The Newbury Show and the Last Barn Dance of Empire By Our Man in a Wax Jacket, somewhere between Duty Free and the Sheep Ring NEWBURY, England – Every September, when the jet stream coughs a cold front across the Home Counties, the Newbury & District Agricultural Show re-asserts itself like a stubborn cow pat…
Navratri 2025: Nine Nights of Global Nausea, Neon, and Negotiable Piety By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Mumbai T2 The ninth day of Navratri 2025 has just wrapped—at least in the parts of the planet where the Wi-Fi is still on. Elsewhere, from the neon-blasted garba grounds of Gandhinagar to the LED-lit living rooms…
Cost-of-Living Payments: A Global Panic Button That Keeps Getting Pressed By Our Man in Several Overpriced Airports COPENHAGEN — The memo must have gone out in 23 languages: when the price of eggs starts resembling the price of cocaine, governments reach for the emergency envelope marked “Cost-of-Living Payment.” From Seoul to São Paulo, officials are…
The World Watches America Play Tag With Itself By Diego Morales, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large NEW YORK—Across the marble lobbies of five-star hotels from Dubai to Davos, television screens flickered this week with the same surreal tableau: grown adults in suits sprinting across manicured lawns, frantically tagging one another while bellowing the words “You’re it, communist!” and…
WARSAW—Somewhere over the Vistula, a squadron of Soviet-era MiG-29s—freshly repainted, hastily re-blessed by a nervous priest, and still faintly smelling of mothballs—is performing aerial yoga. The jets once belonged to Poland, were offered to Ukraine, got vetoed by Washington, and now, like a middle-manager’s mid-life Porsche, have been traded to South Korea for a bulk…
Debora Estrella: A Name for the End of the World By Our Correspondent in Transit, Somewhere Between Time Zones and Existential Dread If you’ve never heard of Debora Estrella, congratulations—you still possess the innocence the rest of us surrendered at the last global summit, the one where the coffee was ethically sourced but the futures…
The Curious Case of Marcela Borges, or How One Brazilian Judge Accidentally Became the World’s Most Expensive Speed Bump By our São Paulo correspondent, still nursing a hangover from the 2013 protests RIO DE JANEIRO – Somewhere between the Amazon’s slow-motion deforestation and the daily carnival of Brazilian politics, a 42-year-old federal judge named Marcela…
The Makai Lemon: A Tiny Fruit’s Grand Tour Through the Collapsing World Order By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk First spotted wilting on a Sri Lankan spice dock in 2019, the “makai lemon”—a golf-ball-sized citrus that tastes like a lime that’s been ghost-peppered by regret—has since become the unofficial mascot of global supply-chain trauma. What…
Fogerty’s Creedence: The Last American Soundtrack Playing in a Planet-Wide Waiting Room By “Globetrotting” Gustave Serrano, filed from an airport lounge whose PA system still thinks “Proud Mary” is a boarding call Somewhere between the duty-free tequila and the vinyl reissue stand at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, John Fogerty’s nasal rasp leaks out like contraband nostalgia….
Tulsa, Oklahoma—population roughly the same as Reykjavík plus a decent football stadium—has once again become a global barometer, not for oil futures or evangelical voter turnout, but for the simple fact that its weather behaved like a drunk diplomat at a climate summit: unpredictably, loudly, and with collateral damage. Last Tuesday’s softball-sized hail turned sedans…
In the spring of 2025, governments from Reykjavík to Rabat will once again reach into the same threadbare pocket and pull out a fistful of freshly minted cost-of-living payments—those discreet fiscal love-taps meant to convince citizens that inflation is just a passing mood swing. The sums vary: Berlin dishes out €300 per adult, Jakarta opts…
Washington, D.C.—a city that once prided itself on exporting democracy and importing lobbyists—took a brief respite from its usual grift on Saturday night to host the Great Transatlantic Transfusion known as DC United v. Inter Miami. On paper, it was Major League Soccer fixture #17. In practice, it was a geopolitical séance where a club…
