The Global Brotherhood of Bumper-Car Barristers From Lagos to Los Angeles, an army of tailored suits has perfected the art of turning twisted metal into tuition fees. There are two universal constants in the 21st-century metropolis: traffic lights that exist only as decorative suggestions, and the business card of a car-accident lawyer wedged between your…
The Earth Tilts Slightly Off-Axis as Stacey Solomon Wins an NTA, Confusing Continents Everywhere By the time the news pinged across fiber-optic cables from London’s O2 Arena to Lagos, Lima, and Laos, the planet’s collective response could be summarised in one elegant, multilingual shrug: “Who, exactly, is Stacey Solomon—and why does her shiny new National…
From the vantage point of a bar in Brussels that still smells faintly of tear-gas from last week’s farmers’ protest, the Uvalde school massacre looks less like a uniquely American tragedy and more like the loudest episode in a planetary sitcom titled “Humans: The Director’s Cut.” Nineteen children and two teachers were erased on 24…
Alaska’s Permanent Fund: The Welfare State That Republicans Forgot to Hate By our correspondent who once cashed a dividend check and still feels dirty about it ANCHORAGE—While the rest of the planet guts social programs faster than you can say “austerity,” America’s northernmost petro-colony has been quietly mailing free money to every resident—toddlers included—since 1982….
Car Injury Attorneys: The Globe’s New Ambassadors of Ambulance-Chasing Diplomacy By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Traffic Circle in Paris and the World’s Longest Tailback Outside Lagos It begins, as most modern tragedies do, with a notification. Somewhere between the squeal of rubber and the ping of an airbag sensor, a fender-bender in São Paulo…
In the grand, spiraling telenovela of global pop culture, few supporting players have managed to surf every wave—from Broadway to algorithmic streaming sludge—with the buoyant inevitability of a well-greased otter quite like Josh Gad. From a balcony in Buenos Aires you might see him as the cinematic equivalent of the McDonald’s french fry: simultaneously everywhere,…
Dodger Game, n.: A planetary pastime in which the world’s most powerful governments, corporations, and individuals compete to see who can avoid responsibility for the greatest number of catastrophes before the final buzzer—also known, on certain days, as a baseball match in Chavez Ravine. Same rules, different stakes. From the grandstands of geopolitics, the Dodgers…
Kurt Russell: The Last American Action Hero the World Actually Tolerates While the planet burns through its third year of geopolitical dumpster fires and economic whack-a-mole, one man has somehow maintained his status as Hollywood’s most exportable tough guy without starting a single international incident. Kurt Russell—actor, former child star, and apparently the only American…
Warsaw, 03:14 a.m. local—While most of the planet was doom-scrolling inflation graphs or arguing about whether the ocean is actually on fire this week, one modest Polish web portal quietly chalked up its one-billionth click since January. The culprit? “onet pl,” a two-decade-old digital veteran that looks, at first glance, like the internet equivalent of…
Kali Uchis: America’s Newest Export in Soft-Focus Nostalgia and Hard-Edged Irony By Our Correspondent Who Has Spent Too Many Nights in Airport Lounges Listening to Elevator Bossa Nova Medellín → Los Angeles → Your Algorithm—The career arc of Karly-Marina Loaiza, better known as Kali Uchis, is a tidy parable for the age of planetary pop-on-demand….
BlackRock: The Shadow Treasury with a Mood Ring By Our Man in Geneva, nursing a third espresso and counting the milliseconds until the next sovereign default The first thing you notice when you land in any capital city these days is the luggage carousel. Not the diplomatic plates, not the stray oligarch’s jet—just the carousel,…
The Left-Handed Relief: How Alex Vesia Became Baseball’s Accidental Diplomat in a World That Keeps Striking Out In the grand theater of global affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and climate summits devolve into carbon-spewing junkets—it’s almost endearing that a 28-year-old left-handed reliever from California might represent humanity’s most successful export of American…
