Dawson Knox and the Curious Export of American Grief A dispatch from the Department of Existential Exports By the time the news of Dawson Knox’s younger brother Luke’s death pinged European phones at 03:47 CEST—sandwiched between an Amber Alert and a crypto-scam push notification—the Buffalo Bills tight end had already become an unwitting case study…
Ollie Gordon II and the Global Theater of Running Very Fast in Circles By Dave’s International Desk of Mild Disillusionment Somewhere between the 40-yard line and the end zone of geopolitics, a 19-year-old from Fort Worth, Texas, has become the planet’s most efficient argument for the continued relevance of American excess. Ollie Gordon II—whose surname…
Halsey at the Border: How a Pop Star Became a Geopolitical Flash-Mob It began, as most millennial crises do, with a tweet. Ashley Frangipane—stage name Halsey, for those who still confuse her with a British motorway—posted a grainy video from a muddy field outside Rafah, Gaza, insisting that the world “look up.” Within minutes, the…
The word “flamengo” is, strictly speaking, a typo—three errant keystrokes that turn the Portuguese “Flamengo” into something that looks like a Scandinavian death-metal band or the newest lifestyle disease. Yet the slip travels remarkably well. From the barrios of Rio to the betting shops of Manila, “flamengo” keeps popping up on screens, receipts, and hastily…
From the banks of the Thames to the neon sprawl of Shibuya, the name “Jake Retzlaff” is trending on the same algorithmic conveyor belt that once ferried Baby Yoda memes and the phrase “quiet quitting.” If you’re outside the United States, you may have first seen the syllables attached to a grainy clip of a…
From the orchards of Normandy to the rooftop gardens of Singapore, a new pollinator has checked in—one that arrives by drone propeller and leaves behind a QR-code receipt instead of pollen. Meet the Apple Bee: not an actual insect, but the latest attempt by humanity to fix a problem we created by throwing more humanity…
Opta Stats: The Global Spreadsheet That Knows You’re Overrated Before You Do By Our Man in Cyberspace, Still Nursing a Hangover from the Last World Cup If the planet ever decides to hold a beauty contest for raw data, Opta’s spreadsheets would arrive dripping in sponsored moisturizer, each cell flexing like an influencer on a…
The Year the Planet Decided Zac Efron Was a Geopolitical Asset By Dave’s Foreign Desk, filing from four time-zones and a suspiciously warm December It began, as most 21st-century absurdities do, on a group chat. Somewhere between a grainy paparazzi shot of Zac Efron hugging a solar panel in Namibia and an AI-generated deepfake of…
When the United Nations convened last year to debate whether the 21st century had officially collapsed into satire, the delegate from Luxembourg quietly held up a tablet looping a 1990s infomercial in which Gary Busey—eyes wide as a currency crisis—explained how to cook a steak with a car battery. The room fell silent. No vote…
Dandadan Season 3: When the World’s Idols Unite to Fight Alien STDs and Catholic Guilt—A Global Dispatch By the time the third season of Dandadan dropped, the planet had already survived two pandemics, three near-misses with nuclear winter, and one regrettable summer when everyone tried to make NFTs happen. Against that backdrop, a Japanese streaming…
The Curious Case of Jonah Tong: A Man Who Accidentally Became the Planet’s Refrigerator Lightbulb By the International Desk Somewhere between the 14th floor of a WeWork in Singapore and a noodle stall in Taipei’s underground mall, Jonah Tong became the most discussed non-entity in global affairs. No one elected him, no one hired him,…
From the bunkered newsrooms of Kyiv to the glass-walled cafés of Buenos Aires, an unlikely lingua franca is being whispered across encrypted chats and Slack channels this Wednesday: “NYT Connections hints, September 18.” In a world where one stray drone can reroute global wheat futures before breakfast, the planet’s collective cortex has chosen to obsess…
