Big Brother Live Feeds: The Planet’s Longest Unscripted UN Security Council Meeting by Our Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar items are also under 24/7 surveillance There was a time, quaint as a rotary phone, when the phrase “Big Brother live feeds” conjured up grainy shots of twenty-something strangers arguing about dishwater in…
Baylor vs SMU: A Texas Tussle Watched by a World That’s Given Up on Everything Else By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic DALLAS—While the Eastern Hemisphere sleeps through another night of currency collapse and the Western one rehearses its next apology for existing, roughly ninety thousand Texans will gather Saturday…
**When Beauty Meets Bluetooth: The Brooks Nader Incident and Our Global Panic Room** In a world where nuclear powers play chicken in the Taiwan Strait and glaciers perform disappearing acts faster than a magician’s assistant, humanity has collectively decided that the real international crisis worth our breathless attention is… a Sports Illustrated model’s misadventure with…
**The Global Courtroom: How Judge Judy Became America’s Most Successful Legal Export Since the Drone Strike** While the world grapples with war crimes tribunals in The Hague and the International Court of Justice’s lengthy deliberations on genocide, somewhere in the collective consciousness of humanity, a 5-foot-tall former family court judge from Brooklyn has been dispensing…
Marvel Tokon Beta: When the World’s Favorite Superhero Franchise Decides to Issue Its Own Currency (and Nobody Tells the IMF) By the time most of you woke up this morning, some kid in Lagos had already flipped a pixelated Captain America shield NFT for enough Marvel Tokon Beta (MTB) to buy three weeks of actual…
The Postcode Lottery: How Five Digits Decide Your Fate on This Spinning Rock By the time you finish reading this sentence, three babies will have drawn the cosmic short straw and been born in postal zones where life expectancy is already wheezing twenty years behind the luckier infants wailing a few alphanumeric characters away. Welcome…
Josh Brolin’s Chin Has More Passport Stamps Than Your LinkedIn Profile By Our Bureau of Expensive Mid-Life Crises, Geneva When the World Economic Forum wants a mood board for “late-capitalist gravitas,” it apparently just air-drops a 4K still of Josh Brolin squinting at a green screen. From the neon sewers of Seoul to the tax…
DAVID BOWIE, CITIZEN OF NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE by our itinerant correspondent still trying to find a payphone that works PARIS—At 3 a.m. in a Marais dive bar, the jukebox coughs up “Heroes” for the fourth time tonight. A German banker in a bespoke suit weeps quietly into his pastis; two Senegalese buskers argue about the…
Dallas, Texas—never the shy type—has spent the last few weeks auditioning for the Four Horsemen. One moment it’s 28 °C and the cicadas are gossiping like hedge-fund analysts at a rooftop bar; the next, marble-sized hail is auditioning for the lead role in “The Day After Tomorrow: Suburban Edition.” International observers, once content to treat…
In Houston, under a roof that cost more than the GDP of several Pacific island nations, the Astros played baseball last night. That sentence already contains enough contradictions—indoor baseball, billion-dollar air-conditioning, a sport once exported as a metaphor for American innocence now wrapped in retractable steel—to make any foreign correspondent reach for the antacid and…
Dallas, Texas— The forecast here is so cartoonishly extreme that it feels like the city is auditioning for a spot in the United Nations Climate Hall of Infamy. One day the mercury tickles 110°F (43°C), the next a derecho rewinds the thermostat to 68°F and flips every patio umbrella into low-orbit lawn art. From a…
The Curious Case of Trevor Lawrence: How a Quarterback from Cartersville, Georgia Briefly Became the UN Secretary-General of American Soft Power By the time Trevor Lawrence trotted onto the Wembley pitch last October for the Jacksonville Jaguars’ annual hostage-taking of British NFL fans, the global temperature had risen another 0.2°C, two more democracies had quietly…
