LOS ANGELES—Seen from 35,000 feet, the city unfurls like a radioactive circuit board that someone spilled glitter on: a vast, humming grid of lights, smog, and the occasional brushfire giving the whole thing a festive orange halo. To the rest of the planet, Los Angeles is less a municipality than a planetary mood ring—when it…
**Marcos Giron: The Accidental Diplomat of Tennis in an Era of Existential Chaos** In a world where nations weaponize everything from natural gas to TikTok, it’s almost quaint that a 30-year-old Californian with a one-handed backhand has become an unlikely envoy of soft power. Marcos Giron—ranked 49th, owns one ATP title, and looks like the…
The Summer I Turned Pretty Ends, the World Keeps Spinning (Barely) By the time the final beach sunset faded to black on Prime Video last Friday, three things were already certain: Conrad had chosen his girl, the fish-market economy of fictional Cousins Beach would survive another season of hormonal chaos, and somewhere in Sri Lanka…
In a windowless studio somewhere between Harrisburg and the existential void, the Pennsylvania Lottery’s numbered balls pirouette nightly to the delight of 12.9 million Pennsylvanians—and, increasingly, to a silent, VPN-enabled audience that stretches from Lagos to Lahore. The PA Lottery “winning numbers,” once the quaint obsession of rust-belt grandmothers clutching crumpled slips at Sheetz counters,…
Paul Rudd: The Last Pleasant Man Standing, or How Hollywood Accidentally Weaponized Nice By the time you read this, Paul Rudd has probably aged another micro-millimetre, the same imperceptible sliver he’s been adding every fiscal quarter since 1995. Scientists in Switzerland, bored with the Higgs boson, are now using Large Hadron Collider downtime to measure…
Gen V Season 2 Release Time: A Global Countdown for the Morally Flexible By Dave’s International Desk, filed at 03:17 GMT from somewhere with suspiciously fast Wi-Fi The planet’s collective id has once again synchronized its watch. In twelve time zones, from the frost-bitten sanity of Oslo to the humidity-soaked delirium of Jakarta, humans are…
As the planet lurches from one existential cliff to the next—climate deadlines missed, democracies auctioned off to the highest bidder, and social media algorithms replacing the concept of shared reality—someone, somewhere, has decided the world urgently needs to know what Leo Woodall had for breakfast. It’s a curious form of global triage, but here we…
The United Kingdom has once again reminded the planet that, even in an age of collapsing ice shelves and collapsing attention spans, the most combustible topic remains the annual cost of tea and biscuits for the over-66s. This week’s confirmation that the state pension will rise by 8.5 % next April—thanks to the infamous “triple…
Peter Schmeichel, the colossal Dane who once stood between Manchester United’s posts as if guarding the last pint of Carlsberg on Earth, has long since retired from professional football. Yet his shadow—broad, brooding, and occasionally wearing a goalkeeper’s cap—continues to stretch across continents like a smug eclipse. From Lagos to Lima, Schmeichel’s name is invoked…
Storm Frontiers: How AccuWeather Quietly Re-Writes the Planet’s Mood Swings (Dave’s Locker, International Desk) PARIS—It’s 3:11 p.m. local time, and a push notification just informed a commuter on the RER B that a “life-threatening derecho” will flatten her picnic plans in twenty-three minutes. She sighs, deletes the brie from her online cart, and mutters something…
The Summer I Turned Pretty Ends—World Braces for the Aftershocks By Diego Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker COPENHAGEN — Somewhere between NATO’s latest communique on Arctic troop rotations and the IMF’s grim warning about synchronized recessions, a modest beach house in fictitious Cousins, USA, closed its shutters for the season. The Season 2 finale of…
Hotel Babylon: A Global Tour of the Last Refuge Before the Apocalypse By Your Correspondent, Fresh from the Minibar and Existential Dread PARIS—At 2:14 a.m. in the Hôtel des Grands Boulevards, a Saudi prince is arguing with the night concierge about the ethical sourcing of his pillow mints. Three floors below, a climate-science post-doc from…
