Gaza Strip: 140 Square Kilometres of Perpetual Headlines By the time you finish reading this sentence, some foreign minister somewhere will have issued a “deeply concerned” press release about Gaza. That is the Strip’s greatest export: statements of concern, delivered in impeccable officialese, then promptly filed next to the coffee-stained draft on climate change and…
Atlanta—Delta Air Lines, the self-declared “Keep Climbing” carrier, spent the weekend climbing only as far as the nearest gate agent’s apology podium. Roughly 6,000 flights—give or take a few hundred, because who’s counting when the app already crashed—were scrubbed after a routine software update turned into a transatlantic game of Jenga played with air-traffic control….
Publishers Clearing House Files for Bankruptcy, Proving Even the House Can Lose the Sweepstakes By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Physical Mail NEW YORK—The envelope that once promised “You may already be a winner!” has finally delivered its punch line: Publishers Clearing House (PCH) filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware this…
Tropical Storm Gabrielle, the Atlantic’s latest damp squib turned headline darling, has spent the past week doing what every self-respecting weather system does in 2024: politely forming off Cabo Verde, taking a selfie for the National Hurricane Center, and then sauntering north-east like a bored tourist who’s just realized the duty-free shop is closed. While…
Windhoek, Tuesday—If you scan the world map for geopolitical fault lines these days, you’ll usually land on places where the tectonic plates of ideology, oil, or unfiltered narcissism rub together. Yet here we are, fixated on a squabble between two nations whose combined GDP is slightly smaller than the annual budget of a mid-tier Swiss…
Flash Flood Warning: The Planet’s Latest Party Trick By our soaked correspondent, still wringing out the passport GENEVA—Somewhere between the 37th climate summit and the 847th “once-in-a-century” downpour of the decade, the World Meteorological Organization quietly upgraded its vocabulary. “Cloudburst” was deemed too quaint, “inundation” too bureaucratic. The new lingua franca is the blunt, all-caps…
**Golden Statuettes, Global Yawns: How the 2025 Emmys Became Earth’s Favorite Background Noise** LOS ANGELES—While missiles flew over the Red Sea, while glaciers calibrated their exit strategy, and while one-third of humanity debated which app will deliver dinner before the landlord delivers eviction papers, the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards unfolded here last night like a…
Somewhere over the Atlantic, a Category-4 cyclone is doing its best impression of an overachieving intern—working weekends, skipping lunch, and generally reminding everyone why we don’t let nature have a LinkedIn profile. Back on dry land, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Center—known to friends, foreign meteorologists, and doom-scrolling insomniacs simply as “NOAA”—is the…
September 16: The Day the Calendar Trips Over Its Own Ambition by Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats of History Every year, September 16 arrives with the subtlety of a tourist who has read one guidebook too many. It elbows its way into the global consciousness, convinced it is the protagonist of a story that…
Subways of the World Pause to Watch a Single Line Go Dark How the 2025 LIRR Strike Became the Planet’s Favorite Metaphor for Everything Going Wrong Tokyo – While the rest of humanity was busy arguing over which apocalypse would clock in first—climate, AI, or the next Marvel reboot—New York’s Long Island Rail Road quietly…
**The Ballad of Ryan Routh: When Local Lunacy Goes Global** If you’ve been anywhere near a screen this week, you’ve likely encountered the mugshot that launched a thousand memes: Ryan Routh, the 58-year-old Hawaiian construction worker turned alleged would-be assassin, whose apparent attempt to turn Donald Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course into a reenactment…
BFI London Film Festival: One More Glittering Mirage in the Wreckage of the World By our man in the press pen, nursing a lukewarm prosecco and existential dread. London, mid-October—when the Thames smells faintly of diesel and the last of the empire’s optimism is auctioned off in NFT form—rolls out its annual crimson carpet for…
