If you squint at a world map long enough, the United States looks less like a republic and more like a giant, slightly frayed Wi-Fi router that occasionally forgets its own password. Somewhere near the blinking “SENATE” light sits Ron Wyden—Oregon’s senior senator, professional committee chair, and improbable apostle of digital privacy—busily trying to keep…
Dubai’s floodlit coliseum is once again hosting the world’s most polite blood-sport: Pakistan versus UAE, a fixture that sounds like the geopolitical equivalent of a LinkedIn request—cordial on the surface, quietly lethal beneath. On paper it’s only a cricket match; in practice it’s a diplomatic spreadsheet wearing athletic gear. One side represents a nuclear-armed republic…
Daily Horoscope for September 4, 2025 – A Global Forecast in Which Absolutely No One Gets Out Alive By Our Cynical Correspondent, currently orbiting the chaos from a press seat in Reykjavík REYKJAVÍK—Somewhere between the 14th volcanic belch of the year and the IMF’s 37th emergency Zoom, humanity reached for its horoscopes this morning like…
The Curious Case of Nik Bonitto, or How a Linebacker Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man at the End of the Bar, Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Somewhere between the 104th meridian west and the Prime Meridian, Nik Bonitto has become an unlikely export—Denver’s 6’3″, 240-pound outside linebacker now haunting the sleep cycles…
Nintendo eShop to Close: A Funeral March for the World’s Smallest, Most Expensive Nation-State By Dave’s International Desk (Tokyo → Rio → Lagos → Your Couch) TOKYO—On a humid Thursday, Nintendo politely informed the planet that, come March 2025, the eShop for 3DS and Wii U will flat-line. The announcement landed in fourteen languages, which…
C-SPAN: The World’s Dullest Telescope on America’s Loudest Democracy By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Every civilization eventually builds a monument to its own attention span. The Romans had the Colosseum, India has the Taj Mahal, and the United States—ever the pioneer in low-cost masochism—gave us C-SPAN. Conceived in 1979 as a charitable…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Great American Fever Dream By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—Watching Bobby Kennedy III’s namesake crisscross Iowa in a Patagonia vest and a voice hoarse from anti-vax testimonials is, for the rest of the planet, like bingeing a prestige dramedy in which the writers’…
BBC iPlayer: The Empire Streams Back By Our Man in the Ether, somewhere between GMT+8 jet-lag and existential dread The British Broadcasting Corporation, once content to beam clipped vowels into crackling short-wave radios from Lagos to Lahore, has quietly reinvented itself as the Netflix your history teacher warned you about. BBC iPlayer—originally pitched in 2007…
The Lego Death Star: A 4,016-Piece Monument to Our Global Death Drive By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between aisle 7 and existential dread GENEVA—While diplomats inside the Palais des Nations bicker over wording in Article 3(b) of yet another non-binding resolution, the real arms race is happening in toy stores from Berlin to Bangkok. Lego’s…
Honda Prelude: A Two-Door Coupé That Outlived the Cold War, the Internet, and Your Last Relationship By the time the final Prelude rolled off the Suzuka line in 2001, it had already become something no marketing department could script: a rolling fossil of the late-20th-century promise that technology might actually save us. While the planet…
Martha Plimpton: The Accidental Global Cassandra If you mention Martha Plimpton at a dinner party in Lagos, Berlin, or Buenos Aires, you are statistically more likely to be met with polite confusion than if you mention “climate change” or “crypto bankruptcy.” Yet the actress-activist—once the snarling teen outlaw of 1980s suburban cinema—has quietly become a…
MILAN—While half the planet queues for half-priced lentils and the other half frantically googles “how to survive on crypto,” Giorgio Armani is quietly staging a coup on the very concept of collapse. Forget bread lines—this week the maestro of minimalism unveiled a Spring/Summer 2025 menswear collection that looks suspiciously like what the last billionaire will…
