Oliver Farnworth: The Accidental Geopolitical Barometer Nobody Ordered By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic If you’ve blinked since 2017 you probably missed Oliver Farnworth’s first international incident. The British actor—best known for playing “man who looks like he’s perpetually smelling milk about to turn”—was quietly filming a car-commercial-cameo in rural…
**Boston’s Weather: A Global Parable of Snow, Hubris, and the End of the World as We Know It** *By our correspondent who once wore flip-flops in February and has the frostbite to prove it* BOSTON—While the rest of the planet debates whether 2023 was merely the hottest year on record or the opening act for…
The Big E: When America’s Deep-Fried Carnival Becomes a Mirror for a Planet on the Brink By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Still Picking Funnel-Cake Glitter Out of His Notebook Springfield, Massachusetts – Every September, while the rest of the world debates supply-chain collapses, missile trajectories, or whether the COP-whatever will finally outlaw patio heaters, the…
**From Moscow to Manila, the World Listens: How a Brooklyn Bedroom Podcast Became Global Soft-Power Diplomacy** If you’ve ever wondered what American cultural hegemony sounds like in 2024, it’s the wet slap of saliva on a microphone somewhere in DUMBO, accompanied by the phrase “gluck-gluck 9000.” “Call Her Daddy,” the sex-and-satire podcast that began as…
**From Fenway to the Fall of Empires: How the Red Sox Standings Mirror a World in Decline** While the world watches grainy TikToks of Ukrainian drone strikes and central bankers debate whether to crash the housing market slowly or all at once, the Boston Red Sox have spent the spring perfecting the art of hovering…
Vanessa Bryant: The Accidental Global Empress of Grief Management By our man in the departure lounge, filing from somewhere over the Pacific It’s a peculiar sort of twenty-first-century coronation: one moment you’re the discreet spouse of a basketball polyglot who sells sneakers to Jakarta and jerseys to Lagos, the next you’re the planet’s reluctant grief-czar….
World Suicide Prevention Day, 10 September, is the one calendar square when humanity collectively decides that living is, on balance, preferable to the alternative—at least until the next quarterly earnings report. The United Nations, ever the sentimental host, invites every member state to light candles, ring bells, and tweet emojis in a synchronized display of…
Twice a year, planet Earth performs its most democratic magic trick: the global disappearing act we call “time change.” One moment it’s 2:00 a.m.; the next it’s either 1:59 a.m. for the second lap or 3:00 a.m. on fast-forward—depending on which side of the equator you’re pretending to sleep on. From Reykjavík to Riyadh, no…
NEW YORK—This morning, as the Hudson River looked suspiciously like the Thames on a bad day, New Yorkers discovered that their weather had once again become a global spectacle. A stubborn low-pressure system—one that had already battered Lisbon, flirted with Reykjavík, and ghosted Casablanca—decided that the only place worth ruining was Midtown. Satellite images showed…
Jenna Dewan and the Soft-Power Ballet of Planet Earth by Dave’s Locker Global Desk PARIS — While COP negotiators in Bonn argue over commas in the climate text, and the BRICS+ bloc quietly re-carpets the world in yuan, a far more potent form of soft power pirouettes across our collective attention span: Jenna Dewan’s career….
The Colossus of North London Has Arrived—Now Let’s See Who Notices By Diego “Match-Day Malthus” Serrano, filing from the global buffet of existential dread Haringey, London – Somewhere between the artisanal coffee concessions and the 65-metre bar that could hydrate a medium-sized nation, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium yawns open like a titanium clam that swallowed a…
The Knicks Abroad: How a New York Basketball Punchline Became a Universal Metaphor for Hopeless Devotion By Special Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk NEW YORK—From the vantage point of a rooftop bar in Hong Kong, the Knicks look almost noble. Their orange-and-blue jerseys glow on flat-screens above the harbor, a flickering totem of New York…
