Chequers Prime Minister: A Weekend in the English Countryside That Shook the World By Dave’s International Affairs Desk If you ever wondered where the fate of 67 million Britons—and, by extension, the global financial system—gets decided on a rainy Friday afternoon, the answer is a 16th-century manor house whose greatest architectural triumph is its ability…
Basement Flooding: The World’s Wettest Underground Revolution By Our Correspondent, still drying his socks in five languages GENEVA—While diplomats upstairs argue over carbon credits and whose submarine is parked in whose harbor, the planet’s true diplomatic channel is busy negotiating with gravity and faulty sump pumps. From Brooklyn to Bangladesh, the basement is flooding, and…
Basement Submarines and the End of the World A Dispatch from the Planet’s Lower-Middle Floors By the time you read this, someone in Jakarta, Jakarta-on-the-Rhine (Cologne), or a newly soggy suburb of Detroit is probably up to their ankles in what used to be a wine cellar. The flooded basement—once the punch line of American…
Euston Station, or How the Empire’s Front Door Learned to Love the Queue By our London bureau chief, still dazed from the 07:42 to Manchester Piccadilly On any given Tuesday morning, while Singapore’s Changi offers orchids and a butterfly dome and Dubai International tempts travelers with indoor waterfalls, London’s Euston Station greets humanity with the…
BREAKING: Six Digits Bring World to Brief, Beautiful Standstill by Mathilde “Mat” Huisman, roving correspondent, currently somewhere between Schiphol and a questionable airport lounge in Doha Geneva—At 20:17 GMT last night the Swiss lottery consortium transmitted the following sequence to 195 countries, three orbiting satellites, and one confused alpaca farmer in Patagonia: 04, 09, 17,…
CASTELLÓN, Spain – Somewhere between a Ryanair gate in Brussels and the existential dread of a Monday morning, Castellón announces itself: a sun-baked slice of the Valencian coast that apparently missed the memo about austerity. The city’s airport—built at €150 million, inaugurated in 2011, and promptly mothballed for four years—stands as a gleaming monument to…
Trump Statue Unveiled in Italian Hamlet, Planet Braces for Next Bronze Catastrophe By Matteo “The Sardine” Moretti, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker ROME—In the sort of sleepy Tuscan village where the loudest sound is usually a pensioner clearing his throat, officials this week hoisted a 7-foot, 400-kilogram bronze effigy of Donald J. Trump into the central…
Passport to Purgatory: How the Humble Citizenship Test Became the World’s Most Politicized Pop-Quiz By Our Man in the Queue, Watching the World Fill Out Form 47-B in Triplicate LONDON—Somewhere between the multiple-choice question about the national tree and the oral recitation of a centuries-old poem, the modern citizenship test stops being an exam and…
Candace Owens: the accidental export America never meant to ship PARIS—Every country has its ideological souvenirs, those little cultural knick-knacks that somehow slip past customs and end up cluttering foreign living-room shelves. France sends existential dread disguised as perfume; Britain still mails packets of colonial nostalgia in the form of Downton Abbey box sets. The…
**The Postcode Lottery: Where Your Address Determines Your Destiny** In the grand casino of life, it appears the house always wins—especially when the house in question is determined by a random string of letters and numbers assigned by postal services. The People’s Postcode Lottery, that peculiarly British invention where neighbors collectively gamble on their geographic…
THE PANIC ROOMS OF SUBURBIA HAVE GLOBAL COUNTERPARTS—AND THEY’RE ALL RUNNING OUT OF WINE From the manicured cul-de-sacs of Westchester to the pastel high-rises of Singapore’s River Valley, a peculiar species is pacing: the Desperate Housewife, now upgraded to Version 2.0 with Wi-Fi, a side hustle, and a creeping sense that the planet is on…
Tucker Carlson’s Long Goodbye: How One American Broadcaster Became Global Clickbait From the cafés of Istanbul to the karaoke bars of Seoul, the news that Fox News had sacked its prime-time prince landed with the same collective shrug you give when your flight is delayed again: “Ah yes, the empire is still busy devouring itself.”…
