Taylor Swift Cinema Showgirl: One Nation’s Pop Star Becomes the Planet’s State-Sponsored Diversion By the time the lights dimmed in a repurposed multiplex in Lagos last Friday, the ticket taker had already run out of souvenir wristbands. In Jakarta, scalpers were accepting payment in goat curry. And in Reykjavík, the mayor politely asked citizens to…
The Rising Tide We Bought on Credit By Our Jaded Correspondent in a Drier-Than-Average Café, Bangkok The United Nations likes to say that floods are “the most common natural disaster,” which is diplomatic code for “the one we keep inviting back to dinner.” From the neon-drowned streets of Seoul to the newly aquatic boulevards of…
When Boris Becker—three-time Wimbledon champion, German national treasure, and walking advertisement for 1980s exuberance—was escorted to a Victorian-era cell in Wandsworth Prison last April, the planet performed a collective shrug. From Lagos to Lima, the verdict was filed under “rich-people problems,” somewhere between a crypto-founder’s tax evasion and a pop star’s yacht fire. Yet the…
Jude Law, Jason Bateman, and the Black Rabbit: A Global Morality Play in Four Movements By the time the Black Rabbit cocktail bar opened its unmarked door beneath a crumbling palazzo in Venice last month, the world had already decided what it was. A money-laundering front? An A-list fever dream? Another casualty of the streaming…
From the Tube to the Troposphere: How One Skinny Plastic Straw Became the Planet’s Least-Loved Lifeline By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent LONDON—Somewhere beneath the River Thames, a beige spaghetti strand is doing the Lord’s work: ferrying antibiotics, potassium, morphine, and the occasional shot of mid-shift espresso into the bloodstream of a banker who passed out…
Hurricane Gabrielle, the season’s latest drama queen, tore across the mid-Atlantic this week like a trust-fund influencer discovering third-world poverty: loud, destructive, and absolutely convinced the planet revolves around her. While forecasters dutifully measured wind speeds and barometric tantrums, the rest of humanity watched the same rerun we always do—satellite loops, breathless correspondents in rain…
Typhoon Nando—now upgraded to “super” status, because apparently the weather gods are binge-watching disaster movies—has taken a hard right into the Philippines with the subtlety of a drunk tourist at karaoke night. Satellite imagery shows a swirling white behemoth roughly the size of Great Britain, which is fitting since both are presently circling the drain,…
Good morning, planet. The phrase itself is a geopolitical anomaly—cheerful, optimistic, and about as reliable as a cease-fire in a sandbox. Every dawn, 7.9 billion humans attempt the ritual: a grunt in Lagos, a bow in Kyoto, a WhatsApp voice note from a cousin who definitely screenshotted your last conversation. Yet behind the pleasantry lurks…
Typhoon Season: The Planet’s Annual Game of Whack-a-Muman By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk It’s late summer again, which means three things: airline Wi-Fi still doesn’t work, Europe is discovering new ways to barbecue itself, and the Western Pacific is firing bowling balls the size of Belgium at coastlines from Luzon to Kyushu. Typhoon season has…
The Global Cult of Gibbs: How One Man’s Name Became a Universal Password for Power Moves By the time the sun hit the marble façades of Brussels, “gibbs” had already ricocheted through seven WhatsApp groups in Lagos, two encrypted Signal chats in Kyiv, and a rather tense Zoom stand-up in Singapore. By sunset, it was…
Ari Shapiro’s Velvet Voice Keeps the World from Completely Imploding—One Broadcast at a Time By Dave’s Locker International Desk If the planet ever awards a Grammy for “Least Panic-Inducing Tone While the House Burns,” the trophy would surely go to Ari Shapiro, the NPR stalwart whose nightly baritone glides across time zones like a diplomatic…
New God of War: How the Pentagon’s Latest AI Drone Swarm Earned a Mythic Title in 23 Languages By the time the first grainy cellphone clip reached Telegram—grey pixels jerking across the Libyan night sky like angry fireflies—military attachés in nineteen capitals already knew what they were looking at. They just didn’t know what to…
