Darlington: The Tiny English Town Accidentally Running the World While Pretending to Be Unremarkable By Our Man in the North, nursing a lukewarm pint of bitter and existential dread DARLINGTON, County Durham—Population 107,000, two Morrison’s car parks, and one nuclear reactor that glows just brightly enough to read the morning headlines. On paper, Darlington is…
North Carolina: The World’s Favorite Overachieving Backwater By Pascal “Pax” Delacorte, International Correspondent at Large RALEIGH—If the planet were a high-school reunion, North Carolina would be the once-overlooked kid who now shows up in a rented Tesla, quoting Latin and smelling faintly of both artisanal bourbon and litigation. From the outside, this oblong patch of…
Carlos Gu and the Glorious Farce of Global Tech Ambition By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a WeWork in Shenzhen and a Palo Alto juice bar that charges extra for “hope,” the name Carlos Gu began circulating last month with the quiet inevitability of a tax hike. To most of the planet—i.e., anyone outside…
The world’s longest, most expensive staring contest is back on. Washington and Beijing have once again squared off across the Pacific, pupils dilated, wallets open, each daring the other to blink first while the rest of us try to remember when this stopped being metaphorical and started costing real money. From semiconductor embargoes that read…
ASH BY ELEGANCE: WHEN THE WORLD’S MOST EXCLUSIVE AESTHETIC CULT GOES FULL GLOBAL, EVEN THE VOLCANOES PUT ON TUXEDOS By the time the first shipment of “Ash by Elegance” arrived in Singapore, the customs officer—who had previously confiscated everything from counterfeit Birkins to a full-size giraffe femur—took one look at the matte-black box, sniffed, and…
Pittsburgh Weather: The Last Honest Barometer in a Burning World By Our Man in Allegheny County, filing from a city that still believes in seasons—and consequences. When the first snowflake lands on the Smithfield Street Bridge, diplomats in Geneva receive a courtesy text. It reads: “Brace yourselves, the Yinzer Jet Stream is shifting again.” They…
**Dallas Ice: When Hell (or Texas) Freezes Over and the World Takes Notes** Dallas—home to oil barons, oversized steaks, and a football team that hasn’t seen a Super Bowl since the Clinton administration—recently discovered ice. Not the kind you put in your bourbon, but the kind that shuts down highways, bursts pipes, and makes international…
A Bureaucratic Eye on Nature’s Tantrums: The National Hurricane Center, International Edition By Our Correspondent Who Has Weathered Worse Cocktails Than Storms In a pastel office park on the swampy fringes of Miami—an address that ironically requires flood insurance—sits the planet’s most-watched meteorological oracle: the U.S. National Hurricane Center. To Americans it’s the stern voice…
Fresh: The Last Luxury Good Humanity Still Pretends Isn’t Rotting By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Arctic Cold Chain and a Bangkok Street Cart PARIS—At 4:47 a.m. on the Rungis wholesale floor, a crate of strawberries is declared “extra-fresh.” The label is printed in seven languages, none of which mention that the berries were harvested…
TSMC: The Tiny Island That Holds the World Hostage By the time you finish reading this sentence, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) will have printed another 300 smartphone processors—each one capable of running TikTok, Instagram, or the nuclear launch codes of any moderately funded superpower. Investors politely call TSM a “bellwether”; the rest of us…
A Tornado Warning in a World Already Spinning By the time the sirens began their unmusical wail across central Oklahoma last Tuesday, half the planet was already watching via a Brazilian storm-chaser’s TikTok live stream. Somewhere in Lagos, an Uber driver glanced at the same purple hook echo on his weather app, muttered “not my…
Tory Horton and the Global Glitch: How One Man’s Name Became the Planet’s Newest Rorschach Test By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Despair and Duty In the grand, gaudy casino of world affairs—where microchips play roulette with truth and every national leader claims to hold the winning chip—there emerged this week an unlikely ball bouncing across…
