**Sri Lanka vs Afghanistan: When Cricket Diplomacy Meets Geopolitical Reality** In the grand theater of international relations, nothing quite captures humanity’s capacity for simultaneous cooperation and competition like watching two nations battle it out over a leather ball while their governments navigate the delicate dance of diplomacy. Such is the case with Sri Lanka versus…
Intel Stock: The Chip That Fell Off the Geopolitical Table By our correspondent in Taipei, nursing a vending-machine coffee that tastes like melted circuit board Word out of Wall Street—and its various international franchises from Shanghai to the City of London—is that Intel’s share price has become the financial equivalent of a cracked motherboard: technically…
**The Global Hunger Games: How Your Toaster Became a Geopolitical Weapon** While you’re cursing your $200 electric bill, somewhere in Brussels a bureaucrat is quietly calculating whether European democracy can survive another winter without Russian gas. Welcome to the wonderful world of consumers energy—the only marketplace where grandmothers freezing in their apartments directly influence NATO…
The Ballad of Slaven Bilić: A Balkan Bard in a World That Stopped Listening to Rock ’n’ Roll By the time Slaven Bilić reached Beijing in 2023—fresh off a red-eye that smelled equally of instant noodles and Chinese state-media cologne—he carried the same leather jacket he’d worn while head-banging at AC/DC concerts in Zagreb circa…
Daria Kasatkina is not the tennis story most broadcasters lead with. She doesn’t smash rackets, date pop stars, or hire an entourage the size of a NATO battalion. Instead, the 26-year-old Russian has spent the last year turning press conferences into miniature Nuremberg trials—minus the dramatic lighting—while still finding time to dispatch top-ten opponents with…
Basement Submarines and the End of the World A Dispatch from the Planet’s Lower-Middle Floors By the time you read this, someone in Jakarta, Jakarta-on-the-Rhine (Cologne), or a newly soggy suburb of Detroit is probably up to their ankles in what used to be a wine cellar. The flooded basement—once the punch line of American…
Paris, 2024 – Somewhere between the pâtisserie and the palace, Emmanuel Macron has managed to turn the very idea of political gravity into a flaky, buttery croissant: crisp on the outside, hollow in the middle, yet weirdly irresistible to anyone watching from abroad. To the rest of the planet, “Macron” is no longer just a…
Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Global Catastrophes By Our Special Correspondent, Somewhere Between the 9th and 10th Circle of Fact-Checking VIENNA—From the mahogany-paneled briefing rooms of the IAEA to the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila, humanity has reached a rare consensus: we prefer our mendacities artisanal, preferably with a local accent and a…
Ekaterina Alexandrova and the Fine Art of Being Russian While Winning By the time Ekaterina Alexandrova cracked the Top 20 last season, the Kremlin had already annexed a chunk of Ukraine, Wimbledon had politely asked Russian players to compete as neutrals, and several European governments were debating whether a tennis ball could be considered a…
Home-Run Diplomacy: How Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani Accidentally Became Soft-Power Envoys By Dave’s Locker Global Desk TOKYO—While the world’s foreign ministries argue over tariffs and tweets, the two men most likely to decide the 2024 MLB home-run crown are conducting their own brand of shuttle diplomacy—one swing at a time. Aaron Judge, the 6-foot-7…
Global Piggy Banks, Empty Promises: The International Battle to Save Anything at All by S. Mortimer, roving correspondent, somewhere between a Zurich vault and a Manila remittance counter ZURICH—Ask a Swiss banker what “savings” means and he’ll wax lyrical about fiduciary duty while discreetly sliding a brochure for numbered accounts beneath the marble counter. Ask…
ATHLETICS: THE PLANET’S MOST EXPENSIVE MASS COPING MECHANISM By the time the sun rises over the Maracanã, it has already set on a makeshift track in Svalbard where three Norwegian scientists jog in minus-20°C darkness, trying to outrun existential dread. Athletics, in its noble guise as the pursuit of human excellence, is really just the…
