PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the Seine-et-Marne, a pensioner is binge-watching Turkish telenovelas at 3 a.m., an Algerian student in Belleville is streaming the latest Korean zombie series on the same account as her cousin in Montréal, and a gilet-jaune protestor is catching up on “Squid Game” on his phone while waiting for the CRS…
Teair Tart: The 315-Pound Canary in the Global Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker, International Affairs Desk On paper, Teair Tart is just an American football player—a 6’2″, 315-pound defensive tackle who recently signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after stints with the Tennessee Titans and the Los Angeles Chargers. In practice, however, Tart has become…
Baltimore, Maryland – Somewhere between the crab-cake stands and the rusted-out steel cranes that once propped up an empire, the Orioles scored six runs last night. Six. A modest tally by the steroid-addled standards of modern baseball, yet in the grand bazaar of global affairs it landed with the discreet thud of a diplomatic cable…
The last time the planet’s collective pulse spiked in unison, it wasn’t the Fed raising rates or a North Korean missile test—it was the trailer for “The Beekeeper,” in which Jason Statham, age-melting like a budget Bond, detonates a call-center scam ring with the moral clarity of a man who’s never waited on hold with…
Vince Vaughn, the 6-foot-5 human reminder that the 1990s never really ended, has lately been spotted on diplomatic red carpets from Berlin to Bangkok. This is less a career pivot than a symptom of our times: when the world tilts toward chaos, it apparently appoints a fast-talking Midwesterner as its comic relief attaché. The man…
Tim Mayza: The Left-Arm Reliever Quietly Teaching the World That Pain Is Universal By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic TORONTO—While the planet busies itself with grander catastrophes—ballooning sovereign debt, glaciers filing for early retirement, and TikToks of cats lip-syncing to war-crime tribunals—Tim Mayza keeps reporting to work in the same…
From the marble lobbies of Dubai to the sweaty karaoke bars of Manila, the planet’s attention has lately pivoted—ever so briefly—from wars, viruses, and crypto-crash eulogies to a 24-year-old kid from Colleyville, Texas, who smashes baseballs as if personally offended by the laws of physics. Bobby Witt Jr., the Kansas City Royals’ shortstop-turned-overnight-geopolitical-emoji, just wrapped…
The Curious Global Dominion of Becky Lynch: How a Dublin Bartender Became an International Soft-Power Asset In the grand, tragicomic opera of geopolitics—where nuclear codes are entrusted to septuagenarians who confuse TikTok with a breath mint—it turns out one of the more reliable diplomatic pressure valves is a 5-foot-6 redhead from the Liberties who used…
BILLY BOB THORNTON: AMERICA’S SOUTHERN-FRIED EXPORT OF MENACE, MISANTHROPY, AND MISPLACED ROMANCE By the time you finish reading this sentence, Billy Bob Thornton will have been married in at least one additional time zone. The man who once wore Angelina Jolie’s blood in a vial around his neck has become, against all odds, the United…
The Cheap Thrill Is Gone: How Poundland’s Slow Death Mirrors the Collapse of the Post-War Bargain Across the British high street, the fluorescent lights of Poundland are flickering out like cheap candles at a state funeral. Another 150 stores—roughly one in six—will shutter by Christmas, joining the 800 already boarded up since 2018. If you…
The Curious Case of Marshawn Lynch, or How a Man Who Refused to Speak Became the Loudest Voice in the Room By Our Correspondent Somewhere over Greenland Somewhere between the 50-yard line and the end zone, Marshawn Lynch decided that silence could be weaponized. While the rest of the planet was busy screaming itself hoarse…
The Border That Isn’t: How Nicaragua and Costa Rica Invented a Cold War for the TikTok Age By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk SAN JOSÉ—For the uninitiated, the San Juan River looks like any other sleepy tropical waterway—think lazy crocodiles, overworked herons, and the occasional backpacker who’s read too much Lonely Planet. Yet this 200-kilometre ribbon…
