Guatemala vs. The Rest of the World: A David-sized Slingshot Aimed at the Goliath of Global Indifference By Our Correspondent, still brushing volcanic ash off his notebook At first glance, “Guatemala vs” looks like an unfinished Twitter feud—half a headline, half a dare. Yet the open-ended preposition is precisely the point. In courtrooms from Washington…
ZURICH—The first time I heard the phrase “GSH bears” I assumed it was either a typo for “gosh, bears” or some obscure crypto-token named after a ursine deity. In fact, it turns out to be the Global Synthetic Hedge—bears, plural, because nothing this catastrophically leveraged ever travels alone. Picture a flock of algorithmic grizzlies unleashed…
**The Age of Gridiron Diplomacy: How JJ McCarthy’s 21 Years Shook the Geopolitical Chessboard** In a world where nuclear codes rest in the hands of men who can’t operate TikTok, the international community found itself breathlessly consulting Wikipedia today to answer the burning question: exactly how old is University of Michigan quarterback JJ McCarthy? The…
**The Universal Language of Buck: How America’s Most Polarizing Sportscaster Became a Global Mirror** In the pantheon of American sports broadcasting, few names evoke such visceral reactions as Joe Buck—a man whose voice has narrated more championship collapses than a Greek chorus on amphetamines. Yet beyond the baseball diamonds and football fields of the United…
The strange afterlife of Mel Gibson has become a sort of planetary weather vane: wherever the wind blows hardest—populism, cancel culture, streaming wars, or the latest geopolitical flare-up—you’ll find the Australian-American actor-director hovering like a cigar-chomping ghost at the edge of the frame. From Cannes to Caracas, his name still triggers a Pavlovian response: half…
Michelle Beisner-Buck: The Sideline Reporter Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time most of the planet’s 195 nations had finished arguing about the shape of the COP28 negotiating table, Michelle Beisner-Buck was already on a tarmac in Qatar, squinting into a desert sunset and asking an NFL linebacker how he planned to “finish…
Ashton Kutcher: The Last American Export That Still Works by our correspondent in a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “password123” PARIS—On the same day the French government announced yet another bailout for baguette artisans, Ashton Kutcher was in Davos explaining to a roomful of unelected technocrats how blockchain can stop child trafficking. Somewhere in…
The Washington Nationals and the Miami Marlins, two baseball franchises whose combined payrolls could bail out a modestly failing European bank, faced off last night in a contest that the global community greeted with the same polite indifference normally reserved for a UN subcommittee on agricultural tariffs. From the Maracanã to the Marina Bay Sands,…
Chang’an: The City That Invented Globalization, Then Got Rebranded By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you want to see the birthplace of twenty-first-century supply-chain anxiety, you need to look 1,400 years backward and 8,000 kilometers east of Davos. Welcome to Chang’an—modern-day Xi’an—where cosmopolitan merchants once haggled over bolts of silk and, presumably, complained that the…
Royals vs Guardians: How a Pedigreed Pastime Became a Global Power Struggle The phrase “Royals vs Guardians” sounds like the elevator pitch for a Netflix fantasy series—complete with brooding heirs, moody castles, and a CGI dragon voiced by a disgraced Oscar winner. In reality, the drama is unfolding on baseball diamonds from Kansas City to…
Set for Life Results: A Global Lottery of Hope and Despair in Six Numbers By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Des Moines and Dar es Salaam Every Friday night, a modest surge of electricity ripples across GMT+0 through GMT+12 as Australia’s Set for Life draws its six polite little digits. The numbers themselves—2, 11, 19, 27,…
Casablanca—where the air smells of Atlantic salt, diesel exhaust, and the faint but unmistakable perfume of geopolitical compromise. From the rooftop of the downtown Hyatt, you can watch the sun set behind a skyline that looks like Dubai’s younger, thriftier cousin—half-finished glass towers next to tile-roofed medinas, all of it ring-fenced by cranes that never…
