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…
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…
