Brad Lander and the Municipal Thermometer: Why One New York Comptroller Makes the Bond Markets Sweat from Singapore to São Paulo By the time Brad Lander hops on his 7 a.m. Zoom with London pension managers, the overnight repo desks in Hong Kong have already priced in whatever he might say. That’s the quiet punchline…
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the American political commentator whose surname sounds like a brand of discount cologne, has transcended mere domestic notoriety to become a curious specimen of late-imperial pageantry. From Manila to Milan, observers watch her performative patriotism with the same detached fascination usually reserved for slow-motion train derailments or North Korean parades—equal parts horror and…
Red Robin, the globe-trotting mascot of American casual-dining excess, has landed in fourteen countries and counting—proof that if you fry it, they will come. The chain’s crimson-capped robin now perches above the neon streets of Dubai, the megamall food courts of Manila, and a repurposed Cold-War bunker in Riga that still smells faintly of surplus…
The Year the Planet Decided Zac Efron Was a Geopolitical Asset By Dave’s Foreign Desk, filing from four time-zones and a suspiciously warm December It began, as most 21st-century absurdities do, on a group chat. Somewhere between a grainy paparazzi shot of Zac Efron hugging a solar panel in Namibia and an AI-generated deepfake of…
The Curious Case of the Vanishing Nimrods: How Three Missing Coloradans Became a Global Mirror By the time the first snow flurries hit the Rocky Mountains last week, three hunters—each armed with enough gear to outfit a small expeditionary force—had already slipped off the digital map somewhere between TikTok and the Continental Divide. What began…
Xavier Legette’s 200-yard Sunday matinee in Munich wasn’t just another box-score footnote; it was a geopolitical flare shot across the bow of every soccer-obsessed continent. While the Allianz Arena crowd practiced polite Teutonic applause, American expats in lederhosen howled like their student-loan balances had just been forgiven. Somewhere in Lagos a betting syndicate recalibrated the…
In Queens, New York, sits Benjamin N. Cardozo High School—a red-brick monument to the American conviction that meritocracy can be manufactured like plastic lawn flamingos. Named after the Supreme Court justice who once called law “a solemn farce,” the building now hosts a daily farce of its own: 3,800 teenagers trying to game the algorithm…
The Mayor of London: A Punchline in a Global Farce By Our Man in the Departures Lounge If you squint from 30,000 feet, London looks less like a city and more like a hedge fund’s mood ring—green when the pound rallies, bruised purple when another minister resigns on live television. Hovering above it all, nominally…
Thomas Tuchel: Football’s Last Cosmopolitan, Packing His Suitcase Again By A. Verlaine, International Desk, somewhere over the Atlantic The news pinged across time zones like a low-budget Bond film title card: Tuchel Leaves Bayern. In Tokyo salarymen smirked into their miso, in Lagos betting shops recalibrated odds, and in Washington think-tankers—who still believe “soccer” is…
When the United Nations convened last year to debate whether the 21st century had officially collapsed into satire, the delegate from Luxembourg quietly held up a tablet looping a 1990s infomercial in which Gary Busey—eyes wide as a currency crisis—explained how to cook a steak with a car battery. The room fell silent. No vote…
Devon Achane: The 5’9″, 190-lb Glitch in the NFL’s Matrix—and the Planet’s Wobbly Orbit Bylines from Houston to Beijing, Lagos to Reykjavík, all agree on one thing: the kid is stupidly fast. While the rest of us shuffle through airport security with the collective grace of a broken Roomba, Devon Achane has been slicing through…
Dandadan Season 3: When the World’s Idols Unite to Fight Alien STDs and Catholic Guilt—A Global Dispatch By the time the third season of Dandadan dropped, the planet had already survived two pandemics, three near-misses with nuclear winter, and one regrettable summer when everyone tried to make NFTs happen. Against that backdrop, a Japanese streaming…
