**The Great American Left Turn: How NASCAR Became the World’s Most Misunderstood Diplomatic Tool** While the rest of the planet obsesses over football—the kind played with actual feet—America continues its century-long affair with turning left at 200 mph. The NASCAR Cup Series, that glorious testament to human stubbornness and fossil fuel consumption, has somehow evolved…
The Royal Mint: Where Empire Goes to Melt Llantrisant, Wales – If you listen carefully outside the security fencing of the Royal Mint, you can almost hear the empire being fed into a blast furnace. Here, in a former mining town whose name nobody outside the Valleys can pronounce, the physical residue of Britain’s vanished…
**The Ross King Phenomenon: How One Man’s Art Historical Midlife Crisis Became a Global Cottage Industry** If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Canadian art historian discovers that academic salaries couldn’t finance a decent bottle of Chianti, let alone a Tuscan villa, look no further than Ross King. The man has transformed the literary…
Lewis Capaldi: The Glaswegian Sad-Boy Export the World Didn’t Know It Needed By Dave’s Locker, Global Emotional Trade Correspondent Somewhere over the Atlantic right now, a 737 is ferrying a Scottish man who looks like the before-picture in a hair-loss commercial and sings like every pub in Britain just called last orders. Lewis Capaldi—26, self-deprecating…
Blown Britannia: How a Small Island’s Breeze Becomes a Global Mood Ring By Our Man in the Jet Stream, filing from an airport lounge whose roof is currently somewhere over the North Sea LONDON—The United Kingdom has issued yet another “yellow warning” for strong winds, which is meteorologist-speak for “batten down the ornamental gnomes.” Gusts…
Ella Seidel, the Tennis Prodigy Who Makes Global Panic Look Like a Gentle Warm-Up By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the city that perfected existential dread in cafés and surrender in 1940, twenty-year-old German qualifier Ella Seidel spent last week politely reminding the planet that panic is best outsourced to the adults. First came world…
Chiba Lotte Marines: The Little Ballclub That Could—and Still Might Start a Trade War ZOZO Marine Stadium, Chiba—The sun is setting over Tokyo Bay and, like clockwork, the Chiba Lotte Marines are reminding the planet that baseball isn’t just America’s pastime; it’s Japan’s coping mechanism. While the Yankees hemorrhage cash on players who treat hamstrings…
Iva Jović, the 16-year-old tennis prodigy from Serbia, has been crowned the Orange Bowl champion, a title that once served as a crystal ball for future Grand Slam winners back when newspapers still mattered. While the planet teeters between climate catastrophe and TikTok diplomacy, the international press corps has dutifully pivoted from COP28 meltdowns to…
The FTSE 250: Britain’s Overlooked Middle Child in a World That Only Notices Extremes By Our Correspondent, presently somewhere between a Pret and a Costa in Zone 2 It is fashionable, these days, to obsess over absolutes: the trillion-dollar mega-caps that orbit like bloated moons above the global economy, or the penny-ante crypto tokens that…
Ocado’s Share Price: A Canary in the Global Panic Room International correspondents like to pretend their beat is the fate of nations. In truth, we spend most of our time watching spreadsheets dressed up as destiny. Take Ocado Group, the British online grocer turned warehouse-robot evangelist. Its share price has become less a financial metric…
PARIS—A decade ago the only people who knew their titer from their Tdap were gap-year backpackers and epidemiologists with a sense of adventure. Today, the travel vaccine has become the hottest accessory since noise-canceling headphones and diplomatic immunity. From the marble corridors of the WHO in Geneva to the pop-up clinics wedged between duty-free liquor…
The FTSE 100: London’s Glittering Lie in an Age of Global Delusion London – Somewhere between the third flat white and the sixth Zoom call, the FTSE 100 ticked up another 14 points this morning, prompting the usual carnival of breathless headlines. “Markets surge on optimism,” they crowed, as if the index were a barometer…
