Trump’s UK State Visit: A Global Freak-Show on the Thames LONDON — Air Force One touched down at Stansted on Monday like a gilded albatross, and the world’s most reliable generator of diplomatic whiplash shuffled onto British soil for his third official visit as U.S. president. From Beijing to Brasília, trading floors and WhatsApp groups…
CBeebies: The Soft-Power Kindergarten That Conquered the Planet By Dave’s International Affairs Desk In the great geopolitical nursery rhyme, CBeebies is the pastel-colored Trojan horse you never saw coming. Produced by the BBC and beamed into 100-plus territories from Lagos to Lapland, the channel is technically aimed at humans who still think “property rights” means…
**Peter Kay: The Comedian Who Accidentally Became a Global Stress Ball** While the world burns through its second decade of perpetual crisis management, Peter Kay—the Bolton-bred everyman who looks like your cousin’s accountant—has improbably become the international community’s preferred coping mechanism. From Manchester to Manila, his particular brand of observational humor about garlic bread and…
Paul Mescal and the Great Global Yearning for Earnestness By “Hemlock” O’Donnell, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large DUBLIN—If you stand at the corner of Dame Street and George’s Street at 2:13 a.m., when the kebab grease is still warm and the seagulls have unionised, you can almost hear the planet sigh with relief that Paul Mescal exists. The…
The planet’s collective calendar just received another immovable holiday: EA Sports has decreed that FC 26 will land on 26 September 2025. Mark it in crimson—right next to elections no one trusts, COP summits no one honors, and the next “once-in-a-century” storm. From the glass towers of Singapore to the tin-roof bars of La Paz,…
Tom Hardy: The Last Action Figure Standing Between Us and Global Thermonuclear Boredom From the smoking rubble of what used to be called “cinema,” one man emerges wearing three layers of knitwear, a Bane mask repurposed as a tea-cozy, and the weary expression of someone who has just realized the Doomsday Clock is running on…
**The Curious Case of Melissa Jefferson-Wooden: When American Bureaucracy Goes Global** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and climate change threatens to turn us all into expensive aquarium exhibits—it’s refreshing when a story emerges that reminds us the real enemy was never Russia or China, but rather…
Diana Shnaider: A Tennis Prodigy for the Age of Global Collapse From the clay of Roland-Garros to the hard courts of Flushing Meadows, 19-year-old Diana Shnaider has materialized like a polite but lethal apparition, reminding us that even as the planet smolders, someone somewhere is still practicing drop shots with monastic devotion. Born in Moscow,…
The American Pastime’s Autumnal Hunger Games: A Globe-Trotting Dispatch on the MLB Playoff Picture By Our Man Who Once Saw a Cricket Match End Because Everyone Got Bored Let us begin with the obvious: most of the planet does not, technically speaking, give a solitary damn about the Major League Baseball postseason. In Lagos traffic,…
**Gridiron by the Numbers: How America’s Statistical Obsession Became the World’s Guilty Pleasure** While the rest of the planet was busy with that other football—the one where feet actually touch balls—America spent the last century perfecting the art of turning padded gladiators into spreadsheet entries. Now, in a plot twist that would make even the…
Turnstiles: The World’s Tiniest Border Guards By the time you finish reading this sentence, roughly 2,700 people will have pushed through a turnstile somewhere on the planet. They will do so in languages that span 180 alphabets, under currencies that may collapse by suppertime, and with pockets containing everything from expired metro cards to emergency…
The planet woke up yesterday to the latest Set for Life draws, a phrase that scans like a particularly bitter punch-line in an era when most of us are simply set for Tuesday. From Sydney to Sheffield, five fresh millionaires discovered they will receive a drip-feed of wealth—roughly $20,000 a month for twenty years—while the…
