A long time ago—1977, to be exact—in a studio lot far, far away (Burbank), a cash-strapped George Lucas stitched together leftover WWII dog-fight footage, samurai tropes, and Joseph Campbell’s refrigerator-magnet philosophy. The result was Star Wars, a scrappy B-movie that accidentally became the planet’s most efficient soft-power delivery system since the British Empire served gin….
VATICAN CITY—In what seasoned curial insiders are calling “the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hostile takeover,” the global church woke up this week to discover that the Holy Spirit—long presumed to be a dove—has apparently pivoted into venture capital. The Synod on Synodality, a two-year circular conversation that began with earnest Zoom breakout rooms and ends…
Wayward Netflix, Wayward Pines: A Parable for the Streaming Apocalypse By Our Bureau Chief Emeritus, still technically on sabbatical in Geneva The news that Netflix has quietly shuffled *Wayward Pines*—that M. Night Shyamalan-produced fever dream about a town where time, ethics, and plot coherence all go to die—into its “Leaving Soon” carousel should have registered…
The World According to Russell M. Nelson: A Non-Mormon Planet Watches a 99-Year-Old Heart Surgeon Rewrite Global Religion in Real Time By Dave’s Locker International Bureau In the grand geopolitical casino, where nuclear buttons are fondled like worry beads and billionaires race to Mars to escape the mess they financed, Russell M. Nelson has quietly…
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…
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…
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,…
Croatia: The Mediterranean’s Prettiest Paradox Quietly Wagging the World The first thing international investors notice about Croatia is that its coastline looks like Italy’s but costs half as much—an observation that makes Venetian real-estate agents pray to Saint Mark with renewed fervor. Yet beyond the terracotta roofs and Game-of-Thrones gift-shop tedium, this nation of 3.8…
A Passport, a Pen, and the Gentle Art of Making Dictators Sweat By Our Correspondent in Self-Imposed Exile™ Somewhere between the duty-free tequila in Mexico City’s Terminal 2 and the fluorescent purgatory of a European layover, Jorge Ruvalcaba—investigative reporter, migration nerd, and occasional migraine to three sitting presidents—boards yet another red-eye. The boarding pass says…
Jack Jenkins Has Entered the Chat: One Man, Many Passports, Infinite Implications By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic The name “Jack Jenkins” keeps popping up on expense reports from Lagos to Lviv, in encrypted Signal threads, and—most recently—in the metadata of a leaked EU white paper on “non-state strategic communicators.” Depending on which border…
North Carolina: The World’s Favorite Overachieving Backwater By Pascal “Pax” Delacorte, International Correspondent at Large RALEIGH—If the planet were a high-school reunion, North Carolina would be the once-overlooked kid who now shows up in a rented Tesla, quoting Latin and smelling faintly of both artisanal bourbon and litigation. From the outside, this oblong patch of…
Colorado: The World’s Most Expensive Petting Zoo for Tech Burnouts and Powder Addicts By Marcello van der Waals, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker DENVER—Somewhere between the 12-dollar oat-milk cortado and the boutique axe-throwing bar, it hits you: Colorado is less a U.S. state than a multinational experiment in what happens when hedge-fund refugees discover altitude sickness….
