Tokyo wakes up, checks the Nikkei, and sees Merrill Lynch’s ghost hovering above the trading floor like an overpriced latte that refuses to evaporate. London’s Canary Wharf echoes with the same apparition. São Paulo, Mumbai, Dubai—everywhere capital goes to feel important—there’s a faint, expensive smell of Merrill Lynch cologne drifting through the vents. The firm…
Alexander Bublik: The Kazakh Jester Who Proves Tennis Is a Cosmic Joke In the grand, grotesque carnival that is professional tennis—where Rafael Nadal’s biceps are worshipped like minor deities and Novak Djokovic’s gluten-free aura is monitored by satellites—Alexander Bublik has chosen the role of the court jester. Born in St. Petersburg, raised in Moscow, naturalised…
Smith-Mundt, the Zombie Act That Won’t Stay Dead by Our Correspondent in the Land of Overlapping Narratives If you’ve spent any time in the global commentariat lately, you may have noticed certain State Department tweets that read like they were written by a caffeinated teenager who just discovered sarcasm. Thank the Smith-Mundt Act—or rather, its…
Noah Centineo and the Soft-Power Romance Industrial Complex A field report from the Department of Global Heartthrobs and Geopolitical Fluff PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the 13th arrondissement’s last surviving DVD store, a gaggle of Korean exchange students is reenacting that locker-kiss scene from “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Their TikTok hashtag (#CentineoInSeoul)…
Luton Airport: The Tiny Terminal That Could (and Probably Shouldn’t) Luton, Bedfordshire – Just 30 miles north of London, a modest ribbon of tarmac sprouts from a landscape best described as “aggressively beige.” This is London Luton Airport, the budget airline’s answer to the question, “How cheaply can we simulate international travel while still charging…
Baseball, that charmingly parochial pastime Americans insist on calling the “World Series” despite inviting only one country, has finally coughed up a genuinely global phenomenon: Bohm Baseball. Named after Philadelphia third-baseman Alec Bohm—who, in a moment of exquisite candor, told a stadium full of paying customers exactly what he thought of their beloved sport—this new…
Mikel Arteta, the accidental geopolitician, is currently conducting a real-time experiment in soft power from a bench in North London. While the rest of us doom-scroll through tariff wars, coups, and that inexplicable new TikTok dance, Arteta has quietly turned Arsenal Football Club into a multilateral alliance that would make the UN Security Council blush…
**The Unlikely Diplomat: How Jason Crow Became the World’s Most Unwilling International Symbol** While most Americans couldn’t pick Jason Crow out of a lineup, the former Army Ranger turned Congressman from Colorado has accidentally become the poster child for democratic backsliding in the world’s most self-congratulatory democracy. It’s a bit like being voted “Most Likely…
Freeze Warning: A Global Icy Stare in a Heating World by Our Correspondent, somewhere between the last functioning tavern and the first broken thermostat Dateline: Geneva, 03:17 a.m. local time—because even the sun is rationing these days. The World Meteorological Organization has just issued a multinational “freeze warning,” a bureaucratic euphemism for “brace yourselves, Earth,…
The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Cousin: Why the Whole World Is Now a Fantasy Premier League Colony By Our Man in the Ether Somewhere between the collapse of the post-war order and the rise of oat-milk lattes, the Premier League stopped being a mere English pastime and became the planet’s largest secular religion. The liturgy is…
Sam Heughan: Scotland’s Accidental Soft-Power Kilt Missile and the World’s Thirst for Tartan-Wrapped Reassurance By Our Man in the Highlands, Nursing a Hangover and a Passport Full of Airport Stamps There are moments when the global order feels like a Jenga tower assembled by drunk toddlers: one wobble in Washington, one sneeze in Beijing, and…
The Global Ballet of Brake Lights: Why the Pedestrian-Accident Lawyer Is Now a Borderless Brand By the time you finish reading this sentence, another human being somewhere between Lagos and Ljubljana will have been introduced to the hood ornament of a moving vehicle. Statistics, those charming little liars, inform us that 1.35 million of these…
