Chappell Roan and the Age of Manufactured Authenticity A dispatch from the front lines of pop’s new Cold War By the time Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” cracked the Global Spotify Top 50 last week, diplomats in Brussels were already drafting memos: a drag-tinged Midwestern torch song had somehow become a soft-power bargaining chip. From…
Sydney Thomas: One Name, Five Continents, and the Inevitable Collapse of Meaning By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a Tokyo boardroom and a Lagos open-air market, the phrase “Sydney Thomas” is being murmured with equal parts hope and dread. To the algorithmic class, it’s the latest data-point oracle; to the rest of the planet,…
In a world where handheld consoles now outnumber passports at most border crossings, ASUS just lobbed another plastic rectangle into the global carry-on luggage wars: the ROG Ally X. The sequel nobody asked for—except, apparently, every commuter from Lagos to Lisbon who has discovered that a 90-minute metro ride is the perfect span to finish…
In the grand, borderless theater of late-stage capitalism, the Xbox Ally X has arrived like a well-timed punchline—delivered in Dolby Atmos, naturally. Microsoft’s newest handheld PC—sorry, “portable gaming companion”—landed last week with all the subtlety of a drone strike in a suburban cul-de-sac. From the neon canyons of Akihabara to the smog-softened skyline of São…
The Ballad of NBA YoungBoy, or How America Exports Its Teenage Apocalypse By Dave’s Locker, International Desk Somewhere between Baton Rouge and the back-alley Wi-Fi of a Manila slum, 24-year-old Kentrell “NBA YoungBoy” Gaulden is live-streaming to 11 million people who collectively owe more in student loans than the GDP of Paraguay. To the uninitiated,…
Allianz Stadium: Where the Beautiful Game Meets the Beautiful Lie Sydney, Australia From the air, the new Allianz Stadium looks like a freshly unwrapped gift box someone forgot to re-gift. Forty-five thousand seats, a retractable roof, and enough LED ribbon boards to make Times Square blush—yet it still feels oddly disposable, as if the architects…
Amazon’s $25 Million Prime-Time Penalty: A Global Cautionary Tale About the Subscription Trap By the time you finish this sentence, another bleary-eyed customer in São Paulo will have clicked “yes” on a pre-checked box that quietly enrolls him in Amazon Prime. Somewhere in Lagos, a teenager will assume the “free trial” ends when the calendar…
A Snow Globe of Violence: Why the World Still Watches Fargo By special correspondent to Dave’s Locker, filed from a hotel bar in Ulaanbaatar that smells faintly of reindeer and regret. The first thing you learn on the international beat is that nothing travels faster than folklore with a body count. Fargo—Coen brothers film, three-season…
PARIS—In a world still reeling from supply-chain collapses, crypto bankruptcies, and the curious resurgence of fascism as retro chic, Paramount+ has decided what the planet really needs is a nine-episode, $90-million argument about space helmets. The second season of “Halo,” streaming everywhere except the parts of Earth where broadband is still a rumor, arrives like…
Steve Harvey, the indefatigable mustache in the gilded cage of American daytime television, has quietly become one of the United States’ most reliable cultural exports—no small feat for a man whose résumé still includes the Miss Universe pageant of 2015, when he crowned the wrong queen in front of a planet that had nothing better…
The Handheld Cold War: How the Xbox-ASUS Rog Ally X Arms Race Is Redrawing the Map of Leisure From Reykjavík to Reykjavík (Population 130,000, but with excellent Wi-Fi) By the time you finish this sentence, another commuter in Manila will have elbowed three strangers to reach a seat on the MRT, pulled out a neon-lit…
The Daily Record: Humanity’s Obsessive Love Affair with Counting Itself PARIS—In the predawn hush outside the Hôtel de Ville, a municipal clerk named Odette prints the daily record of Parisian births, deaths, marriages, parking tickets, and—since last month—TikTok views. She stamps each sheet with the same bronze seal Napoleon commissioned for his own birthday announcements,…
