Mets vs Phillies: Two Rust-Belt City-States Fight Over a Pastime While the Planet Melts By Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, International Correspondent, currently hiding from his bar tab in Athens If you squint at the right moment—say, during a 3-2 changeup that dies in the humid Philadelphia night—the Mets-Phillies rivalry starts to look like a low-stakes reenactment…
Raymond Cruz: The Man Who Weaponised Soap By the time the first shipment of Tuco Salamanca’s infamous blue meth reached the docks of Rotterdam, Raymond Cruz had already become a household name in places where subtitles are a way of life. From the favelas of Rio to the rooftop bars of Mumbai, someone is right…
Rupert Murdoch, 93, has announced—again, with the weary inevitability of a Bond villain returning for one last sequel—that he will finally loosen his grip on the Death Star of global media. Or, more accurately, he’ll shuffle sideways into the honorary title of “Chairman Emeritus” of Fox and News Corp while his son Lachlan assumes the…
Nebius: The Cloud That Slipped Out of Russia’s Sanctions Like a Thief in a Fog Bank By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk It was bound to happen. Somewhere between the tenth EU sanctions package and the fifteenth round of “never again” promises, a Russian tech company discovered that the fastest route to global respectability is to…
Casablanca—where the air smells of Atlantic salt, diesel exhaust, and the faint but unmistakable perfume of geopolitical compromise. From the rooftop of the downtown Hyatt, you can watch the sun set behind a skyline that looks like Dubai’s younger, thriftier cousin—half-finished glass towers next to tile-roofed medinas, all of it ring-fenced by cranes that never…
PARIS—Somewhere between the baguette crumbs and the hushed reverence of Court 2 at Roland-Garros, Alycia Parks is busy reminding the planet that power tennis is no longer the monopoly of Eastern European finishing schools or Floridian academies staffed by ex-Soviet taskmasters with a vitamin-B12 drip. Instead, the 6-foot-1 product of suburban Atlanta—pop. 500K, humidity 200%—has…
Renée Zellweger and the Collapsible World Order By our correspondent drinking coffee in three time zones at once In the grand geopolitical casino, you wouldn’t normally bet on a Texan who once pretended to be British for two whole films. Yet Renée Zellweger—yes, the woman who made millions by squeezing into impossibly large knickers and…
COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between the hygge glow of a Danish bodega and the neon anxiety of a 24-hour Bloomberg terminal, NBIS stock (Nordic Blockchain Infrastructure Services A/S) has become the world’s favorite new punch line about how we never actually learn. The Copenhagen-based firm, whose logo looks suspiciously like a QR code having a mid-life crisis, claims…
Sweden: A Nation So Pleasant It Hurts By Dave’s Locker International Desk (and a lukewarm cup of overpriced filter coffee) STOCKHOLM—Somewhere between the 14th-century cobblestones and the 5G antenna disguised as a birch tree, Sweden has managed to become a geopolitical Rorschach test for the rest of the planet. To American progressives, it’s a pastel-coloured…
The Eternal Derby of Inconvenience Guatemala vs Panama, or How to Misplace a Canal and Still Win the Century By the time you finish this paragraph, a container ship the length of lower Manhattan will have slipped through the Panama Canal, earning the Panamanian treasury roughly the GDP of a midsize Baltic nation. Meanwhile, 600…
From the balmy banks of the Clyde to the fluorescent glare of Turf Moor, Greg Taylor has evolved from a boyhood Celtic fan into a walking referendum on the state of modern football—complete with all the contradictions, neuroses, and transfer-mark-to-market arbitrage that entails. While most of the planet sorts out inflation, war, and whether to…
Ann Ming: The Woman Who Turned a Mother’s Grief Into the World’s Slowest-Motion Revenge By the time Ann Ming finally watched her daughter’s killer convicted for a second time—14 years after he’d literally laughed at the verdict—the rest of the planet had already moved on to fresher horrors: two Gulf wars, the birth of social…
