The Day the Sky Fell: How September 11 Gifted the World a New Brand of Chaos By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Everyone remembers where they were, or so the cliché insists. I was in a Nairobi newsroom watching a fuzzy CRT feed as the second plane performed its murderous…
PARIS — Somewhere on the Left Bank, an aging diplomat stubbed out a Gauloise and muttered, “They’re putting the guy who wrote the Twitter thread into Hoover’s old chair.” He wasn’t wrong. The Senate’s 51–49 confirmation of Kash Patel as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is less a changing of the…
The Global Art of Sudden Career Termination: A Brief History of Political Assassination In the grand theater of international relations, few acts are as final—or as theatrically effective—as the well-timed assassination. From ancient Rome’s floor plans (note the convenient lack of metal detectors in the Senate) to modern Moscow’s creative use of radioactive tea, the…
PARIS — If you had told the average café philosopher here last year that a 44-year-old Indian-American prosecutor from Long Island would soon be whispering in the ear of the next U.S. president, they would have snorted their espresso into the Seine. Yet Kash Patel—pronounced “cash” by people who enjoy cheap puns and “kaash” by…
Global Mail: The Quiet Bureaucrats Who Decide Whether Your Nasty Letter Crosses a Border by Our Correspondent, currently somewhere between two time zones and several broken scanners PARIS—Somewhere in the fluorescent bowels of La Poste’s sorting hub at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, a man named Étienne is weighing a postcard of the Eiffel Tower against the possibility that…
**The Global Arms Race for Defensive Supremacy: Week 2’s Winners, Losers, and the Rest of Us** While the world’s billionaires were busy playing astronaut and the rest of humanity debated whether pineapple belongs on pizza, defense ministries across the globe were quietly shuffling their strategic decks in Week 2 of what historians will inevitably call…
Elizabeth Tsurkov and the Global Hostage Economy: A Graduate Student, a War, and the Price of Curiosity By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Russian-Israeli doctoral candidate at Princeton, vanished in Baghdad last March, the world performed its now-customary shrug: another intellectual swallowed by the Levantine wood-chipper. Nine months later, the Islamic Resistance…
Knives Out: A Global Affair in Which Everyone Is Guilty By Our Correspondent Who Has Already Checked the Silverware Drawer GENEVA—The phrase “knives out” once conjured up quaint English country houses, thunderclaps, and a Belgian sleuth fussing over egg-temperature. Today it is less parlour game and more planetary blood sport. From the South China Sea…
Switzerland vs Slovenia: A Tale of Two Alp-Mates and the Quiet Collapse of European Exceptionalism By Dave’s Locker International Desk ZURICH—On paper, the match-up is almost charmingly lopsided: Switzerland, the planet’s discreet banker, pitted against Slovenia, a country whose greatest export is probably “postcard envy.” Yet this week’s Alpine face-off—part Euro qualifier, part existential audit—has…
John Healey, the newly-minted British Defence Secretary, has the sort of surname that sounds like a minor medical condition—something you’d pick up after an ill-advised weekend in Tbilisi. Yet the man himself is no rash; he is, depending on whom you ask, either a methodical fixer or the human equivalent of a damp firework: promising,…
Pete Hegseth, the Fox & Friends Weekend warrior who once accidentally grenaded a colleague’s career (and the colleague), has been nominated by President-elect Trump to run the Pentagon. The news landed like a free round at an O’Club happy hour: American allies choked on their cucumber sandwiches, adversaries opened fresh spreadsheets, and the global commentariat…
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE — While the United Nations was busy congratulating itself on yet another non-binding climate accord, and while the world’s defense contractors toasted record quarterly earnings, a 12-year-old in the American South was quietly building a thermonuclear reactor in what used to be his parents’ bonus room. Jackson Oswalt’s homemade fusion device—an artful tangle…
