Foreign Correspondence

Hello, and happy Friday! It has been a long, sweltering summer — one that, luckily for me, spanned beaches as far flung as SoCal, the Côte d'Azur, the southeast of England, the Costa Brava, and one pretty sizable Austrian lake. In order, from top left: Carlsbad, California; Nice, France; Broadstairs, England; Blanes, Spain, and Lake Stubenberg, Austria. But summer is nearly over, and so too is this inadvertent pause to our correspondence, which I’m hoping to return to with a bit more regularity.

Hello, and happy Friday! In our last correspondence, I speculated that I might become a little insufferable if my beloved Arsenal won the Premier League — a feat that, at that point, had eluded the club for more than two decades. In this one, I can confirm that I was right to be concerned. Your author pictured among the throngs of fans outside the Emirates Stadium on the night Arsenal were named Premier League champions.

Hello, and happy Friday! Yesterday marked an exciting development in my years-long journey to becoming a full-fledged Brit: I voted in my first UK election. This was a local election, but the days leading up to the vote felt every bit as intense as any of the general elections I’ve covered in the past. Canvassers became fixtures in our neighborhood, armed with pamphlets and stump speeches.

Hello, happy Friday and — to those observing — Eid Mubarak! It’s hard to feel celebratory given the state of, well, everything. As my Reuters’ colleagues reported this week, the U.S. is weighing the deployment of thousands of troops to the region — an outcome that only a small fraction of Americans would actually support, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll — while global markets reel from the impact the war is having on energy exports.

Hello, and … well, it’s Friday. This correspondence comes to you from my sick bed, where I’ve been confined since getting struck down with what I can only describe as the plague earlier this week. On the bright side: I’ve had plenty of time to watch the news, which has more dystopian twists and turns than anything Netflix can offer.

Hello, and happy almost Friday. In my nearly decade-long career in journalism, I’ve witnessed many rounds of layoffs — but none quite as brutal as the one that befell TheWashington Post this week. Well, not “befell,” exactly. That makes it sound like an unfortunate accident or an inevitable twist of fate. The reality was far more deliberate.

Hello, and happy new year! In a bid to put as much distance between myself and my laptop as possible during the festive period, I neglected to send my usual end-of-year correspondence. As fulfilling as 2025 was on a personal level — from starting my new role at Reuters to running my first marathon — it wasn’t a year I was particularly eager to look back on. One only need look back on some of its most profound images to understand why.

Hello, and happy Friday! This correspondence took an unscheduled hibernation over the past few weeks, during which I flew back to California, celebrated my first Thanksgiving on U.S. soil in nearly a decade, and soaked up some sunshine — something that now only exists in Brits’ fondest memories.

Hello, and happy Friday! Last weekend, I finally checked off a major bucket-list item: running my first marathon. The hardest part wasn’t just enduring the 26.2 miles up and down Lisbon’s beautiful coastline — it was telling (almost) no one I’d signed up for the race in the first place. The reason for that was pretty simple: As excited as I was to take on a new distance, I dreaded becoming one of those insufferable runners who signs up for a race only to talk of nothing else for months.

Hello, and happy Friday. This week marked two years since Oct. 7, 2023 — the deadliest day in Israel’s history and the start of what would become the deadliest war on Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948. I’ve spent much of these past two years writing about the war — from the man-made famine it produced to the technological precision with which it killed more than 67,000 people, among them entire families.