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…
Sheridan Smith and the Global Anxiety Supply Chain By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent-at-Large Somewhere between a UN climate summit and a TikTok livestream of a cat wearing a tiny tuxedo, the planet found itself briefly transfixed by the latest “Sheridan Smith drama.” For readers who have spent the past decade in a cave—presumably a more…
Where to Buy Powerball Tickets: A Globe-Trotting Guide to the World’s Most Expensive Daydream By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, Still Jet-Lagged and Morally Ambiguous NEW YORK – If you’ve glanced at the headlines lately, you’ll know the Powerball jackpot has swollen to a sum that would make a small nation blush—roughly the GDP of Iceland, minus…
Turkey vs Serbia: When Two Middle Powers Decide to Throw Elbows in the Balkan Playground By the time you read this, the latest diplomatic “flare-up” between Ankara and Belgrade may have already been memory-holed by the next algorithmic outrage. Still, for those keeping score on how small, proud nations weaponize history, the Turkey–Serbia spat is…
Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian-born pop-intellectual with the hair of a startled alpaca and the delivery of a bedtime-storyteller who moonlights as a management consultant, has managed to export a very particular brand of reassuring explanation to every corner of the globe. From Lagos traffic jams to Tokyo bullet-train lounges, airport bookstores still stack The Tipping…
