The Kiss of Debt – How a Tiny Hematophage Became the World’s Most Understated Debt Collector By the time you finish your morning flat-white in Brooklyn, a silent collection agency has already crawled out of a crack in a mud-brick wall in Cochabamba and bitten a sleeping child just above the lip. The agent’s calling…
The Curse of the Dbacks: How One Awkward Acronym Went Global and Nobody Noticed By Diego V. Serrano, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker In a world where acronyms multiply faster than conspiracy theories, the humble “dbacks” has quietly slipped past immigration control and embedded itself in the lingua franca of the terminally online. Originally a shorthand…
Big Brother Is Streaming—And He’s Got 8K Resolution By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 1.3 petabytes of face-recognition data will be filed away in places you’ve never heard of, with names like “Project Lavender Mist” or “Operation Helpful Walrus.” From Singapore’s lamp posts that scold jaywalkers in real time to Detroit’s “Green Light”…
Australasia’s sunburned continent versus the southern cone of Latin America: on paper it sounds like a geopolitical bar-fight between two lonely hemispheres, each convinced the other smells faintly of sheep. Yet the rivalry—now being re-heated in everything from lithium boardrooms to TikTok rugby brawls—has quietly become the world’s most polite proxy war. Think of it…
Big Brother Live Feeds: The Planet’s Longest Unscripted UN Security Council Meeting by Our Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar items are also under 24/7 surveillance There was a time, quaint as a rotary phone, when the phrase “Big Brother live feeds” conjured up grainy shots of twenty-something strangers arguing about dishwater in…
**When Beauty Meets Bluetooth: The Brooks Nader Incident and Our Global Panic Room** In a world where nuclear powers play chicken in the Taiwan Strait and glaciers perform disappearing acts faster than a magician’s assistant, humanity has collectively decided that the real international crisis worth our breathless attention is… a Sports Illustrated model’s misadventure with…
**The Global Courtroom: How Judge Judy Became America’s Most Successful Legal Export Since the Drone Strike** While the world grapples with war crimes tribunals in The Hague and the International Court of Justice’s lengthy deliberations on genocide, somewhere in the collective consciousness of humanity, a 5-foot-tall former family court judge from Brooklyn has been dispensing…
Marvel Tokon Beta: When the World’s Favorite Superhero Franchise Decides to Issue Its Own Currency (and Nobody Tells the IMF) By the time most of you woke up this morning, some kid in Lagos had already flipped a pixelated Captain America shield NFT for enough Marvel Tokon Beta (MTB) to buy three weeks of actual…
The Postcode Lottery: How Five Digits Decide Your Fate on This Spinning Rock By the time you finish reading this sentence, three babies will have drawn the cosmic short straw and been born in postal zones where life expectancy is already wheezing twenty years behind the luckier infants wailing a few alphanumeric characters away. Welcome…
Josh Brolin’s Chin Has More Passport Stamps Than Your LinkedIn Profile By Our Bureau of Expensive Mid-Life Crises, Geneva When the World Economic Forum wants a mood board for “late-capitalist gravitas,” it apparently just air-drops a 4K still of Josh Brolin squinting at a green screen. From the neon sewers of Seoul to the tax…
DAVID BOWIE, CITIZEN OF NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE by our itinerant correspondent still trying to find a payphone that works PARIS—At 3 a.m. in a Marais dive bar, the jukebox coughs up “Heroes” for the fourth time tonight. A German banker in a bespoke suit weeps quietly into his pastis; two Senegalese buskers argue about the…
Dallas, Texas—never the shy type—has spent the last few weeks auditioning for the Four Horsemen. One moment it’s 28 °C and the cicadas are gossiping like hedge-fund analysts at a rooftop bar; the next, marble-sized hail is auditioning for the lead role in “The Day After Tomorrow: Suburban Edition.” International observers, once content to treat…
