St. Elmo’s Fire: The World’s Oldest Blue-Light Special, Now Playing on Every Continent By Dave’s Locker International Desk Dateline: Somewhere between the Strait of Malacca and your doom-scrolling thumb. If you thought St. Elmo’s Fire was just an ’80s Brat Pack film about beautiful people weeping into their trust funds, congratulations—you have already grasped the…
The Fourth Amendment: America’s Most Exported Paranoia By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently self-quarantining in a non-extradition country) The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—protecting the citizenry from “unreasonable searches and seizures”—reads like a quaint postcard from 1791. On the front: powdered wigs, candlelit parlors, a polite knock before His Majesty’s agents rummage through your snuffbox….
Dirtbag Billionaire: A Global Field Guide to the New Gilded Age’s Anti-Hero By the time you finish this paragraph, another hoodie-clad centi-millionaire will have declared himself a “dirtbag billionaire” on a podcast recorded from the cargo hold of his Gulfstream. The phrase—equal parts self-deprecating marketing stunt and accurate character assessment—has already achieved the rare linguistic…
**The Sweetener Index: How Ariana Grande Tickets Became a Global Economic Barometer** In the grand theater of late-stage capitalism, nothing quite captures the zeitgeist like watching grown adults mortgage their futures for three hours of perfectly choreographed regret. From Tokyo to Tulum, the Great Ariana Grande Ticket Scramble of 2024 has evolved from mere pop…
Fabianski: The Last Firewall Standing Between Global Schadenfreude and Polish Existential Dread By “Łukasz” (because who else would write this?) WARSAW—On most Tuesdays, the Vistula still smells faintly of diesel and regret, which is fitting because that’s about when Łukasz Fabiański—goalkeeper, accidental diplomat, and the closest thing Poland has to an international insurance policy—realizes he…
Wetherspoons: The Last Honest Embassy on Earth An International Correspondent’s Field Notes from the Imperial Pub Chain by “Marlowe” – filing from the Salisbury, Fleet Street, over a £2.15 “breakfast stout” The United Nations has 193 member states, but only one issues its own currency in the form of laminated beer mats and calls its…
UnitedHealth Group’s ticker, UNH, has become the planet’s barometer for how much we’re collectively willing to pay not to die. From Singapore to São Paulo, analysts watch the same squiggly line crawl across their Bloomberg terminals, interpreting each uptick as proof that sickness remains the world’s most reliable growth industry. The stock hit another all-time…
Smokey Bones Falls Off the Spit: A Post-BBQ Requiem for a Carb-Loading Civilization By Our Man in the Charcoal Cloud, somewhere between Doha and Detroit The emails hit inboxes like a wet napkin on a Formica table: Smokey Bones, America’s 61-location temple to smoked meats and bottomless fries, is quietly shuttering another tranche of restaurants….
From the banks of the Vistula to the Thames, and now somewhere between Warsaw and the M4, Łukasz Fabiański has spent the better part of two decades demonstrating that the best way to survive modernity is to stand perfectly still while everyone else runs in circles. A goalkeeper, yes—but also a walking metaphor for every…
# The Loser That Launched a Thousand Memes: How Japan’s Winless Wonder Became the World’s Favorite Underdog If you’ve spent any time online this week, you’ve probably seen the clip: a glossy brown racehorse charges down the home stretch, legs pistoning, jockey crouched like a panicked origami crane—only to finish stone-cold last, again. Meet Haru…
Word Games as World Order: How a Quiet September 9 Grid Became the Planet’s Most Democratic Power Struggle By Tomas “Tommy” Verdier, Senior International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker VIENNA—At 3 a.m. local time, while diplomats at the UN snored over draft resolutions on carbon credits, 3.4 million civilians from Reykjavík to Rabat were locked in a…
Kathmandu’s weather is famously unreliable—monsoon one minute, smog the next—so it’s fitting that Sher Bahadur Deuba has popped in and out of the prime minister’s chair more often than a Himalayan teahouse changes its Wi-Fi password. On 13 July 2021, the 75-year-old liberal warhorse saddled up for his fifth non-consecutive term, a feat that would…
