Wetherspoons: The Last Honest Embassy on Earth An International Correspondent’s Field Notes from the Imperial Pub Chain by “Marlowe” – filing from the Salisbury, Fleet Street, over a £2.15 “breakfast stout” The United Nations has 193 member states, but only one issues its own currency in the form of laminated beer mats and calls its…
UnitedHealth Group’s ticker, UNH, has become the planet’s barometer for how much we’re collectively willing to pay not to die. From Singapore to São Paulo, analysts watch the same squiggly line crawl across their Bloomberg terminals, interpreting each uptick as proof that sickness remains the world’s most reliable growth industry. The stock hit another all-time…
Smokey Bones Falls Off the Spit: A Post-BBQ Requiem for a Carb-Loading Civilization By Our Man in the Charcoal Cloud, somewhere between Doha and Detroit The emails hit inboxes like a wet napkin on a Formica table: Smokey Bones, America’s 61-location temple to smoked meats and bottomless fries, is quietly shuttering another tranche of restaurants….
From the banks of the Vistula to the Thames, and now somewhere between Warsaw and the M4, Łukasz Fabiański has spent the better part of two decades demonstrating that the best way to survive modernity is to stand perfectly still while everyone else runs in circles. A goalkeeper, yes—but also a walking metaphor for every…
# The Loser That Launched a Thousand Memes: How Japan’s Winless Wonder Became the World’s Favorite Underdog If you’ve spent any time online this week, you’ve probably seen the clip: a glossy brown racehorse charges down the home stretch, legs pistoning, jockey crouched like a panicked origami crane—only to finish stone-cold last, again. Meet Haru…
Word Games as World Order: How a Quiet September 9 Grid Became the Planet’s Most Democratic Power Struggle By Tomas “Tommy” Verdier, Senior International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker VIENNA—At 3 a.m. local time, while diplomats at the UN snored over draft resolutions on carbon credits, 3.4 million civilians from Reykjavík to Rabat were locked in a…
Kathmandu’s weather is famously unreliable—monsoon one minute, smog the next—so it’s fitting that Sher Bahadur Deuba has popped in and out of the prime minister’s chair more often than a Himalayan teahouse changes its Wi-Fi password. On 13 July 2021, the 75-year-old liberal warhorse saddled up for his fifth non-consecutive term, a feat that would…
Ange Postecoglou: The Last Optimist in a World That Has Already Called It a Day By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the North London traffic and the existential dread of a Tuesday Champions League press conference, Ange Postecoglou continues to insist that football is about “the beautiful game” and not merely a quarterly EBITDA…
Hasbro: How a Rhode Island Toymaker Became the Soft-Power Emperor of a Planet on the Brink By the time the first Ukrainian kid unpacked a donated box containing a My Little Pony action figure still labeled in Cyrillic for the Moscow market, the cosmic joke was already complete. Somewhere in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a middle…
**The Kissing Bug’s Grand World Tour: How a Latin American Parasite Became Everyone’s Problem** By the time you finish your morning espresso, three more people will have joined the 6–7 million already hosting *Trypanosoma cruzi*, the unicellar squatter that causes Chagas disease. Most of them won’t know it yet; the parasite is polite enough to…
**The Curious Case of Katie Abraham: How One Woman’s Digital Footprint Became a Global Mirror** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and central banks perform interpretive dance with interest rates—the saga of Katie Abraham might seem like small potatoes. But then again, history teaches us that revolutions…
**The Wagyu Whitewash: How Burger King Turned Japan’s Sacred Cow into Global Fast-Food Fodder** *By our correspondent in the departure lounge of dietary disillusion* TOKYO—In the beginning, there was the cow, and the cow was good—so good, in fact, that Japanese emperors once forbade commoners from eating it. Fast-forward eight centuries and the same bovine…
