Tokyo Open: Where Neon Dreams and Geopolitical Schemes Share the Same Taxi By Dave’s Far-East Correspondent, nursing a ¥2,000 vending-machine coffee TOKYO—The “Tokyo Open” sounds, at first sniff, like another polite tennis tournament where ball-boys bow deeper than the baseline. In 2024, however, the phrase has swollen into an umbrella term covering everything from Japan’s…
The Almighty Greenback’s Mood Swing: Watching the World Hold Its Breath Over “قیمت دلار” By the time Tehran’s currency hawkers finish their second espresso, the dollar-rial rate has already sprinted past yesterday’s closing like a caffeinated greyhound. Across the planet—whether you call it “قیمت دلار,” “dólar hoy,” or simply “why is my rent in pesos…
31 Atlas: A Cartographic Joke with No Punchline By “World-Weary” Watanabe, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Despair lies the 31 Atlas, a new, crowd-sourced map that claims to chart “the world as it actually exists, minus the delusions.” Released last Tuesday by an anonymous collective that…
Quentin Tarantino: The Last American Auteur Exporting Revenge Fantasies to a World Already Overflowing with Them Dave’s Locker – International Bureau, somewhere between Cannes and the 38th parallel By the time the credits rolled on Pulp Fiction in 1994, the planet had already stockpiled enough Kalashnikovs to make every “Royale with Cheese” crack feel like…
Martine McCutcheon and the Quiet Collapse of the Global Dream By Our London Bureau Chief, still hung-over from the last royal wedding LONDON — While COP summits wheeze out one final communique and Silicon Valley re-brands mass layoffs as “right-sizing,” a former East-End soap star has apparently been declared solvent again. Martine McCutcheon, once the…
Florence Welch and the Apocalypse Choir: How One British Siren Became the Unofficial Soundtrack to Global Panic There’s a moment, somewhere between the third gin and the fourth news alert about melting ice caps, when Florence Welch’s voice detonates in your headphones like a glitter bomb filled with medieval incense. Suddenly you’re not doom-scrolling in…
American Express: The Green-Card Colossus That Runs on Champagne and Existential Dread By the time you land in Singapore, the flight attendants have already whispered to one another that your Platinum card is the only thing standing between you and a complimentary extra peanut. From the marble atrium of Heathrow Terminal 5 to a yak-butter…
Somewhere between a UN Security Council session and a Comic-Con queue, the planet’s streaming algorithms have flung open the doors of the multiverse and unleashed Marvel Zombies—five 30-minute morsels of animated carnage that have slithered onto Disney+ faster than a hedge-fund manager eyeing an emerging-market bailout. From Lagos to Lisbon, Seoul to São Paulo, audiences…
Martin Scorsese, the 82-year-old New Yorker who still looks faintly surprised every time he survives another awards season, has become a sort of secular patron saint of global cinephilia. From the neon back-alleys of Tokyo to the crumbling art-deco cinemas of Buenos Aires, his name is whispered with the same reverence once reserved for deities…
USC vs Illinois: An American Civil War Reenactment the World Didn’t Ask For By Our Man on the Pacific Rim Who’s Already Had Too Much Coffee Los Angeles—While most of the planet was busy watching the ruble impersonate a rock climber and the Arctic circle audition for a beach holiday, the United States chose Friday…
London, England – Somewhere between the third scone and the fourth cup of tea, the United Kingdom’s Met Office issued yet another yellow warning for rain, a meteorological advisory so routine that bookmakers now refuse to take bets on whether it will appear before the Queen’s face on a ten-pound note. From the vantage point…
A GLOBAL GUIDE TO THE POLITICAL WEATHER FORECAST: WHY EVERYONE CHECKS THE BAROMETER OF OTHER PEOPLE’S VOTES By the time you read this, the pollsters of at least three continents have already revised their “final” numbers twice, quietly deleted a tweet, and blamed the dog for eating the crosstabs. General election polling, once the modest…
