Nate Burleson: The Accidental Diplomat Quietly Teaching the World How to Talk to Itself By the time most Americans were debating whether their morning coffee tasted more like hope or despair, Nate Burleson had already addressed three continents without leaving a Midtown studio. The former Detroit Lions receiver—whose career highlight reel once consisted of hurdling…
The 10-Year Treasury: Humanity’s Favorite Global Mood Ring By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Frankfurt and Existential Dread Every morning from Tokyo to Toronto, bond traders wake up, kiss their Bloomberg terminals, and ask the same question: “So, what’s the 10-year doing?” It’s less a query than a planetary pulse-check. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield—currently flirting…
The Dominican Republic, that sun-bleached comma between the Atlantic and the Caribbean, has spent the last few centuries perfecting a very particular global talent: offering the rest of us a mirror in which to admire our own contradictions. From the air it looks like a careless green smudge on the edge of empire, but down…
Orlando Bloom: The Last Global Elf Standing Between Us and Total Cultural Collapse By the time the sun rises over the Bosphorus, Orlando Bloom has already been pirated in seventeen languages. Somewhere in Jakarta, a bootleg Legolas screensaver flickers across a cracked Huawei monitor; in Lagos, a street vendor hawks laminated wallet-sized photographs of Will…
Papers, Please: The world’s favorite new pastime is watching other people move Dateline: Somewhere between the Mediterranean’s floating graveyard and the Rio Grande’s TikTok livestream—take your pick, both have Wi-Fi and existential dread in equal measure. This week, immigration is once again the planet’s most lucrative spectator sport. From the Channel Tunnel to the Darién…
Jeremy Corbyn, the accidental icon who once made a red rose look like a Molotov cocktail to some and a peace offering to others, is enjoying a second act. From the back benches of the House of Commons, the man who was supposed to be the ghost at Labour’s centrist feast is now being courted…
Economic Calendar: The World’s Most Expensive Day-Planner By Our Correspondent Still Recovering from Last Week’s Flash Crash If aliens ever bothered to scan Earth’s financial chatter, they’d assume our species worships a holy spreadsheet known as the economic calendar. Every line item—NFP Friday in Washington, CPI Wednesday in Brussels, PMI dawn prayers in Tokyo—is penciled…
Scotland vs Denmark: A Nordic Noir Sequel Starring Bagpipes and Existential Dread By Our Correspondent Still Recovering from Copenhagen’s €9 Pints On paper, Scotland v Denmark is merely the final group-stage footnote of UEFA’s bloated Nations League carousel—an exercise in administrative box-ticking so convoluted even the accountants have given up. Yet, like most things European…
Moscow, February 2024 – Somewhere between the borscht and the ballistic missiles, the planet keeps turning, apparently unaware that two ex-Soviet neighbors have turned the European breadbasket into the world’s biggest live-fire TED Talk on “How Not to Run a Land War.” Two years in, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become less a regional…
Dubai, that shimmering monument to indoor ski slopes and zero-percent income tax, has handed down a life sentence to 31-year-old British teacher Mia O’Brien for allegedly smuggling half a kilo of medical cannabis oil. The verdict, announced Sunday at the emirate’s Criminal Court of First Instance, has managed to unite everyone from Geneva bureaucrats to…
Scotland Game: How a Nation Invented Modern Football, Then Decided Losing Was More Authentic By Cormac O’Shaughnessy, International Affairs Correspondent If you listen closely to the hum of global football chatter this week, you’ll hear a low, bagpipe-adjacent drone: Scotland is, once again, playing a game. Not just any game, mind you, but the Scotland…
The World This Week: A Global Round-Up of Managed Catastrophes By L. M. Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It’s late spring in the northern hemisphere, which means conference season, summit season, and—if you squint—apology season. From Washington to Davos-by-Zoom, the planet’s most powerful have spent the past seven days issuing statements that read…
