Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, Is the Last Global Fairy Tale Standing—And That Should Terrify Us All By Our Correspondent in Self-Imposed Exile from Several Commonwealth Realms Somewhere between the collapse of the British pound and the collapse of British politics lies Catherine, Princess of Wales—still smiling that serene, orthodontically perfect smile while the rest…
Melania Trump: The World’s Most Expensive Sphinx Finally Speaks—Sort Of By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-medicating with Slovenian wine in an undisclosed Balkan café The global press corps collectively dropped its lukewarm espresso this week when Melania Trump—international woman of mystery, former catalogue sphinx, and current resident of a gilded Florida mausoleum—stepped back into the…
Lucy Lawless and the Fine Art of Global Iconoclasm by “Roving” Rodrigo Valdez, filed from the last decent bar in Auckland that still serves journalists on expense accounts Auckland—Somewhere between the 1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2023 global polycrisis, the planet decided it needed a six-foot Kiwi warrior princess to explain the concept of…
The Mountain State’s Weekly Mirage: How West Virginia’s Lottery Became a Global Parable of Hope and Desperation By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough from the right altitude, the West Virginia Lottery looks like a modest civic ritual: $1 tickets, pastel scratch-offs, and the nightly televised drum-roll that temporarily distracts 1.8 million…
Generation Z: The Planet’s First Global Cohort Learns to Live on the Ashes of Optimism By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg If you want to meet Generation Z in the wild, skip the TikTok montages and try the overnight bus from Nairobi to Kampala. You’ll find them trading memes about climate collapse in…
Mozambique’s fisheries minister is weeping into her morning espresso. The yen just hit a 34-year low. Somewhere in Lagos a data-center hums loud enough to drown out the muezzin. And yet, on every continent, a certain strain of disaffected human is still pressing play on “How Soon Is Now?”—proof that even as the planet overheats,…
Olly Murs and the Quiet Collapse of the Post-Brexit Pop Empire A dispatch from the wreckage of global soft power, with sequins. By the time the first missile fragments rained down over the Red Sea, Olly Murs was somewhere above the Persian Gulf in seat 3A, rehearsing falsetto runs for an Abu Dhabi brunch crowd…
Mamdani: A Name That Travels—Sometimes with a Passport, Sometimes Without By Our Man in Every Terminal Lounge If you say “Mamdani” in a faculty club in New York, you’ll summon a polite nod to Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan polymath whose books on colonial ghosts and post-colonial hangover are heavier than the guilt in an IMF…
Molly Smith and the Great Global Rebranding of Absolutely Nothing By Our Correspondent, still jet-lagged in Terminal 3 Dateline: Somewhere between Reykjavik and regret Somewhere in the churning stomach of international capitalism, Molly Smith has become the latest placebo we swallow when the world’s indigestion flares. Who is Molly Smith? Pick a continent and you’ll…
Maryland’s Little Gamble: How a Mid-Atlantic Scratch-Off Became a Mirror for the Planet’s Desperate Daydreams By Diego “House Always Wins” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker BALTIMORE—On the surface, the Maryland Lottery looks like any other state-run numbers racket: garishly colored tickets, an app that pings like a needy ex, and billboards promising that someone, somewhere,…
Victoria: A Name That Conquered the World and Still Won’t Pick Up the Check By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent Somewhere between Duty-Free and Disillusionment There are, at last count, roughly 1.3 million Victorias on LinkedIn alone—enough to fill a medium-sized authoritarian parade and still have a queue outside the bar. From the diamond mines of…
Achieve: A Global Tour of the Impossible Dream, Now 30 % Off By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Terminal 3 and Existential Dread “Achieve,” the travel brochure promises, is a quaint village reachable by anyone with grit, Wi-Fi, and a premium LinkedIn subscription. In reality it’s more of a floating island—today moored off the coast of…
