Phoenix Group Stock: A Global Funeral Director’s Guide to Outliving Everyone By our man in the trenches, still wearing yesterday’s suit DUBLIN—If capitalism has a sense of humor, it’s probably the kind that books you a front-row seat at your own wake. Phoenix Group Holdings—Europe’s largest consolidator of life-insurance corpses—has just reported record half-year cash…
Jennifer Lawrence: The Last Movie Star in a Planet That Forgot How to Watch Somewhere between the collapse of the polar vortex and the collapse of Twitter, Jennifer Lawrence—Kentucky-born, Oscar-anointed, and still only 33—has become the closest thing the fractured globe has to a unifying folk tale. From Lagos bootleg-DVD stalls to Seoul’s ultra-clean multiplexes,…
The World According to Billy Strings: How a Bluegrass Shredder Became the UN’s Unofficial Soundtrack By the time the Ukrainian bartender in Kraków queued up “Dust in a Baggie” at 3 a.m., nobody in the room had slept in 36 hours. Jet-lagged Canadians, shell-shocked Poles, and a lone Kiwi who swore he was only passing…
Olivia Rodrigo and the Global Export of Heartbreak Diplomacy By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—While the United Nations Security Council was busy vetoing itself into irrelevance last week, a 20-year-old from Temecula, California, quietly achieved what seasoned envoys have failed to do for decades: unite the planet in shared, slightly masochistic misery. Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore…
Anna Haugh, the Dublin-born chef currently plating polished Irish nostalgia on London’s glossy Myrtle Avenue, has become the latest proof that national identity is now just another garnish—artfully tweezed, Instagram-filtered, and priced by the ounce. From São Paulo to Seoul, menus are littered with “modern Irish” the way diplomatic communiqués are littered with the word…
The Curious Case of Bradley Walsh: How a Cheeky Chappy from Watford Accidentally Became a Soft-Power Superweapon By the time the chyron reading “BRADLEY WALSH LAUGHS AT OWN JOKE FOR 47th TIME” flashed across Japanese breakfast television, it was already too late. The planet had been colonised—politely, inexorably—by a 63-year-old former Pontins Bluecoat whose greatest…
StubHub: The Global Bazaar Where Fandom Meets Financial Darwinism Dave’s Locker – International Desk Somewhere in a fluorescent-lit call center in Manila, a twenty-three-year-old named Lito is reassuring a Belgian Swiftie that yes, her €1,200 “platinum circle” ticket for Singapore’s National Stadium is genuine, despite the PDF looking suspiciously like it was cooked up on…
Biff Poggi and the New American Gladiator School: A Dispatch from the Global Coliseum By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic The name itself sounds like a minor Marvel villain who never quite made the cut—Biff Poggi, the hedge-fund Midas turned college-football Svengali, now stomping across the Atlantic with the subtlety…
Grace Dent: How One British Critic Became the Canary in the World’s Deep-Fryer By Our Somewhat Stuffed Correspondent, Geneva GENEVA — While the planet busies itself with nuclear brinkmanship and algorithmic overlords, an unlikely barometer of global anxiety has emerged: the gastric fortune-teller known as Grace Dent. The Guardian’s restaurant critic and MasterChef regular has…
Guinea vs Algeria: When Two Nations Duke It Out and the Rest of the World Pretends It’s Just Football By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Conakry-Dar es Salaam Route Conakry, Thursday night. The lights flicker like a bad omen at Stade du 28 Septembre, which is fitting because every time Guinea and Algeria meet,…
When the Dow Jones Industrial Average sneezes, the world doesn’t just catch a cold—it starts Googling funeral arrangements and debating which national anthem to play at the wake. Across time zones, from the glass sarcophagi of London’s Canary Wharf to the neon temples of Shanghai’s Lujiazui, traders watch those thirty American blue-chips like anxious relatives…
The Ballad of Etihad Accounting: How Manchester City’s 115 Charges Became the World’s Favorite Soap Opera By L. Marchetti, International Correspondent-at-Large (and part-time cynic) In the grand, gilded circus of global football, nothing travels faster than schadenfreude—except, perhaps, a Gulf-state sovereign wealth fund. So when the Premier League finally unsheathed 115 charges against Manchester City…
