The ACIP Meeting: Where the World’s Vaccine Gods Decide Who Lives, Who Dies, and Who Gets a Sore Arm By the time the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) wrapped its latest closed-door séance in a beige Atlanta Marriott, roughly 5.7 billion human beings were already speculating—via group chats, op-eds, and the occasional goat sacrifice—about…
The Gentle Art of Choosing Your Catastrophe: Sri Lanka vs Afghanistan, a Cricket Match for the Ages By Dave’s Diplomatically Cynical Correspondent Dubai, 2023. The air-con hums like a bored drone over the Arabian Gulf, and somewhere between the fifth champagne brunch and the seventh geopolitical crisis, the cricketing universe has decided to stage a…
Lyse Doucet and the Fine Art of Keeping a Straight Face While the World Burns By Dave’s Locker, International Desk of Controlled Despair In the global newsroom—an increasingly fluorescent purgatory where Wi-Fi passwords expire faster than cease-fires—Lyse Doucet is the rare correspondent who can deliver a death toll with the poise of a sommelier announcing…
Storm in a Teacup, with Global Froth by Our Man in the Departure Lounge The British Isles are once again under official “don’t panic, but do panic” orders as the Met Office issues a fresh flurry of colour-coded weather warnings—amber for wind, yellow for rain, and, in a festive twist, a sort of mauve for…
LONDON—Somewhere between a Brexit-themed fever dream and the last functional espresso machine in the West End, the musical “Waitress” has rolled out its pastry-laden national tour of the United Kingdom. Yes, that Waitress: the one where a battered woman named Jenna escapes an abusive marriage by baking cathartic pies with names like “My Husband’s a…
Wycombe Wanderers and the Beautiful Art of Glorious Failure By Dave’s International Desk of Diminishing Returns High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire – population 125,000, elevation 100 meters above sea level, elevation of expectations approximately three pints above sea level on a Tuesday. To the uninitiated, Wycombe Wanderers FC is a modest English club currently marooned in League…
The phrase “woman in mind” sounds like the opening line of a noir voice-over: She had legs that went clear to next Tuesday and a geopolitical agenda that could sink a small island nation. In reality, it’s less Bogart and more Davos-by-Zoom. From Reykjavík to Riyadh, the phrase now circulates in policy papers, TEDx after-parties,…
Basement Flooding: The World’s Wettest Underground Revolution By Our Correspondent, still drying his socks in five languages GENEVA—While diplomats upstairs argue over carbon credits and whose submarine is parked in whose harbor, the planet’s true diplomatic channel is busy negotiating with gravity and faulty sump pumps. From Brooklyn to Bangladesh, the basement is flooding, and…
Basement Submarines and the End of the World A Dispatch from the Planet’s Lower-Middle Floors By the time you read this, someone in Jakarta, Jakarta-on-the-Rhine (Cologne), or a newly soggy suburb of Detroit is probably up to their ankles in what used to be a wine cellar. The flooded basement—once the punch line of American…
Darwin Núñez and the Beautiful, Horrible Global Hype Machine By Santiago “The Jaundiced Eye” Morales, International Desk Montevideo, Liverpool, Baku—pick a dot on the map and someone is currently screaming either “¡Golazo!” or “£85 million down the drain!” at a screen featuring Darwin Núñez. The 24-year-old Uruguayan striker has become a sort of planetary Rorschach…
Gael Monfils, the human highlight reel currently moon-walking his way through what polite society still calls “the twilight of his career,” is tennis’s last living reminder that the sport was once supposed to be fun. While the rest of the men’s tour has been busy cloning 6-foot-6 Balkan metronomes who hit the ball as if…
Euston Station, or How the Empire’s Front Door Learned to Love the Queue By our London bureau chief, still dazed from the 07:42 to Manchester Piccadilly On any given Tuesday morning, while Singapore’s Changi offers orchids and a butterfly dome and Dubai International tempts travelers with indoor waterfalls, London’s Euston Station greets humanity with the…
