Kyiv, Lviv, and the Lampedusa of the Mind A field dispatch from the cheap seats of the 21st century By the time you finish this sentence, another container of “lethal aid” will have cleared customs in Gdańsk, another oligarch will have relocated from Moscow to Dubai, and another earnest European energy minister will have discovered…
# The Curious Case of Andy Byron: How One Man’s Digital Midlife Crisis Became a Global Mirror If you haven’t heard of Andy Byron yet, congratulations on maintaining your sanity in our hyperconnected asylum. For the rest of us doom-scrollers, Andy has become the latest specimen in humanity’s ongoing experiment of turning ordinary people into…
Adam Sandler: The Last American Export That Even Trade Wars Can’t Kill By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the collapse of the global liberal order and the day Netflix’s algorithm achieved sentience, the planet quietly agreed on one point of consensus: Adam Sandler is inevitable. From the air-conditioned multiplexes of Riyadh—where his latest comedy…
**The Digital Coliseum: How a Texan Gamer Became the World’s Most Unlikely Diplomat** In an era where traditional diplomacy crumbles faster than a week-old croissant, humanity has found its newest cultural ambassador: a 33-year-old Austin native who streams World of Warcraft in a room that looks like it hasn’t seen daylight since the Clinton administration….
The Global Spectrum: How the World Decides Which Autistic Traits Are Genius and Which Get You Fired ZURICH—On the same Tuesday that a Swiss asset-management firm discreetly hired a 24-year-old Kazakh “pattern savant” to spot algorithmic glitches, a Cambodian garment factory quietly fired a 34-year-old seamstress for “excessive rocking.” Both women carry the same formal…
The Empty Silo: A Hollow Monument to a World That Forgot to Eat By Our Man in the Global Pantry, filing from everywhere and nowhere. Somewhere between the 45th parallel and the 19th nervous breakdown, another grain silo stands empty. Its corrugated ribs catch the sunrise like a rusted xylophone, playing a tune no one…
Cat Deeley: The British Export Who Conquered America, Then Slipped Back Across the Pond Like a Guilty Burglar By the time you finish reading this sentence, Cat Deeley will have changed continents again—such is the peripatetic fate of the Birmingham-born host who once seduced American prime-time with a smile sharp enough to slice USDA-approved cheese….
Morning Live: The Planet’s 24-Hour Pop-Up Republic of Caffeine, Chaos, and Quiet Desperation By Dave’s International Desk of Perpetual Jet Lag In the soft blue glow that precedes sunrise, the world performs its daily miracle: 195 sovereign nations agree, without a treaty or even a particularly coherent WhatsApp group, to pretend that 6 a.m. is…
The Tractor Also Rises: How a Middle-Aged British Blowhard Became the World’s Accidental Agricultural Prophet By Our Man in the Manure PARIS — In a week when the UN warns that soil degradation could shave 10 % off global GDP by 2050, the hottest export out of the United Kingdom is neither whisky nor royal…
Sam Thompson and the Curious Case of the Planet-Sized Personality Dave’s Locker International Desk – Monday, 09:14 GMT Somewhere between a Tokyo bullet-train bar car and a Lagos rooftop speakeasy, the name “Sam Thompson” is being whispered with the same nervy reverence usually reserved for crypto moguls who haven’t yet been indicted. Who, exactly, is…
Louise Minchin: How One Woman’s 3:40 a.m. Wake-Up Call Echoes from Kyiv to Caracas By our correspondent, still jet-lagged in Terminal 2 In the grand geopolitical casino, where chips are measured in oil pipelines and rare-earth minerals, Louise Minchin’s decision to step off the BBC Breakfast sofa last autumn might look like spare change sliding…
INEOS: How a Quiet Chemical Empire Became the World’s Loudest Sponsor of Everything ZURICH — Somewhere between the Rhine and the Clyde, INEOS has managed to turn industrial solvents into soft-power superglue. The conglomerate—founded in 1998 by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a man who reportedly keeps a Gulfstream G650 for weekdays and another for weekends—now sponsors…
