THE STUDIO—OR HOW LOS ANGELES LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE AIRSTRIKE By our man in the bunker, somewhere between Burbank and the Hague It was fitting that the first tweet about The Studio TV Show came from a 15-year-old in Lagos watching on a cracked Android: “Hollywood finally made a war-crime sitcom—10/10 would…
Bloomberg: The Terminal That Runs the World—Or at Least Thinks It Does By the time the sun has crept over the Sea of Marmara, a trader in Istanbul is already jabbing at a keyboard the color of old money, watching yields on 10-year Treasuries twitch like a cat in a thunderstorm. Half a world away,…
CPI Day: When a Bureaucratic Spreadsheet Becomes the Planet’s Pulse Geneva—Somewhere between the 06:30 espresso and the 06:31 coronary, traders in five continents discovered that eggs in Ljubljana are 0.3 % cheaper than last month, a revelation so thrilling it shaved 180 points off the Nikkei before Tokyo even finished its miso soup. Such is…
PARIS—Somewhere between the second encore of “Stonehenge” and the moment Nigel Tufnel tries to coax extra volume from an amp that already goes to eleven, it hits you: This Is Spinal Tap is not merely a 1984 mock-rockumentary about three pasty Brits in perilously tight trousers. It is the Rosetta Stone for every multinational boondoggle…
Manchester, England, has always prided itself on exporting gloom at scale—first via the Smiths’ back catalogue, now via low-pressure systems that circle the globe like grumpy tourists. The city’s latest forecast—steady drizzle, intermittent existential dread, maximum 12 °C—may read like a local shrug, but in a world where the jet stream is drunk-dialling the Arctic,…
Laure Ferrari and the Fine Art of Disappearing in Plain Sight By our cynical correspondent in Brussels It takes a special kind of talent to vanish from the European Parliament while still technically occupying a seat. Laure Ferrari—yes, that Ferrari, the one who once compared the EU to a “concentration camp run by vegetarians”—has spent…
The World According to 9/11 Times A global correspondent’s sardonic travelogue through the age that began with two falling towers and never quite ended By the time the North Tower folded itself into a neat heap of irony at 10:28 a.m. Eastern, it was already happy-hour in Singapore, siesta in Madrid, and Tuesday’s second cup…
A Yacht Too Far: Roman Abramovich and the Art of Losing Everything Except the Bill By Dave’s Foreign Desk, currently anchored in a moral grey zone somewhere west of Cyprus There are billionaires who merely buy football clubs; then there is Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich, the man who turned oligarchy into a spectator sport. For two…
Wentworth, England – Somewhere between the first Pro-Am cocktail and the final corporate-suite handshake, the BMW PGA Championship manages to convince the planet that a small Surrey estate is, for one week, the gravitational center of world order. That the order in question involves men in pastel cashmere politely demolishing each other’s egos is, apparently,…
Teaching Tiny Humans About the Day the World Lost Its Innocence (and Its Mind) PARIS—Every September, history teachers from Reykjavik to Rio face the same awkward choreography: how to explain to a room of nine-year-olds why two buildings once fell down and turned the planet into a permanent airport security queue. The trick, veteran educators…
Whoopi Goldberg’s Net Worth and the Quiet Rebellion of $60 Million A dispatch from the borderless republic of celebrity finance PARIS—Somewhere between the iron-clad vault of the Banque de France and the neon glare of a Lagos betting kiosk, sixty million U.S. dollars sits wearing a purple crochet beret and cracking jokes about flatulence. That,…
The Twenty-Fourth Time Around September 11, 2025 – A Planet Still Trying to Read the Safety Card in the Dark By the time the sun clawed its way over the International Date Line this Wednesday, the Earth had already logged its 24th consecutive orbit since passenger jets became improvised cruise missiles. From Auckland to Anchorage,…
