Frances Tiafoe: The Last American Standing on a Planet That’s Forgotten How to Stand Still By Dave’s Foreign Bureau of Existential Scoreboards PARIS, AUGUST—Somewhere between the 13th arrondissement’s overpriced croissants and the clay-stained baseline of Court Philippe-Chatrier, Frances Tiafoe reminded the world that the United States still exports something other than inflation and Marvel spin-offs:…
TradingView: The Neon Church Where the World’s Money Prays to Itself By “Still-Shorting-My-Own-Sanity” Correspondent, somewhere over the dateline with spotty Wi-Fi and cheaper coffee than sense. Somewhere between the collapse of another regional bank in Zurich and the latest crypto-trading hamster flat-lining in Germany, an oddly soothing shade of black-and-green has become the lingua franca…
Simon Jordan: The Mouth That Roared Across Borders By our man in the cheap seats, still recovering from the Premier League’s latest morality play LONDON—Somewhere between a Brexit argument and a heatwave-induced blackout, Simon Jordan is holding court again. The former Crystal Palace owner-turned-broadcaster has become Britain’s loudest export since the vuvuzela: impossible to ignore,…
Russell Howard and the Global Giggle-Industrial Complex A dispatch from the front lines of exported British mirth By the time the plane begins its descent into Singapore, the in-flight entertainment system has already offered me three separate Russell Howard stand-up specials in three different languages. Somewhere over the Bay of Bengal, a Malaysian teenager is…
Bookers of the World, Unite: How a Four-Letter Word Became the Planet’s Quiet Puppet-Master From the neon back-alleys of Lagos to the sterile lobbies of Davos, the word “booker” has mutated into a shape-shifting verb, noun, and, lately, existential threat. In its earliest, most innocent form, it meant the poor soul who wrestled with opera…
Somewhere off the coast of California, two leopard sharks are sizing each other up like delegates at a climate summit: all posturing, no eye contact, and a shared understanding that whatever happens next will be awkward, brief, and entirely for the cameras of passing drone hobbyists. Welcome, dear reader, to the annual congress of Triakis…
When the name Brendan Carr first appears on a foreign desk’s wire feed, the immediate instinct is to ask which hemisphere he’s currently irritating. The answer, reliably, is all of them. As the senior Republican commissioner of the United States Federal Communications Commission, Carr has spent the last decade transforming what used to be a…
Ryder Cup Tee Times: When the World’s Clocks Align to Watch Millionaires Walk Slowly By our correspondent in a hotel bar that still thinks Brexit is “any minute now” The Ryder Cup does not merely publish tee times; it releases global coordinates for mass synchronized anxiety. At 07:35 local (06:35 GMT, 01:35 EST, 14:35 in…
**The Pastry Pub: How Greggs’ Boozy Gambit Explains Everything Wrong With Late-Stage Capitalism** In the grand tradition of British innovation—that storied lineage that gave us the steam engine, penicillin, and the phrase “fancy a pint?”—a Newcastle bakery chain has now conquered the final frontier: getting absolutely plastered while consuming sausage rolls. Greggs, the purveyor of…
Robert Carlyle, the Scottish actor who looks like he’s been personally wronged by every decade since 1979, has quietly become the planet’s most reliable barometer for global despair. From the heroin-scarred housing schemes of Trainspotting to the mushroom-cloud melancholy of 28 Weeks Later, Carlyle’s face has mapped the world’s slide from post-Cold-War optimism into whatever…
ASAP Rocky, the Harlem-born rapper who once rhymed about “Goldie,” is now a walking geopolitical Rorschach test. From Stockholm to SoHo, his 2019 Swedish assault case became an unlikely referendum on race, privilege, and diplomatic etiquette—proof that in 2023, even a mixtape can detonate an international incident. When Rocky and two associates were jailed for…
**The Deborah Haynes Doctrine: How One British Journalist Accidentally Became the World’s Most Effective War Correspondent** While the rest of us were perfecting our sourdough starters and pretending to understand cryptocurrency, Deborah Haynes has been busy doing something rather quaint: actual journalism. In an era when “breaking news” increasingly means someone’s tweeted something inflammatory about…
