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…
Manila, Philippines – At the precise moment delegates in Glasgow were pledging to phase out coal, the Philippines was quietly signing yet another 20-year sweetheart deal to import more of the black stuff. This, in a country already blessed with enough sunshine to tan the entire planet and enough wind to blow every politician’s promises…
Kyiv, Lviv, and the Lampedusa of the Mind A field dispatch from the cheap seats of the 21st century By the time you finish this sentence, another container of “lethal aid” will have cleared customs in Gdańsk, another oligarch will have relocated from Moscow to Dubai, and another earnest European energy minister will have discovered…
The Empty Silo: A Hollow Monument to a World That Forgot to Eat By Our Man in the Global Pantry, filing from everywhere and nowhere. Somewhere between the 45th parallel and the 19th nervous breakdown, another grain silo stands empty. Its corrugated ribs catch the sunrise like a rusted xylophone, playing a tune no one…
Qatar Airways: The World’s Nicest Way to Ignore Geopolitics at 35,000 Feet Doha—Somewhere above the Persian Gulf, the cabin lights dim to a shade called “midnight indigo” and a flight attendant glides down the aisle offering warm almonds as if they were tiny, salted apologies for the last half-century of regional turbulence. Qatar Airways, the…
If Earth were a half-finished jigsaw puzzle abandoned on a coffee table, New Zealand would be the pristine piece still in the box—edge intact, colors un-smeared, quietly wondering why everyone else looks so dog-eared. To the rest of the planet, Aotearoa is the last kid picked for dodgeball who turns out to be annoyingly good…
**Balkans Roulette: Why the World Still Keeps One Nervous Eye on Serbia** BELGRADE—Walk the length of Knez Mihailova on any given afternoon and you’ll witness the full, glorious contradiction that is modern Serbia: teenagers in Supreme hoodies filming TikToks against 19th-century facades, pensioners feeding pigeons next to a Nike store, and—if you linger long enough—some…
If you type “Russian” into a search bar in 2024, the autocomplete suggestions read like a fever dream: “Russian oil price cap,” “Russian war crimes,” “Russian salad dressing – still safe?” Somewhere between the sanctions and the dill, the word itself has become a geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see tells the world exactly where…
Auckland, Wednesday – Somewhere in the Pacific, two sheep-shackled nations are squaring off again like estranged siblings arguing over who forgot to return the family boomerang. To the rest of the planet, the New Zealand vs Australia rivalry is a quaint sideshow—cute accents, excellent coffee, and the faint possibility that one of them might actually…
The planet has always been a messy chessboard, but lately it feels as though someone upended the pieces, set the board on fire, and then demanded we keep playing. From the Black Sea to the South China Sea, from the Sahel to the Amazon, the refrain is the same: one battle after another, each marketed…
San Francisco Weather: The Fog That Ate Global Capitalism By Our Man on the Brink, filing from a city that still thinks irony is a weather pattern. Let us begin with the only forecast that matters: Karl the Fog—that amorphous, sentient blanket of damp self-importance—has been granted diplomatic status by at least three EU member…
Arsenal News: A Global Arms Bazaar Where Everyone Wins (Except the Targets) By the time you finish this sentence, at least three governments, two private security firms, and one very enthusiastic TikTok influencer will have refreshed their feeds for the latest “Arsenal News.” The phrase used to summon images of North London footballers fumbling away…
