Weather Bristol: How a Drizzly English Backwater Became the Planet’s Atmospheric Punchline By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still drying off in Gate 43 Let us begin with the obvious: the weather in Bristol, population 465,000 and shrinking faster than British diplomatic credibility, is not, in itself, interesting. It is grey, damp, and insistently mediocre—like a LinkedIn…
The continent that once carved the planet into colonies with the enthusiasm of a chef slicing truffles now finds itself an elegant, slightly anxious dinner guest at the global feast it once catered. Europe, that antique mosaic of kingdoms, republics, and tax shelters, is busy rehearsing humility while the rest of the world scrolls past…
Tourists usually flock to the Costa del Sol for sangria, sunburn, and the reassuring fantasy that the Mediterranean is a postcard rather than a crime scene. So when the Spanish press christened last month’s quadruple homicide in Marbella “The Sunshine Murders,” the branding stuck faster than cheap sunscreen. Four bodies—two British crypto-advisers, a retired Danish…
Mark Wright and the Global Echo Chamber: How a British Reality Star Became a Mirror for the World’s Narcissism From the vantage point of a Wi-Fi–choked Bangkok café, where a French influencer live-streams his latte art to 3.7 million followers who will forget it in eight seconds, the name “Mark Wright” arrives like a linguistic…
Metro Bank and the Fine Art of Lending Gravity to the World By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It begins, as all modern tragedies do, with an innocuous push-notification. Somewhere between the canapés in Davos and the humid back-alleys of Manila, Metro Bank—once the plucky British challenger that painted its branches in garish “store”…
**The World’s Most Dangerous Reality Show: Ukraine’s Geopolitical Theater** Two years into Europe’s most unnecessary war since someone decided the Habsburgs needed a slight nudge in 1914, Ukraine has become the planet’s most depressing reality television series—except the contestants can’t vote themselves off the island, and the producers are nuclear powers with questionable impulse control….
Rainn Wilson: How a Paper-Selling Schrute Became the Planet’s Unlikely Moral Compass By Our Man in Copenhagen, Still Wondering When Satire Died If you had told a roomful of mid-2000s cubicle drones that the beet-farming, Battlestar-loving oddity on their screens would one day be schooling the United Nations on climate grief, they’d have assumed you’d…
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…
