Harvard, that venerable brick-and-ivy ATM for the ruling class, has lately become the planet’s most expensive piñata. From Brasília boardrooms to Bangalore coffee shops, the university is now cited as shorthand for a global elite that can’t quite decide whether it’s enlightened or simply entitled. When the Supreme Court clipped its affirmative-action wings last June,…
Paris, 14 July – The planet’s film critics have spent the past fortnight in a collective swoon over Emerald Fennell, a 38-year-old British polymath who appears to have cracked the algorithm for making audiences laugh, squirm, and question their moral compasses—all while wearing couture. From Cannes to Busan, from the Dolby Theatre to whatever windowless…
Jon Jones: Humanity’s Last Riot-Control Specialist By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, filed from a hotel bar where CNN is muted but the fight replays never are The first time most of the planet heard about Jon Jones, he wasn’t being celebrated for his footwork or his ability to fold human joints like origami; he was on…
Anisimova: The Name the World Suddenly Can’t Spell but Won’t Stop Saying By our correspondent in a hotel bar that still thinks fax machines are avant-garde PARIS—Somewhere between the third espresso and the fourth police barricade, it became clear that “Anisimova” had transcended its bearer and become a global Rorschach test. To the French, it…
WARSAW, 1 a.m. local time—While most of the planet was doom-scrolling through another evening of geopolitical whack-a-mole, a solitary 23-year-old from Raszyn was busy re-negotiating the price of immortality. Iga Świątek’s three-set demolition of Aryna Sabalenka in the Madrid final did more than add another bauble to Poland’s trophy cabinet; it quietly redrew a few…
Figma’s Phantom IPO: How a Design-Tool Darling Became the Rorschach Test for Late-Stage Capitalism By the time you finish reading this sentence, another unicorn will have galloped past the slaughterhouse gates. Among them, Figma—purveyor of cloud-based rectangles and the preferred doodle-pad of every product manager who thinks Helvetica is a personality—is once again flirting with…
How Much Is a Powerball Ticket? The $2 Passport to Pan-Global Delusion By Our Man in the Departure Lounge The short, almost insultingly straightforward answer is: two dollars, give or take a state-tax rounding error. That’s it—less than a flat white in Melbourne, cheaper than a single ride on the London Tube, and markedly less…
Double Jeopardy: The World’s Favorite Get-Out-of-Jail Card By M. Sardonique, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker The phrase “double jeopardy” sounds like a misguided game show—two rounds of misery for the price of one—but in the legal world it’s the velvet rope that keeps prosecutors from hammering the same defendant until the jury finally stops sleeping….
Eurobasket 2025: When the Continent’s Fractured Egos Learn to Share One Orange Ball and a Trophy By the Global Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker Berlin—The biennial festival of hardwood nationalism known as Eurobasket has rolled back into town, and once again Europe is pretending that twenty-four countries can resolve centuries of mutual suspicion by sweating through…
American Eagle Outfitters—ticker symbol AEO, for anyone still pretending retail tickers are more than three-letter horoscopes—has spent the year behaving like a jet-lagged tourist: stumbling out of bed in Pittsburgh, checking its passport, and suddenly discovering the rest of the planet exists. The stock is up roughly 60 % since January, a figure that sounds…
Jenna Ortega and the Global Afterlife of Wednesday Addams By a Correspondent Who Once Interviewed a Somali Pirate About Streaming Royalties Somewhere between the first TikTok dance craze and the fourteenth UN Security Council briefing on cultural imperialism, Jenna Ortega became the inadvertent face of planetary adolescence. The 20-year-old actress—born in California to Mexican-Puerto Rican…
Sienna Miller and the End of the Empire’s Last Illusion By Dave’s International Desk London, Rome, Caracas—pick a capital, any capital—and you will find a glossy magazine cover asking, with breathless sincerity, what Sienna Miller wore to a film premiere you’ll never see. The question itself is a Rorschach test for the late-imperial moment: we…
