If you stand on any international film-festival red carpet long enough, you’ll spot Benny Safdie orbiting the chaos like a benign black hole: quietly warping space-time while the rest of us scramble for canapés. The curly-haired half of the Safdie brothers has spent the past decade dragging American indie cinema—kicking, screaming, and probably high on…
Kevin Bacon: The Global Village’s Favorite Piece of String By the time the sun rises over the Sea of Japan, a salaryman in Osaka has already discovered he is four steps from Kevin Bacon via a K-drama star who once studied at UCLA. At the same instant, a bleary-eyed student in Lagos updates her thesis…
**Whiskey, Heartbreak, and the Global Village: Chris Stapleton as Accidental Diplomat** *By Our Correspondent Who’s Watched Empires Fall but Never Missed a Good Guitar Solo* NASHVILLE—While the world busies itself weaponizing trade routes and TikTok trends, a bearded Kentucky export named Chris Stapleton has been quietly achieving what the State Department gave up on sometime…
The Virginia Lottery’s latest “$1.3-billion-prize-that-nobody-claimed” kerfuffle has been greeted abroad with the same polite horror reserved for American cheese-in-a-can: fascinating, slightly nauseating, and impossible to look away from. From Lagos to Ljubljana, headlines asked the same question: how do you misplace a life-altering fortune when inflation is devouring paychecks faster than a TikTok trend? The…
Jameson Williams: How One Speedster’s Hamstring Became a Geopolitical Flashpoint By Dave’s Locker, World Affairs Desk PARIS—On Tuesday, while the European Central Bank was busy attempting to convince 450 million citizens that negative interest rates are somehow a personality trait, another drama with far graver implications was unfolding across the Atlantic: Detroit Lions wide receiver…
From the Deck of a Slowly Sinking Cruise Ship Somewhere Between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mariana Trench by Our Correspondent-at-Large, still waiting for the Wi-Fi to load The phrase “Sam Houston vs Hawaii” sounds like the kind of fever dream you’d get after eating too much poke washed down with lukewarm Lone Star…
**Live from New York, It’s a Global Fever Dream: Why the World Still Watches SNL Tonight** While missiles arc over the Black Sea and container ships queue like depressed ducks outside Shanghai, a curious planetary ritual unfolds at 23:30 Eastern every autumn-to-spring Saturday: thirty-odd million humans—from Lagos living rooms to Hanoi hostels—tune in for ninety…
PHOENIX—In a strip-mall bodega where the refrigerated air smells faintly of microwave burritos and unfulfilled ambition, a man named Ernesto—who swears he once shook hands with the Pope’s second cousin—just handed over six crumpled dollars for a slip of paper promising him a one-in-302-million chance at the Arizona Lottery’s “The Pick.” Half a world away,…
When the University of Michigan announced the “indefinite suspension” of its head football coach, Jim Harbaugh, the initial reaction in Ann Arbor was predictable: grown men in maize-and-blue jerseys weeping into their overpriced IPAs. Yet halfway around the world, the tremor registered differently. In Singapore, traders at the Marina Bay futures desk briefly paused their…
**The Global Gloom Merchant: How Tim Burton Became the World’s Favorite Dealer of Beautiful Nightmares** In a world where reality increasingly resembles a fever dream designed by committee, Tim Burton has accidentally become our most reliable cartographer of the absurd. While politicians peddle optimism like snake oil and tech bros promise us salvation through slightly…
**The Geopolitics of a Division Race: How the NL West Became a Proxy War for Global Anxiety** While the world watches actual proxy wars, supply chain collapses, and the slow-motion demolition of the international order, the National League West has quietly emerged as baseball’s most compelling metaphor for twenty-first-century power struggles. If you squint hard…
The Global Countdown to Westeros: How House of the Dragon Season 3 Became the World’s Most Expensive Collective Therapy Session Winter, that old reliable PR agent for existential dread, is still coming. Yet from the frostbitten suburbs of Helsinki to the sweat-glazed favelas of Rio, humanity has decided the best use of its remaining fossil-fuel…
