Craig Mazin and the Global Glow-Up of Nuclear Anxiety By Dave’s Locker, International Desk It takes a peculiar talent to make the world voluntarily re-ignite its nightmares about glowing rain and two-headed livestock, yet Craig Mazin has managed it twice—first with a fungus that turns gamers into clickers, and then, more alarmingly, with a reactor…
Sinner: The World’s Favorite Scapegoat, Now Available in Multiple Languages By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent Who Has Personally Sinned on Three Continents Before Breakfast PARIS—If you believe the marketing, the term “sinner” has never been more cosmopolitan. Once the exclusive property of medieval flagellants and small-town preachers armed with megaphones and cholesterol, the label is…
Silksong: The Phantom Game That Has the Whole World Waiting—And Why That Says Everything About Us Dave’s Locker | International Desk | 06.11.2024 Somewhere between the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the next scheduled heat-death of Twitter, humanity has found a new shared obsession: a 2-D bug princess who may or may…
Osaka – Population: 19 million, Sarcasm: Infinite By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (still jet-lagged since 2019) If Tokyo is the world’s impeccably ironed suit, Osaka is the same suit after it’s slept in a capsule hotel, eaten three sticks of kushikatsu, and decided to pick a fight with the global order. Long dismissed abroad as…
CenterPoint Energy: Houston, We Have a Grid Problem (and It’s Contagious) By the time the lights flickered out in Texas last February, the rest of the planet had already stopped pretending to be surprised. After all, we’ve spent the last decade watching power grids from South Africa to Siberia audition for the same tragicomedy: one…
Argentina: The World’s Most Consistently Unpredictable Soap Opera By: A Correspondent Who Learned Long Ago Never to Bet Against a Country That’s Already Bankrupt Twice Before Lunch Buenos Aires cafés still smell of burnt sugar and desperation, which is convenient because the IMF is currently asking for both back—preferably in dollars. While the rest of…
The Bridge of Spies: A Cold War Waltz That Never Quite Ended By Dave’s Locker International Desk Berlin—There’s something irresistibly comic about the fact that the most famous prisoner exchange in modern history happened on a bridge named after a dead communist, supervised by men who would all eventually be played by Oscar winners. Welcome…
Musetti: A Global Love Affair With a Twelve-Cent Doughnut Hole By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the last functioning traffic light in Naples, the planet has quietly agreed that the pinnacle of human ingenuity is a sugar-dusted sphere of fried dough the size of a golf ball. Italians call it musetti;…
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…
