Rio de Janeiro – Somewhere in the luminous sprawl that Brazilians politely call a city, two footballing tribes prepared last night to re-enact a 115-year-old grudge match whose geopolitical footprint now reaches further than most UN peacekeeping missions. Santos versus São Paulo, the coastal pearl versus the concrete leviathan, is no longer a provincial squabble…
From the Ruins of a Reality-TV Love Triangle, a Global Cultural Export Rises PARIS—On a rain-lashed Tuesday, the patrons of Café de Flore—those weathered existentialists who once debated Sartre over Gauloises—were instead murmuring about Ariana Madix. Not Proust, not politics, but a 38-year-old American cocktail waitress turned pop-culture phoenix who has somehow become the lingua…
Love Island: The Geopolitical Bikini Line From the sun-bleached terraces of Mallorca to the algorithmic abyss of 37 Netflix territories, Love Island is no longer a guilty British pleasure—it is the soft-power equivalent of exporting lukewarm prosecco in a NATO ration pack. Across six continents, viewers watch genetically symmetrical strangers couple, decouple, and recouple with…
Poundland Cadbury Selection Boxes: The Last Chocolate Diplomats in a Fracturing World By the time the white-and-orange price tag drops to £1, the Cadbury selection box has already travelled further than most of us will this decade. Somewhere between Bournville and the fluorescent aisles of a Poundland near Luton, it has absorbed tariffs, exchange-rate tantrums,…
Mike Tirico’s Voice Is the Last Neutral Currency on Earth—And That Terrifies Everyone By Dave’s Locker Global Desk The planet is currently running on three things: TikTok attention spans, microchips made in places we pretend not to spy on, and Mike Tirico’s baritone. The first two are volatile; the third is the closest thing the…
Kansas City, USA – In a world where a misplaced drone strike can shave 3% off global wheat futures before your coffee cools, the opening of a quarterback-themed steakhouse hardly seems like geopolitical news. Yet when Patrick Mahomes—American football’s golden-armed boy-king—unveiled “Mahomes & Co. 15” inside the glitzy Loews Hotel last month, foreign desks from…
In the marble-clad lobby of the Geneva International Motor Show—an event that now feels as quaint as a telegraph convention—a Hyundai Palisade sat under surgical-grade LED light, politely pretending it wasn’t a three-ton metaphor for the global middle class’s midlife crisis. Delegates in lanyards shuffled past, each clutching a brochure promising “premium serenity,” which is…
LOS ANGELES—The Grammy Salute to Earth, Wind & Fire unfolded Monday night like a sequined time capsule ejected from a burning planet: all horn stabs, cosmic optimism, and the faint whiff of existential panic that now accompanies any mass nostalgia event. While American networks sold it as a feel-good tribute, the rest of the globe—currently…
Royal Mail’s Slow-Motion Collapse Is a Love Letter to the End of Empire By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for a parcel posted in 2021 LONDON—On a drizzly Tuesday that could pass for any Tuesday since 1973, Royal Mail announced another “strategic pivot,” which is C-suite argot for “we’re quietly circling the…
Antalya, Turkey—Where the Sun Now Comes with a Side of Smoke By Our Correspondent Who Packed SPF 50 and a Fire Blanket ANTALYA, Turkey — In the glossy brochures, the Turkish Riviera is still a sun-kissed miracle of turquoise water and all-inclusive cocktails. In real time, it looks more like the inside of a tandoor…
Higher Ed, Higher Debt: The World’s Longest Commencement Speech By our correspondent who still remembers what “interest-free” felt like PARIS—Across the planet, the mortarboards have been flung, the champagne flutes rinsed, and the congratulatory Instagram stories archived. Yet for the class of 2024—and every class stretching back to roughly 2008—graduation is less a finish line…
KANSAS CITY—Somewhere between a Russian oligarch’s rusting super-yacht and a Shanghai data-center humming with TikTok algorithms, a 25-year-old cornerback named Jaylen Watson is quietly altering the gravitational pull of the planet. That may sound like the sort of hyperbolic nonsense usually reserved for cryptocurrency white papers, but stay with me: when Watson housed a 99-yard…
