Strictly Come Dancing’s Grande Dame of the Glitterball Guillotine By our man in sequined exile, somewhere over the Black Sea There are moments when the planet’s tectonic plates of culture shift with the subtlety of a rhinestone-studded elbow to the ribs. One such tremor occurred when Shirley Ballas—known in whispered green rooms from Baku to…
**The Unlikely Global Ripple of Sharon Hodgson: How a British MP’s Crusade Against Childhood Obesity Became a Mirror for the World’s Gluttony** *By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Still Recovering from Airline Food* LONDON—Across the river from the glass sarcophagus that houses Parliament, Sharon Hodgson is quietly waging war on chicken nuggets. To the…
Facebook to Pay $725 Million to Settle a Privacy Suit, Proving Once Again That a Deal with the Devil Is Cheaper Than Therapy By Hugo van der Loon, International Correspondent When news broke that Meta—the artist formerly known as Facebook—will fork over $725 million to settle the long-running Cambridge Analytica privacy debacle, global reaction ranged…
**The Great Satellite Bazaar: How Starlink Became the World’s Most Expensive Escape Route** While the rest of us were busy arguing about whether 5G causes cancer or Bill Gates puts microchips in vaccines, Elon Musk quietly built a celestial internet provider that’s rapidly becoming the digital equivalent of a Swiss bank account—expensive, exclusive, and incredibly…
**Last Orders for Civilization: How a Giant Pub in East London Became the UN of Beer** LONDON—While the rest of the planet stockpiles iodine tablets and rehearses nuclear evacuation drills, 50,000 optimists from 46 countries have spent the past five days queueing inside a former industrial warehouse to argue about hop varieties. Welcome to the…
**The Ginger Globetrotter: How Ed Sheeran Became the World’s Most Unlikely Cultural Imperialist** In an era where American pop culture’s hegemony faces unprecedented challenges from K-pop, Afrobeat, and whatever TikTok algorithmic chaos emerges from the digital ether, one pale British troubadour continues his quiet conquest of global consciousness. Ed Sheeran—yes, that Ed Sheeranthe human embodiment…
KATHMANDU — While the rest of the planet debates whether the AI apocalypse will arrive via chatbot or drone swarm, Nepal’s Generation Z has opted for a refreshingly analog form of existential revolt: hurling traffic cones, TikTok-ing in gas masks, and turning the capital’s ring road into an open-air seminar on post-pandemic rage. Their grievance…
A Ballad for the End Times: Calum Scott’s Global Sob-Fest and Why We’re All Still Crying in Economy By Dave’s International Bureau of Melodrama & Collateral Damage Somewhere over the Sea of Japan, a salaryman on his third highball queues up “Dancing On My Own” for the fourth straight flight. Half a world away, a…
BREAKING: Remote Sheep Farmer in Yorkshire Holds Secret to Global Sanity, World Resolutely Ignores Her By Our Jaded Correspondent, Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Despair The international press corps has spent the past fortnight chasing an errant Chinese spy balloon, a collapsing crypto exchange in the Bahamas, and whatever Elon Musk last tweeted from the porcelain…
Kat Slater Is Everywhere, and Nowhere: How a Fictional Cockney Matriarch Became the World’s Guilt-Free Rorschach Test Dave’s Locker – Global Affairs Desk Somewhere between the Suez Canal blockage and the fifteenth crypto-crash of the week, an EastEnders clip went viral from Jakarta to Johannesburg. The scene: Kat Slater, leopard-print trench coat flapping like a…
When Do Tube Strikes End? A Dispatch From the Liminal Underworld By Our Correspondent, fresh off the District line and still tasting the metallic regret of instant coffee number four LONDON—Somewhere between the stale croissant fumes of King’s Cross and the existential dread of a Monday 7:12 a.m. platform announcement, the question arises: when, exactly,…
James McAvoy, the Scottish pocket-rocket who has spent two decades convincing the world that he is both Professor X and a Glasgow bar brawler, has quietly become the United Nations’ favorite chameleon. While diplomats argue over commas in multilateral treaties, McAvoy has been slipping across borders with nothing more menacing than a posh English accent…
