Aryan Khan and the Global Art of Being Guilty While Innocent By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, nursing his fourth G&T and the remains of his faith in jurisprudence. Mumbai, October 2021. Somewhere between the VIP lounge and the narcotics-sniffing spaniel, the heir to the Khan cinematic dynasty discovered that fame is a passport…
The world woke up last week to the headline that 143 of the 193 card-carrying members of the United Nations General Assembly had decided, in their infinite collective wisdom, that “Palestine” ought to be seated a little closer to the front of the classroom. Not quite full statehood—more of a diplomatic bar-mitzvah, really: you get…
In the same week that the Arctic registered its first 2 °C above-normal ocean temperature and a Swiss banker was caught using carrier pigeons to smuggle bearer bonds, the Daily Mail—fleet-footed, fluorescent, and forever indignant—managed to make both stories about house prices in Kent. This is not merely a British eccentricity; it is a global…
The Daily Mail: A British Export That Manages to Be Both Tea-Time Staple and Global Existential Threat Word count: 600 PARIS — Somewhere between the croissants and the climate apocalypse, the planet woke up to discover that Britain’s most dependable cultural export is no longer the Beatles or even polite queueing, but a tabloid so…
Green Day, 2024 Edition: When the Planet Takes Its Annual Sick Day By the time the clock struck 8:30 p.m. Saturday in Samoa—conveniently the first place on Earth to tick forward—lights blinked off across an archipelago that already smells of diesel and coconut-scented FOMO. Thus began the planet’s 18th consecutive “Earth Hour,” the feel-good blackout…
Karl-Anthony Towns, or KAT as the marketing departments insist on calling him, is what happens when a basketball prodigy collides with the 21st-century attention economy. Born in Edison, New Jersey, to a Dominican mother and an African-American father, he carries three passports’ worth of expectations before he’s even laced up a sneaker. The Dominican Republic…
Typhoon Ragasa, the latest atmospheric tantrum in the Pacific’s long-running soap opera, swept through the Philippines last week with the theatrical flair of a Hollywood divorce: wind speeds of 220 km/h, a storm surge that redecorated entire coastlines, and enough rainfall to make Noah reach for his contractor’s license. Manila’s stock exchange suspended trading, the…
Bollywoes: How the World Learns to Love and Loathe India’s Glittering Guilt Machine By Our Correspondent in a Safe House Somewhere Between Bandra and Netflix HQ If the global film industry were a bar at closing time, Hollywood would be the loud American bragging about his IPO, Nollywood the Nigerian hustler selling you miracle watches,…
Charlie Kirk’s “Last Interview”: A Globe-Trotting Autopsy on the Death of Nuance By Matteo Deluca, Contributing Cynic-at-Large If the world were a bar, Charlie Kirk just knocked over the last stool, shouted the house special into a bullhorn, and called it a closing-time confession. His much-hyped “final interview” (filmed in a Dallas studio that looks…
Xavier Worthy: The 4.21-Second Passport That Just Got Every Continent’s Attention By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Immigration Control and the 40-Yard Dash PARIS—In the same week that the UN admitted it will miss every sustainable-development target and the Doomsday Clock nudged to 89 seconds from midnight, a 20-year-old from Fresno, California, reminded the planet that…
EasyJet and the Great Orange Descent: How a Budget Airline Became a Global Mood Ring By Our Man in the Departure Lounge It is 06:47 at Gatwick, and the queue for EasyJet flight EZY9001 to Dubrovnik already resembles a UN refugee camp sponsored by Pret A Manger. The passengers—German backpackers, French retirees, a Ghanaian wedding…
If you squint hard enough from the top of the Hollywood Hills, the Pacific looks like a giant flat-screen TV showing a rerun of the Roman Empire. Down below, the Banc of California Stadium is staging its own miniature collapse of civilization: LAFC versus Real Salt Lake, a fixture that matters far more to passport-toting…
