Damascus: the city so old it makes Rome look like a startup. While the rest of us were still figuring out fire, Damascenes were already running a sophisticated bazaar, minting coins, and—if the local tour guides are to be believed—inventing both ice cream and passive-aggressive customer service. Today the Syrian capital is less a city…
**Abu Dhabi: Where Oil Money Meets Existential Dread** The capital of the United Arab Emirates has always been the quieter, more calculating sibling to Dubai’s flamboyant showmanship—a city that built the world’s largest indoor theme park while its neighbors were still figuring out indoor plumbing. But beneath the marble-clad surface of this desert metropolis lies…
Ella al-Shamahi: The Paleopathologist Who Makes Extinction Look Like a Career Move By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk London, Rome, Nairobi, TikTok—wherever you are, the algorithm has probably served you a clip of Ella al-Shamahi: wry grin, hijab tucked under a hard hat, rappelling into a Yemeni sinkhole while explaining that the bones below may rewrite…
Together for Palestine: A Global Chorus That Can’t Quite Hit the Same Note By Dave’s Locker International Desk The hashtag du jour, “Together for Palestine,” now pings across 195 sovereign Wi-Fi networks with the urgency of a pop-up ad for eternal salvation. It has trended in Lagos, trended in Lima, trended in Luxembourg—proof that nothing…
Gaza Strip: 140 Square Kilometres of Perpetual Headlines By the time you finish reading this sentence, some foreign minister somewhere will have issued a “deeply concerned” press release about Gaza. That is the Strip’s greatest export: statements of concern, delivered in impeccable officialese, then promptly filed next to the coffee-stained draft on climate change and…
The Curious Case of Mohammed Alakel: A Portrait in Global Inconvenience By Our Correspondent in Somewhere-With-Wi-Fi Let us begin with the obvious: Mohammed Alakel is not, strictly speaking, famous. His name does not trend on the same algorithmic hamster wheel that recently elevated a raccoon eating cotton candy in a Tokyo subway to the rank…
**Pak vs Oma: The Geopolitical Cage Match Nobody Ordered** In the grand theater of international relations, where nuclear powers play chess with human civilization and small nations desperately try not to become pawns, we occasionally witness a spectacle so absurd it makes one question whether the simulation is finally glitching. Enter the latest diplomatic thriller:…
Doha’s Unruly Child: Al Jazeera, Twenty-Eight Years of Making Friends and Enemies in Equal Measure By our correspondent who once spent three weeks in a Cairo hotel room watching AJ Arabic on mute just to watch the wallpaper move. In the beginning there was the BBC World Service, and it was…British. Then, in 1996, Qatar—a…
Qatar Airways: The World’s Nicest Way to Ignore Geopolitics at 35,000 Feet Doha—Somewhere above the Persian Gulf, the cabin lights dim to a shade called “midnight indigo” and a flight attendant glides down the aisle offering warm almonds as if they were tiny, salted apologies for the last half-century of regional turbulence. Qatar Airways, the…
The Bigger Tantrum: How Israel Became Everyone’s Favorite Emotional Support Conflict If the planet were a badly lit bar at 3 a.m., Israel would be the patron standing on a stool, waving a half-empty flag and explaining—loudly—why everyone else is ruining the evening. The rest of us, nursing watered-down geopolitics and existential dread, keep ordering…
