Ethan Hawke: The Last American Leading Man Who Still Reads Books on Airplanes *By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent in a Departure Lounge Somewhere Between Reykjavík and Regret* The planet tilts, currencies collapse, and TikTok teaches teenagers to perform open-heart surgery in fifteen seconds flat, yet Ethan Hawke persists—loping through film festivals from Sarajevo to Santiago…
Phillies Magic Number: When a Baseball Stat Becomes the Planet’s Faint Pulse By the time most of the world had finished doom-scrolling news of yet another currency free-fall and a renegade super-typhoon doing donuts in the Pacific, a quiet, almost quaint phrase began trending on English-language timelines from Lagos to Lahore: “Phillies magic number.” For…
Knives Out: A Global Affair in Which Everyone Is Guilty By Our Correspondent Who Has Already Checked the Silverware Drawer GENEVA—The phrase “knives out” once conjured up quaint English country houses, thunderclaps, and a Belgian sleuth fussing over egg-temperature. Today it is less parlour game and more planetary blood sport. From the South China Sea…
Stockholm Syndrome, Global Edition: Watching the World Argue Over a 20-Year-Old Who Still Can’t Legally Rent a Car in Most U.S. States By Dave’s International Affairs Desk The planet’s most famous truant is at it again. Greta Thunberg, whose 2018 “Skolstrejk för klimatet” began as a solo cardboard protest outside the Swedish parliament, has now…
Guatemala vs. The Rest of the World: A David-sized Slingshot Aimed at the Goliath of Global Indifference By Our Correspondent, still brushing volcanic ash off his notebook At first glance, “Guatemala vs” looks like an unfinished Twitter feud—half a headline, half a dare. Yet the open-ended preposition is precisely the point. In courtrooms from Washington…
Chicago Bears: A Global Parable of Perpetual Rebuilding By a correspondent who has watched empires rise and fall faster than a Bears third-quarter lead The Chicago Bears are, at first glance, a regional curiosity: 53 men in navy and orange chasing an oblong ball beside a lake so frigid it could double as a Russian…
Kirk Cousins Has Entered the Transfer Portal to the Rest of the Planet By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic MINNEAPOLIS—While the planet busies itself with minor trifles—Ukrainian power grids being redecorated by Iranian drones, the Arctic Circle auditioning for a role as the next Mediterranean, and Sri Lanka experimenting with…
Tonight, somewhere between the Arctic Circle and the last functioning Wi-Fi router in Gaza, twenty-two million souls will crane their necks at the same glowing rectangle to ask the same question: “What football game is on tonight?” The query itself is a kind of secular prayer—uttered in seven thousand languages, muttered over instant noodles in…
ZURICH—The first time I heard the phrase “GSH bears” I assumed it was either a typo for “gosh, bears” or some obscure crypto-token named after a ursine deity. In fact, it turns out to be the Global Synthetic Hedge—bears, plural, because nothing this catastrophically leveraged ever travels alone. Picture a flock of algorithmic grizzlies unleashed…
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 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…
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…
