Marilyn Manson: The Global Boogeyman Who Outgrew the Role By Our Correspondent, somewhere between the death-rattle of the 20th century and the auto-tuned apocalypse of the 21st It is 1997 in Jakarta. Traffic wheezes like a dying accordion, Suharto still clings to power, and a bootleg VCD of “Antichrist Superstar” is circulating through the city’s…
The Planet Wagers On: How a Quiet Maltese Brand Became the House Bank for a Restless Earth By the time the final whistle blew in last month’s Copa Libertadores final, Betway’s odds ticker had already refreshed for the Bangladesh Premier League, a lower-division Belarusian reserve match, and a competitive thumb-wrestling semi-final in an undisclosed Siberian…
Weather Liverpool: A Microclimate in the Macrocasm By A. N. Other, Senior Meteorological Misanthrope If you want to understand the planet’s mood swings, forget the satellite loops above the Pacific and take the 86A to Pier Head on a Tuesday in March. Liverpool’s weather is not merely local precipitation with a Beatles soundtrack; it is…
Suzan Lamens and the Quiet Art of Winning When Nobody’s Watching By Our Man in Rotterdam, still waiting for the coffee to kick in ROTTERDAM—In a planet currently transfixed by cease-fires that aren’t, elections that refuse to concede, and social-media CEOs who treat geopolitics like a particularly spicy meme, the name Suzan Lamens has been…
Mackenzie McDonald: The Quiet American Who Reminds the World That Tennis Still Exists Outside the Big Three PARIS—While diplomats from 195 countries bickered in nearby conference rooms about carbon thresholds that none of them intend to meet, Mackenzie McDonald quietly dispatched a seeded Bulgarian on Court 14 at Roland-Garros, thereby proving that American men can…
By the time the Arizona Diamondbacks finished their latest act of baseball kabuki on Thursday night, the final score—7-3 over the San Francisco Giants—was already scrolling across ticker feeds in Singapore, popping up in Buenos Aires sports apps, and being auto-translated into seventeen languages nobody asked for. Somewhere in Kyiv a war-weary IT contractor glanced…
If you’re looking for the 21st-century Silk Road, forget dusty caravans and Marco Polo cosplayers: follow the private-jet vapor trails to New Zealand’s South Island, the Norwegian Arctic, or a Kansas missile silo recently converted into “premium doomsday condos.” There, behind blast doors thick enough to make a Cold War general blush, the planet’s most…
There are only two things guaranteed to bring a room full of diplomats to blows: a disputed offshore oil field and the question of whose national junior hockey program is merely corrupt versus genuinely evil. Hockey teams, those quaint collections of padded gladiators who speak exclusively in clichés and dental records, have quietly become the…
ROME—The humble noodle, that starchy life raft upon which the Western world has floated its collective neuroses for centuries, has lately become a geopolitical flashpoint, a climate bargaining chip, and the last reliable currency in a planet that can’t decide whether to starve or drown first. From the wheat plains of Saskatchewan to the gas-starved…
Icebound Empire: How 32 NHL Teams Quietly Became the World’s Most Expensive Export By the time the Zamboni’s final lap glistens like a freshly minted credit card, most spectators have already forgotten that the National Hockey League is less a North American pastime than an accidental global franchise. Yes, the rinks are still refrigerated with…
**The Global Bale-Out: How One Welshman Became Hollywood’s Favorite Emotional Refugee** In an era when nations erect walls faster than teenagers build TikTok followings, Christian Bale has made a career of transcending borders—though usually while running from explosions or toward Oscar nominations. The Welsh-born actor’s latest metamorphosis in “The Pale Blue Eye” reminds us that…
John Ritter, International Man of Collapsible Furniture By “Diplomatic” Dave, Senior Correspondent for Absurdity Abroad BURBANK—Somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant is still explaining to a bewildered Japanese tourist that, no, the man who died on the set of “8 Simple Rules” was not, in fact, the inventor of Zen minimalism. Such is the…
