KARACHI—“Brother of the Taliban’s favourite travel agent” is not the sort of résumé line that opens doors in most capitals, yet Umer Shah, younger sibling of the Afghan Interior Minister’s notorious fixer Ahmad Shah, keeps managing to slip through them anyway. While big brother Ahmad busies himself shuttling dignitaries between Kabul, Doha and the occasional…
Nvidia: The Green Giant Making the World’s Dictators and Democracies Equally Dependent by Our Correspondent in a Café Where the Wi-Fi Is Faster Than the Justice System If Silicon Valley had a Godfather, it would wear a leather jacket, speak with a mild Taiwanese-American accent, and answer to “Jensen.” Nvidia, the company that started life…
Austin Metcalf and the Great American Talent Vacuum By our Special Correspondent in Existential Airports Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the third watered-down espresso at Gate C12, a name flashed across the departure board: “Austin Metcalf.” Not the man himself—he’s still safely marooned in whichever mid-tier U.S. city currently markets itself as “the next…
PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant crumb and a NATO communiqué, Jennifer Coolidge has become a trans-Atlantic bargaining chip. The White Lotus matriarch, once America’s favorite ditzy aunt, now operates as soft-power currency in every capital that still pretends to care about culture. Berlin DJs remix her sighs into techno; Lagos hair-braiders sell “Tanya waves”; Tokyo teens…
Ozempic Goes Global: A Tale of Needles, Net-Exports, and Narcissism By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker COPENHAGEN – Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the food-courts of Dubai, a Danish pharmaceutical company discovered that the fastest route to world domination is through the human waistline. Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic—originally a humble diabetes drug—has become the planet’s most…
Robert Plant Has Left the Building—But the Echoes Are Louder Than Ever By A. N. Correspondent-at-Large, filing from a hotel bar in Marrakech that still thinks “Stairway to Heaven” is a polite request for the elevator. When Robert Plant wandered onstage last month in Tangier to yelp “Immigrant Song” for the first time since Jimmy…
Sofia Kenin’s Comeback: A Tennis Parable for an Era That Can’t Handle a Simple Plot By Our Correspondent, still jet-lagged from a decade that refuses to end MELBOURNE—If you squint through the neon haze of the Australian Open’s midnight session, Sofia Kenin looks less like a former champion reclaiming her turf and more like the…
Breakfast: The World’s Most Important Meal and Most Elaborate Act of Self-Deception By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the frostbitten fjords of Norway to the smog-choked megacities of China, humanity greets the dawn with a ritual so universal it feels divinely ordained: pretending that a slice of toast and a thimble of caffeine can compensate…
Zach Bryan versus Gavin Adcock: a barroom dust-up that briefly eclipsed wars, coups, and the slow-motion collapse of several glaciers. To the casual observer, it was merely two American musicians—one platinum-selling troubadour, one TikTok-boosted country-rock hopeful—exchanging pleasantries with fists outside the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, at 2:13 a.m. last Saturday. To the rest…
From the moment the Russo brothers strutted onstage in São Paulo to announce “Avengers: Doomsday,” the planet’s collective cortisol level spiked like an over-caffeinated hedge-fund algorithm. The title alone—Doomsday, not Secret Wars, not Kang Dynasty, but the word you normally reserve for climate reports and intercontinental ballistic press conferences—suggests Marvel has finally admitted what the…
Scott Hastings: The Man Who Accidentally Became a Global Meme and Didn’t Even Notice By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific TOKYO—Somewhere between a Tokyo bullet-train platform and a bar in Reykjavík, a 38-year-old data analyst named Scott Hastings has become the planet’s most involuntary cultural export. Not because he invented a cryptocurrency, toppled a…
NHS Maternity Review Trusts: A Global Spectator Sport Where Everyone Loses (Except Consultants) From the vantage point of a hotel bar in Geneva—where the cocktails cost more than the WHO’s annual budget for midwife training—I’ve been watching Britain’s latest public ritual: the NHS maternity review. Across the world, nations have turned the slow-motion unravelling of…
