The Strait of Hormuz isn’t just another narrow waterway cutting through the earth’s crust—it’s the circulatory system of the global oil economy. Tucked between Iran and Oman, this 21-mile-wide passage connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and, ultimately, the Indian Ocean. Every day, massive oil tankers navigate its waters, carrying millions of…
Caracas, 3 a.m.: the lights are out again, but the jokes keep coming. A Venezuelan friend texts me, “We’re the only country where the national sport is guessing whether the blackout lasted longer than the last government promise.” The world, distracted by newer, shinier catastrophes, still sends the occasional sympathy emoji—then swipes right to the…
Russia Runs on Empty: A Global Masterclass in How to Turn Oil into Anxiety By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere over the Caspian Moscow, late May—At the very moment when Russian state television was boasting that the Motherland’s hydrocarbons could power Europe until the sun burned out, motorists in Krasnodar were queuing for…
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM—AND A PARADE They used to say everything in Texas was bigger. Having spent the last decade filing dispatches from shrinking post-industrial towns, flooded Pacific atolls, and European capitals that now double as open-air museums to their own relevance, I can confirm: Houston is still enormous, still sweating, and still acting…
Sun Kings 2.0: How Solar Companies Became the New Petro-Sheikhs—Only Politer and With Better Slides By our correspondent, still wearing SPF-50 in December BARCELONA—Walk along the marina at sunrise and you’ll spot the tell-tale shimmer: entire super-yachts wrapped in photovoltaic panels, their owners sipping cold-brew espresso brewed from the same rays that keep the champagne…
The lights flickered from Lagos to Lyon last week, and no one at the United Nations cocktail circuit bothered to ask why. That’s because the culprit wasn’t another geopolitical tantrum or a rogue undersea cable—it was Entergy, the New-Orleans-based utility whose name sounds like a budget airline but whose reach now stretches like a power…
The lights blinked out in my corner of [Your City] at 19:43 local time last night, a civic event so routine it barely trended on neighborhood WhatsApp groups. Yet the ripple effect was instant: Wi-Fi flat-lined, Netflix froze mid-cliff-hanger, and half a streetful of home-office heroes discovered that their laptops’ “100 %” battery indicators are…
Terry Pegula: the American shale-billionaire who accidentally became a geopolitical punch-line. To most of the planet—those billions who manage to get through the day without obsessing over the Buffalo Bills—the name “Pegula” sounds like a discontinued Italian scooter. Yet the 72-year-old wild-catting tycoon from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, now sits at the unlikely intersection of American gridiron…
The Black Gold That Binds Us All Brussels, Belgium – Somewhere between the smoked-glass towers of NATO headquarters and the Kremlin’s gilded halls, the same liquid flows: Russian crude. It’s the punchline nobody asked for in a joke that keeps getting darker. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West promised to “cut off the artery” of…
A Governor in Harrisburg, a President in Budapest, and the World in the Cheap Seats By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged from three connecting flights and one regrettable pierogi in Warsaw. It is 3 a.m. in Kyiv when Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania tweets a photo of himself ladling chipped-ham sandwiches at a Pittsburgh fire…
Sun vs. Sky: A Global Cage Match Sponsored by Existential Dread Dave’s Locker, International Desk – 12 June 2024 Somewhere above the Malacca Strait, a container ship the length of a small principality steams east while its captain squints at the sun like a man trying to read the fine print on a doomsday contract….
