Larry Wilcox, the Man Who Rode a Motorcycle into the Cold War: A Global Post-Mortem on CHiPs and Geopolitical Kitsch If you squint at the 1970s hard enough, they look like a half-remembered fever dream sponsored by cheap gasoline and cheaper morals. Somewhere in that haze sat Officer Jon Baker—California tan, mirrored sunglasses reflecting both…
Richmond, Virginia—In a world where nations wage proxy wars over semiconductor supremacy and central bankers treat inflation like a moody house-cat, the Commonwealth of Virginia has decided that the most pressing geopolitical lever available to it is… a tax rebate. Yes, dear global citizen, while the Arctic melts faster than a popsicle in Dubai and…
**The Liberal Paradox: How a Word Meaning ‘Free’ Became Everyone’s Favorite Insult** *From Buenos Aires to Beijing, everyone’s either a liberal or accusing someone else of being one—with roughly the same level of enthusiasm you’d reserve for a root canal.* In the grand theater of global politics, “liberal” has become the Swiss Army knife of…
The Empire of Copper: Why the World Still Cares About a British Utility Called Openreach By Our Correspondent, somewhere with worse broadband than Leeds It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single nation in possession of a creaking Victorian legacy must be in want of faster cat videos. Enter Openreach—the polite British euphemism for…
Pittsburgh Weather: The Last Honest Barometer in a Burning World By Our Man in Allegheny County, filing from a city that still believes in seasons—and consequences. When the first snowflake lands on the Smithfield Street Bridge, diplomats in Geneva receive a courtesy text. It reads: “Brace yourselves, the Yinzer Jet Stream is shifting again.” They…
From Manila’s fluorescent-lit call centers to the frost-bitten permafrost labs of Svalbard, one unlikely object now unites humanity: a 0.1-millimeter-thick strand of synthetic spider silk so light it flutters like divine breath yet strong enough to moor a container ship. Marketed under the optimistic brand name “Simply Divine Strands,” the filament is the latest darling…
Great White Sharks: The World’s Most Diplomatic Predator By the time you finish this sentence, a great white will have silently patrolled roughly 40 metres of open ocean—unbothered by tariffs, unimpressed by NATO communiqués, and blissfully unaware that humans just spent $2.3 trillion arguing about borders it crosses nightly without a passport. Carcharodon carcharias is,…
**The Global Obsession with NYT Connections: A Daily Ritual in Our Collective Descent** In a world where nuclear tensions simmer like a forgotten kettle and climate change delivers its punchlines with increasing regularity, humanity has found its new opiate: a four-by-four grid of words that must be sorted into categories. The New York Times’ Connections…
Raye O2: How One Woman’s Oxygen-Bottle Ballad Became the Soundtrack to a Planet That Forgot to Breathe By the time the first chorus of “raye o2” drifted across a smoke-choked Jakarta skyline, the planet had already been gasping for years—wildfires, heat domes, and the polite cough of diplomatic summits that promise “net-zero by 2050” while…
Seann William Scott: The Last American Export the World Didn’t Order, Yet Quietly Consumed In the grand bazaar of global pop culture, where K-pop idols are shipped like rare minerals and Turkish dramas are smuggled across borders in USB drives the size of lethal lipsticks, one unlikely commodity keeps popping up in the discount bin:…
PlayStation Plus Games: The Monthly Care Package Keeping 48 Million People From Starting Actual Revolutions By Dmitri Valenti – Dave’s Locker, International Affairs & Digital Downtime GENEVA — Somewhere between the 3 a.m. UN Security Council livestream and the seventh cup of vending-machine espresso, I realized the most geopolitically stabilizing force of 2024 isn’t NATO,…
Silver: The World’s Shiniest Political Barometer (Or, How a Soft Metal Keeps Telling Us We’re Doomed) By the time you finish this sentence, silver will have changed price three times—twice in London, once in Mumbai, and, for all we know, once in whatever backroom the People’s Bank of China uses to practice alchemy. The spot…
