Edinburgh, Tuesday night, and a chill wind sweeps across Tynecastle Park carrying the faint smell of North Sea regret and deep-fried existential dread. On the pitch, Scotland’s Under-21s—an optimistic contradiction in terms—are doing their level best to convince 16,000 rain-soaked souls that the future is bright, or at least brighter than the present. Across the…
Bad moods have gone global, and the planet is now exporting irritability in 4K resolution. From the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila where operators practice smiling at 3 a.m. to the fog-shrouded cafés of Copenhagen where everyone is still somehow content, humanity has discovered that sulking scales. Moody is no longer a temperament; it is…
Burnham Yard: The Tiny Patch of Rust That Just Taught the World How Not to Die By the time the last Union Pacific freight rumbled out of Burnham Yard last Tuesday, the Denver rail hub had already become an international parable. Not because it was particularly large—at 70 acres it could fit comfortably inside a…
Connelly Early, for the handful of readers who haven’t already doom-scrolled past his name, is the sort of mid-tier American bureaucrat whose sudden elevation to global talking-point tells you everything about how thin the membrane between order and chaos has become. Until last Thursday he was an assistant under-secretary for something so forgettably titled that…
Baku to Kyiv: Two Wars, One Playbook, Zero Refunds By Our Man Who’s Stopped Expecting Miracles If the planet were a casino, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe would be those smoky back tables where the house always wins and the players keep doubling down on losing hands. This week, while the world’s attention swung like…
Ouagadougou’s Stade du 4 Août, 10 p.m. local time, and the mercury is still flirting with 38°C. The turf looks like it’s been blow-dried by a Saharan hair-dryer, which is fitting: everything about Burkina Faso vs Egypt these days feels like a slow-motion tumbleweed of geopolitical slapstick. On paper it’s a football qualifier—2026 World Cup,…
Kinshasa and Dakar are not, to the casual eye, obvious rivals. One is a humid sprawl of eight million souls perched on the Congo River, where traffic lights are decorative suggestions and power cuts arrive with Swiss punctuality. The other is a breezy Atlantic capital where the ocean smells of fish, hip-hop, and the faint…
NEWS FROM THE NUMBERS COALFACE 10-Year Treasury Yield: A Moody Barometer for a World That Can’t Decide If It’s Dying or Just Napping SINGAPORE—Every morning, somewhere between the first espresso and the last muttered curse at Bloomberg, traders around the planet glance at one figure the way medieval sailors once checked the North Star: the…
Ofsted Unleashes ‘New Framework’ – World Watches in Mild Panic By Our Correspondent in an Undisclosed Café, Somewhere Between Heathrow and Existential Dread LONDON—Yesterday, in a conference room scented faintly of instant coffee and impending judgment, Ofsted unveiled its latest inspection framework. Across the planet, education ministers from Seoul to São Paulo leaned forward like…
Jabrill Peppers and the Global Theater of One Man’s Hamstring Byline: Helmut van der Linde, filing from a hotel bar in Doha where the Wi-Fi is sponsored by a regime that thinks “ACL tear” is a political slogan. Jabrill Peppers tore his ACL last week. Somewhere in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a franchise that has…
The Paper Shield: How Constitutions Became the World’s Most Popular Fiction Genre By our correspondent in the departures lounge of a failing republic GENEVA—While you were binge-watching constitutional crises on mute in the airport bar, 195 countries were quietly updating their national origin stories. The product? A tidy 800-word PDF that promises to turn blood-soaked…
Elizabeth Gilbert, the American author whose passport now contains more stamps than an Italian post office, has become the de-facto cartographer of the modern soul’s grand tour. Ever since she dragged 10 million readers through the trattorias of Rome, the ashrams of India, and the rice paddies of Bali, her memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” has…
