The Curious Case of Inka Williams: How a 20-Something From Byron Bay Became the UN’s Accidental Climate Poster Child By Rufus Delacroix, International Affairs Desk SYDNEY—If you’ve never heard of Inka Williams, congratulations: you still possess a few un-monetised neurons. The 24-year-old Australian model-cum-activist has spent the past decade perfecting the lucrative art of looking…
Dubai—population 3.4 million, 92 percent imported—has never quite decided whether it is a city, a brand, or a fever dream induced by too much air-conditioning and not enough irony. From a distance it looks like a hedge-fund PowerPoint got drunk on 3-D rendering software and decided to build itself. Up close it feels like the…
Royal London, International Capital of Regal Schadenfreude by Our Man in the Fog, somewhere between Heathrow’s perfume-drenched duty-free and the £18 pint zone The moment the plane drops below cloud cover, the city unfolds like a gilt-edged pop-up book: Big Ben’s scaffolding finally gone, the Shard pretending it’s Tokyo, and somewhere behind those red-brick chimneys…
Indomitable Lions, Laughable Bureaucracy: Cameroon FC as a Mirror to the World’s Beautiful, Broken Game By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between Douala duty-free and a Paris sports bar On paper, Cameroon FC—officially the Cameroon national football team, nickname so grandiose it could start a land war, “Les Lions Indomptables”—is just another collection of millionaire…
From the banks of the Tyne to the TikTok feeds of Jakarta, Chloe Ferry has become a one-woman soft-power export whose primary raw material is precisely calibrated chaos. Once merely the most pneumatic cast member of MTV UK’s Geordie Shore, she now circulates globally as a living, lip-glossed metaphor for the age of algorithmic fame:…
Laufey: The 24-Year-Old Jazz Bard Who Convinced TikTok That Heartbreak Is a Luxury Good By Dave’s International Desk Somewhere between the collapse of the global supply chain and the collapse of your last talking stage, an Icelandic-Chinese cellist named Laufey (pronounced “LIE-vay,” because of course it is) has quietly become the sonic comfort blanket for…
Canterbury, England — Travel east from London until the smog thins and the sheep begin to outnumber the Deliveroo riders and you’ll find the University of Kent, a campus whose red-brick brutalism looks suspiciously like the Ministry of Truth on a spa weekend. Founded in 1965—roughly the same moment the world decided napalm and miniskirts…
Ford’s Latest Recall: A 2.4-Million-Vehicle Oopsie That Unites the World in Mild Dismay By Dave’s Correspondent-at-Large, somewhere over a fog-bound North Atlantic DETROIT—Ford just issued a recall on 2.4 million vehicles worldwide because the backup camera occasionally decides to show you yesterday’s parking lot instead of today’s toddler. The glitch, charmingly labeled “unintended camera image…
The Curious Case of the Mandelson-Epstein Postcard: A Global Rash of Schadenfreude, Self-Righteousness, and Quiet Panic By “Lucky” Sørensen, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker It began, as all modern scandals do, with a grainy photograph no bigger than a passport stamp: Peter Mandelson, Britain’s perennial éminence grise, smiling the thin smile of a man who has…
The M25 as a Global Metaphor: How a 117-Mile British Ring Road Became the Planet’s Slow-Motion Carousel of Existential Dread By the time you finish this sentence, a lorry full of Romanian tomatoes will have inched forward exactly 0.7 metres somewhere between Junctions 14 and 15, thereby delaying the entire global food chain by another…
**The Tiny Terror of Tunbridge Wells: How a British Toddler Became the World’s Most Unlikely Geopolitical Weapon** In a world where grown men with nuclear codes throw tantrums over social media, leave it to an eight-year-old British boy to demonstrate actual leadership. Tony Hudgell—the child who started life with fewer limbs than your average IKEA…
Hogwarts, NATO, and the Gentle Art of Gothic Soft Power A dispatch on Stuart Craig, Harry Potter, and the architectural export of British melancholy By the time Stuart Craig finished sketching the first crooked gable of Hogwarts, Boris Yeltsin was still busy auctioning off the Soviet Union and the world’s newest worry was whether dial-up…
