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…
The Fourth Amendment: America’s Most Exported Paranoia By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently self-quarantining in a non-extradition country) The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—protecting the citizenry from “unreasonable searches and seizures”—reads like a quaint postcard from 1791. On the front: powdered wigs, candlelit parlors, a polite knock before His Majesty’s agents rummage through your snuffbox….
**The Sweetener Index: How Ariana Grande Tickets Became a Global Economic Barometer** In the grand theater of late-stage capitalism, nothing quite captures the zeitgeist like watching grown adults mortgage their futures for three hours of perfectly choreographed regret. From Tokyo to Tulum, the Great Ariana Grande Ticket Scramble of 2024 has evolved from mere pop…
Wetherspoons: The Last Honest Embassy on Earth An International Correspondent’s Field Notes from the Imperial Pub Chain by “Marlowe” – filing from the Salisbury, Fleet Street, over a £2.15 “breakfast stout” The United Nations has 193 member states, but only one issues its own currency in the form of laminated beer mats and calls its…
McDonald’s Monopoly: How a French Fry Bribe Became a Global Morality Play By Dave’s Locker International Desk From Manila to Manchester, the same ritual unfolds every autumn: otherwise rational citizens queue for lukewarm nuggets in the hope that the paper sleeve will cough up a Boardwalk sticker and finance their escape from late-stage capitalism. Welcome…
