Pakistan vs Bangladesh: When Cricket Becomes a Geopolitical Rorschach Test The world’s favorite colonial hangover—cricket—returns to center stage this week as Pakistan and Bangladesh lock horns in a fixture that, on paper, is just another set of overs in a long, algorithmic tournament. Yet in the grand bazaar of international symbolism, Pak vs Ban is…
The Ballad of Bon Jovi, Global Citizen and Reluctant Prophet of Late-Stage Capitalism By Diego Valdez, Senior Correspondent-at-Large It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of stadium anthems must be in want of a geopolitical legacy. Enter Jon Bon Jovi—New Jersey’s prodigal son, hair-metal’s answer to soft power diplomacy—who has…
Roo Irvine and the Global Cottage-Core Arms Race By Our Man in the Back Row of Antiques Roadshow International In the grand chessboard of soft-power projection, where nations once hurled missiles and trade tariffs, they now deploy ceramic rabbits and polite Scottish accents. Enter Roo Irvine—ceramicist, antiques expert, and, whether she likes it or not,…
The Bureaucratic Ballet of the Unemployed A dispatch from the border where statistics and human despair do an awkward tango By the time America’s Department of Labor released its weekly “initial jobless claims” number last Thursday, the figure had already been strip-mined, polished, and weaponised by three continents’ worth of traders before the coffee in…
Good Morning America’s “Deals & Steals” segment ran again this morning, parachuting another crate of discounted ephemera onto the breakfast tables of an anxious republic. While the hosts chirped about 40 % off a cordless neck-fan, the rest of the planet—some of it literally on fire—was left to wonder how a country so allergic to…
If you type “Jon Rahm wife” into a search engine anywhere from Reykjavík to Reykjavík-on-the-Patio (Miami), you are greeted by the same beatific photograph: Kelley Cahill, former Arizona State javelin flinger, standing beside the Basque-born golfer like a statuesque insurance policy against loneliness. The picture is cropped so tightly you can almost smell the sunscreen….
NFL Week 4: When America’s Gladiators Invade the World’s Living Rooms By the time the first London kickoff rolls around at 9:30 a.m. Eastern—an hour chosen, one suspects, by a committee that also schedules root canals—roughly 190 countries will be receiving the same pixelated sermon of shoulder pads and mortgage commercials. From a pub in…
BALTIMORE—While the rest of the planet melts, floods, burns, or all three on alternating days, Charm City has elected this week to audition for a supporting role in a Beckett play: grey, drizzly, and stubbornly indifferent to the apocalypse surrounding it. A stubborn low-pressure system—meteorologists call it a “cut-off low,” locals call it “Tuesday”—has parked…
ULA’s Latest Launch: A Firework Display for a Planet Already on Fire By [REDACTED], Senior Space Correspondent, somewhere between the Kármán line and the breakfast buffet CAPE CANAVERAL—Another Tuesday, another column of white-hot money clawing its way past Florida’s thinning ozone layer. United Launch Alliance—those Boeing-Lockheed love-children who bill taxpayers the way boutique hotels bill…
Jack Ciattarelli: A Garden-Variety Governor Who Never Was, Viewed from the Cheap Seats of the World By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—Somewhere between the espresso bar at Charles de Gaulle and the duty-free shop selling cigarettes named after emotions, one might pause to ask: why, in a year when the Arctic caught fire…
If you want a single ticker to explain late-stage capitalism’s planetary conquest, look no further than SBUX—Starbucks, the green mermaid that has caffeinated the globe until even the glaciers are considering an espresso shot. From the moment the Nasdaq bell rings in New York, the stock pirouettes through time zones like a jittery insomniac, dragging…
When Katie Couric sat down with Sarah Palin in 2008, the moment ricocheted from Anchorage to Abu Dhabi faster than a sub-prime mortgage collapse. To Americans it was a “gotcha” interview; to the rest of the planet it was an omen—proof that the empire’s next-in-line couldn’t name a newspaper she read. Couric, ever the polite…
