The Walking Dead: A Global Tour of the Half-Alive By Our Man in the Departures Lounge If you thought “the walking dead” was just cable television’s longest-running excuse for splatter makeup, you haven’t cleared immigration lately. From Wall Street to the winding visa queues of Dubai, the planet is awash with ambulatory corpses who nevertheless…
The Ballad of Duc Phuc: How a Vietnamese Pop Star Accidentally Became the World’s Mood Ring By Dave’s International Desk (still hung-over from last night’s geopolitical karaoke) HANOI—On the face of it, the rise of Nguyễn Đức Phúc—stage name Duc Phuc, a moniker that sounds like a minor Scandinavian deity or an IKEA lamp—should be…
Arc’teryx Fireworks Display: When Outerwear Brands Decide to Burn Money for Sport By Lucía “No, That’s Not a Typo” Valdez, International Correspondent-at-Large Vancouver—The same city that once apologized for being too polite—twice—has now apologized for being too loud. Last night, the outdoor-apparel monolith Arc’teryx staged what it billed as “a vertical light symphony celebrating human…
Fireball Over France: A Cosmic Flash Mob Rehearses the End Times By L. Marlowe, International Affairs Desk (and part-time meteorite chaser) PARIS—At 21:43 local time on Tuesday, the skies above the Dordogne briefly resembled a deleted scene from a Christopher Nolan film. A neon-green fireball, described by witnesses as “a dragon’s sneeze” and by astronomers…
Alejandro Fernández, the man who once sold out Madrid’s Las Ventas bullring faster than Spain can burn through another prime minister, has quietly become the planet’s most efficient exporter of heartbreak wrapped in a mariachi trumpet. While the rest of us debate tariffs and TikTok bans, Fernández has been staging a one-man NAFTA reboot, moving…
Arc’teryx: The Bird That Conquered the Apocalypse (and Your Rent Budget) ZURICH—Somewhere between a climate summit in Davos and a street-style shoot in Seoul, the Arc’teryx bird logo has become the unofficial flag of our slow-motion apocalypse. What began as a tiny climbing-hardware shop in North Vancouver—named after Archaeopteryx, the first lizard that dared to…
In a bunker somewhere beneath the Alps, the great global algorithm has finally coughed up the pairing nobody asked for: David Moyes, the Glaswegian footballing existentialist, and Liverpool FC, the self-styled heartbeat of world football. The headline ricochets from Jakarta sports bars to São Paulo WhatsApp groups like an errant Fabinho back-pass, leaving seasoned observers…
Justin Timberlake: The Planet’s Eternal Prom King, Now with Baggage Fees Dave’s Locker World Service | June 2025 From the neon karaoke bars of Seoul to the crumbling palazzi of Naples, the name Justin Timberlake still triggers the same Pavlovian hip-thrust in every late-millennial cortex. A decade after the last believable “SexyBack,” JT remains the…
Portola Festival: San Francisco’s Boutique Rave Ships Its Hangover Around the Planet By the time the Portola Festival’s final fog-soaked beat dropped last Sunday, the city’s Pier 80 looked like a UN-chartered refugee camp after a particularly stylish apocalypse. Half-dazed Europeans clutched €12 oat-milk lattes, Aussies compared jet-lag horror stories with the serenity of war…
The OG Trailer: Humanity’s 90-Second Attention Span Goes Global In a world where nuclear powers can’t agree on basic facts and climate change is apparently negotiable, humanity has finally found something we can all share: the compulsive need to watch grainy footage of movies that don’t exist yet. The “OG trailer”—that first tantalizing glimpse of…
Eric Gentry: The Accidental Prophet of a World That Forgot How to Blink By “Deadeye” Delgado, roving correspondent for Dave’s Locker Somewhere in the thin air above the Sea of Okhotsk, a Russian oligarch’s private jet flickers on a NATO radar like a guilty conscience. In Lagos, a cryptocurrency scammer refreshes his phone to see…
Will Klein Is Everywhere, Nowhere, and Somehow Still Late for the Revolution By our correspondent in the departure lounge of Schiphol’s D-gates, where the espresso tastes of existential dread If you’ve spent any time on a screen in the last eighteen months, you have already met Will Klein—in the same way you’ve met gravity, or…
