The Bigger Tantrum: How Israel Became Everyone’s Favorite Emotional Support Conflict If the planet were a badly lit bar at 3 a.m., Israel would be the patron standing on a stool, waving a half-empty flag and explaining—loudly—why everyone else is ruining the evening. The rest of us, nursing watered-down geopolitics and existential dread, keep ordering…
Singapore: The Tiny City-State That Outsmarted the Planet – and Still Worries About Parking Tickets By Our Correspondent with a Sunburn and a Sense of Irony SINGAPORE—Somewhere between the 14th time you’re reminded not to chew gum and the 15th “No Durians” sign on the MRT, it hits you: this whole country is a deliberate…
Gallup, New Mexico isn’t where you expect to find the pulse of the planet, yet the very name has become shorthand for “what humanity is thinking, give or take three percent.” From its windswept high-desert perch, the Gallup Organization dispatches pollsters like caffeinated missionaries to 160-odd countries, armed with questionnaires and the touching belief that…
Global Team-Building: The World’s Favorite Ritual of Organized Chaos By our roving correspondent, still jet-lagged in three time zones If you watch the news long enough, you’ll notice the planet is basically one colossal group project nobody asked to join. From the UN Security Council’s monthly passive-aggressive potluck to your office’s “synergy circle,” teams are…
The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards—aka the VMAs, or “Diplomatic Immunity for Sequins”—were held Tuesday night in Newark, New Jersey, a city chosen, rumor has it, because the airport has a direct flight to every nation currently under U.S. sanctions. One might expect a glorified high-school talent show to have limited geopolitical relevance, yet the…
Mike Green, the Man Who Accidentally Became a Global Geopolitical Rorschach Test By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Hotel Mini-Bar and Existential Dread Somewhere on a laptop screen in Lagos, a hedge-fund analyst named Mike Green is being quoted as gospel. In a dimly lit bar in Bucharest, two crypto bros toast “the real Mike…
The Jelly Roll Doctrine: How a Swirled Pastry Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time you finish this sentence, approximately 2.7 metric tons of jelly rolls will have been consumed somewhere between Jakarta and Jacksonville. That’s the kind of useless statistic international correspondents like me toss around to sound worldly while secretly Googling “what is…
Ariana Grande: The 5’3” Geopolitical Juggernaut in a Ponytail By Dave’s Locker International Desk If the Cold War was fought with missiles and manifestos, the 21st-century version is waged with perfume endorsements, TikTok choreography, and the high-pitched whistle note that can apparently be heard from Seoul to São Paulo. Ariana Grande, the Boca-Raton-born soprano who…
Buffalo, New York – Population: 278,000, Average January temperature: –3 °C, Collective blood-alcohol level on game day: incalculable. Thousands of kilometres away, the good citizens of Baltimore are busy convincing themselves that crab cakes and Old Bay seasoning constitute a personality. Between these two post-industrial monuments to American decline, an oval ball will be hurled…
Niagara Falls: The World’s Most Photogenic Glitch in the Geological Matrix By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the deck of the Maid of the Mist—now rebranded, of course, as “Mist-Xperience™ Premium Voyage: Poncho Included”—you quickly realize that Niagara Falls is less a waterfall and more a global congregation of humanity’s collective short attention span. On…
The Buffalo Bills Depth Chart: A Geopolitical Roster in a Cold Zip Code By Our Man on the Thruway, filing from somewhere between Reykjavík and Rochester The first thing you notice, squinting at the Bills’ depth chart from a hotel bar in Luxembourg, is how it reads like a NATO seating chart that met an…
The Global Racing Order: How NASCAR’s Top-10 Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By Our Man in the Paddock, nursing a lukewarm Belgian lager and existential dread When the latest NASCAR Cup Series standings dropped this week, the United States treated it like a casual Tuesday at the Waffle House: loud, carb-heavy, and vaguely apocalyptic. Meanwhile,…
