Cubs Score: A Small Number in a Big, Rotting World By the time the Cubs’ latest box score flickered onto smartphones from Lagos to Lahore, the planet had already tallied far grimmer numbers: 2.3 million new covid cases, $1.4 billion in fresh sovereign debt, and one rogue beluga suspected of Russian espionage. Yet for eight…
The Word Heard ’Round the World By Our Man in the Cloud Today’s Wordle answer—mercifully still un-Googled by the disciplined—is “PLANE.” Five innocuous letters that, in ordinary times, would elicit nothing more than a smug green-square tweet and a half-eaten breakfast burrito. Yet on this particular morning, as Kyiv’s air-raid sirens harmonize with Jakarta’s dawn…
The Global Rebrand of a Meltdown: How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fritz by H. L. “Hapless” Delacroix, International Desk Somewhere between a Tokyo bullet-train delay and a Frankfurt baggage carousel jammed by one rebellious Samsonite, the word “fritz” slipped out of its Teutonic cradle and became the planet’s favorite euphemism…
Global Puzzle Panic: How a New York Times Grid Became the Planet’s Favorite Five-Minute Existential Crisis By the time the sun rose over Reykjavik on September 23, half of Finland had already solved the NYT Connections grid, posted their streak on X, and gone back to pretending their national happiness index isn’t a polite fiction….
Wordle and Connections: How Two Little Puzzles Became the Last Neutral Territory in a Fractured World By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently hiding from deadlines in a Reykjavik airport lounge It began, as most global crises do, innocently enough. One morning in February 2022, while Russian tanks queued politely outside Kyiv and half of Twitter was…
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…
Cameron Dicker and the Quiet Art of Outsourcing Global Anxiety to a 24-Year-Old Australian with a Right Boot By Our Correspondent in a Café Where Even the Espresso Seems Nervous SYDNEY—While the Northern Hemisphere spent the weekend doom-scrolling through central-bank communiqués and the latest “will-they-won’t-they” missile parade in the Sea of Japan, a 24-year-old Queenslander…
Ederson: The Quiet Apocalypse of the Sweeper-Keeper and the Global Collapse of Boundaries By Dave’s Locker foreign desk (still technically allowed to leave the building) There’s a certain morbid poetry in watching Ederson Santana de Moraes—Manchester City’s Brazilian goalkeeper, occasional quarterback, and full-time refutation of the very concept of “goal”—saunter 40 yards from his own…
Jets Gipson: One Man’s Layover in the Age of Perpetual Turbulence by Dave’s Foreign Correspondent at Large ZURICH—At 06:17 CET, somewhere between the espresso machine and the duty-free Toblerone, a traveler named Jets Gipson became an unwilling global metaphor. His name ping-ponged from Jakarta timelines to Lagos group chats, translated into Cyrillic hashtags and mangled…
Daily Horoscope Today: A Cosmic Weather Report for a Planet That Forgot Its Umbrella By the time you read this, roughly 2.9 billion people—give or take a distracted doom-scroller in Jakarta—have already glanced at a horoscope. Some did it for comfort, others for procrastination, and a brave few to confirm that yes, Mercury is indeed…
Global Meltdown: How the World’s Collective Nervous Breakdown Became the Ultimate Status Symbol By the time the WHO upgraded “burnout” from a trendy complaint to an official diagnosis, the planet had already moved on to flashier disorders. From Manila to Minneapolis, mental health has become the new passport stamp: if you’re not anxious, are you…
**Seth Rogen: The Stoner King Who Conquered the World (and Nobody Stopped Him)** In a world teetering on the brink of environmental collapse, where democracy faces its midlife crisis and billionaires treat space travel like a weekend getaway, one man has achieved what diplomats and defense contractors never could: global unity through the universal language…
