The Gregorian calendar, that cheerful fiction we all agreed to pretend is real, insists the Formula 1 circus is in town once again—this time in Jeddah, a city whose coastal corniche looks suspiciously like Monaco after a particularly aggressive sand-blasting. Somewhere between the call to prayer and the call to Netflix, millions of humans will…
Brendan Cole: the name that once echoed through British living rooms like the clink of a teacup has now drifted into the broader, bleaker auditorium of global pop culture. For those who missed the memo between missile launches and crypto crashes, Cole is the New Zealand-born ballroom dancer who spent fifteen years gliding across the…
When the Gulfstream G650 carrying Zia Yusuf touched down in Riyadh last month, the collective sigh of relief in Zurich could be heard all the way to Singapore. Not because the Swiss missed him—quite the opposite—but because global capital markets had finally located their missing puzzle piece. The man who once navigated the labyrinthine corridors…
Countryfile: The BBC’s Rustic Sedative, Exported to a World Already Half-Asleep By the time the opening credits roll—mist over a buttercup meadow, a Labrador doing its best impression of a civic mascot—roughly 82 million people outside the United Kingdom have already seen something today that made them want to lie down in a field and…
The Global Village Has a New Village Explainer – and He’s Still Not Sure Why We’re Here By our Special Correspondent, currently self-isolating with a thermometer in one hand and a passport in the other From a cramped flat in São Paulo to a yurt on the Mongolian steppe, the name “Brian Cox” now travels…
Andy Burnham, the self-styled “King of the North,” has spent the past decade perfecting the rare political art of sounding rebellious while still cashing Whitehall’s cheques. To the outside world, the Mayor of Greater Manchester is a municipal curiosity—somewhere between a regional mascot and a low-budget Game of Thrones extra. Yet in an era when…
**Night City Goes Global: How Cyberpunk 2077 Became a Mirror for Our Dystopian Present** In the grand tradition of humanity’s capacity for missing the point entirely, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 has transcended its humble origins as a buggy video game to become something far more remarkable: a global Rorschach test for our collective anxiety…
The planet tilts gently on its axis every autumn, but nowhere tips harder than the United States, where entire Sundays now disappear into the neon vortex known as NFL Sunday Ticket. From the rueful comfort of a Singapore hawker centre or a Lisbon tasca, one can watch American ex-pats—once worldly backpackers—suddenly transform into helmet-clutching oracles…
John Healey, the newly-minted British Defence Secretary, has the sort of surname that sounds like a minor medical condition—something you’d pick up after an ill-advised weekend in Tbilisi. Yet the man himself is no rash; he is, depending on whom you ask, either a methodical fixer or the human equivalent of a damp firework: promising,…
Cardiff 10k: When the World’s Problems Take a Coffee Break at Mile 4 By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Bristol Channel The Cardiff 10k – that quaint riverside jog-wearing-a-race-number – rolled out again last weekend as though the planet weren’t busy stockpiling fresh catastrophes for autumn. While the UN General Assembly…
THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF HEARTBREAK, NOW WITH BETTER LABS Dispatch from the Bureau of Cosmic Irony, somewhere above the Atlantic If you’ve flown from Lagos to London lately, scrolled TikTok in São Paulo, or queued for ramen in Shibuya at 2 a.m., odds are the same ghostly falsetto floated through the earbuds of the stranger…
Andrew Garfield: The Accidental Citizen of Nowhere in Particular by our bureau chief, still jet-lagged from a red-eye out of Reykjavík The first thing you learn on the international circuit is that every passport contains a small, invisible clause: “May be upgraded to brand ambassador at any moment, no refund.” Andrew Garfield, that angular Brit…
