CHICAGO—Somewhere between the 18th-century fur trapper’s “Checagou” and the modern tourist’s Instagram grid, the Windy City learned to weaponize its own nickname. Locals insist the moniker was originally a dig at bloviating politicians, not the lake-effect gusts that peel toupees off bankers on LaSalle Street. Outsiders, of course, prefer the meteorological interpretation because it’s easier…
Paris, 2024 – Somewhere between the pâtisserie and the palace, Emmanuel Macron has managed to turn the very idea of political gravity into a flaky, buttery croissant: crisp on the outside, hollow in the middle, yet weirdly irresistible to anyone watching from abroad. To the rest of the planet, “Macron” is no longer just a…
**The New Panopticon: Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and the Global Theater of the Absurd** In a world where privacy has become as quaint as a rotary phone, Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses have arrived to ensure that no moment goes unrecorded, no indiscretion unarchived, and no dinner conversation undocumented by that guy at the next table…
Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Global Catastrophes By Our Special Correspondent, Somewhere Between the 9th and 10th Circle of Fact-Checking VIENNA—From the mahogany-paneled briefing rooms of the IAEA to the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila, humanity has reached a rare consensus: we prefer our mendacities artisanal, preferably with a local accent and a…
Dispatch from the Asphalt Frontlines: Why Car-Injury Attorneys Are the New Global Diplomats By A Correspondent Who Has Seen More Bent Metal Than a Kazakh Scrapyard It begins, as most modern tragedies do, with a push notification. Somewhere between the Mariana Trench of debt and the Himalayan heights of insurance premiums, a human foot misjudges…
Trump Statue Unveiled in Italian Hamlet, Planet Braces for Next Bronze Catastrophe By Matteo “The Sardine” Moretti, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker ROME—In the sort of sleepy Tuscan village where the loudest sound is usually a pensioner clearing his throat, officials this week hoisted a 7-foot, 400-kilogram bronze effigy of Donald J. Trump into the central…
Try Guys, Try World: How Four Former BuzzFeeders Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By the time the Try Guys announced their split from Ned Fulmer last September, global interest had already turned the scandal into a low-stakes World Cup of Schadenfreude. From Manila to Madrid, timelines filled with incredulous takes: a married man cheats…
Twycross Zoo and the Great Ape Paradox: How a Modest English Menagerie Became a Final Embassy for Our Cousins From the satellite’s-eye view, Twycross Zoo sits like a green postage stamp in the middle of England’s post-industrial Midlands, a region once famous for ceramic toilets and now for Amazon fulfillment centers. Zoom in and you’ll…
The World Watches Sky News UK—Whether It Asked To or Not By our man in the departure lounge with an expired passport and a running tab If you have ever spent a sleepless night in a foreign airport, you have met Sky News UK. It flickers above the baggage carousel in Dubai at 03:14, murmurs…
In the Horn of Africa, wedged between the Red Sea and a desert the color of regret, lies Eritrea—population five million, embassies roughly five, and UN human-rights rapporteurs approximately one permanent. To the casual observer it looks like a cartographical afterthought, yet for the last three decades this sliver of coastline has quietly perfected a…
Passport to Purgatory: How the Humble Citizenship Test Became the World’s Most Politicized Pop-Quiz By Our Man in the Queue, Watching the World Fill Out Form 47-B in Triplicate LONDON—Somewhere between the multiple-choice question about the national tree and the oral recitation of a centuries-old poem, the modern citizenship test stops being an exam and…
Candace Owens: the accidental export America never meant to ship PARIS—Every country has its ideological souvenirs, those little cultural knick-knacks that somehow slip past customs and end up cluttering foreign living-room shelves. France sends existential dread disguised as perfume; Britain still mails packets of colonial nostalgia in the form of Downton Abbey box sets. The…
