PARIS—Somewhere between a Greek philosophy seminar and a Berlin squat party, the word “antifa” slipped its linguistic moorings and became a global Rorschach test. To one half of the planet, it is a vigilante boogeyman lurking behind every broken Starbucks window; to the other, it is the last lonely fire brigade in a world already…
From the concrete bowels of Detroit’s Comerica Park to the flickering smartphone screens in Saigon’s midnight cafés, the phrase “Tigers game” has metastasized into something far larger than nine innings of baseball. Mention it in Seoul and a crypto-punishing college kid pictures the Doosan Bears mascot; whisper it in Jakarta and a wildlife-trafficking middleman hears…
PARIS—While Washington was busy arguing over whether a TikTok ban violates the “freedom to doom-scroll,” the rest of the planet watched with the detached amusement of a bartender who’s seen the same brawl every Friday night. The American First Amendment—once the loudest kid on the ideological playground—now finds itself in a strange mid-life crisis: still…
SURVIVOR: A GLOBAL USER’S MANUAL FOR OUTLASTING EVERYTHING, INCLUDING YOURSELF Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—The planet has become one long, badly produced reality show whose host never sleeps and whose prize is simply waking up tomorrow. From the floodplains of Bangladesh to the boardrooms of Davos, “survivor” is no longer a noun but a job description—equal…
Mahmoud Khalil: One Man, Two Passports, and the Entire Planet’s Nervous Breakdown By the time Mahmoud Khalil was escorted off a sidewalk in St. Louis last month—hands zip-tied, Columbia Law sweatshirt riding up to reveal a polite paunch—he had already become a Rorschach test for whatever international ailment you happened to be nursing. To the…
The Kimmel Conundrum: How a Late-Night Punchline Became a Global Barometer of American Decay By “Jet-Lagged” Jonah Verhoeven, Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent If you had told the ghosts of the Cold War that, three decades after the Wall fell, the free world’s most exportable cultural product would be a 56-year-old Brooklyn wise-ass named Jimmy Kimmel,…
South Park’s latest export, “Charlie Kirk: The Moisture Crisis,” landed on Paramount+ last night with the delicacy of a drone strike in a gated community. From Nairobi to Naples, viewers watched Colorado’s most culturally insensitive fourth-graders skewer America’s most moisturized conservative influencer, proving once again that satire remains the United States’ most reliable soft-power weapon—second…
SURVIVOR 49: THE WORLD’S MOST RELIABLE DIPLOMATIC CHANNEL, NOW IN ULTRA-HD Somewhere over the South Pacific, a customs agent in Nadi is stamping the 47th passport of a contestant who claims her profession is “influencer–slash–crypto-visionary.” She’s heading to a Fijian sand-spit so small it doesn’t appear on Google Earth unless you zoom in on the…
While the rest of the planet was busy debating whether AI will replace us or merely enslave us, a 23-year-old linebacker from Texas named DeMarvion Overshown quietly reminded the world that flesh-and-blood drama still packs the bigger punch. On a Tuesday that began with European bond yields yawning and Asian markets shrugging, Overshown’s anterior cruciate…
Charleston, South Carolina—population 137,000, median age 35.8, median home price $390,000—added one more grim statistic on the night of 17 June 2015: nine black parishioners murdered during Bible study by a 21-year-old white nationalist who wore his bowl-cut like a defiant middle finger to modernity. Dylann Roof, international observers noted with the weary shrug of…
Lead leaching cookware is the rare product recall that manages to unite Beijing bargain-hunters, Parisian gastronomes, and Midwestern coupon-clippers in one slow-motion panic. From the wet markets of Guangzhou to the Instagram kitchens of Copenhagen, the same grim punch-line is being served: dinner might be glazing itself with a light seasoning of cumulative brain damage,…
FDA COOKWARE LEAD: HOW AMERICA’S LATEST KITCHEN SCANDAL IS EXPORTING PANIC FROM PEORIA TO PESHAWAR By the time the U.S. Food & Drug Administration sheepishly admitted last week that “some cookware” may be leaching enough lead to make a Roman emperor nervous, the news had already raced across borders faster than a Michelin-starred chef fleeing…
