California’s Proposition 50 is, at first glance, a gloriously bureaucratic footnote—an asterisk on the world’s most overstuffed ballot pamphlet. Passed in June 2016, it tweaks the state constitution so that lawmakers who’ve been naughty can be suspended without pay by a two-thirds vote of their own chamber. That’s it; no fireworks, no tear-gas, no flag-draped…
Subway to Nowhere: How a Local Train Strike in Queens Became a Global Parable of Late-Stage Capitalism By the time you read this, the Long Island Rail Road may or may not be running, which is a polite way of saying the trains are reenacting Schrödinger’s thought experiment on steel wheels. A strike—threatened, then postponed,…
Somewhere between the Charles River and the apocalypse, Tufts University sits like an ivy-clad bunker for the globally anxious. From a distance, it looks like another postcard of New England autumn, but zoom in and you’ll see a campus where future diplomats, vaccine engineers, and hedge-fund ethicists rehearse for a planet that may not bother…
The Rumor That Leapt Time Zones By Dave’s Locker International Desk It began, as all modern plagues do, with a half-charged phone battery in a Lagos airport lounge. A WhatsApp voice note—breathless, 19 seconds, accompanied by the obligatory “Fwd many times” disclaimer—claimed that an unnamed “high official” had defected, carrying a flash drive fatter than…
Rhinos vs Dragons: A Global Cage Match in Which Everyone Loses By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, still filing from the departure lounge of life KUALA LUMPUR—On paper, the matchup looks absurd: two tons of armor-plated herbivore versus a mythical jet-engine reptile that doubles as a medieval flamethrower. Yet this is 2024, and the paper has…
The Netflix series “Accused” has now been binge-gorged in 190 countries, subtitled into 34 languages, and meme-ified by teenagers who think “habeas corpus” is a Harry Potter spell. From Buenos Aires to Baku, viewers watch the same 45-minute morality play: an ordinary schmuck stands in the dock, flashbacks reveal how quickly decency curdles, and a…
Astros-Blue Jays: A Cosmic Game of Avian Revenge Played Out on a Dying Planet By Dave’s Foreign Bureau, filed from a press box that still smells faintly of 2017 champagne and 2020 disinfectant If you squint hard enough from the international space station, Houston’s Minute Maid Park and Toronto’s Rogers Centre look like two Lite-Brite…
Laura Ingraham: America’s Favorite Export of Manufactured Outrage Hits the Global Market By a Correspondent Who Has Seen Angrier Sunrises in Cheaper Countries Somewhere between the koi ponds of Davos and the karaoke bars of Seoul, an odd export from the United States has quietly gone viral: Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host whose nightly…
Jair Bolsonaro: The Tropical Trump Who Refused to Leave Quietly SÃO PAULO—While the rest of the planet spent the early 2020s arguing over pandemic etiquette and whether Netflix thumbnails now count as culture, Brazil elected the world’s loudest denialist, watched him botch a public-health crisis with almost artistic incompetence, and then endured his extended tantrum…
The Bishop Who Streams Salvation: Robert Barron’s Digital Empire and the Vatican’s Netflix Strategy ROME—While Silicon Valley titans race to colonize Mars and Wall Street wizards invent new ways to lose other people’s money, Bishop Robert Barron has quietly built something far more ambitious: a global Catholic media empire that makes Netflix’s content library look…
Chief Justice John Roberts is a man who, for reasons best known to himself, decided to spend his twilight years refereeing a constitutional demolition derby in which every contestant is driving a monster truck labeled “Originalism,” “Stare Decisis,” or “Whatever Gets Me on the 6 o’clock News.” From Lagos to Lisbon, bureaucrats, barristers, and bored…
The Gospel According to Meagan Good, or How a California Church Dress Scandal Became the Planet’s Latest Morality Play In the 48 hours after Meagan Good stepped onto an Atlanta red carpet wearing a cut-out, silver lamé gown that appeared held together by hope and two strategically-placed rhinestones, the incident followed the classic arc of…
