Angelina Jolie, the woman who turned a vial of blood and a penchant for adopting half the planet into a one-woman foreign policy, has spent the past two decades auditioning for the role of “Earth’s Concerned Mom.” From refugee camps to the UN’s gilded antechambers, she has perfected the art of looking photogenically anguished while…
San Francisco Weather: The Fog That Ate Global Capitalism By Our Man on the Brink, filing from a city that still thinks irony is a weather pattern. Let us begin with the only forecast that matters: Karl the Fog—that amorphous, sentient blanket of damp self-importance—has been granted diplomatic status by at least three EU member…
LOS ANGELES—The ground beneath Hollywood’s most over-medicated city rolled over in its sleep at 12:20 p.m. local time, registering a polite 5.2 on the Richter scale and reminding the planet that even America’s self-proclaimed capital of reinvention is still, geologically speaking, on the Pacific’s naughty list. From Tokyo to Tehran, seismologists looked up from their…
Arsenal News: A Global Arms Bazaar Where Everyone Wins (Except the Targets) By the time you finish this sentence, at least three governments, two private security firms, and one very enthusiastic TikTok influencer will have refreshed their feeds for the latest “Arsenal News.” The phrase used to summon images of North London footballers fumbling away…
The Hollywood Bowl, that half-domed amphitheater squatting on a Hollywood hill like a crashed UFO made of redwood and stucco, is supposedly just another music venue. Yet to the rest of the planet it remains a shorthand for America’s most profitable export: the illusion that everyone, everywhere, is invited to the party—provided they can afford…
The NHS League Tables 2025 have dropped, and the world is leaning in like it’s the final episode of a prestige drama where everyone dies of preventable disease. From Seoul to São Paulo, health ministers, policy wonks, and the sort of people who put “disruption” on their LinkedIn are watching the UK’s annual blood-letting with…
The Empire Strikes Back—With a Mic: How BBC Sports Became the World’s Genteel Referee While Rome Burns By the time the vuvuzelas had mercifully fallen silent in Johannesburg, the BBC’s World Cup coverage had already been translated into forty-three languages, pirated across three continents, and memed into oblivion on whatever corner of Weibo wasn’t behind…
Michelle Pfeiffer, the original cat-eyed sphinx of Hollywood, has spent four decades quietly proving that global soft power can be exercised in a Chanel suit and a smirk. While nations pour billions into embassies, summits, and panda-diplomacy, Pfeiffer has been exporting a far more potent product: immaculate cheekbones and the implicit promise that somewhere in…
Fender-Bender Diplomacy: How Auto Accident Attorneys Quietly Run the World By Matteo “Crash” Ricci, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large Drive any capital city ring-road at rush hour—Berlin’s A100, Lagos’s Third Mainland, or the smog-kissed tangle around São Paulo’s Marginal—and you’ll notice a curious ecosystem thriving in the median strip. It isn’t flora. It’s fauna with briefcases: auto accident…
James Corden: The Empire Exports Its Cheekiest Chappie By Our Man in a State of Permanent Jet Lag The British have a long, proud tradition of sending their most troublesome specimens abroad—convicts to Australia, Gordon Ramsay to Los Angeles, and, most recently, James Corden to the American late-night sofa. While the first two shipments arguably…
London Underground workers have apparently decided that a Tuesday in late spring is the perfect moment to remind the planet that the gears of global capitalism can still be jammed with nothing more exotic than a clipboard and a megaphone. The tube strike—rolling power cuts for the human circulatory system of a city that long…
When Rob Reiner ambled onto the world stage in 1971, the planet was busy with other matters—China had just discovered ping-pong diplomacy, Nixon was rehearsing his exit lines, and half of Europe was still trying to find a decent tomato. Yet somewhere between Archie Bunker’s hollering and a meathead’s earnest protest, Reiner quietly became a…
