Yankees Games: A Global Ritual in the Cathedral of Late Capitalism By Our Man in the Bleachers (and Occasionally in the Bar) Somewhere between the first ceremonial pitch and the seventh-inning stretch, the Bronx becomes the temporary capital of the world. Diplomats in bespoke bomber jackets forget trade-war talking points; hedge-fund emirs in Italian loafers…
Elizabeth McGovern: The Accidental Geopolitical Barometer No One Ordered By Our Disillusioned Foreign Correspondent, Somewhere Between Dubrovnik and Despair It takes a special kind of historical irony that an actress best known for playing a kind-hearted countess in a fictional English manor is now the most reliable metric we have for measuring the West’s moral…
David Muir, the immaculate-haired baritone who materializes nightly on American screens like a hologram from a better-behaved timeline, has become an unlikely export. While U.S. viewers treat his World News Tonight as a civic sacrament—somewhere between prayer and pharmaceutical ad—audiences abroad increasingly see Muir as the last functioning appliance in a house whose wiring is…
South Park: The Little Colorado Town That Weaponized Global Schadenfreude By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk In a world where diplomats still pretend that “deep concern” is a policy and billion-dollar summits produce press releases nobody reads, four construction-paper children in a fictional backwater have become the de-facto United Nations of satire. South Park, Colorado—population: whatever…
The Welsh-English Love Story That Quietly Conquered the Planet By our resident correspondent, still recovering from the cultural whiplash of discovering that a modest sitcom about two families can do what NATO summits cannot: make disparate nations laugh at the same joke. In the grand geopolitical chessboard of 2024—where AI threatens elections, oceans boil, and…
Paris, 02:47 local time – Somewhere between the after-hours bar at Le Baron and the fluorescent glare of a 24-hour pâtisserie, a push-alert pings on a diplomat’s burner phone: “A-list actress caught lip-syncing to own leaked voice notes outside Nobu Malibu.” The attaché sighs, orders another espresso martini, and forwards the link to a colleague…
The New York Times: A Very American Empire That Still Pretends to Be Shocked By Our Correspondent in a Café Where the Wi-Fi Costs Extra Somewhere between the croissant crumbs and the existential dread that passes for breakfast in most of the world, the international press corps has learned to treat The New York Times…
From the vantage point of a rickety café terrace in Sarajevo—where bullet-pocked walls still tell 1990s bedtime stories—watching Tomi Lahren’s latest TikTok rant pop up on a cracked iPhone feels like cultural whiplash served with extra foam. One moment, locals debate EU grain tariffs; the next, a blonde commentator in Dallas is yelling that the…
Tim Walz and the Global Giggle Fit By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, somewhere over the Atlantic If you mention “Tim Walz” in a Brussels café, the waiter will nod politely while mentally calculating the tip. Say it in a Nairobi newsroom and an editor will ask whether that’s the new strain of avian…
When the world wants to feel civilised, it opens a tab on The New York Times. From Lagos to Lima, the faint glow of its blue masthead is the modern equivalent of a Victorian parlour lamp: reassuring, slightly smug, and reassuringly smug. The ritual is global—tap, skim, nod knowingly at a headline about deforestation, then…
Slovenia, a country whose greatest historical export until recently was existential dread packaged as ski-jumping medals, has given the planet Luka Dončić: a 6’7″ reminder that the global economy now runs on highlight reels and schadenfreude. While the United Nations still pretends to solve crises with communiqués nobody reads, Dončić quietly exports Slovenian soft power…
Dublin – Somewhere between a Guinness tap and an IMF spreadsheet – A small island nation that once exported priests, potatoes and property bubbles has, in the last quarter-century, quietly perfected a far more recession-proof commodity: the Gleeson. Not a tax loophole, not a cryptocurrency—just Brendan Gleeson, the 6-foot-2 walking rebuke to every Hollywood algorithm…
