Darlington: The Tiny English Town Accidentally Running the World While Pretending to Be Unremarkable By Our Man in the North, nursing a lukewarm pint of bitter and existential dread DARLINGTON, County Durham—Population 107,000, two Morrison’s car parks, and one nuclear reactor that glows just brightly enough to read the morning headlines. On paper, Darlington is…
The planet has become one long corridor of consecutive boss fights. From the multiplexes of Manila to the streaming queues of Stockholm, the dominant cinematic export of the moment is the “one-battle-after-another” epic: a genre in which the plot is just a polite intermission between choreographed mayhem. Think “John Wick” with a diplomatic passport, or…
COPENHAGEN—Scandinavian airspace is once again playing host to the world’s most fashionable paranoia. Over the past fortnight, unidentified drones—sleek, silent, and apparently equipped with the social skills of a Scandinavian teenager—have been loitering around Danish military installations like bored TikTokers outside a 7-Eleven. The sightings, first shrugged off as “probably just Lars testing his new…
KYIV—Somewhere between the third air-raid siren and the fourth espresso, you realize the war in Ukraine has become the planet’s most macabre subscription service: it autorenews every morning, drains the global wallet, and still hasn’t figured out how to skip the ads. Two years, five summits, and roughly 17,000 think-tank papers later, the front lines…
Sarah Campbell and the Quiet Collapse of Borders Global Dispatch from the Desk of a Jet-Lagged Realist Sarah Campbell’s name first surfaced last Tuesday in a two-line wire-service squib buried beneath the latest crypto-scandal and a puff piece about Beyoncé’s new yacht. Within 48 hours it had metastasized across five continents, translated into seventeen languages,…
KSL News: How a Mormon-Market Local Outlet Accidentally Became the Canary in Global Media’s Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker International Desk Salt Lake City—nestled between mountains that look Photoshopped and a lake so salty it could season the world’s fries—doesn’t scream “global bellwether.” Yet KSL News, the mild-mannered broadcast child of Bonneville International (which is,…
Marc Márquez, the Catalan kid who insists on turning internal organs into confetti, is once again the planet’s most expensive medical experiment on two wheels. While lesser mortals binge-watch geopolitical meltdowns on their phones, Márquez has spent the past decade rewriting Newtonian physics in 300-kilometre-per-hour increments, proving that the universe can be bent—but only if…
A long time ago—1977, to be exact—in a studio lot far, far away (Burbank), a cash-strapped George Lucas stitched together leftover WWII dog-fight footage, samurai tropes, and Joseph Campbell’s refrigerator-magnet philosophy. The result was Star Wars, a scrappy B-movie that accidentally became the planet’s most efficient soft-power delivery system since the British Empire served gin….
VATICAN CITY—In what seasoned curial insiders are calling “the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hostile takeover,” the global church woke up this week to discover that the Holy Spirit—long presumed to be a dove—has apparently pivoted into venture capital. The Synod on Synodality, a two-year circular conversation that began with earnest Zoom breakout rooms and ends…
RUSSELL M. NELSON: THE QUIETLY GLOBAL OCTOGENARIAN WHO RUNS A CHURCH THE SIZE OF SWEDEN By the time most men are swapping their briefcases for orthopedic shoes, Russell M. Nelson—current prophet, seer, and revelator of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—was circumnavigating the globe like a caffeinated Magellan with a medical degree. At…
President Nelson Health: When the Heartbeat of a Nation Becomes a Global EKG Geneva—In the marble corridors of the World Health Organization, an unspoken question flickers across interpreters’ headsets: “How’s the old ticker?” The query isn’t about a medical chart; it’s shorthand for President Nelson’s cardiac stent, upgraded last week in a gleaming Cape Town…
Wayward Netflix, Wayward Pines: A Parable for the Streaming Apocalypse By Our Bureau Chief Emeritus, still technically on sabbatical in Geneva The news that Netflix has quietly shuffled *Wayward Pines*—that M. Night Shyamalan-produced fever dream about a town where time, ethics, and plot coherence all go to die—into its “Leaving Soon” carousel should have registered…
