Figma’s Phantom IPO: How a Design-Tool Darling Became the Rorschach Test for Late-Stage Capitalism By the time you finish reading this sentence, another unicorn will have galloped past the slaughterhouse gates. Among them, Figma—purveyor of cloud-based rectangles and the preferred doodle-pad of every product manager who thinks Helvetica is a personality—is once again flirting with…
How Much Is a Powerball Ticket? The $2 Passport to Pan-Global Delusion By Our Man in the Departure Lounge The short, almost insultingly straightforward answer is: two dollars, give or take a state-tax rounding error. That’s it—less than a flat white in Melbourne, cheaper than a single ride on the London Tube, and markedly less…
Double Jeopardy: The World’s Favorite Get-Out-of-Jail Card By M. Sardonique, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker The phrase “double jeopardy” sounds like a misguided game show—two rounds of misery for the price of one—but in the legal world it’s the velvet rope that keeps prosecutors from hammering the same defendant until the jury finally stops sleeping….
Eurobasket 2025: When the Continent’s Fractured Egos Learn to Share One Orange Ball and a Trophy By the Global Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker Berlin—The biennial festival of hardwood nationalism known as Eurobasket has rolled back into town, and once again Europe is pretending that twenty-four countries can resolve centuries of mutual suspicion by sweating through…
American Eagle Outfitters—ticker symbol AEO, for anyone still pretending retail tickers are more than three-letter horoscopes—has spent the year behaving like a jet-lagged tourist: stumbling out of bed in Pittsburgh, checking its passport, and suddenly discovering the rest of the planet exists. The stock is up roughly 60 % since January, a figure that sounds…
Figma’s Quarterly Miracle: How a Free Design Tool Convinced the Planet to Pay Rent for Pixels By Dave Correspondent-at-Large, wired on lukewarm coffee in a hotel whose Wi-Fi is sponsored by regret San Francisco, Wednesday, 2 a.m. local—The earnings call began with the obligatory “record-breaking” superlative, continued through a PowerPoint deck that looked suspiciously like…
Jenna Ortega and the Global Afterlife of Wednesday Addams By a Correspondent Who Once Interviewed a Somali Pirate About Streaming Royalties Somewhere between the first TikTok dance craze and the fourteenth UN Security Council briefing on cultural imperialism, Jenna Ortega became the inadvertent face of planetary adolescence. The 20-year-old actress—born in California to Mexican-Puerto Rican…
Sienna Miller and the End of the Empire’s Last Illusion By Dave’s International Desk London, Rome, Caracas—pick a capital, any capital—and you will find a glossy magazine cover asking, with breathless sincerity, what Sienna Miller wore to a film premiere you’ll never see. The question itself is a Rorschach test for the late-imperial moment: we…
The Funicular: Humanity’s Quietly Desperate Uphill Climb by “Correspondent at Large, Altitude Varies” From the cliff-hugging cars of Valparaíso to the sweat-soaked rails of Hong Kong’s Peak Tram, the funicular is the planet’s most honest confession: we are tired, we are late, and gravity has won again. While diplomats haggle over carbon targets and billionaires…
Did MrBeast Buy the NFL? A Dispatch from the End of Civilization, Probably By the time the rumor ping-ponged its way across five continents, the question had already mutated into a dozen languages: “¿MrBeast compró la NFL?”, “MrBeast hat die NFL gekauft?”, “ミスター・ビーストがNFLを買収したってマジ？” The short answer, delivered with the same enthusiasm a coroner uses to…
Bangkok, Thailand – In a move that has simultaneously thrilled gamers and sent cultural attachés scrambling for Wikipedia, Behaviour Interactive has announced that the next killer in Dead by Daylight will be the Krasue, Southeast Asia’s favorite floating vampiric head-and-entrails combo. Because nothing says “cross-cultural fun” like monetizing a region’s collective nightmare since the 14th…
The Ballad of Ryan Helsley: When a Fastball Becomes a Diplomatic Incident By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic In an age when trade wars are fought on Twitter and climate summits end in steak dinners, the most electrifying act of international brinkmanship this month came from a 29-year-old man with…
