Rome, Eternal City—where the Wi-Fi is patchy but the frescoes have held up for five centuries. From the Colosseum’s selfie-stick perimeter to the Senate’s revolving-door premiership, Italy keeps demonstrating that collapsing empires are a renewable resource. The rest of the world watches with the same expression tourists wear when their €18 gelato melts onto €250…
Unknown Number: The Global Panic in Your Pocket By Eduardo “Eddy” Valdez, Senior Paranoia Correspondent PARIS—Somewhere between croissant number three and the daily existential dread of climate reports, I received a call from a number my phone labeled “Maybe: Death.” Naturally, I answered. The line clicked, a synthesized voice whispered “We know what you did,”…
Julianne Hough, the Utah-born dancer who once glided across American living rooms in sequined anonymity, has now pirouetted onto a far larger stage: the planet’s collective nervous breakdown. From the Dolby Theatre to Davos, from TikTok’s algorithmic abyss to a sweat lodge in the Swiss Alps, Hough’s recent career pivot—part corporate-wellness messiah, part high-end grief…
Giorgio Armani, the 89-year-old maestro of Milanese understatement, has spent half a century selling the world a very expensive mirage: the promise that if we just button the right shade of greige, we too can glide through geopolitical meltdowns with the serene detachment of a man who has never once spilled espresso on his lapel….
Kelly Ripa, Live from the End of the World By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Atlantic and Existential Dread NEW YORK—At precisely 9:00 a.m. Eastern, while glaciers calve and supply chains snap like cheap bracelets, Kelly Ripa greets America with the smile of someone who has already finished her Pilates and her Pinot. The studio…
PARIS – In the long, tedious annals of human attention‐seeking, few phenomena travel faster than a twenty-something American who can contort his face like Silly Putty and speak fluent internet. Enter Drew “Druski” Desbordes, a Georgian (the state, not the country) whose primary export is the sort of manic befuddlement that translates into every language…
September Horoscopes, or How the Planet Learns to Hold Its Breath Again Dave’s Locker, International Desk The ninth month arrives like a polite summons from an accountant: time to tally summer’s sins before the fiscal year of autumn closes the books. Across time zones and tax brackets, roughly eight billion bipeds glance skyward, hoping the…
Kazakhstan versus Wales: a fixture that sounds like the punch-line to an obscure geopolitical joke, yet here we are, pretending it matters. On paper it’s a UEFA Nations League group game; in practice it is a morality play staged for the benefit of arm-chair Brahmins from Bishkek to Bangor, all of whom have Wi-Fi strong…
The Global Joke Index: How One-Liners Are Quietly Steering Geopolitics By Our Correspondent in Perpetual Transit VIENNA—While the rest of the press corps was busy dissecting grainy satellite photos of missile silos last week, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe quietly released a more explosive document: the first-ever Global Joke Index (GJI). The…
San Salvador, El Salvador – If you squint past the heat haze, the place looks almost hopeful. Glass towers glint where bullet casings once did, Bitcoin ATMs wink like slot machines, and the president’s Twitter feed is a 24/7 motivational poster with the occasional AK-47 cameo. From Berlin boardrooms to Beijing Belt-and-Road spreadsheets, the world…
The Beautiful Catastrophe: How 22 Millionaires Chasing a Ball Became the Planet’s Last Universal Language By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When the lights go up in Doha, Dortmund, or downtown Dakar, the same curious ritual unfolds: grown adults scream at a sphere while other grown adults scream at screens showing the sphere. From the marble…
The ADP National Employment Report dropped this morning like an overpriced latte on a marble trading-floor desk: briefly scalding, quickly mopped up, and instantly debated by people whose bonuses depend on pretending to know what it means. According to America’s largest private-payroll processor, U.S. private employers added a breezy 192,000 jobs in April—comfortably above the…
