Julianne Hough, the Utah-born dancer who once glided across American living rooms in sequined anonymity, has now pirouetted onto a far larger stage: the planet’s collective nervous breakdown. From the Dolby Theatre to Davos, from TikTok’s algorithmic abyss to a sweat lodge in the Swiss Alps, Hough’s recent career pivot—part corporate-wellness messiah, part high-end grief…
Kelly Ripa, Live from the End of the World By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Atlantic and Existential Dread NEW YORK—At precisely 9:00 a.m. Eastern, while glaciers calve and supply chains snap like cheap bracelets, Kelly Ripa greets America with the smile of someone who has already finished her Pilates and her Pinot. The studio…
PARIS – In the long, tedious annals of human attention‐seeking, few phenomena travel faster than a twenty-something American who can contort his face like Silly Putty and speak fluent internet. Enter Drew “Druski” Desbordes, a Georgian (the state, not the country) whose primary export is the sort of manic befuddlement that translates into every language…
September Horoscopes, or How the Planet Learns to Hold Its Breath Again Dave’s Locker, International Desk The ninth month arrives like a polite summons from an accountant: time to tally summer’s sins before the fiscal year of autumn closes the books. Across time zones and tax brackets, roughly eight billion bipeds glance skyward, hoping the…
Tokyo, Wednesday, 3:14 a.m.—while the rest of the planet either sleeps fitfully or doom-scrolls itself into a deeper existential debt, an emergency press conference is underway inside MAPPA’s gleaming headquarters. The topic: an as-yet-untitled Jujutsu Kaisen spin-off that promises, in the words of producer Makoto Kimura, “to explore the morally gray corridors of jujutsu society…
Stacey Williams and the Algorithmic Afterlife By Our Correspondent, Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic In the grand bazaar of global notoriety, where reputations are bartered for clicks and redemption arcs are sold by the pound, one name has lately been passed from Lagos group chats to Berlin newsrooms with the hushed urgency usually reserved for currency…
Strands Hints: The World’s Newest Guilty Pleasure in a Guilt-Free Wrapper By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, nursing a lukewarm espresso in Terminal 3 Somewhere between the collapse of a second regional bank and the third coup rumor of the week, the planet discovered it could still be distracted by a daily puzzle that looks like…
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE — While the United Nations was busy congratulating itself on yet another non-binding climate accord, and while the world’s defense contractors toasted record quarterly earnings, a 12-year-old in the American South was quietly building a thermonuclear reactor in what used to be his parents’ bonus room. Jackson Oswalt’s homemade fusion device—an artful tangle…
The Curious Case of Paul Doyle: A Parable for Our Interconnected Age By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent Dateline: Somewhere between Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and a half-functional Zoom call Paul Doyle, if the name rings any bells at all, is the mild-mannered Irish civil servant who accidentally set off a trans-continental domino cascade last Tuesday. One…
Molly Smith and the Great Global Rebranding of Absolutely Nothing By Our Correspondent, still jet-lagged in Terminal 3 Dateline: Somewhere between Reykjavik and regret Somewhere in the churning stomach of international capitalism, Molly Smith has become the latest placebo we swallow when the world’s indigestion flares. Who is Molly Smith? Pick a continent and you’ll…
September 3, 2024 Dispatches from the Puzzle Desk By A. Corvo, Senior Correspondent-at-Large PARIS—While half the planet was busy arguing whether the latest BRICS summit would finally topple the dollar (spoiler: it won’t, the greenback is like a cockroach with a Black Card), the rest of humanity did what it always does when existential dread…
Borderlands 4 and the Great Global Countdown: How a Loot-Shooter Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time you finish reading this paragraph, at least three more Reddit threads will have declared, with unshakable certainty, that Borderlands 4 will launch on 14 September 2025. By dinner, that date will be debunked, re-credited to a “leaked Nvidia…
