Mike Waltz Is the Pentagon’s Newest Spin Doctor, and the Planet Just Got a Little Less Safe By Our Correspondent Who Has Seen Three “Defense Reviews” and a Thousand PowerPoints Die The appointment of Congressman Mike Waltz as U.S. National Security Advisor lands like a drone strike on a wedding party: sudden, loud, and guaranteed…
Guardians of What, Exactly? A world tour of the people, algorithms, and heavily armed toddlers who claim they’re keeping us safe. From the marble colonnades of Washington to the fluorescent bunkers beneath Seoul, the word “guardian” is having a moment. It appears in press releases like a polite burglar—never announced, always already inside. The American…
From Bangkok to Berlin, the name Tammy Duckworth is spoken with the hushed reverence usually reserved for ex-Special Forces operatives or people who’ve successfully returned IKEA furniture. A U.S. senator from Illinois, Iraq War helicopter pilot, double amputee, Purple-Heart recipient, and the first sitting senator to give birth while in office, Duckworth has become a…
Tyri Donovan and the Age of the Accidental Geopolitician By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a viral dance challenge and an inter-continental trade dispute, Tyri Donovan—previously known only to her 2.3 million followers as “the girl who turned her panic attack into a banger”—became the first civilian to trigger an emergency session of the…
Etan Patz and the Global Vanishing Act: How One Missing Six-Year-Old Rewrote the Rules for Childhood, Milk Cartons, and International Anxiety By the time you finish your espresso in Rome, a child has already disappeared in São Paulo. By the time you drain the dregs in Seoul, another one is gone in Lagos. Yet ask…
Russian Drones: Skyborne Ambassadors of a World That Forgot How to Sleep By the time the first Iranian-designed Shahed-136 tumbled onto a Kyiv kindergarten, the planet had already given up pretending that unmanned aircraft are merely “tools.” From the Sea of Okhotsk to the Sonoran Desert, Russian drones have become the twenty-first century’s most reliable…
NATO’s Existential Midlife Crisis, Starring Donald Trump and Your Peace of Mind By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If NATO were a person, it would be that fifty-something divorcee who just woke up to find half the household budget missing and an ex texting “I never loved you anyway.” The ex, in this case, is Donald…
In a nondescript conference room somewhere between Brussels and Boredom, the world’s defense ministers recently wrapped up another round of what they insist on calling the “Guardians Game.” The term sounds like a Saturday-morning cartoon spin-off, but it’s actually the polite label for a global wargame that runs on classified servers, diplomatic double-speak, and an…
Lunchtime in Annapolis, Maryland, and a battalion of midshipmen march past the statue of the ur-naval hero John Paul Jones—who, in true American fashion, got famous by failing to sink anything British until the French lent him a decent boat. The scene could be 1845 or 2024; only the smartphones tucked inside starched sleeves betray…
A Knife on the Rails: How One Ukrainian Girl’s Murder Became the World’s Latest Morality Play KYIV–PRAGUE–NEW DELHI, 24 May — If you want a snapshot of our collective attention span in 2024, picture this: somewhere between compartment 7 and the dining car, a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl named Darya Kovalenko was fatally stabbed on the…
Teaching Tiny Humans About the Day the World Lost Its Innocence (and Its Mind) PARIS—Every September, history teachers from Reykjavik to Rio face the same awkward choreography: how to explain to a room of nine-year-olds why two buildings once fell down and turned the planet into a permanent airport security queue. The trick, veteran educators…
The Twenty-Fourth Time Around September 11, 2025 – A Planet Still Trying to Read the Safety Card in the Dark By the time the sun clawed its way over the International Date Line this Wednesday, the Earth had already logged its 24th consecutive orbit since passenger jets became improvised cruise missiles. From Auckland to Anchorage,…
