Melania’s Canary: How a Single Yellow Dress Became the Planet’s Rorschach Test By our correspondent in the departure lounge of history GENEVA—It began, as most twenty-first-century cataclysms do, with a photograph. There she stood, the former First Lady of the United States, wrapped in what Pantone would clinically label “Solar Power #FFD700,” waving from the…
The Tragicomic Global Odyssey of Trent Grisham, Baseball’s Wandering Metaphor By Dave’s International Desk of Disenchantment In the grand bazaar of global sport, where Premier League oligarchs flip super-clubs like condos and Chinese streaming giants bankroll esports teenagers who’ve never seen daylight, Trent Grisham stands as a quaint anachronism: a 27-year-old center-fielder from Fort Worth…
PARIS—Somewhere between a Greek philosophy seminar and a Berlin squat party, the word “antifa” slipped its linguistic moorings and became a global Rorschach test. To one half of the planet, it is a vigilante boogeyman lurking behind every broken Starbucks window; to the other, it is the last lonely fire brigade in a world already…
The World Holds Its Breath While a Handful of People in Washington Whisper About a Number By Our Special Correspondent in the Departure Lounge of Monetary Purgatory If aliens ever bothered to tune into Earth’s financial news, they’d assume the species worships a deity known only as “the Fed.” Every six weeks, priests in business-casual…
The Last Chin Standing: Jay Leno and the Global Afterglow of American Late-Night There’s a moment, somewhere between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Japan, when exhausted cargo-ship crews tune their shortwave radios to whatever English chatter they can catch. Over the crackle drifts the unmistakable drone of Jay Leno—still yukking it up about…
The Alyssa Thomas Doctrine: How a Basketball Bruiser Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time Alyssa Thomas slammed her 2,000th WNBA rebound through the rim last week, the ball was technically in Turkey. That’s because the Connecticut Sun’s resident freight train was in Istanbul, guest-coaching a clinic for teenage girls whose parents still remember when…
Manny Machado and the Global Theater of Overpaid Limberness By Santiago “Sully” Márquez, International Sports Misanthrope Somewhere between the Panama Canal’s perpetual bottleneck and the lithium mines that keep your smartphone humming, Manny Machado continues to bend his 6’3″ frame into positions that would make a Cirque du Soleil accountant blush. To the uninitiated, he…
The Town That Forgot It Was Global By Our Correspondent in the Only Time Zone That Really Matters Somewhere between the last nonstop flight to Dubai and the first drone-delivery of oat milk, a dot on the map began behaving like it mattered. The locals call it “the town,” as though every other municipality on…
Tim Allen: The Last American Tool Man Standing Between Civilization and the Abyss By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent-at-Large PARIS—While Europe debates heat-pump subsidies and Asia perfects the art of paying for groceries with a blink, the United States still has Tim Allen grunting in syndication across 112 territories, a cultural export as durable as asbestos…
They say a passport is just a very expensive souvenir, but try explaining that to the 1.2 billion people who don’t have one that actually works. From the maple-scented booklet in Toronto to the burgundy talisman coveted in Lagos, the modern “citizenship test” has become less a quiz on parliamentary trivia and more a global…
From the concrete bowels of Detroit’s Comerica Park to the flickering smartphone screens in Saigon’s midnight cafés, the phrase “Tigers game” has metastasized into something far larger than nine innings of baseball. Mention it in Seoul and a crypto-punishing college kid pictures the Doosan Bears mascot; whisper it in Jakarta and a wildlife-trafficking middleman hears…
The planet’s lingua franca is no longer English; it is the green and red candlestick. From Lagos cafés where traders watch Meta stock on cracked Android screens to glass towers in Singapore humming with algorithmic prayers, the ticker META has become a planetary rosary bead. Swipe up, recite the revenue, murmur about Reality Labs losses,…
