The NFL App: America’s Pocket-Sized Colosseum Goes Global By [Name Redacted for Legal Reasons], Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between the Indian Ocean and the Arctic Circle, a Berlin commuter streams the third quarter of Chiefs-Bills on a U-Bahn whose Wi-Fi was last upgraded during the Weimar Republic. In Lagos, a data reseller…
Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s most famous hoodie-wearing billionaire, has spent the last decade auditioning for the role of “global sovereign by accident.” From Nairobi to Naples, his creation—Facebook, now the overfed parent Meta—has become the de-facto public square, confession booth, and riot-inciter rolled into one blue-branded burrito. At Davos they still call him “Mr. Zuckerberg”…
Russian Drones: Skyborne Ambassadors of a World That Forgot How to Sleep By the time the first Iranian-designed Shahed-136 tumbled onto a Kyiv kindergarten, the planet had already given up pretending that unmanned aircraft are merely “tools.” From the Sea of Okhotsk to the Sonoran Desert, Russian drones have become the twenty-first century’s most reliable…
Tudum: The Global Echo Chamber We Never Asked For If you’ve ever wondered what the sound of late-stage capitalism clearing its throat would be, Netflix has helpfully provided the answer: “Tudum.” A two-syllable onomatopoeic belch that now doubles as a fan-festival, streaming strategy, and, increasingly, a soft-power flex. Last week the traveling circus—equal parts trade-show,…
Where in the World Is Georgia Tech? A Dispatch from the Capital of “Wait, That’s Not in Europe?” Atlanta, Georgia—If you spin a globe like a drunken roulette wheel and let your finger land where it may, odds are you’ll hit a place that thinks Georgia Tech is either (a) a new EU satellite campus…
It’s March 2025, and Toyota has just issued its largest recall since the company discovered that “just-in-time” also applies to existential dread. Some 8.7 million vehicles across six continents are being summoned back to the loving embrace of a dealership coffee machine that hasn’t been cleaned since 2019. The official reason: a software glitch in…
In the grand theatre of 2019, while real-world borders were being hardened with barbed wire and performative press conferences, Gearbox Software quietly released Borderlands 3 and invited the planet to spend 60 USD on a cartoonish map where every nation is a punchline and every passport is a gun permit. The timing was exquisite: the…
Star Citizen: The Eternal Launch Window to Nowhere By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the Sea of Tranquility and a Frankfurt server rack, a digital Bengal tiger paces in zero-G. It’s wearing a monocle, naturally, because even the NPCs in Star Citizen know that cosmic inflation has hit the luxury-goods market. Welcome to the…
**The United Nations of Toxicity: How League of Legends Became the World’s Most Effective Diplomatic Pressure Cooker** While traditional international organizations struggle with language barriers and cultural differences, Riot Games has inadvertently solved global communication problems by creating a universal language of flaming, feeding, and “gg ez” spam. League of Legends, the free-to-play masterpiece of…
Facebook’s $725 Million Privacy Settlement: A Global Receipt for Twenty Years of Oversharing By Our Correspondent, Somewhere with Better Wi-Fi Than You Mark Zuckerberg’s legal team finally found the “download receipt” button—except instead of a PDF, it’s a $725 million class-action settlement, and instead of a printer, it’s wired directly to the 250 million Americans…
Curiosity and the Global Vanity Project By Our Man in the Void, Geneva Bureau If you stand on the roof of the Palais des Nations at 3 a.m.—a vantage point once reserved for spies and nicotine-addicted translators—you can almost imagine the Martian wind that has been buffeting NASA’s Curiosity rover for the past decade. Almost,…
**Borderlands 4: The Great Digital Border Crisis** In a world where actual borders remain stubbornly physical—complete with barbed wire, armed guards, and the occasional dramatic river crossing—humanity has found a new frontier to squabble over: the digital borders of Steam’s gaming platform. And like every great human endeavor, we’ve managed to turn it into an…
