Tyri Donovan and the Age of the Accidental Geopolitician By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a viral dance challenge and an inter-continental trade dispute, Tyri Donovan—previously known only to her 2.3 million followers as “the girl who turned her panic attack into a banger”—became the first civilian to trigger an emergency session of the…
Preston Smith, the man who turned phonics into a Silicon Valley fever dream, is once again making the planet feel slightly under-educated. From the gleaming co-working temples of San José to the fluorescent-lit cram schools of Seoul, Smith’s shadow looms over every eight-year-old who still thinks “cat” starts with a K. How did a mild-mannered…
BELLY OF THE BEAST: How Cardi B’s Bump Became a Geopolitical Event by our correspondent in the Global Gossip Bureau Rome, May 2024 — Somewhere between the collapse of the franc in West Africa and the latest BRICS expansion, a Bronx-raised former stripper turned Grammy-collector announced she is, once again, gestating. On the surface, Cardi…
Melania Trump Turns 54: A Slovenian-American Time Capsule the World Keeps Dusting Off By our man in Ljubljana, still recovering from airport coffee The planet’s most-watched former fashion model hits her fifty-fourth lap around the sun this week, a statistical blip that somehow triggers push-alerts from Manila to Montevideo. To ask “how old is Melania…
It says something about our times that the most reliable way to predict geopolitical tremors is to watch where the streaming giants place their next bets. Hulu—still technically the “U.S.-only” cousin of the Disney+ empire—has just green-lit Season 2 of *High Potential*, the procedural that asks: what if Sherlock had childcare issues and an IQ…
The Globalization of “Gout Gout”: How a One-Word Meme Became a One-World Problem By R. Ignatius Malveaux, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker In the beginning was the phrase, and the phrase was “gout gout.” Two syllables, twice repeated, no punctuation, no apology. Born somewhere in the fever swamps of Southeast Asian TikTok last autumn, the expression…
Damon Dash, once the cigar-chomping co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records, has become an unlikely Rorschach test for late-stage capitalism: to Wall Street he’s a cautionary tale, to Lagos hustlers he’s a patron saint of bootstrap bravado, and to European bankruptcy courts he’s simply file number 17-10456. From his old loft in Tribeca to the chat rooms…
FC 26 Web App: The Quietest Global Border-Crossing Since the Black Death, Now With Pack Odds By the time the first wave of commuters in Lagos have finished bargaining with their bus conductors over 20-naira change, the FC 26 Web App has already logged 1.3 million log-ins from five continents. By the time the Tokyo…
A Needle in the Global Haystack: How One Weekly Jab Became the Planet’s Hottest Status Symbol GENEVA—The newest weapon in humanity’s eternal war against its own waistline isn’t a dusty treadmill or a kale smoothie, but a humble pen-shaped syringe filled with something called semaglutide. Marketed as Wegovy in the United States, Ozempic everywhere else,…
**Love in the Time of Existential Dread: How The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Finale Became Humanity’s Collective Therapy Session** While the Northern Hemisphere collectively sweated through another record-breaking summer and the Southern Hemisphere braced for what climate scientists euphemistically call “interesting times,” millions of humans sought refuge in the ultimate first-world coping mechanism: watching attractive…
**The Neglected Middle Child of History: Gen X Waves from the Sidelines of Global Chaos** While the world obsesses over whether millennials can afford avocado toast or if Gen Z will cancel democracy itself, Generation X—the demographic equivalent of that mysterious bruise you can’t remember getting—continues its quiet march through middle age with the resigned…
THE GEN V CAST: A GLOBAL FEVER DREAM DELIVERED BY AMAZON’S CORPORATE METAVERSAL WOMB By the time the final episode of Gen V dropped, the planet had already consumed it in seventeen languages, three unauthorized dubs, and one TikTok remix where a Brazilian teenager cuts every scream into a samba beat. The cast—Jaz Sinclair’s blood-bending…
