Somewhere between the Charles River and the apocalypse, Tufts University sits like an ivy-clad bunker for the globally anxious. From a distance, it looks like another postcard of New England autumn, but zoom in and you’ll see a campus where future diplomats, vaccine engineers, and hedge-fund ethicists rehearse for a planet that may not bother…
The Rumor That Leapt Time Zones By Dave’s Locker International Desk It began, as all modern plagues do, with a half-charged phone battery in a Lagos airport lounge. A WhatsApp voice note—breathless, 19 seconds, accompanied by the obligatory “Fwd many times” disclaimer—claimed that an unnamed “high official” had defected, carrying a flash drive fatter than…
Rhinos vs Dragons: A Global Cage Match in Which Everyone Loses By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, still filing from the departure lounge of life KUALA LUMPUR—On paper, the matchup looks absurd: two tons of armor-plated herbivore versus a mythical jet-engine reptile that doubles as a medieval flamethrower. Yet this is 2024, and the paper has…
Laura Ingraham: America’s Favorite Export of Manufactured Outrage Hits the Global Market By a Correspondent Who Has Seen Angrier Sunrises in Cheaper Countries Somewhere between the koi ponds of Davos and the karaoke bars of Seoul, an odd export from the United States has quietly gone viral: Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host whose nightly…
The Bishop Who Streams Salvation: Robert Barron’s Digital Empire and the Vatican’s Netflix Strategy ROME—While Silicon Valley titans race to colonize Mars and Wall Street wizards invent new ways to lose other people’s money, Bishop Robert Barron has quietly built something far more ambitious: a global Catholic media empire that makes Netflix’s content library look…
Chief Justice John Roberts is a man who, for reasons best known to himself, decided to spend his twilight years refereeing a constitutional demolition derby in which every contestant is driving a monster truck labeled “Originalism,” “Stare Decisis,” or “Whatever Gets Me on the 6 o’clock News.” From Lagos to Lisbon, bureaucrats, barristers, and bored…
From the banks of the Danube to the neon canyons of Tokyo, the name Alex Jones now elicits the same weary smirk once reserved for flat-earthers and people who believe the moon landing was staged on a Kubrick set. Yet the American carnival barker in a tactical vest has become, improbably, a global export—proof that…
Stockton University: A Quaint American Campus Where the World’s Problems Go for a Gap Year By Our Correspondent Who Still Owes the Bursar GALLOWAY, New Jersey—Somewhere between the Pine Barrens and the existential dread of late-stage capitalism sits Stockton University, a 2,000-acre arboretum of contradictions. To the average European it looks like a polite Scandinavian…
Bethune-Cookman: A Tiny Florida Campus that Explains Why the Planet is Still on Fire Dateline – Daytona Beach, Florida – or, as it is known in the darker corners of Davos, “Exhibit A in the Tragedy of the Commons.” From a satellite’s bored eye, Bethune-Cookman University looks like a modest cluster of red-brick optimism wedged…
Baton Rouge, Louisiana – It is a safe bet that most people on the planet have never Googled “Southern University,” yet the phrase still manages to radiate a gravitational pull for anyone wondering how a former slave colony quietly reinvented itself as an exporter of culture, football trauma, and contradictory optimism. From Lagos to Lahore,…
Wye Valley: The Last Scenic Cul-de-Sac Before the World Ends There is a quiet, green scar running between England and Wales where the River Wye performs its slow-motion escape from the 21st century. On a good day the place looks like a Tolkien screensaver—hills tossed like crumpled bed linen, sheep posing as unpaid extras, and…
Alabama State University: A Small Campus in the American South That Still Manages to Matter to the Rest of the Planet By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Montgomery, Alabama – While the rest of the world obsesses over which septuagenarian will next get the nuclear codes, a modest cluster of red-brick buildings on the banks of…
