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…
Laura Kuenssberg: The BBC’s Political Gladiator in the Global Colosseum By Dave’s Locker International Desk To the uninitiated, Laura Kuenssberg is merely the BBC’s former political editor—now elevated to Sunday-morning inquisitor on *Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg*—a job title that sounds suspiciously like a hostage video. Yet beyond Britain’s damp little island, her significance has metastasized…
LeBron James, Hall of Famer: A Global Empire Built on Sneakers, Screaming Fans, and the Fragile Myth of Meritocracy By Dave’s Locker International Desk It happened, inevitably, like a tax deadline or a coup in a midsized republic: LeBron James was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The ceremony took place in…
Noel Gallagher, the man who once claimed he’d “rather drink petrol straight from the pump” than reform Oasis, has quietly become the United Kingdom’s last functioning export that doesn’t require refrigeration, a customs form, or an emergency IMF bailout. While Downing Street lurches from self-inflicted crisis to crisis like a drunk tourist on the Ramblas,…
Sarah Pochin and the Quiet Collapse of Sovereignty A dispatch from the frontlines of a world that can’t be bothered to care By the time Sarah Pochin’s name trickled into the global feed—wedged between footage of a burning Bangladeshi textile market and a TikTok of a Finnish prime-ministerial dance-off—most capitals had already moved on to…
Hurricane Kiko, a name that sounds like a failed boy-band member, has decided to treat the Hawaiian archipelago to its own private luau of 120-mile-an-hour misery. From Berlin to Bangkok, commodity traders, insurers, and climate-voyeurs are watching the satellite loops the way teenagers binge true-crime podcasts: equal parts horror and entertainment. Because if a Category-3…
Liechtenstein: The Micro-Monarchy Quietly Running the World’s Off-Balance Sheet By the time you finish this sentence, Liechtenstein’s 39,000 citizens will have collectively earned another million francs, most of it from accounts whose owners would rather you not know their names. That’s the speed at which the planet’s sixth-smallest sovereign state moves money—fast enough to make…
Ros Canter: How One Woman and One Horse Are Quietly Redrawing the Map of Global Sport By the time most of us had finished our second coffee and begun pretending to answer emails, Ros Canter was already airborne somewhere above the dew-soaked turf of the Pratoni del Vivaro. The 32-year-old from Lincolnshire—population roughly equivalent to…
