Simone Biles and the Global Collapse of the Superhuman Myth By our correspondent in a city that still believes medals cure inflation Somewhere between Tokyo’s cardboard beds and Paris’s bedbug-ridden mattresses, Simone Biles decided that a quadruple twist with a side of existential dread was one trick too many. The planet, already short on heroes,…
Rod Stewart, the gravel-voiced troubadour of post-war Britain, has spent six decades proving that polyester doesn’t biodegrade and neither does celebrity. From the smoky pubs of Swinging London to the permanently-lit atriums of Dubai’s five-star hotels, his career is a living fossil—part cautionary tale, part lucrative museum piece—wheeled out whenever global capitalism needs a soundtrack…
Amtrak: How a Rust-Belt Railroad Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor From the bullet-train penthouses of Tokyo to the velvety sleepers of the Moscow–Paris route, the planet has more or less agreed on what a national rail service should do: move citizens quickly, cheaply, and without the existential dread that accompanies a middle seat on…
Kelvin Gastelum, A Microcosm of the Planet’s Perpetual Underdog Story By Eduardo “The Jet-Lagged Prophet” Morales, international desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere in São Paulo a taxi driver is replaying Gastelum’s left hook on loop between WhatsApp memes. In a Seoul PC-bang, a kid toggles between League of Legends and a pirated UFC 236 stream just…
Noah Wyle and the Last ER: How One American Actor Quietly Became the Global Hospital’s Patron Saint of Controlled Chaos By the time most of the planet had locked its doors in March 2020, Noah Wyle—once television’s most over-qualified pediatric ER resident—was in Amman, shooting a refugee-camp miniseries that nobody outside the Arab world had…
Bamako, the capital whose name sounds like a late-night jazz riff but whose mornings smell of diesel, dust, and unfiltered ambition, sits on the Niger River like a card player who’s already shown his hand too many times. In the global imagination, Mali is either a red blob on the Foreign Office map or the…
Bishkek – population roughly the same as Tucson, elevation slightly higher than Denver, and geopolitical relevance that keeps Washington, Beijing, and Moscow awake in shifts. To the casual atlas-flipper it’s just a vowel-heavy smudge between steppe and Tian Shan, yet this modest capital has become the world’s most polite knife-fight: all blades politely concealed beneath…
Salman Ali Agha and the Quiet Art of Surviving the Spotlight By our South-Asia bureau, nursing its third Nescafé of the morning Karachi, 3 a.m.—While the rest of the planet doom-scrolls through another geopolitical migraine, a 25-year-old in a green blazer is quietly shouldering Pakistan’s most volatile export: hope. Salman Ali Agha, the latest “next…
Davis Cup 2025: The Last Tennis Colosseum Before We All Drown or Starve By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Two Time Zones TURIN, ITALY — In a cavernous hall that looks like a Bond villain’s private airport, twenty-five nations have gathered to decide who gets the honor of polishing silverware while the planet politely self-immolates. Welcome…
Jatinder Singh, a name that sounds like it was auto-generated by a visa-processing algorithm, has quietly become the Rosetta Stone through which the world deciphers its own absurdity. The 37-year-old Punjab-born, Toronto-schooled, Dubai-resident management consultant is not famous—yet he is precisely the kind of un-famous person whose itinerary now carries more geopolitical weight than most…
The Curious International Soft-Power of a Yorkshire Bad Boy: How Aaron Dingle Quietly Became a Global Litmus Test for Post-Industrial Angst By the time the closing credits roll on Emmerdale tonight, a Bulgarian barista in Berlin, a Singaporean coder on night shift, and a Mexican diplomat’s daughter in Geneva will have all watched the same…
KARACHI, PAKISTAN – Somewhere between a sandstorm and a smartphone screen, Fakhar Zaman is busy proving that national heroes are just like the rest of us, only with better highlight reels and worse visa queues. The 33-year-old left-handed opener has become a walking metaphor for a country that insists on swinging for the boundary even…
