**Kendrick Lamar: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Prophet from Compton Who Terrifies Dictators** *From the barrios of Bogotá to the banlieues of Paris, one man’s trauma becomes everyone’s anthem* The first time a Kenyan taxi driver in Nairobi asked if I’d heard “Alright,” I realized Kendrick Lamar had accomplished what American foreign policy never could: convincing the…
Allegiant, or How Budget Airlines Became the World’s Cruelest Geography Lesson by Diego “Still Has Knee Room” Monteverde Somewhere over the Atlantic, Allegiant Air Flight 3472—an Airbus A320 that had already seen more owners than a Malibu timeshare—banked south to avoid a storm and, in doing so, sketched the perfect metaphor for 2024: we are…
Millie Bobby Brown and the Global Commodification of Adolescence By Our Correspondent, Still Jet-Lagged from the Last Apocalypse PARIS—On the Champs-Élysées last week, a billboard the size of a modest Balkan republic showed Millie Bobby Brown clutching a $190 bottle of vegan face cream while smiling like a hostage who has read the terms of…
Ilia Topuria: The Featherweight Who Just Punched a Hole in the Global Order By Dave’s Locker International Desk Valencia, Spain – Somewhere between the old-world cafés serving burnt espresso to tourists and the beach clubs blasting reggaeton at 3 a.m., a 27-year-old Georgian-Spaniard named Ilia Topuria decided the planet needed a new universal language: a…
Michael J. Fox and the Global Parkinson’s Punchline Nobody Signed Up For By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Gate 42 Michael J. Fox—Canada’s most polite cultural export after maple-syrup apologies—has spent four decades proving that even a time-travelling teenager can’t outrun the future. Back to the Future turned 39 this year; its star’s personal…
Jeremy Renner: The Snow-Plow Incident as Global Metaphor By our correspondent in the Alps, where the snow is white, the blood is red, and the insurance forms are fifty shades of bureaucratic gray. It began, as most modern tragedies do, with a machine designed to make life easier deciding otherwise. On New Year’s Day 2023,…
**The Global Roulette: How Bet365 Became the World’s Digital Casino** In the grand theater of human folly, where hope pirouettes with desperation under the spotlight of capitalism, few companies have mastered the choreography quite like Bet365. This British-born digital behemoth has transformed from a modest Stoke-on-Trent betting shop into the world’s largest online gambling empire,…
Charlize Theron: Global Muse, South African Export, and the Last Action Heroine Who Still Reads Subtitles By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-in-Exile Johannesburg, Cape Town, Hollywood, and every over-air-conditioned multiplex from Lagos to Lahore—Charlize Theron keeps turning up like a diplomatic passport you forgot you owned. Born in the final spasms of apartheid Benoni, she has spent…
Gridiron Gluttony: How 25 American College Scores Became the Planet’s Guilty Pleasure By Diego “Dolorous” Morales, Special Correspondent, Dave’s Locker While COP28 delegates argued over who gets to sell the last barrel of oil, an arguably more combustible product—American college football—detonated across 25 stadiums last weekend. From the rust-belt cathedrals of the Big Ten to…
In the dingy backroom of a Tijuana sports bar—half-lit by a flickering neon “CERVEZA” sign and the glow of a cracked TV—old-timers still argue about whether Devin Haney is boxing’s last honest craftsman or merely the best-dressed accountant in a sport that long ago laundered its soul. The debate is academic everywhere except the betting…
From the Ring to the Algorithm: Fernando Vargas Jr. and the Global Gladiator 2.0 By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Tokyo-Madrid red-eye TOKYO—Somewhere between the neon glare of Shibuya and the cigarette haze of a Madrid sports bar, a twenty-something welterweight named Fernando Vargas Jr. is being watched by strangers who have never paid…
**Fermenting the World: Brewers as Accidental Diplomats in an Age of Frothy Uncertainty** In the grand theater of global geopolitics, where nations trade barbs over steel tariffs and nuclear arsenals, it turns out the real power brokers wear rubber boots and smell faintly of malt. While diplomats sip tepid conference coffee, the world’s brewers have…
