Gen Z Years, or How to Age Gracefully in a World That Never Learned to Adult by Our Correspondent Somewhere Between TikTok and Existential Despair The generational cartographers at Pew finally drew the line: 1997–2012. In other words, if your first phone had Snake instead of Spotify, congratulations—you’re a millennial fossil. If you learned to…
Global Thermostats and Frozen Pockets: The Winter Fuel Payment as a Geopolitical Mood Ring By Your Correspondent, Still Wearing Three Scarves LONDON—While the British government’s annual Winter Fuel Payment (£200–£300 sent to pensioners like an edible bouquet of lukewarm hope) is technically a domestic affair, its reverberations are felt from the slushy streets of Seoul…
FLOOD WARNING: A WORLDWIDE INVITATION TO DON’T PANIC (TOO MUCH) By the time you finish this sentence, somewhere between Venice and Vientiane, a municipal loudspeaker will blare the same cheery lie: “This is only a drill.” Translation: the river has broken up with its banks and is now speed-dating entire neighborhoods. From Bangladesh’s Brahmaputra to…
Victoria Station: The World’s Most Overqualified Waiting Room By Our London Correspondent, nursing a tepid flat white and existential dread London, UK – Somewhere beneath the ornamental pigeons and the low, grey sky that passes for weather here, Victoria Station yawns open like a bored Leviathan. Every minute, 2,000 fresh pilgrims—armed with wheelie bags, misplaced…
Big Ben, the Clock, and the Empire That Still Refuses to Admit It’s Over By Our Man in London (still pretending the Wi-Fi works) LONDON—On any given day, a thin queue of tourists from Wuhan to Wichita shuffles across Westminster Bridge, selfie sticks raised like incense to a minor deity. Their target: the 96-metre Victorian…
GLOBAL FENDER-BENDERS & THE MERCENARIES WHO LOVE THEM A dispatch on car-crash lawyers from our correspondent who once watched a Lagos traffic jam swallow an ambulance whole Lagos, 8:03 a.m. The danfo minibus kisses the rear bumper of a freshly-imported Tesla—an unholy union of 1990s carburetor and 2020s firmware. Within seconds, two men in fluorescent…
The Transnational Ballet of Gargantuan Steel and Litigious Grace By Diego “Diesel” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Malacca Strait and the M6 outside Birmingham, an eighteen-wheeler hauling Vietnamese sneakers took a corner too fast, scattering its cargo like a piñata of global capitalism. Within minutes, a German insurer, a Singaporean logistics firm,…
NEWSROUND: THE PLANET’S DAILY DOSE OF WHIPLASH, NOW WITH EXTRA SCHADENFREUDE By Our Correspondent, filed from Somewhere with Spotty Wi-Fi The word “newsround” used to sound quaint—like something a BBC announcer chirped between puppet segments while your toast burned. Today, however, it is the metronome of global anxiety: an endless, algorithm-curated carousel of triumph and…
Cincinnati Weather: A Global Parable in Fahrenheit Geneva—While the Security Council debates grain corridors and methane pledges, an equally decisive front is shaping up 4,200 miles away on the banks of the Ohio River. Cincinnati, population 309,000, is currently auditioning for the role of “Atlantis with Skyline Chili.” The city has spent the last month…
Hawaii News Now: Sunrise from the Edge of Empire By Our Man in the Lagoon, filed via coconut-scented sat-phone Somewhere between the ninth breaking-news push alert and the tenth advert for reef-safe sunscreen, the global viewer is reminded—via Hawaii News Now—that paradise is not immune to the algorithmic indigestion afflicting the rest of the planet….
Today’s Weather: A Global Forecast of Mild Panic, Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Existential Dread By Dave’s Locker International Bureau (a.k.a. one slightly jet-lagged correspondent with a dying phone battery) Good morning, afternoon, or whatever temporal fiction you’re clinging to in your corner of the planet. While you debate whether that suspicious cloud is…
Sun vs. Sky: A Global Cage Match Sponsored by Existential Dread Dave’s Locker, International Desk – 12 June 2024 Somewhere above the Malacca Strait, a container ship the length of a small principality steams east while its captain squints at the sun like a man trying to read the fine print on a doomsday contract….
