Rick Davies and the Quiet Implosion of the Anglo-American Dream By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Terminal 3, Somewhere Overpriced The name Rick Davies still rings a faint, ironic bell across five continents—usually in the key of B-minor and accompanied by the clink of an airport lounge ice cube. To the casual observer he…
The Curious Case of Amy Dowden: How One Welsh Dancer Became a Global Metaphor for Resilience in the Age of Spectacle By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you’ve never heard of Amy Dowden, congratulations—you’ve successfully dodged the algorithmic blizzard that is British light-entertainment news. Yet even in the far-flung corners of the planet where Strictly…
Amanita phalloides, the death cap, is the diplomatic envoy no one invited to the potluck of global cuisine, yet keeps RSVP-ing “yes.” From the misty forests of Scandinavia to the suburban cul-de-sacs of Melbourne, this beige-capped diplomat delivers the same lethal communiqué: “Bon appétit, and kindly sign your organ-donor card.” Each year, the mushroom’s toxic…
Ricky Martin: The Glittering Canary in the Global Coal Mine By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still coughing up confetti from 1999 Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the planet agreed on exactly one thing: it was perfectly acceptable—nay, advisable—to scream “¡Un, dos, tres! Un pasito pa’lante, María!” while careening…
Facundo and the Global Theater of the Absurd In the great carnival of international news, where every week brings a fresh candidate for the title of “Most Spectacularly Ill-Advised Human Decision,” the name Facundo has lately been flashing in neon. Not the nineteenth-century Argentine strongman Facundo Quiroga—though heaven knows the original was no stranger to…
**The Global Phenomenon of Hunter Doohan: How a Nice Boy from Arkansas Became the World’s Favorite Creep** In the grand theater of global entertainment, where streaming platforms have become the new colonial powers and algorithms serve as modern-day conquistadors, Hunter Doohan has emerged as an unlikely cultural ambassador. The 29-year-old Arkansas native’s journey from community…
2026 Miss America: The World Watches a Nation Crown Another Brand Ambassador in a Swimsuit Las Vegas—If you squint past the LED glare and the mandatory smiles, the 2026 Miss America Pageant looks less like a beauty contest and more like an annual shareholders’ meeting for the United States’ soft-power division. Delegates from fifty states—plus…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine’s grey shimmer and the 19th-century façades that still pretend the world makes sense, Nick Wright has become the planet’s most unlikely export: a Kansas City–bred, New York–polished sports yapper whose hot takes now ricochet off satellite feeds from Lagos to Lahore. On five continents, bleary-eyed traders, displaced taxi drivers, and insomniac…
YUNGBLUD: A NEON MESSIAH FOR THE POST-NATIONAL TEENAGER By “Stringer” McAllister, filing from a budget airline seat somewhere between Düsseldorf and existential dread The first thing you notice when YUNGBLUD storms onstage—whether in Mexico City’s Foro Sol or a half-repurposed communist-era cinema in Prague—is that passports appear to have been declared optional extras. The crowd…
Tom Phillips, the man who once turned the entire internet into a participatory art installation called “A Humument,” has died at 87, leaving behind a planet-wide game of exquisite corpse that none of us realized we were playing. From Lagos to Lima, Beijing to Bognor Regis, his legacy is less a tombstone than a Post-it…
Flowers, Ravens, and the End of the World (or, How We All Agree on the Same Apocalypse) By the time you read this, a raven has already stolen the iris rhizomes from a pensioner’s balcony in Kyoto, while in Reykjavík a single poppy has pushed through the tarmac next to a Bitcoin-mining facility. The two…
Hamilton Ravens: The Feathered Oligarchs Who’ve Turned a Canadian Steel Town into a Global Metaphor By the time the rest of the planet noticed, the Hamilton Ravens had already unionized. Not the football team, mind you—those poor Ti-Cats haven’t won anything since the invention of the iPhone—but the actual corvids who roost above Locke Street…
