WASHINGTON—If you want to know how the rest of the planet is faring, skip Davos and just loiter on the National Mall for an hour. The air itself has become the world’s most honest diplomat: it imports Saharan dust, Canadian wildfire smoke, and Gulf Stream humidity like a black-market bazaar of atmospheric contraband. Locals call…
It is 04:47 GMT and the planet is already laughing. Somewhere between a TikTok livestream from Jakarta and the BBC’s sober pre-dawn bulletin, the American Powerball has coughed up another instant plutocrat—one ticket, sold at a Speedway gas station in—wait for it—Noblesville, Indiana. The jackpot clocked in at a tasteful US $1.326 billion, which, for…
BMW iX3: The Bavarian Oligarch’s Electric Guilt Sponge By the International Desk, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—If you squint hard enough, the new BMW iX3 looks less like a car and more like a rolling LinkedIn post: polished, slightly smug, and desperate to prove it has read the Paris Agreement. Unveiled simultaneously in Munich, Beijing, and a…
The Empire Checks the Scoreboard: How the Yankees’ Place in the AL East Became a Global Weather Vane By the time most of the planet wakes up, the New York Yankees have already lost or won in front of a half-empty stadium of investment bankers checking Slack. Yet from Nairobi to Naples, the “yankee standings”…
A Flock of Duggar-Lites Takes Flight: The Global Aftershocks of ‘Bringing Up Bates’ Going Off-Air By L. Marlowe, International Cultural Correspondent Dateline: Istanbul, 03:17 a.m. local—because insomnia is the only truly universal language. For the uninitiated, Bringing Up Bates was the Appalachian answer to a question nobody outside the contiguous 48 had ever thought to…
Bobo Baldé and the Global Comedy of Errors in Defense By our Special Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Every so often the world rediscovers a name it once filed under “That guy who used to play for Celtic,” and the name currently doing the rounds—thanks to a viral clip of an own-goal compilation, a podcast…
Amy Coney Barrett and the Spectacular Collapse of American Exceptionalism: A Global View From the Cheap Seats By Our Man in the Departures Lounge The rest of the planet first met Amy Coney Barrett on a Monday night in late September 2020, when she materialized beside Donald Trump like an impeccably-coiffed genie summoned by a…
Somewhere in a nameless bar in Manila, a Korean hedge-fund analyst, a Nigerian logistics broker, and a retired FARC accountant are watching the same pixelated stream of the New York Yankees’ box score. None of them have ever set foot in the Bronx—they couldn’t pick Aaron Judge out of a police lineup—but the flickering digits…
The Eurostar, that sleek steel eel that slithers beneath the English Channel, is often praised as a triumph of European cooperation. In reality, it’s a 400-metre-long metaphor for the continent’s ability to charge premium prices for the privilege of queuing together. Board in London, debark in Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam—three capitals that have perfected the…
The planet is on fire, inflation is staging a renaissance, and yet a non-trivial slice of humanity spent last night refreshing a subreddit in Manila to find out whether a Brazilian yoga instructor betrayed a Scottish hairdresser inside a Bulgarian-set house they will never actually leave. Welcome, dear reader, to the global cottage industry of…
Down Under and Further Down: How Australia vs New Zealand Became the World’s Nicest Blood Feud By Our Correspondent, filing from a press lounge that still smells faintly of burned flat white SYDNEY—Somewhere between the 1,400-kilometre stretch of the Tasman Sea, two of Earth’s most agreeable nations have spent the past century locked in a…
Hurricane Kiko, a Category-4 tantrum that spun through the mid-Pacific last week, officially made landfall somewhere between “Instagrammable disaster” and “global press junket.” The storm clipped the Hawaiian archipelago with the enthusiasm of a drunk tourist looking for poke, then drifted off to international waters like a bored influencer who’s already filmed the “before” segment….
