A Shot Heard ’Round the World: How a Needle the Size of a Housefly Became the Planet’s Most Contested Diplomatic Weapon Dave’s Locker | International Desk PARIS—It takes about 1.2 seconds to inject 0.3 millilitres of Pfizer-BioNTech into a deltoid, yet the global reverberations from that blink-and-you-miss-it act have kept ambassadors up later than any…
In the shadow of real-world supply-chain meltdowns, drone strikes on grain silos, and the slow-motion car crash we politely call “global governance,” one multinational conflict rages on with the moral clarity of a sugar-crazed toddler: Mario Kart. Yes, the Nintendo confection that debuted in 1992 has quietly become the planet’s most reliable diplomatic summit—equal parts…
Nicholas Hoult: The Quiet English Export Quietly Reshaping Global Pop Culture While the World Burns By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged in the smoking lounge of existence If you squint past the streaming-service menus and algorithmic fog, you’ll notice that a lanky lad from Berkshire with the surname of a small but ferocious predator has…
The Las Vegas Aviators—Triple-A farm club of the Oakland Athletics, though that parentage feels increasingly like an unpaid internship—have lately become an unlikely Rorschach test for the global condition. On any given desert night, 10,000 sun-roasted pilgrims cram into the $150 million, air-conditioned hallucination known as Las Vegas Ballpark to watch men in silver-trimmed jerseys…
Vineland: Where America’s Perpetual Midlife Crisis Goes to Die in Peace and Quiet The name itself sounds like a punch line from a forgotten Scandinavian sitcom: Vineland—population 61,000, median age 38.7, median house price $275,000, median existential dread incalculable. Yet this sun-bleached township in southern New Jersey has become an improbable global mirror, reflecting every…
Helen Flanagan, the Cheshire-raised former Coronation Street ingenue turned perennial headline-magnet, has once again managed to ricochet across the planet’s newsfeeds like a rogue ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel. This week it isn’t a jungle in Australia or a mansion in Dubai that has the world rubber-necking, but a single Instagram story in which…
ST. LOUIS VS LAFC: A MICROCOSM OF THE WORLD’S ENDLESS CAPACITY FOR SELF-CONGRATULATION By the time you read this, the final whistle will have blown on the latest episode of America’s newest prime-time soap opera, “MLS Cup Playoffs: Heartland Edition.” Somewhere between the Gateway Arch and the Hollywood sign, two cities that have never agreed…
Rosa Parks, American Civil Saint, Now a Passport Stamp for the World’s Guilt Dave’s Locker – International Desk PARIS—On any given Tuesday, a busload of Chinese tourists in matching yellow caps can be found shuffling past the Montgomery city bus where Rosa Parks once refused to surrender her seat. They pose for selfies, purchase $12…
San José Earthquakes: When the Ground Shakes, the World Shrugs By our correspondent in the land of perpetual Wi-Fi and intermittent tectonics Silicon Valley, that shimmering altar to the gods of disruption, has a dirty little secret: it sits atop one of the planet’s most industrious seismic conveyor belts. The San José Earthquake—note the singular,…
The Curious Case of Chase Roberts: A Nebraska Farm Boy Who Accidentally Became a Global Geopolitical Metaphor By the time the sun rose over the corn stubble outside Lincoln, Nebraska, Chase Roberts had already broken the internet in three languages and triggered a minor diplomatic incident in the South China Sea. Not bad for a…
Heidi Gardner: How One Woman’s Passport-Stamped Brand of Comedy Became a Geopolitical Safety Valve Kansas City to Kyoto, Lagos to Lahore—no matter how bleak the nightly newsfeed, someone, somewhere is streaming a sketch in which Heidi Gardner plays a breathy Instagram mystic named “Brenda from HR.” The joke translates because the absurdity is borderless: every…
THE SUMMER HIKARU DIED: A GLOBAL POST-MORTEM ON A VERY LOCAL GHOST By Our Correspondent Who Has Definitely Read the Manga, Thank You Tokyo, 2024 – Somewhere between the Olympic hangover and the next Godzilla reboot, Japan quietly buried a 17-year-old boy named Hikaru, and the rest of the planet barely blinked. Which is ironic,…
