The Global Aftershocks of a Diva’s Retirement: How One Woman in Spandex Briefly United the Planet By our correspondent who still can’t believe wrestling diplomacy isn’t in the UN charter GENEVA—In the grand theater of geopolitics, where nuclear codes are traded like Pokémon cards and trade wars flare up over dairy subsidies, the 2015 retirement…
PARIS—On a grey Tuesday morning, the French Open’s outer courts smelled of damp clay, disinfectant, and the particular brand of existential dread that hovers over any 20-year-old hailed as the next sovereign of men’s tennis. Holger Rune, Denmark’s resident mood-ring with a forehand, was busy reminding the planet that Nordic melancholy and baseline fury are…
The Global Ballet of Brake Lights: Why the Pedestrian-Accident Lawyer Is Now a Borderless Brand By the time you finish reading this sentence, another human being somewhere between Lagos and Ljubljana will have been introduced to the hood ornament of a moving vehicle. Statistics, those charming little liars, inform us that 1.35 million of these…
Apple TV: A Black-Mirror Snow Globe for the Jet-Lagged Soul by Our Correspondent, presently somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk with spotty Wi-Fi and a stale stroopwafel The device itself is no larger than a coaster you guiltily pocketed from a Copenhagen hotel bar, yet it carries more cultural baggage than a UN diplomat on…
Bucaramanga vs. Tolima: A Football Derby the World Pretends Not to Care About (But Secretly Does) If you spin a globe fast enough, the tiny patch where Colombia’s Santander highlands crash into the Magdalena Valley becomes a brownish smudge—roughly the size of the coffee stain on your desk. Yet every time Atlético Bucaramanga and Deportes…
The Departure Lounge of Civilization By Our Man with the Barf Bag, Somewhere Over the Atlantic The term “migrant deported” usually lands with the grace of a dropped tray in economy class—loud, messy, and guaranteed to wake the neighbors. Yet last Tuesday, when 127 souls were handcuffed onto a chartered Boeing 737 in Frankfurt bound…
Ben Hamer: The Accidental Oracle of Our Age By our international desk, somewhere between the duty-free and the departure gate LONDON—While the planet’s 8-billion-person ensemble cast scrambles for starring roles, a 36-year-old Welsh goalkeeper named Ben Hamer has slipped into the part nobody auditioned for: global metaphor. Hamer, currently third-choice at Watford and therefore about…
The planet tilts eastward each dawn so that a million screens in Jakarta, Lagos, and São Paulo can light up with the same question: “Is SOFI still a buy?” The query itself is a form of late-capitalist prayer—half hope, half hedge, muttered in seventeen currencies and one universal dialect of desperation. In a world where…
London Stadium: Where Olympic Dreams Go to Die (and Pay Premier League Rent) The London Stadium—once the glittering centerpiece of the 2012 Olympics, now a multi-purpose monument to the international pastime of fiscal self-immolation—has become a global case study in how to torch public money faster than a Greek government bond. Originally budgeted at an…
The Sound of One Man Crying: Lewis Capaldi’s Cardiff Concert as Global Metaphor Somewhere between the Brexit hangover and the slow-motion car crash we politely call “global affairs,” 15,000 Welsh souls gathered in a concrete arena to watch a 27-year-old Scotsman publicly disintegrate in 4/4 time. Lewis Capaldi’s Cardiff stop on his inevitably named “Broken…
In a world where Lebanese banks treat customer deposits like surprise party favors and Chinese property developers auction unfinished ghost cities for the price of a decent dim-sum lunch, the Buffalo Bills have decided to soothe our collective anxiety by guaranteeing Josh Allen a sum large enough to buy several small island nations—provided those nations…
Global Gladiator: Hillary Clinton and the Art of Never Leaving the Arena By Dave’s Locker, International Desk If nations were dinner guests, Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the one who keeps refilling her own wine glass while everyone else pretends not to notice the host’s desperate glances at the clock. Twenty-five years after the world…
