River Ouse: The Quiet English Waterway Quietly Judging the Rest of the Planet From the chalk hills of East Sussex to the North Sea’s grey shrug, the River Ouse ambles 35 miles across southern England like a pensioner who has already seen the worst of humanity and decided apathy is the only rational response. To…
**The War Nobody Wanted: Wyoming vs Colorado and the End of American Innocence** While the rest of the planet grapples with actual problems—climate change, nuclear proliferation, the slow death of democracy—America has gifted the world its most pressing conflict yet: a legal cage match between two rectangular states that most foreigners couldn’t locate on a…
Phoenix, Arizona—population 1.7 million, average July temperature roughly equivalent to the surface of Mercury—has always marketed itself as the city that rose from dusty obscurity to become America’s fastest-growing desert mirage. Yet the mythic bird on the municipal seal is beginning to look less like a symbol of rebirth and more like a canary in…
Windhoek, Tuesday—If you scan the world map for geopolitical fault lines these days, you’ll usually land on places where the tectonic plates of ideology, oil, or unfiltered narcissism rub together. Yet here we are, fixated on a squabble between two nations whose combined GDP is slightly smaller than the annual budget of a mid-tier Swiss…
