**The Global Brotherhood of Bumper-Car Barristers** *From Lagos to Los Angeles, an army of tailored suits has perfected the art of turning twisted metal into tuition fees.* There are two universal constants in the 21st-century metropolis: traffic lights that exist only as decorative suggestions, and the business card of a car-accident lawyer wedged between your…
Car Injury Attorneys: The Globe’s New Ambassadors of Ambulance-Chasing Diplomacy By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Traffic Circle in Paris and the World’s Longest Tailback Outside Lagos It begins, as most modern tragedies do, with a notification. Somewhere between the squeal of rubber and the ping of an airbag sensor, a fender-bender in São Paulo…
Dodger Game, n.: A planetary pastime in which the world’s most powerful governments, corporations, and individuals compete to see who can avoid responsibility for the greatest number of catastrophes before the final buzzer—also known, on certain days, as a baseball match in Chavez Ravine. Same rules, different stakes. From the grandstands of geopolitics, the Dodgers…
The Earth Moves—And So Does the Money A sardonic postcard from the shifting crust By the time you finish this sentence, the planet will have executed roughly 50 imperceptible tremors, one M3+ wobble worthy of a California coffee spill, and—if it’s Monday—an M7+ catastrophe somewhere along the Ring of Fire, that 40,000-kilometer geological necklace we…
Oakland, California—city of perpetual reinvention, birthplace of both the Black Panthers and artisanal toast—has once again reminded the planet that its most reliable export isn’t software or sourdough but gunfire. On a balmy Wednesday evening, a modest fusillade erupted near Lake Merritt, that algae-fringed jewel where joggers from 40 countries dodge goose droppings and, apparently,…
Ernest Jones, or rather the ghost of Ernest Jones, has become the unlikely barometer for how quickly the world can pivot from “never again” to “well, actually.” A century after the Welsh psychoanalyst coined the term “rationalization” to explain why perfectly sensible people talk themselves into perfectly insane decisions, his surname is now plastered on…
Perseverance’s Red-Planet Road Trip: A Global Vanity Mirror in 4K The latest postcard from NASA’s Mars rover—complete with sweeping drone footage and a selfie that would humble any influencer—arrived this week with the usual fanfare: breathless headlines from Houston, congratulatory tweets from Jakarta, and, somewhere in the Kremlin, a stony silence thick enough to slice…
A Global Dispatch from the Church of Low-Probability Miracles By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Despair and the Duty-Free The numbers—6, 12, 19, 27, 33, and the bonus 42—dropped into the digital slipstream last night like six drunks tumbling down embassy stairs. Within minutes, the same sequence was being translated into 47 languages, 23 alphabets, and…
Ted Cruz: The World’s Favorite Cartoon Supervillain By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—From the banks of the Seine, where waiters still refuse to serve Freedom Fries, Ted Cruz looks less like a U.S. senator and more like a recurring character in a prestige drama about the decline of empires. To Europeans who’ve spent the last…
Corinthians vs. Athletico-PR: A Tale of Two Cities and the Planet’s Slow Collapse By Our Man in São Paulo, nursing his third caipirinha since dawn Somewhere between the 37th parallel south and the International Space Station’s nightly pass, Corinthians and Athletico-PR will meet tonight in the sort of football match that makes the rest of…
The Wheel Keeps Spinning—Whether You’re Watching or Not By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg The studio lights in Culver City, California, still blind the next contestant who can’t pronounce “quesadilla,” but the real wheel of fortune hasn’t stopped on any soundstage since 1975. It keeps rolling, gathering passport stamps, sanctions, and the occasional…
PARIS — Somewhere on the Left Bank, an aging diplomat stubbed out a Gauloise and muttered, “They’re putting the guy who wrote the Twitter thread into Hoover’s old chair.” He wasn’t wrong. The Senate’s 51–49 confirmation of Kash Patel as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is less a changing of the…
