Lakeside Fire: A Global Bonfire of the Vanities By Our Correspondent Who Has Packed Three Go-Bags and Counts Evacuation Drills as Cardio Lake Como, 03:14 a.m. local time. The flames licking the pastel façades of George Clooney’s preferred brunch strip are, of course, terribly photogenic—so much so that a CNN crew is already live-streaming the…
Mac Jones and the Export of American Quarterbacking: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts By Our Man in Exile, Somewhere Over Greenland Act I – The Transatlantic Pipeline When the New England Patriots drafted Mac Jones 15th overall in 2021, the moment did not, strictly speaking, make the front page of Le Monde or spark a…
The 18:47 from Kharkiv to Kyiv is many things—overcrowded, chronically late, and lately a mobile refugee hostel—but until last week it had not qualified as a frontline. That changed somewhere east of Poltava when a single bullet, fired through a cracked window, ended the life of 29-year-old Olena Krasnova, a logistics officer turned volunteer turned…
Nuno Espírito Santo: The Accidental Globalist Who Keeps Getting Hired to Fire Himself By Our Man on the Touchline, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread Somewhere over the Atlantic—between the duty-free Toblerone and the recycled air—Nuno Espírito Santo is probably updating his LinkedIn again. The Portuguese manager has become football’s most polite pandemic: he…
Nottingham Forest: A Parable of Hope, Hubris, and the Global Football Funnel By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between the Trent and the Tigris On a damp Tuesday in January, while the World Economic Forum was busy recycling last year’s buzzwords in Davos and Elon Musk was still deciding which government to troll…
THE LAST SUPPER BEFORE CHAPTER 11: RED LOBSTER SINKS WHILE THE WORLD WATCHES WITH BUTTERED POPCORN By the time the news crawled across my phone at 3 a.m. in a rainswept Istanbul hostel, Red Lobster had already filed for Chapter 11 from the comfort of Orlando—city of theme-park miracles and, apparently, seafood insolvency. Let us…
From the vantage point of a hotel bar in Phnom Penh—where the barman insists on playing 1990s American sitcom theme songs at funeral-parlor volume—the Cubs versus Braves tussle feels less like a ballgame and more like an allegory for late-stage capitalism’s greatest hits. Two franchises, each clutching century-old grievances like passports to self-pity, meet in…
Ashton Kutcher: The Last American Export That Still Works by our correspondent in a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “password123” PARIS—On the same day the French government announced yet another bailout for baguette artisans, Ashton Kutcher was in Davos explaining to a roomful of unelected technocrats how blockchain can stop child trafficking. Somewhere in…
The Washington Nationals and the Miami Marlins, two baseball franchises whose combined payrolls could bail out a modestly failing European bank, faced off last night in a contest that the global community greeted with the same polite indifference normally reserved for a UN subcommittee on agricultural tariffs. From the Maracanã to the Marina Bay Sands,…
Chang’an: The City That Invented Globalization, Then Got Rebranded By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you want to see the birthplace of twenty-first-century supply-chain anxiety, you need to look 1,400 years backward and 8,000 kilometers east of Davos. Welcome to Chang’an—modern-day Xi’an—where cosmopolitan merchants once haggled over bolts of silk and, presumably, complained that the…
ATHENS — The Acropolis did not crumble, the tourists still queued, and the ouzo kept flowing, which is the closest thing the planet has to a miracle these days. A 4.8-magnitude earthquake shook the Greek capital yesterday at 14:13 local time, rattling marble facades and reminding the world that, beneath every cradle of Western civilization,…
The Weeknd Presale: A Global Ritual of FOMO, Firewalls, and Fractured Dreams By Dave’s Locker International Desk The sun never sets on a Weeknd presale. From Manila’s 3 a.m. queues to São Paulo’s lunch-break cyber stampedes, millions synchronize their suffering in the name of Abel Tesfaye’s falsetto. It is less a ticket drop than a…
