The Global Ballad of ESPN Fantasy: How Imaginary Sports Became the Last Universal Currency By the time the sun rose over Reykjavik last Sunday, 3.4 million people—spread from Lagos to Lapland—had already checked their ESPN Fantasy lineups. They did so before breakfast, before brushing teeth, before remembering whether their actual national football teams were still…
Lush Stores Gaza: When Bubble Bars Meet Border Barriers By Dave’s Far-Flung Correspondent, filing from somewhere with better Wi-Fi than Gaza The first thing you notice is the incongruity: a Lush store—yes, the British purveyor of bath bombs that smell like a fruit salad having an existential crisis—reportedly wants to open in Gaza City. Not…
Tony and Ziva: A Love Story the World Can’t Quit Watching (Even When It’s Trying to Look Away) By the time the latest trailer for the Paramount+ spin-off “NCIS: Tony & Ziva” dropped, the clip had already been subtitled into 27 languages, dissected by Brazilian TikTokers, and turned into a meme template by Indonesian graphic…
Twitter Down: Planet Earth Holds Breath, Discovers Oxygen Still Works By Our Man in the Ether When the blue bird finally keeled over at 03:47 UTC, the silence was so complete you could almost hear the world’s influencers hyperventilating into ring lights. From Lagos to Lisbon, Seoul to São Paulo, the sudden absence of 280-character…
The Weeknd in San Antonio: A Global Pop Ritual in the Shadow of Collapse Dave’s Locker International, filed from somewhere between the Alamo and TikTok San Antonio—where the ghosts of 1836 mingle with vape smoke and the faint smell of churros—played host this week to Abel Tesfaye, the Canadian R&B warlock who answers to “The…
Jenna Ortega and the Global Afterlife of Wednesday Addams By a Correspondent Who Once Interviewed a Somali Pirate About Streaming Royalties Somewhere between the first TikTok dance craze and the fourteenth UN Security Council briefing on cultural imperialism, Jenna Ortega became the inadvertent face of planetary adolescence. The 20-year-old actress—born in California to Mexican-Puerto Rican…
Did MrBeast Buy the NFL? A Dispatch from the End of Civilization, Probably By the time the rumor ping-ponged its way across five continents, the question had already mutated into a dozen languages: “¿MrBeast compró la NFL?”, “MrBeast hat die NFL gekauft?”, “ミスター・ビーストがNFLを買収したってマジ？” The short answer, delivered with the same enthusiasm a coroner uses to…
Bangkok, Thailand – In a move that has simultaneously thrilled gamers and sent cultural attachés scrambling for Wikipedia, Behaviour Interactive has announced that the next killer in Dead by Daylight will be the Krasue, Southeast Asia’s favorite floating vampiric head-and-entrails combo. Because nothing says “cross-cultural fun” like monetizing a region’s collective nightmare since the 14th…
Sheridan Smith and the Global Anxiety Supply Chain By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent-at-Large Somewhere between a UN climate summit and a TikTok livestream of a cat wearing a tiny tuxedo, the planet found itself briefly transfixed by the latest “Sheridan Smith drama.” For readers who have spent the past decade in a cave—presumably a more…
Where to Buy Powerball Tickets: A Globe-Trotting Guide to the World’s Most Expensive Daydream By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, Still Jet-Lagged and Morally Ambiguous NEW YORK – If you’ve glanced at the headlines lately, you’ll know the Powerball jackpot has swollen to a sum that would make a small nation blush—roughly the GDP of Iceland, minus…
Patrick Gibson: The Actor Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Barometer Dave’s Locker – Global Bureau, 12 June 2024 PARIS—In the grand carnival of 21st-century fame, where TikTok dentists become foreign-policy advisors and crypto bros lecture the G-20 on monetary policy, the case of Patrick Gibson is refreshingly modest. The 28-year-old Irish actor did not invent…
Dwayne “The Smashing Machine” Johnson: When a Hollywood Titan Picks Up a Hammer, the World Listens By the time the first grainy TikTok clip surfaced—Dwayne Johnson, all 260 pounds of him, demolishing a cinder-block wall with a single, oddly elegant swing—global markets had already priced in the tremor. Tokyo’s Nikkei dipped 0.4% on “construction-volatility fears.”…
