James McAvoy, the Scottish pocket-rocket who has spent two decades convincing the world that he is both Professor X and a Glasgow bar brawler, has quietly become the United Nations’ favorite chameleon. While diplomats argue over commas in multilateral treaties, McAvoy has been slipping across borders with nothing more menacing than a posh English accent…
Bibury, Gloucestershire – population 627, average blood pressure 180/110 once the tour buses arrive – has become the unlikely barometer for a planet that can’t decide whether it wants to be Instagrammed or left the hell alone. On paper it’s merely a Cotswold hamlet: honey-coloured stone, trout stream, a row of 14th-century weavers’ cottages so…
Bali’s Latest Wet Look: How a Flooded Paradise Became the Planet’s Cautionary TikTok By our correspondent, still drying her passport in the hotel hair-dryer DENPASAR—When the Gods finally decided to rinse the island of incense, Bintang singlets, and crypto-burnout expats, they apparently chose the deluxe cycle. Over three sodden February days, Bali collected a month’s…
A Parish Smirk on the World Stage: How Keely Hodgkinson Ended Up Carrying the Weight of a Planet’s Mid-Life Crisis By the time Keely Hodgkinson crossed the line in Paris last summer, the 800 metres behind her looked less like a track and more like a conveyor belt of global neuroses. One half-lap earlier, an…
The Day the World Hit Refresh Geneva, 05:47 UTC – The sun rose, as it is contractually obligated to do, over a planet that had spent the previous twenty-four hours pretending that one axial rotation could meaningfully divide cause from effect. Traders in Singapore already priced in the hangover before Tokyo had finished pouring the…
Zoe Slater and the Global Soap-Opera Industrial Complex: A Post-Brexit Parable from Albert Square to Abu Dhabi Our man in London reports that Zoe Slater—yes, the human embodiment of the phrase “she’s your muvva, not your sista”—has resurfaced in EastEnders after a two-decade hiatus. While half of Britain spent the week choking on its own…
The Curious Case of Milly Alcock, or How a 23-Year-Old Aussie Became the Last Shared Cultural Reference Standing SYDNEY—Somewhere between the implosion of Twitter and the planet’s 400th consecutive “hottest year on record,” humanity apparently decided its final communal campfire story would be delivered by a 5’5″ actress from New South Wales who once worked…
London, the city that once ruled a quarter of the planet and now can’t rule its own plumbing, stands as the world’s most charming contradiction. While other former imperial capitals have gracefully retired into museum pieces—Vienna sipping coffee, Istanbul smoking hookah—London insists on remaining relevant through sheer bloody-mindedness and an economy based entirely on Russian…
SEPTEMBER 11TH, GLOBALIZED: How One Tuesday Morning Became the Entire Planet’s Permanent Bad Hair Day By the time the second plane hit, the world’s coffee had already gone cold. In Lagos, a stockbroker paused mid-sip, watching the tiny television bolted to the currency-exchange kiosk; in São Paulo, a late-night talk-show host shrugged offstage, instinctively switching…
The Lifetime ISA: Britain’s Fiscal Lifeboat in a World Drowning in Debt By our man in the departures lounge, still waiting for a delayed redemption LONDON—While the rest of the planet frantically googles “how to emigrate without money,” the United Kingdom has quietly rolled out a financial product that doubles as a national personality test:…
When the first Spinal Tap documentary dropped in 1984, the Berlin Wall was still standing, CNN was barely four years old, and most of the planet still believed rock stars were demigods rather than tax exiles with tinnitus. Thirty-nine years later, the surviving members of England’s loudest semi-fictional band are reuniting for Spinal Tap 2—an…
The Day the Sky Fell: How September 11 Gifted the World a New Brand of Chaos By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Everyone remembers where they were, or so the cliché insists. I was in a Nairobi newsroom watching a fuzzy CRT feed as the second plane performed its murderous…
