US News College Rankings: The Annual Olympics of Institutional Narcissism by “Roving Correspondent” (currently filing from a Wi-Fi-enabled yurt in Ulaanbaatar) Every September, like clockwork, American academia straps on its spandex of self-regard and sprints onto the world stage to see who can flex the hardest. The US News & World Report college rankings have…
John Morton, Dead Since 1500, Still Manages to Keep Europe in a Headlock LONDON—While the rest of us struggle to survive the 2020s—crypto winters, climate tantrums, and the occasional attempted coup—one English clergyman who’s been mouldering in his grave for five centuries continues to dictate fiscal policy from beyond the veil. Meet John Morton, late…
The Mammoth in the Room: Utah’s Prehistoric Gift to Modern Absurdity In the grand theater of human folly, where we obsess over cryptocurrency while the planet burns and argue about pronouns as glaciers melt, Utah has delivered us a magnificent reminder of our collective insignificance: a perfectly preserved Columbian mammoth, frozen in time like a…
Cable Diplomacy: How Rachel Maddow Became America’s Soft-Power Weather Vane By Dave’s Locker International Desk When the State Department wants to know which way the Beltway wind is blowing, it can always consult the satellites. When foreign ministries want to know which way the American mind is blowing, they consult Rachel Maddow—preferably with the subtitles…
Maryland: The Crab Cake Republic Quietly Running the World While Everyone Argues About Texas In the grand geopolitical theater, Maryland is the understudy who never forgets a line and occasionally steals the show while the leads are busy having a nervous breakdown. Wedged between the Potomac’s toxic nostalgia and the Chesapeake’s slow-motion ecological suicide, this…
Lions Score: When the King of Beasts Becomes a Global Accounting Ledger By the time the final whistle blew in Johannesburg, the Lions had clawed their way to a 28-24 victory over the Wallabies—an outcome that, on paper, looks like a quaint colonial-era rugby reunion. Yet from Lagos to London, the “lions score” pinged across…
In the grand bazaar of global celebrity, where influence is bartered like spice in medieval Cádiz, Jaden Smith has become the cinnamon stick no one quite knows what to do with—too pungent to ignore, too sweet to take seriously. From the neon canyons of Tokyo billboards to the algorithmic souks of Instagram’s explore page, the…
Trying, According to the Planet By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Trying, the verb the whole world has agreed to conjugate badly, has become the last universal currency. From Ulan Bator to Uberlândia, humans are currently exhausting themselves in the noble art of giving it “the old college try,” despite the old college having…
Turkey, the Bird, the Nation, the Punch-Line—A Dispatch from the Edge of Civilization by Our Correspondent Who Has Eaten Both ISTANBUL—It is 3 a.m. local time, and the muezzin’s call to prayer collides with the bass line of a rooftop techno club, while a street cat—fat, entitled, and visibly bored—gnaws on a leftover döner kebab…
Vladimir Putin’s Russia: A Global Game of Musical Chairs Where the Music Never Stops By Our Correspondent in a Non-Extradition Country Somewhere between the Arctic permafrost and the subtropical beaches of Sochi, the world’s largest country keeps reinventing itself with the grace of a drunken ballerina on stilts. Twenty-four years after a soft-spoken KGB lieutenant-colonel…
Brian Jason Wagner, a name that sounds suspiciously like the alias of a mid-tier Bond villain who sells artisanal crypto-truffles in Zürich, is in fact a flesh-and-blood American now orbiting the international spotlight. From the vantage point of a world that has spent the last decade rubber-necking at every minor US tremor, Wagner’s sudden emergence…
The Hepatitis B Vaccine: A Global Miracle Wrapped in Bureaucratic Red Tape and Human Indifference by Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific Somewhere between the neon-lit syringe factories of Shenzhen and the air-conditioned conference rooms of Geneva, a tiny 20-microgram shot of recombinant DNA is quietly outperforming most foreign-aid programs, peacekeeping missions, and TED talks—combined….
