From Jakarta to Johannesburg, the name “Obama” still functions as international shorthand for a very specific cocktail of audacity, eloquence, and the faint smell of drone exhaust. When Barack Hussein Obama II left the White House in January 2017, the global applause was thunderous—partly because it meant the planet had survived eight years of a…
Finland: A Frozen Fable of Nordic Exceptionalism and the World’s Quiet Envy By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk HELSINKI—On the map, Finland looks like Europe’s afterthought, a modest sliver wedged between the bear-hug of Russia and the polite fist-bump of Sweden. Yet this nation of 5.6 million has spent the past decade serving the rest…
Ric Grenell, the man who once served as Donald Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence for the length of a European vacation, has lately been auditioning for a far grander role: self-appointed viceroy of the entire planet. From Tirana to Tegucigalpa, foreign ministries now keep a “Grenell folder” next to the one marked “Act of…
Como 1 – Sassuolo 0 Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia, Northern Italy, Saturday evening. The fog rolls off Lake Como like a hung-over diplomat slinking out of a five-star summit, and somewhere between the water and the floodlights a football match breaks out—apparently of interest to more than the 11,000 locals too polite to admit they’d rather…
James Comey: The Man Who Made Bureaucracy a Global Spectator Sport By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching the World Burn PARIS—In the grand tradition of international intrigue, few things are as reliably entertaining as watching a tall, earnest American ex-FBI director wander the planet like a remorseful giraffe, signing books and explaining—again—why he…
The view from the Radisson Blu Plaza’s 34th-floor bar is, to be polite, unnervingly tidy: a Lego diorama of fjords, forests and social democracy, all lit by the low-wattage glow of collective guilt about being too comfortable. Oslo—population smaller than a Shanghai rush-hour platform—has managed to turn itself into a global Rorschach test. The rest…
SÃO PAULO—Somewhere between the papaya-colored favela lights and the 24-hour sushi robots, I found myself asking an algorithm for “grocery near me.” The phone, ever the obedient courtier, spat back a map studded with red pins: a Carrefour the size of Liechtenstein, a Korean mom-and-pop that doubles as a cryptocurrency exchange, and, for the romantics,…
The word “brave” used to come with a body count. Leonidas at Thermopylae, Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad, the anonymous soul who first looked at a blue-ringed octopus and thought, “I wonder how that tastes.” Today, the term is more likely to describe a middle-manager who posts a selfie from his standing desk captioned…
The Curious Case of Joanna Page: How a Welsh Actress Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Bellwether To the uninitiated, Joanna Page is merely the cherubic Welsh actress who once spent Christmas with a cartoon bear and, in a moment of festive delirium, convinced an entire nation that Martin Freeman was rom-com material. But step back—say, to…
Annapolis, Maryland – a postcard-perfect colonial port where the U.S. Naval Academy trains future admirals and the state legislature still meets in the only American capitol building older than the country itself. From half a world away, the place looks like a set piece from a Disney+ series about enlightened republics. Yet walk the narrow…
Emma Watson: The UN’s Favorite Hermione and the Global Guilt-Trip Industry PARIS—If you’ve ever wondered what happens to a child star once the goblin-run bank of public affection finally forecloses on her magic, look no further than Emma Watson. Two decades after she first flicked a wand in the Great Hall, the now-33-year-old Brit has…
Fermi, the Enigma That Keeps the Lights On—and the Existential Dread Flowing by Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a Roman metro ticket and the edge of the observable universe sits Enrico Fermi, the chain-smoking, chalk-dust-slinging physicist who managed to be both the midwife of the nuclear age and its first critic. Mention his name…
