Portola Festival: San Francisco’s Boutique Rave Ships Its Hangover Around the Planet By the time the Portola Festival’s final fog-soaked beat dropped last Sunday, the city’s Pier 80 looked like a UN-chartered refugee camp after a particularly stylish apocalypse. Half-dazed Europeans clutched €12 oat-milk lattes, Aussies compared jet-lag horror stories with the serenity of war…
Cost-of-Living Payments: A Global Panic Button That Keeps Getting Pressed By Our Man in Several Overpriced Airports COPENHAGEN — The memo must have gone out in 23 languages: when the price of eggs starts resembling the price of cocaine, governments reach for the emergency envelope marked “Cost-of-Living Payment.” From Seoul to São Paulo, officials are…
**The Laver Cup Schedule: Where Tennis Meets Global Theater in a Weekend of Manufactured Drama** In a world where nuclear powers trade threats on social media and climate change has become the planet’s most reliable constant, the international community has found its true unifying force: watching millionaires hit fuzzy balls across a net while wearing…
Stockholm, Sweden – On a continent where the words “American football” still conjure images of helmeted gluggers knocking the stuffing out of one another in between Bud Light commercials, Kurt Warner remains a convenient shorthand for the American Dream™—factory recall edition. From stacking cans of beans at a Hy-Vee in Iowa to hoisting the Lombardi…
**The Man Who Bought the World (and Other Tuesday Afternoons)** Ramón Juárez del Castillo, the man who allegedly single-handedly tanked three currencies, saved a fourth, and somehow managed to look bored while doing it, has become the international financial community’s favorite cautionary tale. The 47-year-old former philosophy professor turned cryptocurrency savant sits in a Madrid…
Christopher O’Connell: The Accidental Prophet of Post-National Tennis By the time you finish this sentence, three more Australians will have declared themselves digital nomads in Lisbon, two Singaporean hedge-fund kids will have bought Georgian vineyards “for the vibes,” and one unknown tennis journeyman from Sydney will have elbowed his way into the global conversation without…
Chase Sexton and the Globalization of Dirt: How a Kid from La Moille, Illinois Accidentally Became a Soft-Power Asset By the time the Red Bull-branded cargo jet touched down in Riyadh last February, Chase Sexton still couldn’t pronounce “riyal,” but the Saudi General Entertainment Authority had already decided he was worth every petrodollar. The 24-year-old…
The Bads of Bollywood: A Global Tragedy in Three Acts and a Dance Number By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Mumbai, India — If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a $2.4-billion-a-year dream factory begins to snore loudly in public, look no further than Bollywood. Once the planet’s most reliable export of synchronized pelvic thrusts and family-friendly…
Arsenal vs. Manchester City: A Cosmic Distraction from the Planet’s Meltdown By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between Singapore and São Paulo April is the cruellest month, wrote a man who never endured a 3 a.m. kickoff in Jakarta. Yet here we are again, 200 countries synchronising insomnia to watch 22 millionaires chase…
World Holds Breath as Wayne Matthews Tweaks Hamstring, Diplomatic Calendars Rearranged By Our Correspondent in a Café Where the Wi-Fi is Suspiciously Russian Geneva—In the grand amphitheater of global catastrophe, where nuclear codes are passed around like party favors and glaciers file for divorce daily, humanity finally located its true pressure point: Wayne Matthews’ left…
Somewhere between the barricades of Kyiv and the fluorescent aisles of a Carrefour in Dubai, the phrase “UTSA football” is being whispered with the same reverence once reserved for the fall of the Berlin Wall—give or take a tailgate. The University of Texas at San Antonio, an institution most non-Texans still confuse with the Alamo’s…
IYO SKY AND THE ART OF SELLING NOTHING TO EVERYONE—A GLOBAL MASTERCLASS IN ABSURDITY By Our Man in the Cloud Layer, still coughing up micro-plastics Tokyo, Paris, Lagos, São Paulo—wherever you are this week, the phrase “iyo sky” is drifting across group chats, TikToks, and boardrooms with the eerie inevitability of radioactive pollen. To the…
