**The Accidental Symbol: How Sahibzada Farhan Became Cricket’s Reluctant Metaphor for Modern Pakistan** In the grand theater of international cricket, where nations outsource their dignity to eleven men in pajamas, Sahibzada Farhan’s journey from Peshawar’s dusty streets to Pakistan’s mercurial middle order reads less like a sports story and more like a Kafka novella written…
Global Kraft-Up: When the World’s Favourite Emergency Meal Tries to Kill Us All Geneva—While diplomats at the Palais des Nations argue over carbon ceilings and the precise shade of beige that constitutes a war crime, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a worldwide recall of certain boxed macaroni and cheese products after discovering…
By the time Alex Norén arrived in the humid half-light of the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, the planet was already busy imploding on several other fronts: glaciers were taking early retirement, supply chains were playing an elaborate game of Jenga with themselves, and central bankers were discovering that printing money is rather like…
The Curious Diplomacy of Shedeur Sanders: How a Quarterback Became the World’s Most Unwilling Soft-Power Asset By Our Man in Geneva (Where Else?) GENEVA—In the marble corridors of the Palais des Nations, where diplomats habitually argue over comma placement in climate accords, the newest topic of cocktail-hour chatter is not grain corridors or submarine cables…
Paris, late February. While diplomats three Métro stops away at the UNESCO palace wring manicured hands over “rules-based order,” the Parc des Princes hosts its own quarterly exercise in soft-power brinkmanship: PSG versus Lens, a fixture that reliably turns a provincial coal town into a temporary enemy state and reminds the rest of us that…
Celtic: How a Tribal Brand Went Viral 2,000 Years Before TikTok By our correspondent, still recovering from a Dublin pub “research” session The word “Celtic” is having a second act—rather impressive for a civilization that technically never survived the first one. From Boston basketball jerseys to Tokyo tattoo parlors, the swirling spirals and knot-work once…
Wirtz: The Name That Escaped the Swiss Vault and Won’t Go Home By the time you finish this sentence, “Wirtz” will have ping-ponged through a dozen time zones, been autocorrected into “Warts” on a Filipino group-chat, and landed—briefly—in the spam folder of a Brazilian commodities trader who only skimmed the subject line “RE: Wirtz exposure.”…
Quinnen Williams and the Curious Diplomacy of a 320-Pound Trade Embargo By “Our Man in Secaucus,” filing from an airport lounge where the only thing louder than CNN is the espresso machine In most countries, a man who can squat a Fiat Panda is politely left to his protein shakes. Yet Quinnen Williams—defensive tackle, human…
Daily Horoscope, September 14 2025: A World That Still Won’t Listen to Itself By Dave’s Foreign Desk (the one next to the broken espresso machine) ZURICH—While the Swiss National Bank was quietly revising its inflation forecast downward this morning, and while the first autumn cyclone of the season was politely knocking on Manila’s screen doors,…
Green and White in a World of Gray By Our Man in Glasgow, Who Has Seen Too Much The first thing you notice about Celtic FC—once you’ve elbowed past the tartan scarves and the bag-piped rendition of “Grace” that sounds suspiciously like a funeral march—is that the club has somehow convinced 60,000 people that hope…
Greece vs Finland: A Mediterranean Vendetta Meets a Nordic Shrug—Who’s Winning the Cold War on Happiness? By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Finnish civil servant has already submitted his third tax return of the day, while a Greek café owner has greeted his third cousin twice removed with a spontaneous espresso and…
Steelers Game Today: A Rust-Belt Opera for the Apocalypse—Live from Pittsburgh, with Global Backing Vocals By Our Man in the End Times Across time zones stretching from Murmansk to Manila, millions of otherwise rational adults are resetting their body clocks to align with a 1 p.m. kickoff in western Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Steelers—an organization named…
