The Mask That Went Global: How a 5’6″ Luchador from Tijuana Became the World’s Smallest Soft-Power Superpower By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, humanity decided its cultural ambassadors would no longer be violinists or Nobel laureates but a man in a sequined balaclava…
NATO’s Existential Midlife Crisis, Starring Donald Trump and Your Peace of Mind By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If NATO were a person, it would be that fifty-something divorcee who just woke up to find half the household budget missing and an ex texting “I never loved you anyway.” The ex, in this case, is Donald…
The planet is now so comprehensively insured that, should a meteor obliterate the Eastern Seaboard tomorrow, actuaries in Zurich would yawn, adjust their spreadsheets, and schedule a Zoom call before the dust cloud reached Europe. In 2024, insurance is less a safety net than the world’s largest, most neurotic casino—one where every house always wins,…
Nationwide Building Society: The Last Great British Mutual Standing, or Just the Slowest to Fall? LONDON—From a safe distance—say, a rooftop bar in Singapore, a co-working bunker in Berlin, or a tax-efficient villa in Dubai—Nationwide Building Society can look almost quaint. A 175-year-old British institution that still calls itself a “mutual,” as if the word…
Logan Paul: The Export America Keeps Pretending It Didn’t Ship PARIS – Somewhere between a McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées and a Zara on Istiklal Avenue, it dawned on me that Logan Paul is less a YouTuber than a cultural analogue of the plastic straw: cheap, globally ubiquitous, and—once you’ve seen it jammed up a sea…
In the grand bazaar of global celebrity, where fame is traded like Bitcoin on a Tuesday afternoon, Earvin “Magic” Johnson remains the rarest of coins: one that hasn’t devalued, re-minted, or vanished into a forgotten wallet. From Lagos to Lisbon, Beijing to Bogotá, the man who once spun no-look passes in Forum purple now spins…
WNBA Playoffs 2025: When a Mid-Court Trap Becomes Geopolitical Theater By Our Correspondent, writing from a hotel bar that still thinks “mocktail” is a hate crime FIBA’s headquarters in Mies, Switzerland, is a concrete slab that looks like it was designed during a particularly bitter divorce. Inside, executives have spent the summer watching the 2025…
Nick Kurtz, the American catcher who this week signed a reported $4 million deal with the Oakland Athletics, is not yet famous enough to be recognized in the world’s better hotel lobbies. Give it a nanosecond. In an age when a bored Finnish teenager can tank a multinational bank with a meme, the ripple effects…
The Las Vegas Raiders: America’s Wandering Sin-Eater By Dave’s Locker International Desk For the third time in sixty-five years, the Oakland-turned-Los-Angeles-turned-Oakland-again Raiders have folded their tents, slipped the local bonds of affection, and set up shop in Las Vegas—a city whose civic motto might as well be “Your moral bankruptcy, now with comped drinks.” The…
Omaha, Nebraska – a city whose name most of the planet only recognises from a 1995 Soderbergh film or from Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder jamboree, where billionaires pretend that cherry Coke counts as a food group. Yet this modest Midwestern grid of stockyards and start-ups has quietly become a geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see…
New England, the six-state corner of the United States that once fancied itself the moral cockpit of the Western world, has spent the last 400 years oscillating between revolutionary zeal and artisanal smugness. From a safe remove—say, a café terrace in Lisbon where the espresso still costs less than a Boston parking ticket—its latest incarnation…
**Kendrick Lamar: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Prophet from Compton Who Terrifies Dictators** *From the barrios of Bogotá to the banlieues of Paris, one man’s trauma becomes everyone’s anthem* The first time a Kenyan taxi driver in Nairobi asked if I’d heard “Alright,” I realized Kendrick Lamar had accomplished what American foreign policy never could: convincing the…
