Terry Gannon, the American sportscaster whose velvety baritone has soundtracked more Olympic heartbreaks than a Russian figure-skating judge on a bender, has become an unlikely geopolitical Rorschach test. From Beijing to Birmingham, viewers parse his inflection the way Kremlinologists once decoded May Day parade photos—searching for clues about which superpower is currently favored by the…
Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian-born venture capitalist who dresses like a Bond villain on casual Friday, has spent the last decade exporting his particular brand of fiscal sadism to every time zone that still has Wi-Fi. Once merely the loudest carnivore on Canada’s Dragon’s Den, O’Leary has leveraged reality television’s global supply chain—Shark Tank in the…
**The Glittering Spectacle of Global Capitalism, Now Playing at a Cinema Near You** In a world where nuclear powers exchange threats over breakfast and climate change is politely ignored like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, humanity has found its true priority: watching Taylor Swift gyrate in sequins from the comfort of a movie theater seat….
**The Global Empire of Sparkly Drawers: How Clea Shearer Tidied Her Way Into the Geopolitical Conversation** *By Our Correspondent Who Keeps His Socks Rolled in Rebellion* PARIS—In a world where nuclear treaties collapse via tweet and central banks print money the way teenagers print TikToks, it takes a special kind of cultural juggernaut to make…
September Social Security Payments Go Global: How 70 Million Americans’ $113 Billion Windfall Shakes Markets from Manila to Milan By the time the first electronic deposit hits a retiree’s account in Biloxi at 12:01 a.m. on the third of September, a bond trader in Singapore has already slammed three espressos and refreshed her Bloomberg terminal…
Amazon Fresh: The Banana Republic of Groceries Goes Global By Our Correspondent, still wearing yesterday’s shirt in an undisclosed airport lounge Somewhere over the Pacific, between the recycled air and the lukewarm chardonnay, it occurred to me that Amazon Fresh has become the world’s most polite form of colonialism. One click and a pineapple arrives…
SALFORD, England—Across the planet, from the smog-laced skyline of Jakarta to the neon-lit boulevards of Buenos Aires, people are currently worrying about inflation, war, and whether their phones are secretly recording them while they brush their teeth. Meanwhile, in a modest stadium wedged between Manchester’s orbital ring-road and a canal that smells of existential dread,…
The Black-and-White Grid That Binds the Planet By Our Correspondent in Exile, currently somewhere with spotty Wi-Fi and excellent coffee It is 3:47 a.m. in Jakarta, 9:47 p.m. in Lagos, and 11:47 p.m. in São Paulo. Somewhere in each of those time zones a solitary glow emanates from a phone, a tablet, or—if the person…
DENVER—While the Front Range woke to another amber alert screaming across phones, televisions, and that smart fridge nobody asked for, the rest of the planet barely flinched. Not because the disappearance of a nine-year-old is trivial—far from it—but because, in the global village, we’ve all become reluctant connoisseurs of other people’s nightmares. Parisians sipped espresso…
Stonehenge, Globalism’s Oldest Tourist Trap The 4,500-year-old rock circle in Wiltshire has always been Britain’s way of saying, “Yes, we too had a Bronze Age IKEA, and yes, we also threw away the instruction manual.” But seen from the International Space Station—or more realistically, from a budget airline window seat somewhere over the Channel—Stonehenge is…
Emmanuel Macron: Europe’s Last Adult in the Room, or Just the Fastest to the Exit? by Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Paris—In the grand global theatre where most leaders arrive with the subtlety of a chainsaw juggling act, Emmanuel Macron glides onstage like a philosophy professor who accidentally wandered into a bar fight. Tailored suit, unblinking…
**The Global Gospel According to Saint Bill: How a Software Salesman Became Humanity’s Reluctant Savior** DATELINE: SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SEATTLE AND THE STRATOSPHERE — While the rest of us were busy arguing about whether pineapple belongs on pizza, William Henry Gates III quietly transformed from the man who brought us the Blue Screen of Death into…
