Moscow, February 2024 – Somewhere between the borscht and the ballistic missiles, the planet keeps turning, apparently unaware that two ex-Soviet neighbors have turned the European breadbasket into the world’s biggest live-fire TED Talk on “How Not to Run a Land War.” Two years in, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become less a regional…
The World This Week: A Global Round-Up of Managed Catastrophes By L. M. Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It’s late spring in the northern hemisphere, which means conference season, summit season, and—if you squint—apology season. From Washington to Davos-by-Zoom, the planet’s most powerful have spent the past seven days issuing statements that read…
The Telegraph: the 19th-Century Internet That Still Outruns Diplomacy By “Still-Alive” Sanchez, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere with Spotty Wi-Fi PARIS—On a rain-slick evening near Gare du Nord, a Belgian telecom engineer named Régine hooks a clackety brass key to a 160-year-old circuit and taps out “CQ CQ DE FN RÉGINE.” Within minutes an Italian ham in…
Down Under and Further Down: How Australia vs New Zealand Became the World’s Nicest Blood Feud By Our Correspondent, filing from a press lounge that still smells faintly of burned flat white SYDNEY—Somewhere between the 1,400-kilometre stretch of the Tasman Sea, two of Earth’s most agreeable nations have spent the past century locked in a…
Sharjah, Tuesday night – The floodlights hum like tired neon gods above a stadium that has seen empires rise and fall, and tonight it hosts the latest skirmish in the great imperial pageant of cricket: Pakistan, nuclear-armed melodrama incarnate, versus the United Arab Emirates, a nation whose passport stamp is a VIP card to global…
The Lego Death Star: A 4,016-Piece Monument to Our Global Death Drive By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between aisle 7 and existential dread GENEVA—While diplomats inside the Palais des Nations bicker over wording in Article 3(b) of yet another non-binding resolution, the real arms race is happening in toy stores from Berlin to Bangkok. Lego’s…
The Global Joke Index: How One-Liners Are Quietly Steering Geopolitics By Our Correspondent in Perpetual Transit VIENNA—While the rest of the press corps was busy dissecting grainy satellite photos of missile silos last week, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe quietly released a more explosive document: the first-ever Global Joke Index (GJI). The…
Terence Crawford and the Quiet Art of Global Violence By A. Serrano, Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from creditors in a Moldovan airport bar) Omaha, Nebraska—birthplace of TV dinners, Warren Buffett, and now the planet’s most polite destroyer of men. Terence “Bud” Crawford has, in the grand tradition of American exports, taken something provincial (the Midwestern…
Sun vs. Sky: A Global Cage Match Sponsored by Existential Dread Dave’s Locker, International Desk – 12 June 2024 Somewhere above the Malacca Strait, a container ship the length of a small principality steams east while its captain squints at the sun like a man trying to read the fine print on a doomsday contract….
Flushing Meadows, Queens — The 2025 US Open begins next week under a sky the color of a bruised credit card, and the planet’s more polite time zones are already bracing for impact. From Tokyo trading desks that will flicker with live betting algorithms to the European Parliament’s cafeteria where aides will pretend to watch…
Anaconda, Darling of the Dystopian Tropics, Eyes the World Stage By L. Marlowe, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker RIO DE JANEIRO—Every few years, the anaconda slithers out of the fetid Amazon and into the global imagination, reminding the planet’s apex predator—us—that we are still, technically, edible. This time the serpent’s renaissance has nothing to do…
Kingston, Jamaica – In the gentle Caribbean breeze that usually carries only the scent of jerk chicken and the distant bass line of a reggae riddim, something sharper is blowing this week: the metallic tang of freshly printed ballots and the unmistakable whiff of geopolitical opportunism. Jamaica’s national elections on Thursday may look, to the…
