# Istanbul: Where East Meets West, and the Internet Can’t Look Away Istanbul, the bustling metropolis that straddles two continents, has been making waves globally, and not just because of its iconic skyline or the Bosphorus Strait that splits it in two. This city, where the East meets West, has become a hotbed of cultural…
# **Boomtown: The Global Phenomenon That’s Got Everyone Talking (And Moving)** In the vast, ever-shifting landscape of internet culture, few trends have captured the global imagination quite like “boomtown.” Whether you’re a digital nomad, a real estate investor, or just someone who loves a good underdog story, boomtowns are the places that have everyone talking—and…
Cardiff: The Capital City the World Forgot to Monetise (But Might Still Have to Save) If the 21st century has taught us anything, it’s that nowhere is too small to be dragged into the global mosh-pit. Case in point: Cardiff, population 370,000, once content to serve as rainy backdrop for Doctor Who chase scenes, is…
Ashton Gate: The World Shrinks Around a Patch of Grass in South Bristol By our correspondent, still pretending the local is global The first thing you notice when you land at Heathrow—after the queue that makes purgatory look like priority boarding—is that the planet’s problems are now classified as either “over there” or “somebody else’s…
Twin Towers: A Global Obsession With Going Up in Smoke By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, currently chain-smoking on a balcony in Kuala Lumpur KUALA LUMPUR—Type “twin towers” into any search engine and you’ll get two things: a solemn parade of 9/11 retrospectives and glossy vacation selfies from the Petronas Towers. Humanity’s emotional bandwidth, it seems,…
Burnham Yard: The Tiny Patch of Rust That Just Taught the World How Not to Die By the time the last Union Pacific freight rumbled out of Burnham Yard last Tuesday, the Denver rail hub had already become an international parable. Not because it was particularly large—at 70 acres it could fit comfortably inside a…
The Barclays Center, that rust-coated UFO that crash-landed at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, is less a basketball arena than a diplomatic embassy for the global religion of spectacle. Opened in 2012 by a Russian oligarch, bankrolled by a British bank, and programmed to keep American attention spans twitching, it is the perfect three-nation…
The Barclays Center, that rust-colored coliseum squatting at the crossroads of Flatbush and Atlantic, has never really been about basketball. From the moment its weathered-steel carapace rose above Brooklyn’s brownstone quilt, it was clear the structure had higher ambitions than merely housing a mediocre NBA franchise. Today, as ticket prices outpace inflation in most emerging-market…
