Phoenix, Arizona—population 1.7 million, plus however many Canadians are hiding in the guest casitas right now—has posted its 31st consecutive day above 110 °F (43 °C). While the local Chamber of Commerce has rebranded this as “sun-powered living,” the rest of the planet is taking notes on what happens when a city decides to test…
Google just coughed up Gemini, the latest multi-modal oracle trained on more text than any human could skim in a lifetime, and the planet reacted with the usual cocktail of awe, terror, and LinkedIn hot takes. From Brussels boardrooms to Nairobi cyber-cafés, the consensus is that this chatbot-on-steroids is less a product launch and more…
From the Airwaves of Acapulco to the Algorithms of Abu Dhabi Alexis Ayala, the Telenovela Everyman Who Outsmarted the Streaming Wars By the time the espresso machines in Madrid’s Malasaña district finish their morning hiss, the name Alexis Ayala has already ping-ponged through WhatsApp groups in Manila, trended on TikTok in Istanbul, and been auto-subtitled…
Sun News, Earth Blues By our roving cosmic correspondent, still hung-over from last night’s aurora The Sun has been making headlines again—always a bit of a narcissist, that 4.6-billion-year-old ball of plasma. From Delhi’s smog-choked rooftops to Reykjavík’s geothermal spas, the latest “sun news” is that our star has entered a more exuberant phase of…
Jonathan Groff: The Unlikely Global Export America Never Put on a Tariff List PARIS—While Washington and Beijing slug it out over semiconductors and soybeans, another U.S. product is slipping through every customs checkpoint unmolested: Jonathan Groff. Yes, the man who once asked the world if it wanted to build a snowman has quietly become the…
The phrase “vaccines near me” has become a tiny, pleading prayer muttered into glowing rectangles everywhere from Lagos to Lisbon. It is typed in 47 languages, auto-corrected into oblivion, and translated by algorithms that still think “Sinovac” is a Chinese boy-band. Yet behind the banal search bar lies a planetary morality play: a scramble for…
Flu Shots: The World’s Most Politely Ignored Miracle —————————————————- Every autumn, the Northern Hemisphere performs its annual ritual: sleeves roll up, tiny vials of dead virus are jabbed into deltoids, and humanity collectively agrees to pretend it isn’t mildly terrified of needles. From Oslo’s orderly queues to Jakarta’s parking-lot pop-ups, the flu shot is the…
Vaccinations Near Me: A Global Treasure Hunt in the Age of Microscopic Warfare By the time you type “vaccinations near me” into the glowing rectangle that passes for companionship these days, a child in Malawi has already walked six kilometers with her baby brother strapped to her back, hoping the clinic still has two drops…
Travis Decker and the Quiet Art of Making the World Care About Wyoming By “International” Correspondent (read: guy who once got stuck in Schiphol for nine hours) COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between a NATO briefing on Arctic shipping lanes and the sixth refill of airport coffee that tastes like regret, I first heard the name Travis Decker whispered…
The Fitzpatrick Doctrine: How One Irish Surname Accidentally Became the World’s Thermometer By Our Man in Exile, still wearing last week’s cynicism DUBLIN—Somewhere between the Liffey and the apocalypse, the name “Fitzpatrick” has quietly metastasized from humble Hibernian patronymic to planetary shorthand for “how screwed are we, exactly?” To the uninitiated, Fitzpatrick is merely the…
CINCINNATI—From a distance of 7,000 km, the Cincinnati Reds look less like a baseball franchise and more like a controlled experiment in how much nostalgia a single city can inhale before developing a collective pulmonary embolism. Here, on the banks of the Ohio, locals still speak of the 1975-76 “Big Red Machine” the way Sicilians…
Shaq Thompson: The Linebacker Who Proves Americans Will Export Absolutely Anything By our international desk – the one facing a flickering neon sign that reads “Hope Dies Here” Charlotte, North Carolina – While the rest of the planet busies itself with minor trifles—Ukrainian gridlock, Sudan’s food-free diet plan, or the yen’s limbo contest against the…
