Only Murders in the Building: How Three Lonely New Yorkers Became the World’s Most Relatable Diplomats By Our Bureau Chief, Still Recovering from a Long Layover in Newark It began, as most modern catastrophes do, with a podcast. Somewhere between the collapse of global supply chains and the rise of artisanal oxygen bars, three residents…
Lego Star Trek: When the Final Frontier Gets Bricked and the World Holds Its Breath Geneva—In a dimly lit side hall of the Palais des Nations, delegates from 193 countries have spent the week arguing over sanctions, carbon credits, and the precise shade of diplomatic taupe that should color next year’s briefing folders. Yet every…
The United States, that vast laboratory of late-stage capitalism and earnest flag-waving, has always insisted on packaging itself in neat little bundles. Fifty of them, to be precise—states, commonwealths, and one District that pays taxes without representation, a civic arrangement that would make any European monarch blush. To the rest of the planet, this tidy…
The Global Village’s New National Pastime: Watching Pixels Pretend to Play Cricket By our correspondent, still recovering from the 2014 Brazil semifinal and everything since ZURICH—While the World Health Organization argues over whether “gaming disorder” should be spelled with a hyphen, 3.2 billion workers have quietly agreed on a more pressing diagnostic question: how to…
In the pantheon of American secular religions, few cults are as fervent as Nebraska Cornhuskers football, a spectacle so devout that pilgrims from the steppes of Sarpy County to the soy-lattes of Shanghai tune in to watch unpaid laborers in crimson helmets plow into each other for the greater glory of… well, mostly cable ratings…
The Man Who Forgot to Leave the Table A Global Postcard on Gürsel Tekin and the Art of Permanent Opposition ISTANBUL—Somewhere between the baklava and the bitter coffee, Gürsel Tekin has been sitting at Turkey’s political banquet for so long that the waiters have started calling him “furniture.” Forty-odd years in the opposition CHP, and…
Premier League Hall of Fame: A Velvet-Rope Mausoleum for the Planet’s Most Lucrative Circus By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic Let’s get one thing straight before the brass band starts: the Premier League is not a football competition, it’s a planetary mood-stabiliser. Every weekend from Lagos to Lapland, 3.2 billion…
Ben Simmons, the 6’10” Australian who once looked like the NBA’s future, has become a walking Rorschach test for the globalised age: to some he is wasted genius, to others a cautionary tale of pampered potential, and to a growing slice of the planet he is simply that guy who owes everyone money—psychological, cultural, and…
Nina Warhurst and the Curious Case of the Globalized Breakfast Table By Our Man in the Departure Lounge From the frost-bitten outskirts of Manchester to the humid breakfast bars of Singapore, Nina Warhurst has become the unlikely barometer for a planet that can’t decide whether to eat granola or grieve. As BBC Breakfast’s business correspondent,…
The World According to Martin Short: How One Canadian Dwarfed the Globe PARIS—In the grand tradition of small men making outsized noise, Martin Short has managed to become the planet’s unofficial court jester without ever holding elected office or firing a single drone. While diplomats in Geneva trade sternly worded communiqués about carbon emissions and…
LUSAKA—Somewhere between the copper mines that still glint like the dreams of a 1970s commodities trader and the Casablanca skyline that Instagram insists is “just like Spain, but cheaper,” Zambia and Morocco have wandered into the same geopolitical boxing ring. Their fight card isn’t a World Cup qualifier—though God knows both nations could use the…
The Global Pastime Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific Baseball, that pastoral hallucination of America’s 19th-century leisure class, has spent the last century smuggling itself across borders like a bored customs officer with a side hustle. What began as an excuse for Union soldiers to avoid Civil…
