Amy Coney Barrett and the Spectacular Collapse of American Exceptionalism: A Global View From the Cheap Seats By Our Man in the Departures Lounge The rest of the planet first met Amy Coney Barrett on a Monday night in late September 2020, when she materialized beside Donald Trump like an impeccably-coiffed genie summoned by a…
If you squint at a world map long enough, the United States looks less like a republic and more like a giant, slightly frayed Wi-Fi router that occasionally forgets its own password. Somewhere near the blinking “SENATE” light sits Ron Wyden—Oregon’s senior senator, professional committee chair, and improbable apostle of digital privacy—busily trying to keep…
C-SPAN: The World’s Dullest Telescope on America’s Loudest Democracy By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Every civilization eventually builds a monument to its own attention span. The Romans had the Colosseum, India has the Taj Mahal, and the United States—ever the pioneer in low-cost masochism—gave us C-SPAN. Conceived in 1979 as a charitable…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Great American Fever Dream By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—Watching Bobby Kennedy III’s namesake crisscross Iowa in a Patagonia vest and a voice hoarse from anti-vax testimonials is, for the rest of the planet, like bingeing a prestige dramedy in which the writers’…
Pete Hegseth, the Fox & Friends Weekend warrior who once accidentally grenaded a colleague’s career (and the colleague), has been nominated by President-elect Trump to run the Pentagon. The news landed like a free round at an O’Club happy hour: American allies choked on their cucumber sandwiches, adversaries opened fresh spreadsheets, and the global commentariat…
Kingston, Jamaica – In the gentle Caribbean breeze that usually carries only the scent of jerk chicken and the distant bass line of a reggae riddim, something sharper is blowing this week: the metallic tang of freshly printed ballots and the unmistakable whiff of geopolitical opportunism. Jamaica’s national elections on Thursday may look, to the…
GAVIN NEWSOM: AMERICA’S PRETTIEST POLITICAL WEATHER-VANE SWINGS INTO GLOBAL CROSSWINDS By Diego Serrano, Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk There are places—say, a Berlin traffic light, a Lagos street market, a Kyoto tea house—where the name Gavin Newsom lands with the faint pop of a distant champagne cork: pleasant, bubbly, and immediately forgotten. Yet for the…
Nigel Farage: The Man Who Weaponised Nostalgia and Won the World’s Attention By Dave’s Locker International Desk The planet’s pundits spent years dismissing him as a pint-sized sideshow in pin-stripe, yet Nigel Farage has quietly become the Brexit Age’s answer to Rasputin: apparently un-killable, faintly perfumed by beer foam, and still pulling strings long after…
