MADRID – Walk the worn marble of the Manzanares at dusk and you will find the last dictator Europe still applauds. No, not one of those tin-pot nostalgics hogging the headlines in the world’s sad corners—this one wears a black Armani tracksuit, whistles with the authority of a frontier guard, and has turned a modest…
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — On Thursday night the Parken Stadium will throb with the sort of optimism Scandinavians normally reserve for tax-return season. FC Copenhagen, a club whose annual budget is roughly what Bayer Leverkusen spends on sports-science smoothies, welcomes the newly-crowned “Neverlusen” for the first leg of a Europa League quarter-final. Bookmakers have installed the…
Wordle and Connections: How Two Little Puzzles Became the Last Neutral Territory in a Fractured World By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently hiding from deadlines in a Reykjavik airport lounge It began, as most global crises do, innocently enough. One morning in February 2022, while Russian tanks queued politely outside Kyiv and half of Twitter was…
VANGUARD, n. – from the Old French avant-garde, literally “those who get shot at first so the rest of the army can Instagram the moment.” The word has marched far beyond its medieval battlefield origins and now parades through stock markets, art galleries, revolutionary cells, and corporate PowerPoints with the same smug confidence it once…
Google Down: A 60-Minute Global Nervous Breakdown Observed From Five Continents By the time the first outage alerts pinged across Twitter (still limping along like a punch-drunk boxer), the planet was already in the bargaining stage of grief. At 11:47 UTC, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Drive, Docs, and the company’s entire advertising nervous system flickered…
**The Global Implications of Lyssa McGowan’s Pets at Home: When Corporate Pets Become International Players** In the grand theater of international commerce, where titans clash over semiconductor supplies and nations wage economic warfare through trade tariffs, one might be forgiven for missing the seismic shifts occurring in Britain’s pet care retail sector. Yet here we…
The Curious Case of Graham Potter: A Parable for the Age of Instant Judgment By Our Correspondent in the Departure Lounge, Somewhere Over the Atlantic When Graham Potter was quietly escorted out of Stamford Bridge last spring, the global reaction was less a gasp than a collective shrug—a sound that, translated into 37 languages, still…
The World Tunes In to Watch Kabul vs Kandy, Again By Our Correspondent Who Has Memorized Every Airport Lounge Menu on the Subcontinent It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Afghanistan and Sri Lanka meet on a cricket pitch, the planet braces itself for a masterclass in geopolitical karaoke. The flags flutter, the anthems…
MONACO—If you squint from the terrace of the Hôtel de Paris, the principality looks like a Fabergé egg that learned to walk. Two square kilometers of cliffside tax efficiency masquerading as a sovereign state, Monaco is what happens when a spreadsheet buys a yacht and decides to declare independence. The locals—those 38,000 humans and at…
Tom Llamas, the Man with the Perfectly Square Jaw and a Passport Full of Misery From the barricades of Kyiv to the flooded avenues of Manila, Tom Llamas has perfected the art of looking handsomely concerned while the rest of us watch the apocalypse in HD. The Emmy-winning correspondent—currently the global face of NBC News…
Bagram Air Base: The World’s Most Expensive Rental with a View of Infinity Byline: Dave’s Locker, International Desk (somewhere between cynicism and passport control) If real estate is all about location, location, location, then Bagram Air Base is the cosmic joke that keeps on giving: forty miles north of Kabul, sixty minutes from the nearest…
Sally Rooney Has Conquered the Planet—Now Let’s Ask Why DUBLIN—While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through pandemic dashboards and commodity prices, a 32-year-old former debate champion from Castlebar quietly became the most exported piece of Irish soft power since Guinness. Sally Rooney’s three slender novels have been translated into 46 languages, including Catalan, Korean…
