**The Great Global Puzzle: How NYT Connections Became the World’s Favorite Daily Dose of Humble Pie** While the UN General Assembly debates climate change and nuclear proliferation, a quieter form of international diplomacy unfolds daily in the pixelated corners of the New York Times website. September 22nd’s Connections puzzle—the Gray Lady’s daily word association game—has…
Khaby Lame Has Conquered the Planet Without Saying a Single Word—A Victory Speech No One Needed By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching Civilization Eat Itself in 30-Second Bursts GENEVA—The United Nations may still quarrel over grain corridors and carbon thresholds, but the real diplomatic breakthrough of the decade came when a 23-year-old Senegalese-Italian…
Geneva, Switzerland — The World Health Organization convened its emergency committee this week to consider an elegantly bureaucratic question: what, exactly, should humanity start panicking about now? The answer arrived in a neatly formatted PDF titled “Updated Clinical Spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Revision 14-b (Track Changes Enabled).” Buried between footnotes on aerosol persistence and a…
Across six time zones and in languages that still can’t agree on how many “l”s belong in “travelling,” the planet’s chattering classes have lately fixed on a single, improbable unifier: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the 33-year-old Englishman who looks like he was drawn by a committee of hormonal Renaissance masters. From Berlin’s U-Bahn ad panels to Seoul’s…
PARIS—On a rain-slick Tuesday in Montmartre, a busker in a crushed-velvet cape is murdering “Rhiannon” on an out-of-tune accordion. The gendarmes yawn; the tourists film it for TikTok. Somewhere above us, orbiting satellites are still broadcasting Stevie Nicks’ 1975 vibrato to yurts in Mongolia, co-working pods in Lagos, and a Russian oligarch’s panic room in…
The Curious Case of Alexandra Daddario: A Global Study in Eyeballs, Algorithms, and the End of Civil Discretion By Our Bureau of Soft-Power Archaeology The first time the planet truly synchronized its collective blink was 2014, somewhere between Crimea’s annexation and the last Malaysian Airlines tragedy, when a GIF of Alexandra Daddario’s eyes—those crystalline pools…
June Squibb, the 94-year-old Nebraskan who has spent most of her life politely waiting for the planet to notice she could act, has finally become a global phenomenon. One wonders if the Earth simply ran out of younger people willing to risk their hips on a speeding mobility scooter for art. In May, Squibb completed…
GENEVA—The World Health Organization’s emergency session this week was supposed to tackle boringly terrestrial viruses, but delegates spent most of the coffee breaks asking one another the same question: if Earth’s mightiest superheroes can be zombified, what chance does the average taxpayer have? The release of the streaming series “Marvel Zombies” has triggered the kind…
Kyle Richards: A Beverly Hills Housewife as Global Economic Barometer By the time the sun rises over the Pacific and the Tokyo Stock Exchange begins its daily ritual of controlled panic, Kyle Richards is already on her third iced matcha, posting Stories that will later be dissected in Frankfurt boardrooms as a leading cultural indicator….
Pressure Diplomacy: How a Steel Tube Became the World’s Most Expensive Time-Out Room If you want to understand the twenty-first century’s knack for turning every medical device into a geopolitical prop, look no further than the hyperbaric chamber: a glorified diving bell that now moonlights as a wellness cocoon, performance enhancer, and—if the marketing departments…
Heat Advisory: A Global Fever Dream in 42 Languages By Our Man in the Sweltering Trenches Bonn, 14:00 local—Germany’s meteorological service just issued the country’s first-ever “Category 4” heat warning, which sounds less like weather and more like a Defcon level for sunburn. Meanwhile, 5,000 km south, Delhi’s street thermometers melted into Salvador-Dalí puddles at…
**The Global Implications of a Mother’s Tears: How Aidan Hutchinson’s Mom Became Everyone’s Mom** In a world where nuclear powers play chicken in the Taiwan Strait and inflation makes bread a luxury item, humanity has collectively decided that the most important thing happening this week is a blonde woman in a luxury box wearing sunglasses…
