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…
The View from Everywhere By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, 34A, Altitude 36,000 ft The phrase “the view” used to mean something quaint—an expanse of terraced vineyards, a cathedral spire, maybe your neighbor’s questionable taste in swimwear. Now it is a global Rorschach test: what you see depends on which apocalypse you subscribed to….
The World: A 24-Hour Spin Cycle on the Cosmic Laundromat by our roving correspondent, still waiting for his lost sock in the dryer of destiny Yesterday, at 2:17 p.m. GMT—give or take the eternal lateness of airline schedules—Planet Earth completed another smug lap around the sun. Somewhere between the Indian Ocean and a cloud of…
Weather Bristol: How a Drizzly English Backwater Became the Planet’s Atmospheric Punchline By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still drying off in Gate 43 Let us begin with the obvious: the weather in Bristol, population 465,000 and shrinking faster than British diplomatic credibility, is not, in itself, interesting. It is grey, damp, and insistently mediocre—like a LinkedIn…
Kathmandu, Nepal – While the rest of the planet was busy live-tweeting the implosion of yet another tech mogul’s ego, Nepal quietly reminded everyone that altitude can still trump attitude. The Himalayan republic—sandwiched between two nuclear frenemies who can’t agree on whose map is more delusional—just pulled off two feats that actually matter: it wrapped…
KATHMANDU—While the rest of the planet obsesses over which billionaire will colonize Mars first, a modest Himalayan republic the size of Arkansas keeps quietly demonstrating how to survive the twenty-first century without losing its soul—or its sense of irony. Nepal, population 30 million and falling off the map every time Google’s servers hiccup, has become…
Weather Near Me, Apocalypse Near Us By R. Salter, Senior Meteorological Misanthrope, Dave’s Locker It’s a breezy 19 °C on my balcony in Lisbon—perfect for watching the Tagus glitter like a cheap disco ball while the rest of the planet melts, freezes, or combusts, depending on postal code. The phrase “weather near me” used to…
The iron serpent, that 19th-century miracle we still pretend is the future, is slithering across the globe with renewed swagger. From Mumbai’s sweat-soaked commuter carriages to Switzerland’s punctual-as-a-Swiss-banker milk runs, trains are enjoying what marketing departments call a “renaissance” and what the rest of us call “the moment when humanity remembers it can move horizontally…
Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, where the map turns from cobalt blue to a suspiciously Instagram-filtered turquoise, the Hawaiian archipelago is once again auditioning for the part of “Earth’s Paradise” in humanity’s fever-dream tourism reel. From a safe distance—say, a glass-walled lounge in Dubai or a commuter train snaking through Seoul—Hawaii looks like…
Across the planet, “ranger” is less a job description than a Rorschach test. Say it in Nairobi and you picture a Kenya Wildlife Service officer politely asking an irate elephant to please not flatten the minister’s convoy. Whisper it in Warsaw and it conjures a camouflaged forest ghost monitoring Belarusian drones for the EU’s nervous…
MIAMI – Somewhere between the pastel façades of South Beach and the pastel promises of the latest climate summit, the city has begun to resemble a very expensive aquarium that forgot to pay its gravity bill. Tropical Storm Debby’s soggy dress rehearsal last month was merely the overture; now Hurricane Idalia is taking the main…
Wimbledon 2025: A Green-and-Purple Refuge While the World Burns By our man in the press box with a Pimm’s and a grimace London, June 2025 – The All England Club has once again rolled out its immaculately striped lawn like a giant picnic blanket for the planet’s remaining optimists. Outside the gates, Britain’s fourth government…
