Nintendo Direct: The Planet Holds Its Breath While a Japanese Toymaker Reboots Our Collective Delusion By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Kyoto, 6 a.m. local time: salarymen stumble off night trains clutching convenience-store coffee, commuters queue for bullet-train platforms, and a small island nation quietly steers the attention span of eight billion people. Elsewhere, the…
Spotify Lossless: Because Your Existential Dread Now Deserves 24-Bit Clarity By Dave’s Locker International Desk COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between a NATO summit and a climate-crisis brunch, the world’s most influential music streamer finally admitted what every audiophile from Lagos to Lisbon has muttered since 2015: yes, compressed audio is the sonic equivalent of drinking boxed wine at…
When Xavier Gipson, a 22-year-old undrafted receiver from Stephen F. Austin, took the opening kickoff of overtime 65 yards to the house against the Buffalo Bills last September, the planet did not wobble on its axis. The Amazon rainforest did not burst into spontaneous applause, and no Swiss banker adjusted his ledger. Yet in that…
Stephen Curry, the 6-foot-2 human highlight reel from Akron-by-way-of-Davidson, has spent the last decade turning the world’s most American pastime into a kind of transnational cult—and he did it by weaponizing geometry like a bored teenager with a protractor and a grudge. While other superstars sold sneakers, Curry sold parabolas: rainbow arcs that travel farther…
Lossless Spotify: When the Planet Burns, but at Least the Cymbals Sparkle By Dave’s International Bureau of First-World Problems ZURICH—In a world where the Arctic is auditioning for a slush-puppy commercial and democracy comes with optional subtitles, Spotify has finally rolled out lossless audio to 180 countries. The feature—marketed as “HiFi” because “We Found Another…
The planet has, at long last, received the cosmic equivalent of a “save the date” card: Avengers: Doomsday is officially penciled in for May 2026. Naturally, the announcement did not arrive via diplomatic cable or UN press release, but via a carefully choreographed livestream from the Sanctum Sanctorum of Brand Synergy—Disney’s Investor Day—where Robert Downey…
The Summer I Turned Pretty, Episode 10: A Dispatch from the End of the Empire’s Beach Towel By Dave’s Locker’s Senior Correspondent for Soft Power and Coastal Melodrama Geneva, 03:14 a.m. local time—while COP delegates in Bonn argue over half-degree Celsius increments and the Indian monsoon politely drowns another election cycle, the true geopolitical fault…
Tunis—population 2.7 million, median age 32, SPF factor “wishful thinking”—sits on the Mediterranean like a cynical postcard: azure sea on one side, sub-Saharan migration routes on the other, and a constitution that’s been rewritten so often it qualifies as performance art. To the wider world, Tunisia’s capital is either the place where the Arab Spring…
Emma Heming Willis and the Global Cottage Industry of Sympathy By Diego Vélez, International Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS—While the rest of us were busy panic-buying eggs and doom-scrolling through the latest geopolitical fire sale in Eastern Europe, Emma Heming Willis—model, entrepreneur, reluctant poster-child for the modern caregiving economy—quietly became a one-woman transnational Rorschach test. If…
Global Mail: The Quiet Bureaucrats Who Decide Whether Your Nasty Letter Crosses a Border by Our Correspondent, currently somewhere between two time zones and several broken scanners PARIS—Somewhere in the fluorescent bowels of La Poste’s sorting hub at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, a man named Étienne is weighing a postcard of the Eiffel Tower against the possibility that…
**The Monument to a World That Never Learned** The twin reflecting pools descend 30 feet into the earth like inverted towers, each acre of falling water designed to drown out the sounds of a city that apparently never learned to listen. On any given Tuesday—because terror, like capitalism, never takes holidays—you’ll find the 9/11 Memorial…
Binance: The Borderless Bazaar Where Nations Go to Window-Shop Sovereignty By Diego “Ledger” Mercier, Dave’s Locker International Desk It is 3:14 a.m. in Singapore, 7:14 p.m. in Lagos, and wherever you are, Changpeng Zhao—better known as CZ, the hoodie-wearing Houdini of high finance—is probably still awake, jogging in place on a yacht that exists only…
