Gael Monfils, the human highlight reel currently moon-walking his way through what polite society still calls “the twilight of his career,” is tennis’s last living reminder that the sport was once supposed to be fun. While the rest of the men’s tour has been busy cloning 6-foot-6 Balkan metronomes who hit the ball as if…
On Threadneedle Street, a modest mahogany-paneled room in London still manages to jolt Tokyo pension funds, Nigerian importers, and Silicon Valley unicorns with the same flick of a decimal point. That room—home to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee—just nudged the base rate up (or down, or sideways; the gesture is almost beside the…
Anglian Water and the Slow-Motion Flood of Global Incompetence By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Slightly Above Sea Level It takes a special breed of enterprise to turn the most basic miracle of civilisation—clean water appearing when you turn a tap—into a rolling international farce. Yet Anglian Water, the privatised utility tasked with keeping England’s driest, fastest-sinking…
From the barrios of Bogotá to the banlieues of Paris, diplomats and day-laborers now share the same nightly ritual: thumbs flicking at 3-inch kingdoms, launching pixelated knights into other people’s phones with the solemnity of a drone strike. Clash Royale—Supercell’s four-year-old, free-to-start, pay-to-keep-your-dignity mobile skirmisher—has quietly become the most widely spoken second language on Earth….
PARIS—The third-round draw at Roland-Garros was supposed to be a formality: some fresh-faced prodigy versus a 33-year-old Romanian best remembered for a 2009 quarter-final run when TikTok was still just the sound a clock made. Instead, Sorana Cîrstea spent two hours reminding the planet that the tennis narrative is written in erasable ink. She won…
The outage began, as all cataclysms now do, with a single emoji: 🔧. Posted at 07:13 UTC on a Tuesday, it was the universal symbol that Fortnite’s servers had slipped into the digital void, taking with them the daily dopamine rations of 230 million registered souls from Reykjavík to Riyadh. Within minutes, #WhereIsMyBattleBus was trending…
Euston Station, or How the Empire’s Front Door Learned to Love the Queue By our London bureau chief, still dazed from the 07:42 to Manchester Piccadilly On any given Tuesday morning, while Singapore’s Changi offers orchids and a butterfly dome and Dubai International tempts travelers with indoor waterfalls, London’s Euston Station greets humanity with the…
Brad Everett Young: The Accidental Everyman Who Proved Global Fame Is Just One Algorithmic Hiccup Away By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Despair and the Departure Lounge SYDNEY–KABUL–SÃO PAULO—If you blinked last Tuesday you probably missed Brad Everett Young’s 4.7-second ascent from “some guy in Ventura County” to “the planet’s most discussed non-event since the last…
**The Global Mirror: How Images Became Our Universal Language (and Prison)** In the beginning was the Word. These days, it’s the JPEG. While diplomats still argue over semicolons in trade agreements, the world’s real negotiations happen in 1080p, filtered, cropped, and captioned for maximum emotional impact. From Myanmar’s military coup selfies to Ukrainian grandmothers learning…
**The Pixie Paradox: How a British Pop Singer Became a Global Metaphor for Fleeting Fame** In the grand theater of international celebrity, where today’s chart-topper becomes tomorrow’s trivia question, few performers embody the ephemeral nature of global pop stardom quite like Pixie Lott. The English singer-songwriter—whose very name suggests something small, magical, and ultimately imaginary—has…
Tim Berners-Lee: The Man Who Gave Humanity a Rope and Watches Us Hang Ourselves in 4K Across six inhabited continents, at this very instant, roughly five billion souls are hunched over glowing rectangles, doom-scrolling, doom-shopping, or doom-dating. Each tap, swipe, and passive-aggressive emoji owes its existence to one diffident Brit who, in 1989, thought it…
Mawaan Rizwan and the Global Collapse of Earnestness By Dave’s Foreign Desk, somewhere between Gatwick and Guantánamo When Pakistani-British comedian-turned-auteur Mawaan Rizwan dropped “Juice” on BBC Three last spring, the world was busy stockpiling iodine tablets and arguing on Twitter about whether the ocean was now officially soup. In that context, a surreal six-part comedy…
