Volcanic Ash and Haute Couture: France vs. Iceland and the Glorious Futility of Trying to Out-Cool the North Atlantic PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and Reykjavík’s geothermal hot-dog stands, the world is once again being asked to choose between champagne flutes and glacier runoff. France versus Iceland—on the surface, a Euro 2024 qualifying fixture that could…
The Curious Case of Sébastien Lecornu: Europe’s Defense Wunderkind and the Art of Looking Busy While the World Burns By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the grand, slightly mildewed ballroom of European politics, where every minister arrives with a rehearsed sound bite and a half-eaten canapé, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu has managed the…
Hungary vs Portugal: The Quiet Balkanization of European Soft Power Bylines from the Danube to the Tagus, by someone who’s run out of passport pages and patience On the surface, the latest diplomatic joust between Budapest and Lisbon looks like a spat about EU recovery funds, some footnotes on judicial independence, and an energetic argument…
Liam King, the 29-year-old software engineer from Manchester who spent three consecutive nights on the roof of a burning data centre in Jakarta, has unwittingly become the poster child for what happens when late-stage capitalism meets a heatwave and a looming recession. While CNN hailed him as “the last firewall standing between civilisation and a…
Kinshasa and Dakar are not, to the casual eye, obvious rivals. One is a humid sprawl of eight million souls perched on the Congo River, where traffic lights are decorative suggestions and power cuts arrive with Swiss punctuality. The other is a breezy Atlantic capital where the ocean smells of fish, hip-hop, and the faint…
**Earth to Athens: When the Cradle of Civilization Rocks and Rolls** The earth moved in Athens this week, and for once it wasn’t because of another austerity protest. A 5.2 magnitude earthquake rattled Greece’s capital, sending residents fleeing into the streets and reminding everyone that while democracy may have been born here, Mother Nature remains…
The Barclays Center, that rust-coated UFO that crash-landed at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, is less a basketball arena than a diplomatic embassy for the global religion of spectacle. Opened in 2012 by a Russian oligarch, bankrolled by a British bank, and programmed to keep American attention spans twitching, it is the perfect three-nation…
Squirrel Hill Fire: Pittsburgh’s Little Inferno as a Global Mood Ring By our jaded correspondent who keeps a passport in one pocket and a fire extinguisher in the other It takes a special kind of municipal embarrassment to make a neighborhood named after manic tree-rats combust on live television, yet here we are. In the…
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,…
