KABUL—So there I was, sipping tea that tasted faintly of diesel and regret, watching two very different flags flap in the same wind. On one side: Afghanistan, a geopolitical piñata that’s been whacked by every empire since Alexander the Great’s travel blog. On the other: Hong Kong, a neon-lit tax receipt with its own anthem…
DOHA—This week’s bombing outside the National Museum of Qatar felt almost quaint: only three dead, a tidy crater, and—because the explosion happened at 3 a.m.—no influencers live-streaming their own immolation for “content.” In any other decade, the detonation of a car bomb in the Gulf’s squeaky-clean showcase would have merited wall-to-wall coverage. Today it merely…
Nationwide, Everywhere, and Nowhere at All A dispatch from the front lines of the planet’s favorite marketing fiction The word “nationwide” used to sound muscular, like a drumroll before the cavalry. These days it arrives more like a polite cough from the back row of a theater that’s already on fire. From Tokyo to Timbuktu,…
Harare, Monday – In the grand theatre of African geopolitics, two understudies have just stepped into the limelight, and the audience—composed of hedge-fund analysts in Mayfair, Beltway think-tankers, and a handful of bored TikTokers—is trying to figure out whether this is tragedy, farce, or merely another episode of “Debt Diplomacy: Continental Edition.” Zimbabwe and Rwanda,…
Smokey Bones Falls Off the Spit: A Post-BBQ Requiem for a Carb-Loading Civilization By Our Man in the Charcoal Cloud, somewhere between Doha and Detroit The emails hit inboxes like a wet napkin on a Formica table: Smokey Bones, America’s 61-location temple to smoked meats and bottomless fries, is quietly shuttering another tranche of restaurants….
**The Kissing Bug’s Grand World Tour: How a Latin American Parasite Became Everyone’s Problem** By the time you finish your morning espresso, three more people will have joined the 6–7 million already hosting *Trypanosoma cruzi*, the unicellar squatter that causes Chagas disease. Most of them won’t know it yet; the parasite is polite enough to…
The Kissing Bug: A Love Story Written in Blood and Bureaucracy By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you’ve ever felt that romance is dead, meet Triatoma infestans— the “kissing bug,” a creature so devoted it waits until you’re asleep, crawls onto your lips, and gently siphons your blood like a drunk sommelier at last call….
A Coastal Flood Advisory: The World’s Wettest RSVP By Ignacio “Iggy” Montalbán, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert arrived on every phone from Jakarta to Jacksonville at 03:17 local time—like a drunk ex texting “u up?” at closing time. Coastal Flood Advisory. Nothing says “good morning” quite like the polite promise that your neighborhood may…
Kyiv, Lviv, and the Lampedusa of the Mind A field dispatch from the cheap seats of the 21st century By the time you finish this sentence, another container of “lethal aid” will have cleared customs in Gdańsk, another oligarch will have relocated from Moscow to Dubai, and another earnest European energy minister will have discovered…
Morning Live: The Planet’s 24-Hour Pop-Up Republic of Caffeine, Chaos, and Quiet Desperation By Dave’s International Desk of Perpetual Jet Lag In the soft blue glow that precedes sunrise, the world performs its daily miracle: 195 sovereign nations agree, without a treaty or even a particularly coherent WhatsApp group, to pretend that 6 a.m. is…
Omaha, Nebraska—population 486,051, or roughly the same number of people who will claim today to have “always loved” whatever K-pop band just broke Spotify—woke up yesterday to discover its weather behaving like a geopolitical superpower with abandonment issues. One moment, the city was basking in an unseasonable 21 °C (70 °F) springtime flirtation; the next,…
The London Film Festival kicked off last week under the usual autumn drizzle, which felt almost too on-the-nose: a grey sky weeping politely over a city that has perfected the art of pretending everything is fine. Inside the red-carpet bubble, however, the planet’s creative class was busy congratulating itself for surviving another year of algorithmic…
