**Mariners Magic Number: When Baseball Arithmetic Meets Geopolitical Reality** The Seattle Mariners’ magic number currently sits at 12, a figure that would barely register in most corners of our increasingly fractured world—except perhaps as the number of minutes before another government collapses or another tech billionaire launches himself into space. Yet here we are, calculating…
Seattle, Washington – The Emerald City’s latest civic miracle isn’t a software patch or a green-energy IPO; it’s the sudden, baffling availability of Mariners playoff tickets. Yes, the same franchise that spent two decades perfecting the art of October abstinence has qualified for the postseason—twice in a row, if you can believe the medical journals….
**Bangkok’s Eternal Return: Why Thailand Keeps Seducing the World (and Then Sending It Home in a Tuk-Tuk of Regret)** By the time your flight descends through the petrochemical haze above Suvarnabhumi, you’ve already joined a centuries-old parade of outsiders who arrived certain they could bend the Kingdom to their will. The Portuguese came with cannon,…
Jim Carrey: A One-Man Sanctions Package on Hollywood and the Planet By the time you read this, somewhere between Mumbai and Montevideo somebody is still quoting “Alrighty then!” as if it were a UN resolution. That’s the geopolitical reach of James Eugene Carrey, the rubber-faced Canadian export whose greatest trick was convincing the world that…
Padres Schedule: The Global Domino Theory of 162 Baseball Games By the time the first pitch of the San Diego Padres’ season is hurled at Petco Park, the rest of the planet will already have endured three currency crises, two coups, and one viral dance that has mercifully failed to cross the Pacific. Yet somewhere…
**The Age of Kimmel: How One Man’s Birth Year Became a Global Obsession** In a world where nuclear powers engage in Twitter diplomacy and billionaires race to Mars while Earth burns, humanity has found its most pressing international concern: Jimmy Kimmel’s age. The 56-year-old late-night host has unwittingly become a planetary fixation, proving that in…
Stansted: The Last Waiting Room Before the Empire’s After-Party By our man in the departure lounge, still clutching a limp Pret baguette like it’s a diplomatic passport LONDON—Stansted Airport sits 30-odd miles northeast of the capital like a hangover that refuses to apologise. Once a Second World War bomber base, now rebranded as “London” by…
**Rapture Ready: The Global Implications of Apocalypse Tourism** *From Jerusalem to Jakarta, the curious phenomenon of rapture-ready Christians is reshaping geopolitics, economics, and the occasional real estate transaction.* While most of humanity stumbles through Tuesday afternoon blissfully unaware of their impending doom, a peculiar subset of Christians worldwide have their bags packed for a rather…
Robert De Niro, International Man of (Mild) Mystery By Our Correspondent in an Airport Lounge Where the Wi-Fi Charges by the Minute There is a peculiar kind of diplomatic immunity that celebrities acquire once their faces have been projected onto every screen from Lagos to Lagos—yes, both the Nigerian and Portuguese ones. Robert De Niro…
McCartney Kessler and the Quiet Collapse of Global Relevance By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic The name McCartney Kessler sounds, at first blush, like an indie-film protagonist who discovers the cure for ennui in a Reykjavik basement and then forgets it in an Uber. Instead, she is a 23-year-old American tennis player who, last…
The Curious Global Footprint of Jimmy Kimmel’s Wife (Yes, That One) PARIS—On paper, Molly McNearney is simply the co-head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and the woman who married a man famous for pranking children into believing their Halloween candy has vanished. Yet in the grand, malfunctioning kaleidoscope of international celebrity, her name now pings…
Tokyo Game Show 2025: Where the World Presses Start to Escape Itself By Our Correspondent Still Recovering from the After-Party Karaoke Tax The trains into Makuhari Messe ran on time, which should have been the first clue that reality had been patched overnight. By 9 a.m. on opening day, 300,000 pilgrims—developers, streamers, crypto refugees, and…
