Bad moods have gone global, and the planet is now exporting irritability in 4K resolution. From the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila where operators practice smiling at 3 a.m. to the fog-shrouded cafés of Copenhagen where everyone is still somehow content, humanity has discovered that sulking scales. Moody is no longer a temperament; it is…
In the grand theater of international relations, where every handshake is a potential dagger and every pipeline a geopolitical jugular, the sudden romance between Azerbaijan and Ukraine is less a love story than a mutually beneficial hostage situation. One country sits atop enough oil to make a Saudi prince blush, while the other has become…
Connelly Early, for the handful of readers who haven’t already doom-scrolled past his name, is the sort of mid-tier American bureaucrat whose sudden elevation to global talking-point tells you everything about how thin the membrane between order and chaos has become. Until last Thursday he was an assistant under-secretary for something so forgettably titled that…
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…
Sinaloa Cartel Arrests: A Global Game of Whac-a-Mole Where the Mole Has a Swiss Banker By the time Mexican marines politely invited Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López to leave their private jet in El Paso last Thursday, the price of cocaine in Rotterdam had already dipped 8 % and the peso had…
KABUL—So there I was, sipping tea that tasted faintly of diesel and regret, watching two very different flags flap in the same wind. On one side: Afghanistan, a geopolitical piñata that’s been whacked by every empire since Alexander the Great’s travel blog. On the other: Hong Kong, a neon-lit tax receipt with its own anthem…
Doha, Qatar – a city where air-conditioned stadiums sit like chilled mausoleums in the desert, monuments to the idea that money can, in fact, buy you shade. From the vantage point of anyone who’s ever queued for a visa or waited for a delayed budget flight, Qatar is less a country and more a well-financed…
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…
Kathmandu’s weather is famously unreliable—monsoon one minute, smog the next—so it’s fitting that Sher Bahadur Deuba has popped in and out of the prime minister’s chair more often than a Himalayan teahouse changes its Wi-Fi password. On 13 July 2021, the 75-year-old liberal warhorse saddled up for his fifth non-consecutive term, a feat that would…
Hasbro: How a Rhode Island Toymaker Became the Soft-Power Emperor of a Planet on the Brink By the time the first Ukrainian kid unpacked a donated box containing a My Little Pony action figure still labeled in Cyrillic for the Moscow market, the cosmic joke was already complete. Somewhere in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a middle…
