The last time Manchester City and Napoli shared a continental moment, the Dow Jones was lurching toward a sugar-high record, TikTok was still a harmless karaoke app, and nobody outside Wuhan had ever Googled “ventilator.” Six years later, the reunion carries roughly the gravitational pull of a mid-sized moon. One club is bankrolled by an…
Rafe Spall and the Global Theatre of Second-Generation Stardom By our correspondent in the departure lounge of cultural relevance Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the last-call for the red-eye to Reykjavík, it occurred to me that Rafe Spall has quietly become the most internationally useful Spall since the Treaty of Utrecht. While the planet…
ZURICH—Somewhere in the velvety gloom of a private bank’s 14th-floor conference room, a Swiss relationship manager just uncorked a 2005 Château d’Yquem to celebrate the fact that his American clients can once again afford Tuscan villas the size of Liechtenstein. The occasion? The Federal Reserve’s latest rate cut, a move so telegraphed it could have…
The American Primeval Reboot: A Global Audience Watches Uncle Sam Re-Enact His Own Horror Movie By the time the term “American primeval” began trending in seven languages, it was no longer clear whether the United States was staging a historical reenactment or simply filming a live-action prequel to The Purge. From Berlin to Bangkok, the…
Galatasaray: The Sultan’s Red-and-Yellow Balloon Drifting Above a Burning Bazaar By Our Jaded Correspondent in Transit Lounge 3C, IST Istanbul, that magnificent hinge between Europe and whatever Europe thinks Asia still is, has long specialized in exporting moods rather than mere products—melancholy, menace, magnificence. Galatasaray Football Club is the city’s most portable mood: equal parts…
As the sun sets on another humid Caracas evening, a taxi driver toggles between the national news—where the bolívar’s latest cliff-dive is politely described as “volatility”—and a pixelated feed of the Yankees-Red Sox running on a cracked Samsung tablet. The stream stutters, buffers, then delivers Aaron Judge in 720p glory. The driver grins, because for…
Europa League Play-off, Second Leg Old Trafford, Manchester – 22:00 CET, 29 August 2024 If you squint hard enough, Manchester United versus SK Brann begins to resemble one of those late-night infomercials for a miracle kitchen gadget: loudly advertised, vaguely unnecessary, yet somehow compulsory viewing for anyone still awake on a Thursday. On paper it…
Paul Pogba: The 100-Million-Euro Metaphor for Everything Wrong—And Beautifully Absurd—About Global Football Manchester, Shanghai, Riyadh, Turin—pick a continent at random and you’ll still find someone arguing about Paul Pogba. The French midfielder has become less a footballer and more a planetary Rorschach test: to the Premier League’s marketing department he’s a shampoo-commercial deity, to Serie…
Brea stock—two syllables that sound like an artisanal sourdough but in fact describe a substance that keeps the planet’s industrial ovens burning. In the grand bazaar of global commodities, crude oil’s lighter, cheerier cousin is suddenly the belle of the ball, and every suitor from Singapore to Stavanger is elbowing his way to the punch…
Club Brugge: Belgium’s Quiet Trojan Horse in the Age of Globalized Panic By Our Man in Bruges, nursing a Duvel and a mild existential crisis The first thing you notice about Club Brugge KV—aside from the fact that every local insists on pronouncing it “Klup Broo-hha” like they’re gargling coins—is how improbably global it has…
Somewhere above the Adriatic, at 38,000 feet and a cruising speed that would make most commercial pilots weep quietly into their headsets, the planet’s most expensive pair of sneakers is doing what it does best: being airborne, invisible to civilian radar, and theoretically capable of launching thermonuclear Armageddon while its owner finishes dessert. Welcome aboard…
Fat Bear Week: When the World Stops to Gawp at Gluttony While Glaciers Melt By our Foreign Desk bear-observer, filing from somewhere with reliable Wi-Fi and unreliable morals Every October, while COP delegates haggle over a single sentence on carbon markets, a quiet corner of Alaska stages the only election the planet still trusts: Fat…
