**Alice in Borderland Season 3: Because the World Needed Another Reminder That Life Is One Giant, Unwinnable Game** *By our international correspondent who’s beginning to suspect the real borderland is just Tuesday* TOKYO—In what can only be described as the entertainment industry’s latest attempt to monetize our collective existential dread, Netflix has summoned forth Alice…
Leslie Sykes and the Global Ripple of a Micro-Meteorite At 07:14 GMT on a Tuesday that otherwise smelled of burnt coffee and geopolitical anxiety, a 12-millimeter shard of cosmic nickel-iron punched through the stratosphere above the Philippine Sea, skipped across the thermosphere like a stone across a pond, and finally surrendered to gravity above downtown…
The island of Taiwan—about the size of Maryland, with the population of Australia and the geopolitical baggage of a dozen empires—has spent the last seventy-odd years perfecting the world’s most awkward house-sit. Technically it’s still the Republic of China, but after 1949 Beijing decided to rebrand as the People’s Republic, leaving Taipei holding the keys…
October’s PlayStation Plus haul landed this week like a diplomatic communique nobody asked for: a game about death in feudal Japan, a game about death in neo-Tokyo, and a game about death in space, all delivered with the cheery subject line “Essential.” Somewhere in a glass tower in San Mateo, a product manager just got…
**Bangkok: The Sweltering Capital Where the Future Goes to Take a Cold Shower** The smell of diesel exhaust, durian, and unspoken dreams hits you at Suvarnabhumi like a geopolitical uppercut. Bangkok, that humid, hyperventilating metropolis, has spent centuries perfecting the art of looking simultaneously exhausted and inexhaustible—a trick most global cities are still trying to…
The Acropolis, as any Athenian will tell you with the weary certainty of someone who has spent a lifetime explaining why democracy is still on beta-testing, has endured earthquakes, Ottoman cannonballs, and cruise-ship crowds wearing socks with sandals. Yet few tremors have been as precisely calibrated as the ones triggered by Maria Sakkari’s forehand. At…
Typhoon Hong Kong: A Tempest in a Global Teacup By the time Typhoon Hong Kong—christened Saola by the Japanese Meteorological Agency, presumably after a cut-price rental car—slammed into the Pearl River Delta last week, the storm had already achieved what most Instagram influencers only dream of: a billion-dollar brand deal with the planet’s supply chains….
The 3i Atlas Is Quietly Redrawing the World—One Pixelated Border at a Time By “Global” Gus Malone | Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the algorithmic fever dreams of Davos and the fluorescent-lit despair of a Brussels conference room, a consortium of cartographers, data scientists, and—let’s be honest—corporate strategists who couldn’t find Timbuktu on an…
State of Play: The Great Global Game Where Everyone’s Losing but Pretending to Win By the time you read this, the scoreboard has already changed—but don’t worry, the scorekeepers never agreed on the rules anyway. From Washington to Wuhan, Davos to Dakar, the phrase “state of play” has metastasized from sports cliché to geopolitical diagnosis,…
**From Centre Court to Cell Block: Boris Becker’s Global Fall from Grace** The curious case of Boris Becker reads like a modern parable about hubris, tax havens, and the peculiar talent wealthy people possess for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Once the golden boy of German tennis who won Wimbledon at 17—an age…
Ananta Game: How a Mobile App About Reincarnation Became the World’s Quietest Geopolitical Weapon ≈600 words Somewhere between the sixth and seventh screen-tap you realize that Ananta Game is not really a game at all. It is a cosmic DMV queue disguised as pastel pixels, a Buddhist slot machine where your next life depends on…
Elvis Has Left the Building—But His Visa Is Still Valid Everywhere By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for the connecting flight to immortality MEMPHIS, CAIRO, SÃO PAULO—Somewhere between the 1956 quarantine of “Heartbreak Hotel” on the BBC and last week’s Elvis-themed wedding in Manila, the corpse of Elvis Aaron Presley acquired a…
