The Moon and Venus Walk Into a Bar: A Cosmic Rendezvous for the End of the World By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you missed the moon’s flirtatious waltz with Venus this past week, congratulations—you’ve managed to ignore the only celestial event that didn’t immediately segue into a cryptocurrency scam. For roughly four nights, our…
Kilauea’s Quiet Roar: When a Hawaiian Volcano Becomes the Planet’s Mood Ring By Dave’s Locker International Desk HONOLULU—While the rest of the planet was busy arguing over whose election was stolen this week, Kilauea decided to clear its throat with the subtlety of a chainsaw at a library. Lava fountains 60 meters high, sulfur-dioxide plumes…
QUBT Stock: When Quantum Physics Meets Quarterly Earnings, the Universe Shrugs By the time you finish this sentence, a superposition of QUBT—Quantum Computing Inc.—will have both collapsed into a profit and remained stubbornly loss-making somewhere in Delaware. That, dear reader, is the only certainty left in a world where a company trading under the ticker…
**India vs Oman: A Gentle Rivalry in a World Busy Destroying Itself** While the rest of the planet busies itself with more fashionable conflicts—Ukraine grinding on like a bad Netflix series, Gaza rewriting the rules of urban misery, and the South China Sea practicing for World War III—India and Oman have quietly resumed their own…
Budapest—The 2023 World Athletics Championships ended last night with the United States topping the medal table, a sentence that could be copy-pasted from any year since the invention of the stopwatch. Yet beneath the predictable Stars-and-Stripes soundtrack, the nine-day meet served as a handy geopolitical EKG: rising heart rates in East Africa, arrhythmic blips in…
**Track, Field, and the Theater of National Dreams** *Dispatch from the cheap seats of the World Athletics Championships* By the time the 4×400-meter relay limped across the finish line in Budapest last August, the scoreboard read like a UN roll-call written by someone with a grudge: USA 12 golds, Spain 1, India 0 but a…
From the vantage point of a crumbling café terrace overlooking Sarajevo’s Miljacka River—where bullet holes have been artfully rebranded as “heritage texture”—I opened the New York Times “Connections” puzzle for September 19. The grid blinked back at me like a smug digital consul, confident that four tidy categories could encapsulate a planet currently busy tearing…
Pakistan: The Unlucky Lottery Ticket That Refuses to Cash Out By our correspondent in Islamabad, who has learned to keep the whiskey within arm’s reach and the generator closer still. The world has always treated Pakistan like a scratch card bought at 2 a.m. after a bad breakup: everyone hopes for a jackpot, but the…
The Ryder Cup: Where Europe and America Resume Their 96-Year Sibling Squabble on Grass Marco Simone, Italy—While the planet teeters between climate bailouts and the 47th cryptocurrency resurrection, 200,000 well-insured spectators have decamped to a Roman hillside to watch two continents argue over a 17-inch golden cup that looks suspiciously like something you could order…
**The Global Runway: How a Reality TV Show Became an Accurate Metaphor for Geopolitics** In the grand theater of international relations, where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and climate change negotiators argue about commas in 500-page documents, humanity has inadvertently created the perfect metaphor for itself: a reality television show about making dresses…
BAKU—Somewhere between the Caspian Sea’s oily sheen and the Caucasus’ perpetual family feud sits Azerbaijan, a country that has turned geopolitical whiplash into a national sport. For outsiders, it’s the place that keeps winning Eurovision despite democracy scores that make North Korea wince. For energy traders, it’s the pipeline that lets Europe pretend it isn’t…
The Great Global Cough: How a Microscopic Squatter Redrew Borders Without a Passport It began, as all grand tragedies do, with a shrug. Somewhere between a wet market and a virology lab—location still hotly debated by people who’ve never run a PCR in their lives—a spiky little freeloader packed its bags, bought a one-way ticket…
