**The Global Obsession with Five-Letter Words: How Wordle Help Became a Diplomatic Crisis** GENEVA—While the Doomsday Clock ticked ominously at 90 seconds to midnight, representatives from 193 nations gathered last week for what the UN modestly billed as “Emergency Session 47-B: Addressing Digital Inequality in Wordle Assistance.” The emergency, it seems, was that half the…
Michele Kang, the Korean-American tech mogul turned football fairy godmother, has quietly become the most disruptive force in global sport since Sepp Blatter discovered offshore banking. While most billionaires are busy buying islands or running for office, Kang decided the most logical use of her cybersecurity fortune was to stage a hostile takeover of women’s…
Yves Tumor and the Quiet Collapse of Borders by “Marco Vélez, International Cultural Correspondent, currently hiding in a Lisbon hostel that still smells of 2019 optimism” When the first distorted guitar loop of Yves Tumor’s latest single crackled out of a weather-beaten radio in Dakar last month, a Senegalese taxi driver told me it sounded…
Star Citizen: The Eternal Launch Window to Nowhere By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the Sea of Tranquility and a Frankfurt server rack, a digital Bengal tiger paces in zero-G. It’s wearing a monocle, naturally, because even the NPCs in Star Citizen know that cosmic inflation has hit the luxury-goods market. Welcome to the…
Milwaukee, Wisconsin—population 577,000, beer-per-capita champion of the Midwest, and, this week, the unlikely geopolitical barometer for the rest of the planet. While CNN loops footage of glaciers doing their best Titanic impression and the EU debates whether to classify “pleasant spring day” as a protected heritage item, Milwaukee has opted for a more avant-garde climate…
Fantasy Football Scout: The Global Cottage Industry Built on Billionaires’ Benchwarmers By Our Correspondent, currently hiding from ultras in a Moldovan sports bar ZURICH—While the planet debates grain corridors and methane pledges, roughly 250 million earthlings spent last week frantically DMing strangers in Sunderland to discover whether a 19-year-old left-back from Burkina Faso might start…
The steel carcass of a Lancaster bomber has landed again—this time with no crew, no payload, and no chance of mid-air catastrophe beyond the existential dread already baked into the 21st century. Unveiled last week outside the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincolnshire, the seven-metre sculpture is fashioned from 100,000 knives surrendered in UK amnesty…
In a week when the Arctic Circle was busy melting faster than a popsicle in Riyadh and several sovereign nations quietly renegotiated their debt with the structural elegance of a pyramid scheme, the planet still found collective bandwidth to watch 22 millionaires chase a sphere across manicured grass. Arsenal versus Nottingham Forest, a fixture that…
**The Curious Case of Sarm Heslop: A Tale of Paradise, Privilege, and Perpetual Mystery** In the grand theater of international disappearances, where tourists vanish with the regularity of flight delays, the case of Sarm Heslop has achieved that peculiar distinction of becoming simultaneously everywhere and nowhere at all. Three years after the 41-year-old British woman…
The 2025 series of *Strictly Come Dancing* premiered last Saturday, and the planet—still busy juggling wars, elections, and the slow-motion car crash formerly known as “the climate”—paused for two hours to watch celebrities in diamanté try not to fall over. From Kyiv to Caracas, viewers tuned in to see whether a former oligarch’s niece could…
UC Berkeley: The World’s Most Expensive Protest Theme Park By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent If universities were cocktail parties, UC Berkeley would be the guest who shows up late, spits in the punch bowl, and still ends up running the karaoke machine. Perched above San Francisco Bay like a caffeine-withdrawn oracle, this 155-year-old campus has…
Allen Lazard: The Accidental Geopolitician of Touchdowns and Trade Wars by Dave’s Senior Correspondent for Existential Sports Diplomacy PARIS—The last time an American football player made global headlines for something other than a domestic violence plea deal, it was Tom Brady kissing his son a bit too long on the lips. This week, however, the…
