Lead leaching cookware is the rare product recall that manages to unite Beijing bargain-hunters, Parisian gastronomes, and Midwestern coupon-clippers in one slow-motion panic. From the wet markets of Guangzhou to the Instagram kitchens of Copenhagen, the same grim punch-line is being served: dinner might be glazing itself with a light seasoning of cumulative brain damage,…
NASHVILLE — Somewhere between the neon baptism of Lower Broadway and the algorithmic altar of Spotify, Lee Brice has become America’s most exportable baritone. To the uninitiated, he is merely another baseball-capped balladeer singing about tailgates and heartbreak; to the global listener, he is a soft-power Trojan horse wheeled into every airport lounge from Dubai…
Keeley Whitcomb and the Great Global Vanishing Act by our correspondent in the Departures Lounge, nursing a lukewarm negroni and a grudge The name Keeley Whitcomb first slid across encrypted Telegram channels somewhere between a grainy drone strike clip and a meme of Vladimir Putin riding a bear in Crocs. In less than 36 hours,…
Jennifer Hudson: The Weight of a Voice in a World That’s Already Tired of Singing By Diego “Dreadful” Delgado, Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent PARIS—On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where existentialists once chain-smoked their way through post-war dread, a busker croons “And I Am Telling You” in three languages and two broken hearts. No one drops coins….
Rio Ngumoha: The Teenager Who Just Shook the Transfer Market—and Maybe Globalization Itself Liverpool, England — While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through headlines about melting ice caps and election reruns, a 16-year-old kid from Angola—via Portugal, via Chelsea’s academy car park—signed a piece of paper that briefly made the pound sterling look stable….
From the rickety rooftop bars of Havana to the fluorescent-lit sportsbooks of Macau, the Cubs standings—currently hovering in the polite purgatory of third place in the NL Central—have become a kind of universal Rorschach test for anyone who’s ever tried to explain American optimism to a customs officer abroad. Ask a Berliner why a city…
The Marco Rubio Traveling Circus: A Floridian in the Global Funhouse By Diego “Weathered Passport” Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Miami — The first thing you notice when you land at MIA is that even the palm trees seem faintly embarrassed. They know they’re props in a stage set that doubles as the seventh-largest economy…
Jeffrey Gundlach—super-investor, bond oracle, and the man whose permabear scowl has become a kind of global mood ring—has once again wrapped the planet’s financial mandarins around his little finger. From Tokyo’s Ministry of Finance to a Berlin pension fund that still thinks 2 % is a “decent yield,” traders refreshed their browsers at 3 a.m….
FDA COOKWARE LEAD: HOW AMERICA’S LATEST KITCHEN SCANDAL IS EXPORTING PANIC FROM PEORIA TO PESHAWAR By the time the U.S. Food & Drug Administration sheepishly admitted last week that “some cookware” may be leaching enough lead to make a Roman emperor nervous, the news had already raced across borders faster than a Michelin-starred chef fleeing…
Melania Trump’s London Look: When Fashion Diplomacy Meets the End of the World By Dave’s International Correspondent, still jet-lagged and mildly allergic to protocol London, Tuesday, 11:37 GMT. The rain paused just long enough for Mrs. Trump to descend the aircraft steps in a dove-gray Burberry trench so crisp it could have been pressed by…
Michael Olise and the Beautiful Game’s Ugly Price Tag By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge Between Paris and Penang It takes a village to raise a child, they say, but it apparently takes the GDP of a mid-sized Pacific island to buy one who can bend a football like Michael Olise. The 22-year-old Franco-Nigerian-English…
Eric Swalwell, the Californian congressman who once ran for president on a platform of “ban the guns, baby,” has become something of an international Rorschach test. From Brussels to Beijing, observers peer at him and see whatever they most fear or covet: an avatar of American overreach, a walking data-breach cautionary tale, or simply the…
