The Weeknd Presale: A Global Ritual of FOMO, Firewalls, and Fractured Dreams By Dave’s Locker International Desk The sun never sets on a Weeknd presale. From Manila’s 3 a.m. queues to São Paulo’s lunch-break cyber stampedes, millions synchronize their suffering in the name of Abel Tesfaye’s falsetto. It is less a ticket drop than a…
Raymond Cruz: The Man Who Weaponised Soap By the time the first shipment of Tuco Salamanca’s infamous blue meth reached the docks of Rotterdam, Raymond Cruz had already become a household name in places where subtitles are a way of life. From the favelas of Rio to the rooftop bars of Mumbai, someone is right…
Weatherford-on-the-Med, Tuesday, 3:47 a.m.—Somewhere between a NATO summit in Vilnius and the latest BRICS currency pow-wow in Johannesburg, a far more seismic tremor is rattling the tectonic plates of soft-power diplomacy: the rumor, denied, confirmed, denied again, and finally upgraded to “pretty much certain” that Tyrone Dobbs is packing his spanners and quitting Coronation Street….
Coronation Street Spoilers: A Microcosm of Geopolitical Meltdown, but with Better Biscuits By Dave’s International Affairs Desk (and the intern who still thinks Weatherfield is a UN observer state) GENEVA — While the Security Council spent the week arguing over whose turn it is to veto human rights, a far more consequential power struggle unfolded…
Yorkshire’s Dales, UNESCO’s newest candidate for “World Heritage Site of Passive-Aggressive Sheep,” has apparently decided to audition for a seat on the UN Security Council by threatening the life of one Aaron Dingle. The question ricocheting from Lagos living rooms to Tokyo bullet-train gossip circles is not whether the writers will pull the trigger, but…
When a name as ornately hyphenated as Harold Rashad Dabney III hits the trans-Atlantic group chat, even the most jaded diplomatic attaché perks up. Who, exactly, is this third-generation bearer of regal consonants, and why is every bored customs officer from Dubai to Düsseldorf now muttering it under their breath like a cursed haiku? The…
Jennifer Lawrence: The Last Movie Star in a Planet That Forgot How to Watch Somewhere between the collapse of the polar vortex and the collapse of Twitter, Jennifer Lawrence—Kentucky-born, Oscar-anointed, and still only 33—has become the closest thing the fractured globe has to a unifying folk tale. From Lagos bootleg-DVD stalls to Seoul’s ultra-clean multiplexes,…
The World According to Billy Strings: How a Bluegrass Shredder Became the UN’s Unofficial Soundtrack By the time the Ukrainian bartender in Kraków queued up “Dust in a Baggie” at 3 a.m., nobody in the room had slept in 36 hours. Jet-lagged Canadians, shell-shocked Poles, and a lone Kiwi who swore he was only passing…
Olivia Rodrigo and the Global Export of Heartbreak Diplomacy By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—While the United Nations Security Council was busy vetoing itself into irrelevance last week, a 20-year-old from Temecula, California, quietly achieved what seasoned envoys have failed to do for decades: unite the planet in shared, slightly masochistic misery. Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore…
Anna Haugh, the Dublin-born chef currently plating polished Irish nostalgia on London’s glossy Myrtle Avenue, has become the latest proof that national identity is now just another garnish—artfully tweezed, Instagram-filtered, and priced by the ounce. From São Paulo to Seoul, menus are littered with “modern Irish” the way diplomatic communiqués are littered with the word…
The follicular fate of nations: why JJ Watt’s hair matters more than your portfolio By our correspondent, still jet-lagged in three time zones Geneva – While the World Bank convenes panels on sovereign-debt haircuts, an arguably more consequential haircut is trending from Houston to Helsinki: the ever-evolving thatch atop NFL expatriate JJ Watt. Yes, dear…
Scorpio, the Moon is in your second house of money, whispering that your crypto wallet is about as stable as the Turkish lira on a particularly creative Monday. Roughly 2.1 billion people woke up this morning to find their preferred astrologer had already posted a pastel infographic promising “transformation,” “unexpected encounters,” or—if you live in…
