Telemundo News: The Telenovela-Flavored Mirror Latin America Holds Up to the World By an Over-Caffeinated Correspondent Who’s Lost the Remote You don’t need to speak Spanish fluently to grasp the plot twist: while the English-speaking world binge-scrolls TikToks of cats lip-syncing NATO communiqués, roughly 40 million prime-time viewers from Tierra del Fuego to the Bronx…
**SmackDown Diplomacy: How WWE’s Traveling Circus Became the Last Universal Language** GENEVA—While the UN Security Council spent Friday night bickering over whose turn it is to veto humanitarian aid, 1.3 million people from Lagos to Lahore tuned into WWE SmackDown to watch a man in neon spandex pretend-break another man’s spine over a folding chair….
KATHMANDU—When Nepal’s parliament swore in Sushila Karki as the Himalayan republic’s 38th Prime Minister last week, the world’s reaction was a polite golf-clap followed by the usual Google search: “Nepal still has a government?” Indeed it does, though like most things Nepali—yaks on airport runways, Everest traffic jams, constitution-drafting that outlasts the average houseplant—it arrives…
Monmouthshire: The Little County That Couldn’t Quite Decide Which Country It’s In By the time you finish this sentence, a Silicon Valley startup will have rebranded itself three times, Beijing will have built another island, and Monmouthshire will still be quietly arguing with itself about whether it belongs to Wales, England, or some liminal car-park…
Ore Oduba: How A British TV Host Became The Canary In Our Global Celebrity Coal Mine By Our Man in a Mid-Cost Airline Lounge, Somewhere Over the Persian Gulf There are, by last IMF count, roughly 7.9 billion humans currently failing to save for retirement. Of these, only one is named Ore Oduba—an accident of…
Moscow, 3:14 a.m. — While the rest of the planet argues about carbon credits and the ethics of self-driving Teslas, a quieter, more dependable industry is quietly booming in every time zone: the international brotherhood (and sisterhood) of the auto accident attorney. From the neon-lit billboards of Los Angeles to the hand-painted plywood signs nailed…
In the grand theatre of 2019, while real-world borders were being hardened with barbed wire and performative press conferences, Gearbox Software quietly released Borderlands 3 and invited the planet to spend 60 USD on a cartoonish map where every nation is a punchline and every passport is a gun permit. The timing was exquisite: the…
Preston vs Middlesbrough: A Tale of Two Towns, One Ball, and the End of Civilisation As We Know It By Our Man at the End of the Pier, International Correspondent Deep in the damp heart of Lancashire, where the rain falls with the precision of a Swiss debt collector, Preston North End and Middlesbrough are…
Clare Balding and the Global Circus: How One British Broadcaster Accidentally Became a Barometer for the End of Empires By the time Clare Balding read the weather report for the King’s coronation in seven languages—five of which she does not speak—viewers from Lagos to Lima realised something profound had shifted. The BBC had, without meaning…
Yasmin Freddie Fraser’s name first pinged on the trans-Atlantic doom-scroll last Tuesday, somewhere between a grainy TikTok of a burning super-yacht and a Bloomberg alert about the Kazakh tenge. Within six hours she was trending in seven alphabets, inspiring a Portuguese crypto-scam botnet and a Bolivian death-metal single entitled “Fraser.exe Has Stopped Responding.” How did…
CANNES, FRANCE—Somewhere between the rosé-soaked yacht parties and the grimy back-alley screenings, Francis Ford Coppola has once again wandered into the international spotlight like a sleep-deprived oracle who’s misplaced his wallet. The 85-year-old director arrived on the Croisette this May to hawk Megalopolis, a self-funded fever dream he’s been nursing since the Reagan administration—roughly the…
Charlton Athletic vs Millwall: A Timeline of South-London Antipathy Viewed From a Safe Distance By our world-weary correspondent, currently hiding in a neutral-zone Wetherspoon’s 1925 – The Football League, still high on post-Victorian optimism, slots two factories-with-whistles—Charlton (the “Valiants”) and Millwall (the “Lions”)—into the same postcode. No one yet suspects that 100 years later the…
