London, that damp and overpriced island capital, is once again pretending the planet orbits Leicester Square. The 67th BFI London Film Festival (or LFF to the acronym-obsessed) has rolled out its red carpet—this year woven from equal parts recycled polyester and Brexit anxiety—inviting the world to queue politely and pretend the weather is “atmospheric.” From…
The Pacific’s latest mood swing—Hurricane Kiko, a name that sounds more like a trendy Tokyo café than a Category-4 air punch—skimmed past Hawaii this week with the polite indifference of a tourist who realizes the luau is overpriced. From Sydney to São Paulo, the collective global reaction was a shrug that registered on seismographs: another…
LOS ANGELES—The ground beneath Hollywood’s most over-medicated city rolled over in its sleep at 12:20 p.m. local time, registering a polite 5.2 on the Richter scale and reminding the planet that even America’s self-proclaimed capital of reinvention is still, geologically speaking, on the Pacific’s naughty list. From Tokyo to Tehran, seismologists looked up from their…
Arsenal News: A Global Arms Bazaar Where Everyone Wins (Except the Targets) By the time you finish this sentence, at least three governments, two private security firms, and one very enthusiastic TikTok influencer will have refreshed their feeds for the latest “Arsenal News.” The phrase used to summon images of North London footballers fumbling away…
The NHS League Tables 2025 have dropped, and the world is leaning in like it’s the final episode of a prestige drama where everyone dies of preventable disease. From Seoul to São Paulo, health ministers, policy wonks, and the sort of people who put “disruption” on their LinkedIn are watching the UK’s annual blood-letting with…
London Underground workers have apparently decided that a Tuesday in late spring is the perfect moment to remind the planet that the gears of global capitalism can still be jammed with nothing more exotic than a clipboard and a megaphone. The tube strike—rolling power cuts for the human circulatory system of a city that long…
# The Last Free Men: How 1.6 Million Mariners Keep Your Avocado Toast from Being a Lie Somewhere between the 20-knot winds of the Drake Passage and the diesel fumes of the Singapore Strait, the modern world still depends on a caste of sun-blasted nomads who haven’t updated their LinkedIn since dial-up. Meet the 1.6…
The Burger: A Global Love Affair Held Together by Cheese and Existential Dread By the time you finish reading this sentence, humanity will have consumed roughly 2,500 hamburgers—enough to pave a greasy, slightly tragic path from Reykjavík to Jakarta. The burger, once a humble minced-beef puck served to German sailors in nineteenth-century New York, has…
The Aegean, that sun-drenched paddling pool where Western civilisation first learned to charge admission, has started charging an exit fee. A 5.2-magnitude earthquake rattled Rhodes on Tuesday, followed by a 4.8 encore off Crete on Wednesday—prompting a continent that usually only notices Greece when its ATMs cough politely to remember that geology, unlike the EU,…
Tiny Kingdom, Big Shadows: Eswatini in the Age of Global Schadenfreude By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The Kingdom of Eswatini—population 1.2 million, landmass slightly larger than Connecticut, and still stubbornly clinging to an absolute monarchy like it’s 1899 and Wi-Fi hasn’t been invented—managed to crash the international news cycle twice this month. First, when King…
The world’s newest diplomatic crisis isn’t being negotiated in Geneva, Vienna, or even Davos; it’s unfolding on a California soundstage where a 72-year-old widower in suspiciously white sneakers is handing out roses like a geriatric Zeus doling out lightning bolts. ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor” has landed—an octogenarian remix of the franchise that once gave us…
Stockholm Syndrome, Global Edition: Watching the World Argue Over a 20-Year-Old Who Still Can’t Legally Rent a Car in Most U.S. States By Dave’s International Affairs Desk The planet’s most famous truant is at it again. Greta Thunberg, whose 2018 “Skolstrejk för klimatet” began as a solo cardboard protest outside the Swedish parliament, has now…
