The World: A 24-Hour Spin Cycle on the Cosmic Laundromat by our roving correspondent, still waiting for his lost sock in the dryer of destiny Yesterday, at 2:17 p.m. GMT—give or take the eternal lateness of airline schedules—Planet Earth completed another smug lap around the sun. Somewhere between the Indian Ocean and a cloud of…
GOOGLE STOCK: THE WORLD’S FAVORITE DIGITAL LOTTERY TICKET An international dispatch from the frontlines of capitalism, where a search bar has become sovereign. Global markets woke up this week to discover that Alphabet—parent to Google, the search engine that taught us to ask questions we never wanted our mothers to hear—had added another 4% to…
The Great Global Pension Pick-Pocket By Our Man in Geneva, Nursing a Negroni and a Grudge GENEVA — Somewhere between the 12th refill of the UN cafeteria coffee urn and the 17th PowerPoint slide titled “Inter-generational Solidarity,” finance ministers from 40-odd countries reached a quiet consensus this week: retirement accounts are the new cookie jar,…
Zidane: The Last Time the World Agreed on Anything By Dave’s Locker International Desk The name “Zidane” still lands like a dropped glass in a quiet bar: sudden, sharp, and followed by the collective memory of spilled elegance. Seventeen years after Zinedine Zidane’s forehead introduced itself to Marco Materazzi’s sternum in Berlin, the incident remains…
Weather Bristol: How a Drizzly English Backwater Became the Planet’s Atmospheric Punchline By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still drying off in Gate 43 Let us begin with the obvious: the weather in Bristol, population 465,000 and shrinking faster than British diplomatic credibility, is not, in itself, interesting. It is grey, damp, and insistently mediocre—like a LinkedIn…
The continent that once carved the planet into colonies with the enthusiasm of a chef slicing truffles now finds itself an elegant, slightly anxious dinner guest at the global feast it once catered. Europe, that antique mosaic of kingdoms, republics, and tax shelters, is busy rehearsing humility while the rest of the world scrolls past…
Tourists usually flock to the Costa del Sol for sangria, sunburn, and the reassuring fantasy that the Mediterranean is a postcard rather than a crime scene. So when the Spanish press christened last month’s quadruple homicide in Marbella “The Sunshine Murders,” the branding stuck faster than cheap sunscreen. Four bodies—two British crypto-advisers, a retired Danish…
Mark Wright and the Global Echo Chamber: How a British Reality Star Became a Mirror for the World’s Narcissism From the vantage point of a Wi-Fi–choked Bangkok café, where a French influencer live-streams his latte art to 3.7 million followers who will forget it in eight seconds, the name “Mark Wright” arrives like a linguistic…
Metro Bank and the Fine Art of Lending Gravity to the World By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It begins, as all modern tragedies do, with an innocuous push-notification. Somewhere between the canapés in Davos and the humid back-alleys of Manila, Metro Bank—once the plucky British challenger that painted its branches in garish “store”…
**The World’s Most Dangerous Reality Show: Ukraine’s Geopolitical Theater** Two years into Europe’s most unnecessary war since someone decided the Habsburgs needed a slight nudge in 1914, Ukraine has become the planet’s most depressing reality television series—except the contestants can’t vote themselves off the island, and the producers are nuclear powers with questionable impulse control….
Rainn Wilson: How a Paper-Selling Schrute Became the Planet’s Unlikely Moral Compass By Our Man in Copenhagen, Still Wondering When Satire Died If you had told a roomful of mid-2000s cubicle drones that the beet-farming, Battlestar-loving oddity on their screens would one day be schooling the United Nations on climate grief, they’d have assumed you’d…
Only Murders in the Building: How Three Lonely New Yorkers Became the World’s Most Relatable Diplomats By Our Bureau Chief, Still Recovering from a Long Layover in Newark It began, as most modern catastrophes do, with a podcast. Somewhere between the collapse of global supply chains and the rise of artisanal oxygen bars, three residents…
