Word Games as World Order: How a Quiet September 9 Grid Became the Planet’s Most Democratic Power Struggle By Tomas “Tommy” Verdier, Senior International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker VIENNA—At 3 a.m. local time, while diplomats at the UN snored over draft resolutions on carbon credits, 3.4 million civilians from Reykjavík to Rabat were locked in a…
Kathmandu’s weather is famously unreliable—monsoon one minute, smog the next—so it’s fitting that Sher Bahadur Deuba has popped in and out of the prime minister’s chair more often than a Himalayan teahouse changes its Wi-Fi password. On 13 July 2021, the 75-year-old liberal warhorse saddled up for his fifth non-consecutive term, a feat that would…
Ange Postecoglou: The Last Optimist in a World That Has Already Called It a Day By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the North London traffic and the existential dread of a Tuesday Champions League press conference, Ange Postecoglou continues to insist that football is about “the beautiful game” and not merely a quarterly EBITDA…
Hasbro: How a Rhode Island Toymaker Became the Soft-Power Emperor of a Planet on the Brink By the time the first Ukrainian kid unpacked a donated box containing a My Little Pony action figure still labeled in Cyrillic for the Moscow market, the cosmic joke was already complete. Somewhere in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a middle…
**The Kissing Bug’s Grand World Tour: How a Latin American Parasite Became Everyone’s Problem** By the time you finish your morning espresso, three more people will have joined the 6–7 million already hosting *Trypanosoma cruzi*, the unicellar squatter that causes Chagas disease. Most of them won’t know it yet; the parasite is polite enough to…
**The Curious Case of Katie Abraham: How One Woman’s Digital Footprint Became a Global Mirror** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and central banks perform interpretive dance with interest rates—the saga of Katie Abraham might seem like small potatoes. But then again, history teaches us that revolutions…
**The Wagyu Whitewash: How Burger King Turned Japan’s Sacred Cow into Global Fast-Food Fodder** *By our correspondent in the departure lounge of dietary disillusion* TOKYO—In the beginning, there was the cow, and the cow was good—so good, in fact, that Japanese emperors once forbade commoners from eating it. Fast-forward eight centuries and the same bovine…
McDonald’s Monopoly: How a French Fry Bribe Became a Global Morality Play By Dave’s Locker International Desk From Manila to Manchester, the same ritual unfolds every autumn: otherwise rational citizens queue for lukewarm nuggets in the hope that the paper sleeve will cough up a Boardwalk sticker and finance their escape from late-stage capitalism. Welcome…
The Kissing Bug: A Love Story Written in Blood and Bureaucracy By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you’ve ever felt that romance is dead, meet Triatoma infestans— the “kissing bug,” a creature so devoted it waits until you’re asleep, crawls onto your lips, and gently siphons your blood like a drunk sommelier at last call….
Eric Stonestreet: Kansas Beats Kandahar in the Global Sitcom Arms Race Bylines from Berlin, Bishkek, and Burbank all agree on one thing: if the 21st-century’s most effective soft-power weapon is a well-timed pratfall, then the United States has quietly upgraded its arsenal to DEFCON Dad-Joke. Enter Eric Stonestreet—Midwestern export, Emmy-winner, and living proof that geopolitical…
**The Man Who Built Magic: Stuart Craig’s Architectural Sorcery and the Global Empire of Make-Believe** In an era where the real world increasingly resembles a poorly scripted dystopian fever dream, humanity has found its most reliable escape hatch in the meticulously crafted fantasies of a soft-spoken British production designer who never quite learned to color…
A Coastal Flood Advisory: The World’s Wettest RSVP By Ignacio “Iggy” Montalbán, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert arrived on every phone from Jakarta to Jacksonville at 03:17 local time—like a drunk ex texting “u up?” at closing time. Coastal Flood Advisory. Nothing says “good morning” quite like the polite promise that your neighborhood may…
