Coronation Street Vicky: A Soap-Opera Saga for the End of the World By Our Foreign Desk, Somewhere between a Manchester drizzle and a geopolitical tempest LONDON – In the grand tradition of British understatement, the nation currently losing prime ministers faster than most people lose AirPods has decided that its most pressing international export is…
**The Winklevoss Twins: Bitcoin’s Poster Boys for the Global Age of Digital Delusion** In an era where the line between visionary and opportunist blurs faster than a Tokyo salaryman after his fifth shochu, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have managed to transform themselves from Harvard’s most famous aggrieved parties into the poster children of cryptocurrency’s promise—and…
Verizon Wireless: America’s Favorite Pocket-Sized Empire By our man in the departure lounge, nursing lukewarm espresso and a suspicion that the gate agent is reading his Signal messages in real time. NEW YORK — Somewhere above the Atlantic, a Lufthansa A350 is forced to circle Frankfurt because Verizon’s new C-band 5G might—might—confuse an altimeter built…
Apple Pre-Orders: The Annual Global Pilgrimage Where Your Wallet Gets Lighter and the Planet Gets Warmer By Dave’s International Bureau of Ritualized Consumerism Every September, the planet tilts ever so slightly—not on its axis, but on its credit limit. From Jakarta’s flood-prone malls to Oslo’s fjord-side glass cubes, humans form what marketers politely call “queues”…
Last week, while the rest of the planet was busy arguing about Chinese weather balloons, Russian ammunition math, and whether Germany can survive another winter without becoming a giant popsicle, the United States decided to remind us that its most valuable export is still high-caliber melodrama. Matthew Dowd—ABC’s former chief strategist turned MSNBC’s centrist whisperer—was…
**Fox & Friends: The Morning Show That Conquered the World (Whether You Wanted It To or Not)** From the frost-bitten streets of Helsinki to the humid chaos of Jakarta, there’s a peculiar American export that has somehow become the unofficial soundtrack to global anxiety. No, it’s not another Marvel movie or another Taylor Swift album—it’s…
T-Mobile: The Little Magenta Engine That Could (and Did) Swallow the Atlantic By Our Correspondent Still Recovering from Roaming Shock Frankfurt, Germany – Somewhere between the sausage stand and the ECB skyscraper, a pink banner flaps with the smug confidence of a teenager who just discovered cryptocurrency. It reads “Un-carrier. Un-stop.” The locals barely glance…
The Housemaid, Sydney Sweeney, and the Global Sweatshop of Desire By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, still jet-lagged in three time zones PARIS—At 3 a.m. local time, while the rest of humanity doom-scrolls itself to sleep, the phrase “the housemaid sydney sweeney” is rocketing up Google trends in 37 languages. The search spike is equal parts…
Meth, Morality, and the Global Branding of a Fictional Monster By Dave’s Locker International Desk When a mild-mannered chemistry teacher from Albuquerque starts cooking blue rock that ends up on coffee tables from Jakarta to Johannesburg, you know the planet has officially run out of original sins. “Breaking Bad” premiered in 2008, back when the…
**Orlando Weather: Where the Magic Kingdom Meets the Greenhouse Effect** While Europe debates whether 30°C constitutes a humanitarian crisis and the Middle East wonders what all the fuss is about, Orlando has been quietly perfecting its own microclimate of meteorological absurdity. The city that gifted the world animatronic presidents and $15 churros now presents its…
Jets Gipson: One Man’s Layover in the Age of Perpetual Turbulence by Dave’s Foreign Correspondent at Large ZURICH—At 06:17 CET, somewhere between the espresso machine and the duty-free Toblerone, a traveler named Jets Gipson became an unwilling global metaphor. His name ping-ponged from Jakarta timelines to Lagos group chats, translated into Cyrillic hashtags and mangled…
**THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK… WITH A LAWYER: Why Spaceballs 2 Might Be the Only Sequel the Planet Deserves Right Now** GENEVA—While the Doomsday Clock ticked another impatient second toward midnight and the Arctic Circle filed for divorce from the rest of the planet, Hollywood insiders confirmed that Mel Brooks has finally green-lit *Spaceballs 2: The…
