Crypto: The Glorious Global Game of Digital Make-Believe By Our Man in the Ether If you want to watch humanity audition for a remake of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” buy a plane ticket—any ticket—and ask the first person you meet about their crypto strategy. From the glass towers of Singapore to the tin-roof kiosks of…
The Last Civilised Voice: How Radio 4 Became Britain’s Accidental Cultural Ambassador While the rest of the world spirals into TikTok-induced dementia, there’s something almost endearingly anachronistic about Britain’s Radio 4—a station that still believes words should contain more than two syllables and that “content” isn’t necessarily a synonym for “brain rot.” Picture this: Somewhere…
The silver-gray silhouettes that streak across the Sea of Okhotsk are not just machines; they are postcards from a country that insists on writing in all-caps. Russian fighter jets—Sukhois, MiGs, and that theatrical new kid, the Su-57 “Felon”—have become the Kremlin’s preferred punctuation marks in every geopolitical sentence it deems too subtle. One day they…
Mark Owen and the Quiet, Global Art of Disappearing Upwards Dave’s Locker – International Desk, 23:47 GMT Mark Owen has, for the better part of three decades, been the least famous member of whatever room he walks into. This is not an insult; it is a geopolitical super-power. While his four bandmates in Take That…
The Last Voice on Earth: Why Global Dictators Still Fear a Guy with a Microphone and a Hangover By the time you read this, somewhere between the Arctic Circle and the Tropic of Capricorn a solitary human is hunched over a mixing desk that predates the Berlin Wall, coaxing 50,000 watts through the ionosphere like…
Aryan Khan and the Global Art of Being Guilty While Innocent By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, nursing his fourth G&T and the remains of his faith in jurisprudence. Mumbai, October 2021. Somewhere between the VIP lounge and the narcotics-sniffing spaniel, the heir to the Khan cinematic dynasty discovered that fame is a passport…
In the same week that the Arctic registered its first 2 °C above-normal ocean temperature and a Swiss banker was caught using carrier pigeons to smuggle bearer bonds, the Daily Mail—fleet-footed, fluorescent, and forever indignant—managed to make both stories about house prices in Kent. This is not merely a British eccentricity; it is a global…
The Daily Mail: A British Export That Manages to Be Both Tea-Time Staple and Global Existential Threat Word count: 600 PARIS — Somewhere between the croissants and the climate apocalypse, the planet woke up to discover that Britain’s most dependable cultural export is no longer the Beatles or even polite queueing, but a tabloid so…
Bollywoes: How the World Learns to Love and Loathe India’s Glittering Guilt Machine By Our Correspondent in a Safe House Somewhere Between Bandra and Netflix HQ If the global film industry were a bar at closing time, Hollywood would be the loud American bragging about his IPO, Nollywood the Nigerian hustler selling you miracle watches,…
The phrase “a Palestinian state” has spent so many decades on the global to-do list that it now feels like a diplomatic heirloom—polished once a year for the cameras and then tucked back into the drawer next to the Kyoto Protocol’s mittens. Yet every so often the headlines insist the heirloom might actually leave the…
In the marble-clad lobby of the Geneva International Motor Show—an event that now feels as quaint as a telegraph convention—a Hyundai Palisade sat under surgical-grade LED light, politely pretending it wasn’t a three-ton metaphor for the global middle class’s midlife crisis. Delegates in lanyards shuffled past, each clutching a brochure promising “premium serenity,” which is…
Higher Ed, Higher Debt: The World’s Longest Commencement Speech By our correspondent who still remembers what “interest-free” felt like PARIS—Across the planet, the mortarboards have been flung, the champagne flutes rinsed, and the congratulatory Instagram stories archived. Yet for the class of 2024—and every class stretching back to roughly 2008—graduation is less a finish line…
