Open Stock: The World’s Panic Pantry, or How We All Became Amateur Preppers By the time you finish this sentence, someone in São Paulo will have panic-bought their fifteenth roll of industrial-grade aluminum foil, convinced the grid is about to collapse. That, dear reader, is the sound of “open stock” going global—an innocuous retail term…
Banksy, the world’s most famous vandal-entrepreneur, has spent three decades spray-painting the obvious onto other people’s walls and watching the global elite bid for the privilege of scrubbing it off again. From Gaza to Glastonbury, the anonymous Bristolian has turned moral clichés into blue-chip assets, proving that nothing travels faster than a platitude with a…
Fabio Wardley and the Short, Violent Poetry of Global Distraction By Our Man in the Cheap Seats LONDON—While half the planet argues over whose war crimes are more photogenic and central bankers debate whether to call the next recession “transitory” or merely “fashionably late,” a 29-year-old man from Ipswich has been quietly perfecting the art…
Great North Run Medal: A Global Snapshot in Pewter and Pretension By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Tyne and Terminal 2 Picture it: 60,000 pairs of trainers slapping tarmac from Newcastle to South Shields, a human conveyor belt of charity T-shirts, nipple tape, and existential dread. At the far end waits the Great North Run…
Scott Bessent, the man who once turned George Soros’s quantum-sized headaches into a tidy 10-figure profit, now finds himself auditioning for the role of global economic soothsayer. Treasury Secretary? Perhaps. Headline magnet? Absolutely. Either way, the world’s bond traders have already started practicing their deep-breathing exercises, because when Bessent speaks, sovereign yields have been known…
Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed “King of All Media,” has spent four decades proving that shamelessness is the only renewable resource never subject to sanctions. From a converted Long Island basement to a SiriusXM satellite orbiting somewhere above the equator, his signal ricochets across continents like a cosmic fart in a crowded elevator—impossible to ignore and,…
Connections Hint September 8: The Day the World Shared One Small Cheat Code By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you ask a diplomat in Brussels, a bond trader in Singapore, and a barista in Bogotá what they did at 00:01 UTC on 8 September, odds are all three will confess—after a conspiratorial glance over both…
Only Murders, Universal Mayhem Dispatch from the Bureau of Obvious Calamities, International Desk Dateline: Everywhere – The phrase “only murders” began life as the punch-line to a very American joke: a true-crime podcast so niche that homicide is the sole acceptable plot device. Cute, until the rest of the planet realized the gag had grown…
The Cincinnati Reds, a franchise that began life as the Red Stockings when Otto von Bismarck was still young and optimistic, played a baseball game last night. This apparently parochial event in the American Midwest was streamed from Great American Ball Park to 183 countries—one more than currently recognizes Taiwan—proving once again that late capitalism…
The Straits Times: Singapore’s Little Red Dot That Reads Like a Cold Shower to the World’s Hot Mess By the time you finish your first espresso in Paris, The Straits Times has already delivered four breaking-news alerts, two ministerial Facebook posts, and a stern op-ed on the perils of chewing gum. For a newspaper headquartered…
**The Accidental Tourist: Paul Nowak and the Global Search for Meaning in a Meaningless World** In the grand theater of international affairs, where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and billionaires rocket themselves into space for sport, the curious case of Paul Nowak emerges as a peculiar footnote to our collective existential crisis. While…
KATHMANDU—While the rest of the planet obsesses over which billionaire will colonize Mars first, a modest Himalayan republic the size of Arkansas keeps quietly demonstrating how to survive the twenty-first century without losing its soul—or its sense of irony. Nepal, population 30 million and falling off the map every time Google’s servers hiccup, has become…
