Nick Castellanos and the Decline of Western Civilization *A Field Report from the Bleachers of Geopolitics* There is, perhaps, no more reliable barometer of planetary anxiety than the Twitter timeline whenever Nick Castellanos lofts a ball into the right-field seats. One moment the feed is convulsing over a Supreme Court leak, a burning rainforest, or…
Bryan Adams, a Canadian who once screamed into a studio microphone until it surrendered the riff for “Summer of ’69,” has become an unlikely UN-approved cultural export. While diplomats in Geneva haggle over carbon credits and pretend PowerPoints are binding treaties, Adams is quietly doing what soft-power theorists only fantasize about: getting entire continents to…
The Bastards of Bollywood: When Nepotism Goes Global and Gains a Passport By Our Man in the Projection Booth, somewhere over the Indian Ocean MUMBAI—Picture, if you will, the Cannes red carpet: a perfumed catwalk where a starlet’s borrowed diamonds weigh more than the GDP of Tuvalu. Now pan east by 7,000 kilometres, zoom in…
**When Giants Fall: The Global Schadenfreude of a Dodgers Dynasty** The San Francisco Giants’ ritual humiliation of the Los Angeles Dodgers—baseball’s answer to a Goldman Sachs quarterly report—has achieved that rarest of feats: making the rest of the world give a damn about American baseball. From Singaporean hawker centers to São Paulo’s metro stations, humans…
**Final Jeopardy Today: When Trivia Becomes the Last Refuge of a Civilization on the Brink** GENEVA—While the world’s nuclear powers engage in their weekly saber-rattling ritual and climate scientists update their “days until irreversible catastrophe” counters, millions of humans across the globe collectively held their breath yesterday for thirty seconds of televised trivia. Final Jeopardy,…
CLEVELAND—Somewhere between the rust-spotted skyline and the eternal optimism that Lake Erie refuses to drown, the Cleveland Guardians have quietly become the most geopolitically interesting nine innings on earth. To the average European, the name conjures images of stone-faced gargoyles and Brexit negotiations; to a Tokyo commuter it sounds like a new cyber-security protocol; to…
Port Charles Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up: A Dispatch on the Global Aftershocks of General Hospital Spoilers By C. V. Blackstone, International Affairs Correspondent Rumors out of upstate New York—specifically that picturesque hamlet where half the population has been shot, resurrected, or re-cast—now travel faster than a Swiss bank transfer. A single leaked…
The Moon and Venus Walk Into a Bar: A Cosmic Rendezvous for the End of the World By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you missed the moon’s flirtatious waltz with Venus this past week, congratulations—you’ve managed to ignore the only celestial event that didn’t immediately segue into a cryptocurrency scam. For roughly four nights, our…
From the Rooftops of Rome to the Boardrooms of Beijing, Humanity Still Checks Its Horoscope By Our Cynical Correspondent, currently avoiding Mercury retrograde in a windowless bar in Lisbon Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, Wi-Fi sputtering like a dying oracle Christopher Renstrom—San Francisco astrologer, Renaissance-costume enthusiast, and unlikely geopolitical weather vane—has become the preferred cosmic…
releasepartyofashowgirl: a phrase that looks like someone let autocorrect run the United Nations. Yet there we all were—diplomats, crypto-kings, and the last remaining print journalists—squinting at a pink-neon invitation that had pinged simultaneously in fourteen languages and three dialects of emoji. The venue: a decommissioned ICBM silo thirty-five minutes outside Reykjavík, refurbished by a consortium…
PARIS, FRANCE – In a world currently auditioning for the role of “late-stage empire in moral free-fall,” Kristin Scott Thomas has spent four decades perfecting the part of the woman who already knows the ending and still orders another glass of Sancerre. While lesser mortals doom-scroll, the 63-year-old Franco-British sphinx simply lifts one sculpted eyebrow…
Moon Venus: When the Cosmos Trolls Us All By the time the crescent Moon sidled up to Venus last night, half the planet was already doom-scrolling about it. From Jakarta’s smog-choked rooftops to Reykjavík’s geothermal parking lots, millions tilted their phones skyward, hoping for a shot that would earn 0.7 seconds of algorithmic fame. The…
