Tomorrow, for roughly four minutes and twenty-eight seconds—just enough time for a bad first date or a decent espresso—the Moon will photobomb the Sun. The total solar eclipse will rip a 185-kilometre shadow across the Pacific, graze Easter Island’s blank-eyed moai like a celestial pickpocket, then sprint across Chile and Argentina before vanishing into the…
BERLIN—On a crisp Sunday when most sane humans were still negotiating the terms of their hangovers, 50,000 certified optimists assembled at the Brandenburg Gate to discover, yet again, that the human body was not designed to travel 42.195 km at speed. The 50th anniversary BMW Berlin Marathon—slogan: “The Fastest Course on Earth, Terms & Conditions…
Arc’teryx Fireworks Display: When Outerwear Brands Decide to Burn Money for Sport By Lucía “No, That’s Not a Typo” Valdez, International Correspondent-at-Large Vancouver—The same city that once apologized for being too polite—twice—has now apologized for being too loud. Last night, the outdoor-apparel monolith Arc’teryx staged what it billed as “a vertical light symphony celebrating human…
The Newbury Show and the Last Barn Dance of Empire By Our Man in a Wax Jacket, somewhere between Duty Free and the Sheep Ring NEWBURY, England – Every September, when the jet stream coughs a cold front across the Home Counties, the Newbury & District Agricultural Show re-asserts itself like a stubborn cow pat…
Guadalajara—Toluca: Two Mexican Cities and the World’s Slow-Motion Existential Crisis If you spread a map of the globe across your kitchen table tonight, trace a careless thumb 460 kilometers west-to-east across Mexico’s midriff, and mutter “Guadalajara to Toluca,” you’ll notice something unsettling: you’ve just drawn the same line the planet draws when it wants to…
The Granite State’s Global Shadow: Why a Tiny Corner of New England Still Makes the World Sweat DATELINE: Somewhere over the Atlantic—Half a million souls live in New Hampshire, a territory so small that if it were a country it would rank 174th by population, wedged somewhere between Malta and the Maldives. Yet every four…
The lights flickered from Lagos to Lyon last week, and no one at the United Nations cocktail circuit bothered to ask why. That’s because the culprit wasn’t another geopolitical tantrum or a rogue undersea cable—it was Entergy, the New-Orleans-based utility whose name sounds like a budget airline but whose reach now stretches like a power…
Manchester Airport: A Provincial Gate to the Apocalypse, with Pretzels By our correspondent, still queuing at security for the third time today MANCHESTER, United Kingdom — There is a special place in the modern inferno reserved for airports that insist on behaving like minor city-states. Manchester Airport—airport code MAN, as if the runways themselves were…
The phrase “burger near me” is no longer a mere stomach-growl translated into English; it is a geopolitical whisper, a tiny uprising typed into 1.4 billion pockets from Lagos to Lapland. Somewhere in Islamabad, a teenager thumbs the same three words as a hedge-fund analyst in Zürich—both hoping the algorithmic oracle will summon something warm,…
There are only two things guaranteed to bring a room full of diplomats to blows: a disputed offshore oil field and the question of whose national junior hockey program is merely corrupt versus genuinely evil. Hockey teams, those quaint collections of padded gladiators who speak exclusively in clichés and dental records, have quietly become the…
Perth—population 2.2 million, give or take a few FIFO* miners who’ve lost track of what day it is—sits alone on the planet’s loneliest edge: closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, closer to the Antarctic research station’s lonely beer fridge than to Canberra’s warmer political ambitions. To the rest of the world, Western Australia’s capital is…
From the window of a packed Air India Dreamliner somewhere over the Hindu Kush, the phrase “big bold beautiful journey” feels less like an inspirational poster and more like a dare. Down below, glaciers retreat with the urgency of hungover tourists checking out late, while somewhere in the stratosphere an Emirates A380 is probably selling…
