Amy Coney Barrett and the Spectacular Collapse of American Exceptionalism: A Global View From the Cheap Seats By Our Man in the Departures Lounge The rest of the planet first met Amy Coney Barrett on a Monday night in late September 2020, when she materialized beside Donald Trump like an impeccably-coiffed genie summoned by a…
Somewhere in a nameless bar in Manila, a Korean hedge-fund analyst, a Nigerian logistics broker, and a retired FARC accountant are watching the same pixelated stream of the New York Yankees’ box score. None of them have ever set foot in the Bronx—they couldn’t pick Aaron Judge out of a police lineup—but the flickering digits…
The Eurostar, that sleek steel eel that slithers beneath the English Channel, is often praised as a triumph of European cooperation. In reality, it’s a 400-metre-long metaphor for the continent’s ability to charge premium prices for the privilege of queuing together. Board in London, debark in Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam—three capitals that have perfected the…
The planet is on fire, inflation is staging a renaissance, and yet a non-trivial slice of humanity spent last night refreshing a subreddit in Manila to find out whether a Brazilian yoga instructor betrayed a Scottish hairdresser inside a Bulgarian-set house they will never actually leave. Welcome, dear reader, to the global cottage industry of…
Down Under and Further Down: How Australia vs New Zealand Became the World’s Nicest Blood Feud By Our Correspondent, filing from a press lounge that still smells faintly of burned flat white SYDNEY—Somewhere between the 1,400-kilometre stretch of the Tasman Sea, two of Earth’s most agreeable nations have spent the past century locked in a…
Hurricane Kiko, a Category-4 tantrum that spun through the mid-Pacific last week, officially made landfall somewhere between “Instagrammable disaster” and “global press junket.” The storm clipped the Hawaiian archipelago with the enthusiasm of a drunk tourist looking for poke, then drifted off to international waters like a bored influencer who’s already filmed the “before” segment….
Carlos Rodón, the Enigma Who Reminds Us the World Is Still Watching Baseball by Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the 14-hour bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka and the overnight cargo flight that sneaks MLB highlight reels into European sports bars at 3 a.m., Carlos Rodón is throwing 97-mph aspirin tablets past grown men…
Florida Lottery Results: A Sun-Bleached Beacon of Hope in the Global Panic Room Bylines from Tallahassee to Timbuktu TALLAHASSEE—While bond markets convulse in Frankfurt and Shanghai’s property giants play Jenga with concrete promises, the Florida Lottery on Wednesday night announced that a single ticket—purchased somewhere between a Daytona vape shop and a retirement village—has snagged…
Felpham: The Village That Accidentally Became a Global Metaphor by “Sir” Reginald Blight, Senior Coastal Stringer-at-Large Drive ninety minutes south-west from London, past the duty-free cathedrals of Gatwick and the Brexit car parks of Crawley, and you will eventually spill onto a pebble beach where gulls scream like unpaid interns and the air smells faintly…
Emergency Alert Test: The Planet’s Loudest Group Therapy Session The shrill, unmistakable screech that rattled phones from Reykjavík to Riyadh this week was not your cousin’s crypto scam, nor a push notification from a meditation app you forgot you paid for. It was the global Emergency Alert Test, an international mass-bleep designed to remind eight…
Silverstone: The Last Colonial Outpost Where Engines Still Speak Louder Than People By Our Man in the Paddock, nursing a lukewarm gin in a paper cup Silverstone, Northamptonshire—population roughly that of a midsize Moldovan bus station—hosts, once a year, the planet’s most expensive traffic jam. Formula One decamps here like a marauding circus that forgot…
Davos, Switzerland – While most mortals spent last week debating whether the planet’s thermostat should be set to “medium-rare” or “cremation,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) quietly reminded the alpine glitterati that the United States still owns the original remote control. The man who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee took the stage at the World Economic…
