**The Bishop Who Streams Salvation: Robert Barron’s Digital Empire and the Vatican’s Netflix Strategy** ROME—While Silicon Valley titans race to colonize Mars and Wall Street wizards invent new ways to lose other people’s money, Bishop Robert Barron has quietly built something far more ambitious: a global Catholic media empire that makes Netflix’s content library look…
Chief Justice John Roberts is a man who, for reasons best known to himself, decided to spend his twilight years refereeing a constitutional demolition derby in which every contestant is driving a monster truck labeled “Originalism,” “Stare Decisis,” or “Whatever Gets Me on the 6 o’clock News.” From Lagos to Lisbon, bureaucrats, barristers, and bored…
The Gospel According to Meagan Good, or How a California Church Dress Scandal Became the Planet’s Latest Morality Play In the 48 hours after Meagan Good stepped onto an Atlanta red carpet wearing a cut-out, silver lamé gown that appeared held together by hope and two strategically-placed rhinestones, the incident followed the classic arc of…
Tokyo’s dawn had barely broken when the first margin call hit. In a glass tower overlooking Shibuya Crossing, a bleary-eyed analyst watched PSKY—an obscure satellite-imagery outfit headquartered in a repurposed Copenhagen church—spike 42 % on the Nikkei before his espresso finished dripping. By the time London opened, the same stock had already been shorted, memed,…
From the banks of the Danube to the neon canyons of Tokyo, the name Alex Jones now elicits the same weary smirk once reserved for flat-earthers and people who believe the moon landing was staged on a Kubrick set. Yet the American carnival barker in a tactical vest has become, improbably, a global export—proof that…
Aussie Boots, American Dreams, and the Quiet Art of Globalized Punts By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the International Date Line SYDNEY — Somewhere near the 33rd parallel, where the Tasman Sea kisses the Pacific and time zones politely ignore each other, a 31-year-old Perth carpenter turned San Francisco 49ers punter is…
Lord Glasman and the Global Afterlife of Blue Labour: A Cautionary Tale for Every Disillusioned Electorate If you’ve never heard of Maurice Glasman, Baron of Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park, congratulations—you’ve been spared one of Westminster’s more baroque intellectual side quests. Picture a bespectacled academic who once described himself as “a radical conservative with a…
In the grand, looping telenovela that is global pop culture, Jonathan Majors has managed the rare trick of becoming both protagonist and cliff-hanger. One minute the 34-year-old Texan is the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s designated multiversal tyrant, grinning from Lagos billboards and Seoul subway ads; the next he’s a cautionary tale retweeted by law-school seminar groups…
Stockton-on-Tees, California, or the Concept: Pick Your Poison By our roaming correspondent who once confused the two and still hasn’t emotionally recovered If the planet were a pub, Stockton would be the sticky table in the corner where empires go to sober up. The name itself is a global Rorschach test: say it in London…
Stockton-on-Tees, a town whose very name sounds like an accounting error, has become the latest contestant in humanity’s longest-running reality show: “How Many Bullets Fit in a Saturday Night?” The shooting that left one man perforated and three others fashionably ventilated has ricocheted far beyond the Tees, prompting the usual international choreography: British politicians furrowing…
MADRID—Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a bean-bag chair the size of Liechtenstein has just exhaled in relief. Facebook—sorry, Meta—has agreed to pay a modest €1.2 billion (roughly what Mark Zuckerberg spends annually on SPF 50) to settle a European privacy case that began when a law student in Vienna asked, in 2018, “Hey, what exactly do…
Sophie Willan’s Sewing Bee and the End of Empires By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent PARIS—In a dimly lit arrondissement café where the espresso is priced like a Tokyo studio apartment, the television above the bar flickers to life with the unmistakable trill of BBC One. A baker from Bury is trying to sew a corset…
