Typhoon season has returned to Hong Kong, that glittering monument to vertical capitalism, and the city is once again auditioning for the role of Atlantis. While locals exchange knowing glances at supermarket queues—where panic-buyers wrestle over the last instant-noodle shrine—international observers watch the real-time Bloomberg ticker of climate dysfunction. Because when Hong Kong ducks, the…
Shakira, the Colombian-Lebanese pop hydra, has spent the last quarter-century proving that geopolitics can indeed be negotiated in seven-inch stilettos. While lesser mortals fret over trade wars and summit communiqués, she has quietly built a soft-power empire that spans five continents, four languages, and—judging by the global involuntary muscle memory triggered by “Waka Waka”—roughly 1.2…
Somewhere between Havana and Hollywood, Camila Cabello has become the global pop equivalent of a diplomatic passport—stamped by Miami, validated by London, and occasionally detained by Beijing’s censors for “excessive pelvic swaying.” Born in Cojímar to a Mexican father and a Cuban mother, then shuttled across hemispheres like a well-mixed mojito, Cabello embodies the 21st-century…
Gold Hits $2,350 an Ounce, Humanity Still Can’t Decide If It’s Worth More Than Toilet Paper By Our Correspondent Who Once Watched a Dictator Trade Bullion for a Swiss Chalet Thursday, 23 May 2024 – 09:14 GMT The spot price of gold touched a fresh nominal high this morning at $2,350 per troy ounce, give…
The Dickie Bird Doctrine: How a Tiny Cricketing Whisperer Became a Global Metaphor for Soft Power When the news filtered out of Sheffield last week that Dickie Bird—octogenarian umpire, Yorkshire icon, and the only man alive who can make silence sound like a sermon—had been hospitalized, the collective gasp was audible from Lord’s to Lahore….
House of Guinness: When the World’s Favourite Stout Becomes a Geopolitical Football Dublin’s St. James’s Gate has always been a cathedral of foam and folklore, but lately the altar boys are wearing bespoke suits and speaking in the clipped dialects of Singapore, New York, and—because irony never sleeps—London. The “House of Guinness” is no longer…
Roberto Olabe: The Quiet Spaniard Who Turned Football’s Global Assembly Line on Its Head By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the fluorescent glare of a nondescript La Liga training complex and the fluorescent glare of a nondescript Gulf-state hotel lobby, Roberto Olabe is probably explaining—calmly, in that Basque-inflected Spanish that sounds like a lullaby…
Hadush Kebatu and the Quiet Collapse of Borders: A Dispatch from the World’s Newest Nowhere Dateline: Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the last functioning ATM in Addis Ababa—wherever that is these days. On the surface, “hadush kebatu” sounds like a boutique coffee roast or an indie band that breaks up after one EP. In…
Sophie Rain’s Birthday: A Low-Key Personal Milestone That Accidentally Became a Global Stress Test By the time the clock struck midnight in Kiribati—where the day begins for no better reason than cartographic spite—social-media dashboards from Lagos to Lima were already twitching with the hashtag #SophieRainBday. Who, precisely, is Sophie Rain? Depending on which time zone…
Hideo Kojima—part auteur, part walking meme, full-time corporate enigma—has just announced “physint,” a project whose name sounds like a rejected pharmaceutical for social anxiety. In the usual Tokyo livestream, complete with moody lighting and the faint hum of existential dread, Kojima teased a “new action-espionage” game that will somehow be both interactive entertainment and, if…
**Kosovo: Europe’s Favorite Unfinished Symphony Plays On** Pristina—Somewhere between the Balkans’ endless coffee culture and the continent’s most creative interpretation of “sovereignty,” Kosovo continues its 25-year quest to convince the world it exists. The young republic—older than TikTok but younger than the iPod—has become something of a geopolitical Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously independent and not, depending…
Jessica Brady’s Tumor: One Cell’s Rebellion, Two Billion Heartbeats, and the Whole Damn Planet Watching By our correspondent, nursing a flat white in Terminal 3 and pretending the Wi-Fi isn’t harvesting his organs There’s nothing like a single cancer diagnosis to remind the world that borders are essentially decorative. When Australian soccer star Jessica Brady,…
