The Eternal Derby of Inconvenience Guatemala vs Panama, or How to Misplace a Canal and Still Win the Century By the time you finish this paragraph, a container ship the length of lower Manhattan will have slipped through the Panama Canal, earning the Panamanian treasury roughly the GDP of a midsize Baltic nation. Meanwhile, 600…
From the balmy banks of the Clyde to the fluorescent glare of Turf Moor, Greg Taylor has evolved from a boyhood Celtic fan into a walking referendum on the state of modern football—complete with all the contradictions, neuroses, and transfer-mark-to-market arbitrage that entails. While most of the planet sorts out inflation, war, and whether to…
Ann Ming: The Woman Who Turned a Mother’s Grief Into the World’s Slowest-Motion Revenge By the time Ann Ming finally watched her daughter’s killer convicted for a second time—14 years after he’d literally laughed at the verdict—the rest of the planet had already moved on to fresher horrors: two Gulf wars, the birth of social…
SYDNEY—If you squint at the skyline long enough, you can almost see the Murdoch empire’s shadow lengthening across three oceans, a Rorschach blot of satellites, tabloids, and streaming pixels. At the blot’s center stands Lachlan Murdoch: heir, enigma, and—depending on which brunch table you pollute—either the last lion tamer of legacy media or the trust-fund…
Retirement Planning: The World’s Most Expensive Waiting Room By Our Correspondent, presently in one of those “wellness” cafés that charge extra for existential dread ZURICH—On the polished parquet of Credit Suisse’s flagship branch, a septuagenarian in Loro Piana loafers is asking whether his 3-million-franc nest egg will still cover a flat white when he turns…
The Global Bazaar of Hope and Hubris by our correspondent in three time-zones and one existential crisis If you want to see humanity at its most optimistic and delusional in equal measure, skip the dating apps and go straight to the investment pages. From a glass tower in Singapore where a 29-year-old analyst just bet…
PARIS – Somewhere between the croissants and the contempt, another piece of paper has fluttered out of the Jeffrey Epstein file and landed, like a soiled feather, at Donald Trump’s expensively shod feet. The “Trump-Epstein letter” – a single page, undated, signed with the unmistakable Sharpie scrawl of the former US president – has triggered…
Joanna Lumley: The Accidental Diplomat Who Weaponised Charm Against the World Order By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Bar Where the Ice Has Already Melted PARIS—Across the river from Notre-Dame, a gaggle of European finance ministers once waited half an hour to take a selfie with a woman who once played a drunken heiress on…
Steven Lenhart: The Man Who Turned MLS Fouls Into Performance Art and Accidentally Forecasted the End of the American Century By A Correspondent Who Once Watched a Friendly in Pyongyang and Still Has the Whistle Marks PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, the name Steven Lenhart still surfaces in bars along the Boulevard…
Weatherford-on-the-Med, Tuesday, 3:47 a.m.—Somewhere between a NATO summit in Vilnius and the latest BRICS currency pow-wow in Johannesburg, a far more seismic tremor is rattling the tectonic plates of soft-power diplomacy: the rumor, denied, confirmed, denied again, and finally upgraded to “pretty much certain” that Tyrone Dobbs is packing his spanners and quitting Coronation Street….
Charlie Ming, the Man Who Outsourced Apocalypse GENEVA—While the rest of us spent the pandemic arguing over sourdough starters and which Netflix series most accurately predicted the collapse of Western civilization, Charlie Ming quietly built the algorithm that now decides whether your next shipment of baby formula leaves the port of Rotterdam. If that sounds…
William Shatner, the 93-year-old Canadian export who once sold discount airline tickets on late-night television, has now transcended Earthly kitsch to become the first nonagenarian space tourist. While the world’s attention remains glued to whatever fresh geopolitical dumpster fire is trending, Shatner’s 2021 sub-orbital hop aboard Jeff Bezos’s phallic hobby rocket quietly achieved something diplomats,…
