The Curious Case of Suryakumar Yadav: How a Middle-Class Mumbaikar Became the UN Secretary-General of T20 Cricket By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Arabian Sea NEW DELHI—Late one humid evening, as Delhi’s air flirted with the toxicity levels of a small chemical spill, Suryakumar Yadav—population 1.4 billion’s newest export—waltzed down the…
Skyway Bridge: The World’s Most Polite Suicide Hotspot Has a Waiting List By the time dawn’s pink smear crawls across Tampa Bay, the queue on the Skyway Bridge already looks like an underfunded theme-park line. There’s the Japanese salaryman in pressed navy, scrolling spreadsheets between sobs; the Milanese fashion intern clutching a half-finished Fendi bag…
**Hell Goes Global: How Hades 2 Has the World’s Gamers Queueing for Eternal Damnation** In a world where actual international relations resemble a particularly vindictive game of musical chairs, humanity has found its latest collective coping mechanism: queueing for digital damnation. Hades 2, Supergiant Games’ sequel to their 2020 indie darling, has achieved what decades…
Glazed Hegemony: How Krispy Kreme Became the Soft Power the State Department Never Ordered By C. Valdez, Senior Carbohydrate Correspondent PARIS—While the Quai d’Orsay was busy negotiating submarine deals and the Élysée was lecturing the world on gastronomic purity, an American doughnut quietly rolled off a secret production line in the Paris suburbs and into…
Mustafizur Rahman: The Cutter That Cut Through Geopolitics By Our Man in Dhaka, Nursing a Cup of Over-Street Tea To the uninitiated, Mustafizur Rahman is merely a 6’2″ left-arm fast bowler who grips a cricket ball like a barista handles a scalding latte—delicately, yet with lethal intent. To the rest of us, he is a…
Shubman Gill: The Accidental Messiah of a Nation That Can’t Decide Whether It Needs Saving or a Netflix Subscription By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a 3 a.m. doom-scroll in economy class NEW DELHI—In the blue haze of Narendra Modi Stadium—capacity 132,000, or roughly the population of Reykjavik poured into a concrete cereal bowl—Shubman Gill…
United Airlines Flights: How One Airline’s Schedule Chaos Became the World’s Shared Migraine By Desmond “Desi” O’Rourke, International Correspondent Geneva—From the glassy corridors of the Palais des Nations to the sweaty visa queues of Dubai, the same lament echoes: “My United flight’s delayed again.” What began as a charmingly American tradition—turning boarding passes into lottery…
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…
**The Global Hunger Games: How America’s Mega Millions Became the World’s Favorite Fantasy** While inflation ravages purchasing power from Lagos to Lisbon, there’s one American export that remains blissfully immune to currency fluctuations: the dream of instant, unearned wealth. The Mega Millions lottery—America’s weekly exercise in mathematical masochism—has transcended its humble origins to become a…
MOLDOVA: THE WORLD’S MOST INTERESTING FOOTNOTE TRIES TO TURN THE PAGE By Our Correspondent, currently hiding from both Russian and Romanian linguists in Chișinău Somewhere between the Carpathians and the collective international yawn, Moldova has spent three decades perfecting the art of being forgotten. Sandwiched between Ukraine’s ongoing pyrotechnics and Romania’s EU-funded smugness, this sliver…
**Riot Stock: How Wall Street Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chaos** The world watched with mild amusement and growing horror as shares of Riot Platforms (RIOT) became the cryptocurrency world’s favorite financial yo-yo, proving once again that humanity’s capacity for speculative excess knows no borders—or apparently, any upper limit on cognitive dissonance. From…
