From the Baltic to the Bolshoi, the planet’s favorite geopolitical boogeyman is enjoying what might charitably be called a vintage year. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin—ex-KGB judoka, bare-chested horse-whisperer, and the only man who can annex a peninsula before breakfast and still insist he’s just tidying up the yard—continues to set the tempo for our weary waltz…
Emmerdale Spoilers: John Sugden’s Return and the Global Village That Won’t Stop Watching by Dave’s Locker International Desk If a tree falls in the Yorkshire Dales and nobody live-tweets it, did it really happen? Apparently not—because when ITV accidentally let slip that John Sugden is scheduled to lurch back into Emmerdale sometime this summer, the…
Moon Phase Today: A Waxing Global Drama Written in Craters and Capital By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently sober enough to file Geneva—While you were doom-scrolling through another geopolitical meltdown, the moon quietly slid into its First Quarter phase at 10:31 UTC this morning, looking every bit like a celestial half-eaten cookie. Half-lit, half-dark, entirely indifferent—a…
Am I the Drama? A Geopolitical Self-Interrogation Played Out in 195 Seats at the U.N. By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least six governments will have tweeted the phrase “Am I the drama?”—three ironically, two in panicked self-defence, and one because the social-media intern thought it sounded hip in English. What began…
Peter Doocy: The Accidental Diplomat in America’s Theater of the Absurd GENEVA—In the marble corridors of the Palais des Nations, where interpreters swap apocalyptic climate reports in six languages before lunch, U.S. correspondents are usually filed under “local color.” Yet even here, among diplomats who’ve survived coup attempts and champagne shortages, the name Peter Doocy…
The International Republic of Dolly Parton: How a Rhinestone-Studded Appalachian Soprano Became the UN Secretary-General We Never Had By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Gstaad and Dollywood Somewhere on the autobahn between Berlin and Bratislava, a Syrian refugee-turned-taxi-driver keeps a photo of Dolly Parton taped to his sun visor, right next to the mandatory EU fire-extinguisher….
Every so often the planet tilts on its axis, not from tectonic drift or cosmic collision, but because one human being named Jamal does something that makes the rest of us spill our coffee and stare at screens like they’ve just insulted our mothers. Who exactly is Jamal? Pick a continent, any continent, and you’ll…
Paul Rudd: The Last Pleasant Man Standing, or How Hollywood Accidentally Weaponized Nice By the time you read this, Paul Rudd has probably aged another micro-millimetre, the same imperceptible sliver he’s been adding every fiscal quarter since 1995. Scientists in Switzerland, bored with the Higgs boson, are now using Large Hadron Collider downtime to measure…
High and Tight: How a Few Centimeters of Hair Became a Geopolitical Fault Line By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Correspondent Somewhere between the parade square at Saint-Cyr and the barber chair at Camp Humphreys, a silent war is being waged with scissors, clippers, and the occasional ceremonial sword. Grooming standards—those meticulous millimeters…
The Daily Show’s Quiet Global Coup: How a Basement in Manhattan Became the World’s Most Trusted Newsroom From Jakarta to Johannesburg, the phrase “I saw it on The Daily Show” no longer triggers the smug chuckle it once did. Instead, it elicits the same solemn nod you’d give a wire-service alert—only with better punch-lines and…
The EU: A 27-Nation Group Therapy Session the World Can’t Leave Brussels, Belgium – If the planet were a dysfunctional family reunion, the European Union would be the cousin who keeps renegotiating the seating chart while the house is on fire. Twenty-seven countries—give or take one melodramatic ex-member sulking on the lawn—have voluntarily locked themselves…
The Colman Domingo Doctrine: How One Actor’s Rise Explains Everything Wrong (and Right) with the Planet By the time Colman Domingo accepted his BAFTA in February, the planet had already tallied two new wars, three currency collapses, and one rogue AI that tried to unionize itself. Yet the global press corps abandoned the carnage for…
