High Potential, Season 2: A Globally Viral IQ Test That Most of Us Are Still Failing By “International” Correspondent Who Has Read Too Many Subtitles The planet’s streaming algorithms quietly agreed on one thing last week: Season 2 of *High Potential*—the U.S. remake of the French *HPI*—should be force-fed to 190 countries faster than a…
**The Global Spectacle of Whitney Rose’s Failed Business: A Cautionary Tale for the Age of Influencer Capitalism** From the neon-lit boardrooms of Tokyo to the sun-bleached patios of Los Angeles, the international business community has witnessed yet another influencer’s entrepreneurial dreams dissolve faster than a sugar cube in espresso. Whitney Rose—whose claim to fame apparently…
The Prison-Industrial Theme Park Nobody Asked For An International Dispatch on “Mayor of Kingstown” and the Quiet Global Scream It Represents By the time the third season of “Mayor of Kingstown” dropped, the show had already been subtitled, memed, and binge-watched on every continent that still has reliable Wi-Fi. From Lagos living rooms to Lapland…
iOS 26 Wallpaper: The Earth’s Most Expensive National Flag, Now Available in 12K By the time you finish reading this sentence, Apple’s design team in Cupertino will have changed its mind about the default wallpaper twice and scheduled three emergency all-hands meetings about shade #2F4F4F. Yet somewhere between the smog of Delhi and the smog…
Blake Treinen and the Curious Diplomacy of 95-mph Sliders By Our Man in the Dugout, currently hiding from both MLB Security and Interpol If you were trying to explain 21st-century America to a Martian anthropologist—or, more realistically, to a Chinese semiconductor executive who just bought a controlling stake in the Dodgers—you could do worse than…
**The Desert Diamond: How a Phoenix Baseball Team Became the World’s Most Improbable Metaphor** In the grand theater of American excess, where sports franchises operate as municipal extortion rackets disguised as civic pride, the Arizona Diamondbacks represent something refreshingly honest: a failure so complete it’s practically performance art. While European football clubs serve as soft-power…
A Hundred Microclimates of Melancholy: Liverpool Weather as Global Weather Report By Our Man in the Drizzle, somewhere between the Mersey and the Apocalypse Liverpool, England – The first thing you notice, after the maritime gulls have mugged you for your chips, is that Liverpool’s weather can’t quite decide whether it’s rehearsing for climate catastrophe…
**The Global Choreography: How Jen Affleck’s Dancing with the Stars Debut Became the World’s Favorite Distraction** While Ukrainian drones dance through Russian airspace and Chinese balloons pirouette across American skies, humanity has found its true north: watching a woman named Jennifer Affleck—who married into the Affleck dynasty like some sort of Hollywood Habsburg—attempt the cha-cha…
Somewhere above the Indian Ocean, a Boeing 777 freighter hums with the refrigerated sighs of Chilean cherries headed for Chinese New Year, while—in the cargo hold of a separate flight—a single replacement phone charger rattles around in a box the size of a microwave, bound for a London flat whose occupant forgot to tick “eco-friendly…
Keke Palmer, Sean Evans, and the Endless Acid Trip We Call Global Attention A dispatch from the crossroads of celebrity diplomacy, chili diplomacy, and whatever the algorithm thinks you want next By the time the clip of Keke Palmer’s third-eye meltdown over Sean Evans’ “Da Bomb Beyond Insanity” wing reached a noodle stall in Lagos,…
Joel Engardio’s name rarely crackles across international wires like a missile test or a crypto scam, yet the soft-spoken San Francisco supervisor has become an unlikely export product of American municipal dysfunction—proof that even local punch-lines can carry global barcodes. From Berlin cafés where renters toast rent-control victories, to Lagos start-ups praying for reliable electricity,…
Laver Cup 2025: When Tennis Diplomacy Costs More Than a UN Summit Geneva, 26 September 2025 – The jets on the tarmac at Cointrin look like the duty-free aisle of Dubai Duty Free after a Black Friday riot: Gulfstream Vs, a lonely Air Koryo Il-62 (Kim Jong-un’s nephew reportedly collects Federer socks), and a chartered…
