Stephen King: The Last American Export That Doesn’t Require a Shipping Container by our world-weary correspondent, filing from a mildewed motel somewhere east of everywhere He’s sold more than 500 million books, been translated into 60-odd languages, and inspired a global cottage industry of night-lights, therapy sessions, and clowns seeking safer career paths. Yet Stephen…
Notts County: The 160-Year-Old Football Club Teaching the World How to Survive Its Own Stupidity By Our Man in the East Midlands, nursing a lukewarm pint and déjà vu Meadow Lane, Nottingham – In a week when Silicon Valley titans were congratulating themselves for inventing the “metaverse pub” (basically a chat room with beer NFTs),…
PARIS—On the red-clay courts of Roland-Garros this week, a curious sideshow has been unfolding next to the strawberries-and-cream set: Donald Trump Tennis, an unofficial, unsanctioned, yet oddly magnetic phenomenon that began when the former U.S. president’s name was spotted on the reservation sheet of an indoor court in Palm Beach and then ricocheted across continents…
Yerevan—The Armenian capital smells of apricots, diesel, and the faint, metallic whiff of existential dread that hovers over any nation whose neighbor keeps tanks on the lawn. On Thursday night, that bouquet was joined by grilled sardines and Cristiano Ronaldo’s cologne as Portugal rolled into town for a Euro qualifier. The final score—Portugal 3, Armenia…
Tyrese Haliburton and the Quiet Americanization of the World’s Living Room By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When a 23-year-old from Oshkosh, Wisconsin—yes, the place that still manufactures overalls—drops 43 points on the NBA’s most marketable franchise while wearing sneakers named after a Japanese manga demon, you begin to understand why geopolitics now comes with a…
Andora—pronounced with the same breathy reverence a sommelier reserves for a 1945 Château Pétrus—has quietly become the planet’s most exclusive gated community that nobody can actually find on a reliable map. Tucked between two quarrelling Iberian neighbors who can’t even agree on ham regulations, the 468-square-kilometre sovereign speck is what happens when medieval real-estate arbitrage…
Arsenal Women’s meteoric rise isn’t merely a feel-good subplot for North-London nostalgists eating lukewarm pies at the Emirates; it’s a geopolitical mood ring that turns pink whenever global power shifts. While diplomats in Geneva argue over commas in climate accords, Jonas Eidevall’s side has quietly weaponised possession statistics and pressed the patriarchy into its own…
The Curious Case of Erin Bates Paine, or How a Quiverfull Daughter Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time Erin Bates Paine’s Instagram story about her recent miscarriage reached a 19-year-old climate activist in Jakarta, the news had already been processed through three languages, two Telegram channels, and one very excitable Brazilian meme account….
Welcome to the age of the boys—yes, those boys. Not the Netflix superheroes or the prep-school rugby squad, but the planetary swarm of young males aged 15-30 who now constitute history’s largest single demographic bloc. The UN calls them a “youth bulge.” Economists prefer the more market-friendly term “demographic dividend.” Development workers whisper the less…
Tom Holland Is Still Clinging to the Multiverse, and the Rest of Us Are Just Trying to Hang On By the time you finish this sentence, Tom Holland will have signed another three-picture deal, watched his latest blockbuster top the box office in seventeen languages, and politely apologized to a Brussels reporter for spoiling something…
Jessica Alba and the Global Afterglow of the American Dream By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you were to drop a pin on the world map every time a non-American has cited Jessica Alba as evidence that the United States still produces something besides student debt and drone footage, the resulting constellation would look suspiciously…
Brett Anderson and the Curious Case of the Global Everyman By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere between the duty-free cigarette counter and Gate C-19, the name “Brett Anderson” flashed across a hundred screens like a low-budget prophecy. In São Paulo it was spelled “Bret,” in Seoul “Buretteu,” and in the fluorescent corridors of…
