Typhoon Season: The Planet’s Annual Game of Whack-a-Muman By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk It’s late summer again, which means three things: airline Wi-Fi still doesn’t work, Europe is discovering new ways to barbecue itself, and the Western Pacific is firing bowling balls the size of Belgium at coastlines from Luzon to Kyushu. Typhoon season has…
The Onside Kick: A Desperate Act of Hope and Reckoning in a Fractured World By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic There are moments in sport—and, by extension, life—when the playbook is hurled into the bin and a team decides to gamble everything on ten yards of chaos. In American football, this move…
Pressure Diplomacy: How a Steel Tube Became the World’s Most Expensive Time-Out Room If you want to understand the twenty-first century’s knack for turning every medical device into a geopolitical prop, look no further than the hyperbaric chamber: a glorified diving bell that now moonlights as a wellness cocoon, performance enhancer, and—if the marketing departments…
Heat Advisory: A Global Fever Dream in 42 Languages By Our Man in the Sweltering Trenches Bonn, 14:00 local—Germany’s meteorological service just issued the country’s first-ever “Category 4” heat warning, which sounds less like weather and more like a Defcon level for sunburn. Meanwhile, 5,000 km south, Delhi’s street thermometers melted into Salvador-Dalí puddles at…
The Curious Case of the Ravens Kicker, or How One Right Foot Might Tilt the Planet By the time you read this, Justin Tucker—the Baltimore Ravens’ resident leg-slinger and accidental geopolitical actor—has probably already broken another record, shattered another set of eardrums in M&T Bank Stadium, and, in some small but measurable way, nudged the…
Sling: The World’s Most Understated Weapon of Mass Distribution By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk From the marble colonnades of Rome to the fluorescent aisles of a 24-hour Walmart in suburban Manila, the humble sling has spent three millennia perfecting the art of looking harmless while rearranging human geography. Today, it serves coffee in Copenhagen,…
PARIS – The first time I noticed the ravens, I was sipping a €9 espresso beneath the colonnades of the Palais-Royal, pretending the city’s perpetual strikes were merely performance art. A pair of them—blacker than a minister’s heart on tax day—landed on the winged statue of Mercury, tilted their heads, and stared at me with…
Carolina Hurricanes: How One Hockey Team Became the World’s Most Honest Weather Report By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Raleigh-to-Riyadh Bureau RALEIGH—While the United Nations bickers over comma placement in yet another climate communiqué, the Carolina Hurricanes have quietly solved global forecasting: simply name the phenomenon after your hockey club and watch the planet…
Turkey, the Bird, the Nation, the Punch-Line—A Dispatch from the Edge of Civilization by Our Correspondent Who Has Eaten Both ISTANBUL—It is 3 a.m. local time, and the muezzin’s call to prayer collides with the bass line of a rooftop techno club, while a street cat—fat, entitled, and visibly bored—gnaws on a leftover döner kebab…
Vladimir Putin’s Russia: A Global Game of Musical Chairs Where the Music Never Stops By Our Correspondent in a Non-Extradition Country Somewhere between the Arctic permafrost and the subtropical beaches of Sochi, the world’s largest country keeps reinventing itself with the grace of a drunken ballerina on stilts. Twenty-four years after a soft-spoken KGB lieutenant-colonel…
Brian Jason Wagner, a name that sounds suspiciously like the alias of a mid-tier Bond villain who sells artisanal crypto-truffles in Zürich, is in fact a flesh-and-blood American now orbiting the international spotlight. From the vantage point of a world that has spent the last decade rubber-necking at every minor US tremor, Wagner’s sudden emergence…
At precisely whatever hour the American networks decide is best for prime-time anxiety, Donald J. Trump will once again clear his throat and the planet will lean in like passengers hearing the pilot sneeze. From the cafés of Buenos Aires to the boardrooms of Singapore, traders, diplomats, and insomniacs are asking the same question—“when is…
