Green Cards, Red Tape, and the Great Global Shuffle A dispatch from the Department of Citizenship, Climate Anxiety, and Moral Arithmetic By the time the ink dried on Washington’s October update to green-card citizenship requirements, three continents were already awake, caffeinated, and calculating how many more years of their lives would now be spent in…
A Black-Sheep Passport: Satou Sabally and the Absurd Arithmetic of Statelessness By L. V. Mercier, roaming correspondent, currently somewhere between Frankfurt’s tax-free schnitzel and Istanbul’s overpriced baklava When the German Federal Ministry of the Interior announced last week that Satou Sabally—Berlin-born forward for the Dallas Wings and MVP-caliber irritant to WNBA defenses—had been granted a…
In the marble-clad lobby of the Geneva International Motor Show—an event that now feels as quaint as a telegraph convention—a Hyundai Palisade sat under surgical-grade LED light, politely pretending it wasn’t a three-ton metaphor for the global middle class’s midlife crisis. Delegates in lanyards shuffled past, each clutching a brochure promising “premium serenity,” which is…
Gatwick: The Last Honest Place on Earth (Until the Wi-Fi Drops) There are two kinds of international travelers: those who have slept on a Gatwick bench at 03:47, and liars. Tucked improbably close to London yet closer still to existential dread, Gatwick Airport—code LGW, motto “Please Continue to the Next Available Queue”—has spent seventy years…
Every month, like a grim bingo caller in a fluorescent-lit purgatory, the U.S. Department of State releases the Visa Bulletin—an Excel sheet that quietly decides whether your cousin in Manila will see her fiancé this decade or whether that software engineer in Bengaluru can finally stop pretending he enjoys “team-building” Zoom calls. Across time zones,…
Delta State University: A Microcosm of Global Ambition, Grit, and Mild Existential Dread By Dave’s Locker International Desk CLEVELAND, Mississippi — In a world where TikTok diplomacy passes for foreign policy and cryptocurrency evangelists moonlight as macro-economists, few places feel as simultaneously hyper-local and surreally planetary as Delta State University (DSU). Perched on an alluvial…
Greenwich University: The Diplomatic Degree That Travels Better Than Your Expired Passport by our London Bureau Chief, still jet-lagged since 1997 There are, broadly speaking, two types of British universities: the ones that look like Hogwarts and the ones that look like a provincial airport. The University of Greenwich—sprawled across the meridian that divides East…
When the Gulfstream G650 carrying Zia Yusuf touched down in Riyadh last month, the collective sigh of relief in Zurich could be heard all the way to Singapore. Not because the Swiss missed him—quite the opposite—but because global capital markets had finally located their missing puzzle piece. The man who once navigated the labyrinthine corridors…
