The 18:47 from Kharkiv to Kyiv is many things—overcrowded, chronically late, and lately a mobile refugee hostel—but until last week it had not qualified as a frontline. That changed somewhere east of Poltava when a single bullet, fired through a cracked window, ended the life of 29-year-old Olena Krasnova, a logistics officer turned volunteer turned…
Weatherford-on-the-Med, Tuesday, 3:47 a.m.—Somewhere between a NATO summit in Vilnius and the latest BRICS currency pow-wow in Johannesburg, a far more seismic tremor is rattling the tectonic plates of soft-power diplomacy: the rumor, denied, confirmed, denied again, and finally upgraded to “pretty much certain” that Tyrone Dobbs is packing his spanners and quitting Coronation Street….
The Day the Cameras Froze: A Global Rehearsal for Silence By “Jet-Lagged” Jules Montenegro, roving misanthrope-at-large ZURICH—At 09:14 CET on a Tuesday that already felt like a Monday’s hangover, Google Meet rolled over and died. Not with a bang, not even with the polite Swiss cough of “We are experiencing technical difficulties,” but with the…
The ground shook this morning—again—somewhere between Tashkent and Tehran, and within minutes the entire planet began its familiar pantomime of panic, solidarity, and opportunistic brand tweets. A 6.8 magnitude quake rattled the steppe at 04:17 UTC, the sort of hour when seismologists are already awake (they never really sleep) and the rest of us pretend…
Moscow, February 2024 – Somewhere between the borscht and the ballistic missiles, the planet keeps turning, apparently unaware that two ex-Soviet neighbors have turned the European breadbasket into the world’s biggest live-fire TED Talk on “How Not to Run a Land War.” Two years in, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become less a regional…
The Empire Checks the Scoreboard: How the Yankees’ Place in the AL East Became a Global Weather Vane By the time most of the planet wakes up, the New York Yankees have already lost or won in front of a half-empty stadium of investment bankers checking Slack. Yet from Nairobi to Naples, the “yankee standings”…
Amy Coney Barrett and the Spectacular Collapse of American Exceptionalism: A Global View From the Cheap Seats By Our Man in the Departures Lounge The rest of the planet first met Amy Coney Barrett on a Monday night in late September 2020, when she materialized beside Donald Trump like an impeccably-coiffed genie summoned by a…
Victoria: A Name That Conquered the World and Still Won’t Pick Up the Check By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent Somewhere between Duty-Free and Disillusionment There are, at last count, roughly 1.3 million Victorias on LinkedIn alone—enough to fill a medium-sized authoritarian parade and still have a queue outside the bar. From the diamond mines of…
From the vantage point of a press perch that smells faintly of disinfectant and broken dreams—Wimbledon’s media bunker, where hope goes to die and biscuits go stale—Katie Boulter has become an unlikely geopolitical weather vane. The 27-year-old from Leicestershire, currently charted somewhere between “British darling” and “late-stage wildcard,” is not merely swinging a graphite wand…
