Keanu Reeves: The Last Reluctant Globalist By Lena Drăghici, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the bullet-time lobby shootout and the NFT apocalypse, Keanu Reeves became the world’s only universally acceptable export. While Boeing can’t keep its doors attached and Silicon Valley keeps reinventing the fax machine with blockchain sprinkles, the 59-year-old actor glides through…
Michelle Dockery and the Aristocratic Hangover: How One English Actress Became a Global Rorschach Test PARIS—On a rain-slick Wednesday along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, I watched a French teenager in a knock-off Downton Abbey maid’s apron pose for TikTok beside a homeless man selling knock-off Downton Abbey tea towels. Both were, in their own ways, paying…
Harvard, that venerable brick-and-ivy ATM for the ruling class, has lately become the planet’s most expensive piñata. From Brasília boardrooms to Bangalore coffee shops, the university is now cited as shorthand for a global elite that can’t quite decide whether it’s enlightened or simply entitled. When the Supreme Court clipped its affirmative-action wings last June,…
Paris, 14 July – The planet’s film critics have spent the past fortnight in a collective swoon over Emerald Fennell, a 38-year-old British polymath who appears to have cracked the algorithm for making audiences laugh, squirm, and question their moral compasses—all while wearing couture. From Cannes to Busan, from the Dolby Theatre to whatever windowless…
How Much Is a Powerball Ticket? The $2 Passport to Pan-Global Delusion By Our Man in the Departure Lounge The short, almost insultingly straightforward answer is: two dollars, give or take a state-tax rounding error. That’s it—less than a flat white in Melbourne, cheaper than a single ride on the London Tube, and markedly less…
Double Jeopardy: The World’s Favorite Get-Out-of-Jail Card By M. Sardonique, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker The phrase “double jeopardy” sounds like a misguided game show—two rounds of misery for the price of one—but in the legal world it’s the velvet rope that keeps prosecutors from hammering the same defendant until the jury finally stops sleeping….
Sienna Miller and the End of the Empire’s Last Illusion By Dave’s International Desk London, Rome, Caracas—pick a capital, any capital—and you will find a glossy magazine cover asking, with breathless sincerity, what Sienna Miller wore to a film premiere you’ll never see. The question itself is a Rorschach test for the late-imperial moment: we…
The Funicular: Humanity’s Quietly Desperate Uphill Climb by “Correspondent at Large, Altitude Varies” From the cliff-hugging cars of Valparaíso to the sweat-soaked rails of Hong Kong’s Peak Tram, the funicular is the planet’s most honest confession: we are tired, we are late, and gravity has won again. While diplomats haggle over carbon targets and billionaires…
Turkey vs Serbia: When Two Middle Powers Decide to Throw Elbows in the Balkan Playground By the time you read this, the latest diplomatic “flare-up” between Ankara and Belgrade may have already been memory-holed by the next algorithmic outrage. Still, for those keeping score on how small, proud nations weaponize history, the Turkey–Serbia spat is…
Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian-born pop-intellectual with the hair of a startled alpaca and the delivery of a bedtime-storyteller who moonlights as a management consultant, has managed to export a very particular brand of reassuring explanation to every corner of the globe. From Lagos traffic jams to Tokyo bullet-train lounges, airport bookstores still stack The Tipping…
Beyond the Gates: How the World’s VIP Rope Became a Geopolitical Fault Line By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific, Seat 47B For centuries, “beyond the gates” meant pasture land, graveyards, or the occasional dragon. Today it’s where the planet’s real decisions are made: the velvet-roped lounges of Davos, the blast-proof checkpoints of COP summits,…
UMass Lowell: How a Former Textile Trade School Quietly Became the Canary in Global Higher-Ed’s Coal Mine By Our Man in the Commonwealth, Nursing a Dunkin Cold Brew and Existential Dread LOWELL, Massachusetts—Somewhere between the rust-red brick of a repurposed mill and the aggressively optimistic glass of a new “Innovation Hub,” the University of Massachusetts…
