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…
Manchester, Tuesday, 04:02 a.m. local—while the rest of England argues about the price of eggs, Marcus Rashford has managed to become a geopolitical Rorschach test. A 25-year-old footballer whose left foot can bend physics now finds himself bending the entire post-Brexit narrative arc, which is quite a workload for someone who still gets ID’d at…
Barcelona FC: The Last Empire That Still Pretends It Isn’t Falling By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Existential Dread Global capitalism has many temples: the glass cube of an Apple store in Dubai, the tax-domiciled mailbox in Delaware, the neon-lit Nike outlet on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road. Yet none do quite the same brisk trade…
Newcastle-Barcelona: The 1,800-Kilometre Tantrum That Reminds the Planet It’s Still Run by Toddlers in Blazers By Our Man in the Departure Lounge In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call international football, the spat currently unfolding between Newcastle United and FC Barcelona is less a sporting dispute than a morality play performed by millionaires…
COPENHAGEN — The city that gave the world existential angst, open-face sandwiches, and the paradoxical joy of paying $14 for a beer has quietly become the planet’s geopolitical mood ring. While the rest of us scroll through flaming headlines, Copenhagen keeps blinking its bike-friendly, hygge-tinted warning lights: If you want to see how the next…
Wet Britannia: When a Met Office Amber Alert Becomes a Global Schadenfreude Festival By our man in the drizzle, somewhere between a brolly and a breakdown LONDON—As the Met Office issued its latest amber warning for “persistent heavy rain” across southern England this week, the international commentariat rolled its collective eyes so hard you could…
The last time Afghanistan and Sri Lanka met on a cricket pitch, the Taliban had just finished rearranging Kabul’s interior décor, Sri Lanka’s president was busy discovering that swimming pools make poor escape routes, and the global economy was debating whether inflation was merely transitory or the new cardio. All of which is to say:…
Another Tuesday, another column of fire clawing at the sky like humanity’s collective middle finger to gravity. Today’s rocket—let’s call it the SS Bureaucratic Optimism—blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 09:47 GMT carrying a payload of 64 Starlink clones, two weather satellites nobody asked for, and, allegedly, a freeze-dried pizza for the ISS crew who’ve…
The Ballad of Martha Wainwright, or How One Contralto Became the Soundtrack to a Planet Unraveling The first time Martha Wainwright’s voice reached Ulaanbaatar, it arrived via a bootleg cassette smuggled in a yak-wool sock. The customs agent who confiscated it was later found weeping in a yurt, clutching the tape like contraband absolution. That,…
