PARKER ROMO AND THE BORDERLESS FARCE OF MODERN STARDOM Dave’s Locker – International Affairs Desk DATELINE: Somewhere over the Atlantic, Wi-Fi sputtering like a Balkan taxi, 3 a.m. GMT There are, by conservative United Nations estimates, roughly eight billion people currently vying for oxygen on this planet. Roughly 7,999,999,993 of them have never heard of…
Thin Mints as Soft Power: How Girl Scout Cookies Conquered a Planet That Can’t Agree on Anything Else By [Name Withheld to Protect the Guilty], International Affairs Desk GENEVA—While the UN Security Council spends another evening locked in performative stalemate over whose war crimes are more “contextual,” a stealthier multilateral force has managed unanimous global…
**The Global Pursuit of “Pubs Near Me”: Humanity’s Noble Quest for Oblivion** In the grand tapestry of human civilization, few searches unite us quite like “pubs near me.” From the frostbitten streets of Reykjavik to the sweltering alleys of Bangkok, this digital cry for help transcends language barriers, economic systems, and the increasingly thin veneer…
Connelly Early, for the handful of readers who haven’t already doom-scrolled past his name, is the sort of mid-tier American bureaucrat whose sudden elevation to global talking-point tells you everything about how thin the membrane between order and chaos has become. Until last Thursday he was an assistant under-secretary for something so forgettably titled that…
Cape Verde vs. Cameroon: A Tiny Archipelago Punches Up, a Continental Heavyweight Stumbles, and the World Watches with Popcorn By the time the final whistle blew in Yaoundé, the scoreboard said 1-1, but the ledger of global meaning told a more entertaining story: David had just bloodied Goliath’s nose with a borrowed sling, and Goliath—never…
Burger King Japan’s announcement that it will serve a ¥2,000 (US $15) “Wagyu King” burger landed in my inbox while I was watching grainy footage of Sudanese refugees queueing for sorghum. The juxtaposition was almost too perfect: one civilization reduced to boiled grain, another racing to stuff the planet’s most pampered cow between two sesame-seed…
Estonia vs Andorra: Two Tiny Nations, One Giant Mirror to the World’s Midlife Crisis Tallinn and Andorra la Vella sit 2,600 kilometers apart, but in the grand geopolitical waiting room they might as well be sharing the same cracked vinyl couch. One is a post-Soviet start-up that discovered capitalism the way a teenager discovers espresso—wide-eyed,…
Baku to Kyiv: Two Wars, One Playbook, Zero Refunds By Our Man Who’s Stopped Expecting Miracles If the planet were a casino, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe would be those smoky back tables where the house always wins and the players keep doubling down on losing hands. This week, while the world’s attention swung like…
Ouagadougou’s Stade du 4 Août, 10 p.m. local time, and the mercury is still flirting with 38°C. The turf looks like it’s been blow-dried by a Saharan hair-dryer, which is fitting: everything about Burkina Faso vs Egypt these days feels like a slow-motion tumbleweed of geopolitical slapstick. On paper it’s a football qualifier—2026 World Cup,…
Kinshasa and Dakar are not, to the casual eye, obvious rivals. One is a humid sprawl of eight million souls perched on the Congo River, where traffic lights are decorative suggestions and power cuts arrive with Swiss punctuality. The other is a breezy Atlantic capital where the ocean smells of fish, hip-hop, and the faint…
**Earth to Athens: When the Cradle of Civilization Rocks and Rolls** The earth moved in Athens this week, and for once it wasn’t because of another austerity protest. A 5.2 magnitude earthquake rattled Greece’s capital, sending residents fleeing into the streets and reminding everyone that while democracy may have been born here, Mother Nature remains…
2026 Lexus IS: A Luxury Sedan for the End Times (or at Least the Next Recession) By Our Correspondent Somewhere between the Duty-Free and the Apocalypse Let us begin with a universal truth: every nation believes its traffic is the worst. From Jakarta’s scooter tsunamis to Los Angeles’ parking-lot freeways, drivers worldwide cling to the…
