AT&T Finally Pays the Tab for Its World Tour of Negligence, or: How to Settle for Less Than Your Data Is Worth Geneva—While delegates at the UN were busy arguing over the precise definition of “cyber-war,” roughly 70 million former and current AT&T customers received an email this week that was part apology, part ransom…
Hurricane Gabrielle, the season’s latest drama queen, tore across the mid-Atlantic this week like a trust-fund influencer discovering third-world poverty: loud, destructive, and absolutely convinced the planet revolves around her. While forecasters dutifully measured wind speeds and barometric tantrums, the rest of humanity watched the same rerun we always do—satellite loops, breathless correspondents in rain…
Olivia Dean and the Great British Export Boom Nobody Ordered By our London Bureau Chief, nursing a lukewarm Negroni and the last of his optimism If you’ve spent the last five years doom-scrolling through global headlines—plague, war, crypto implosions, that Belgian health minister who insisted on jogging during lockdown—you may have missed a quieter British…
The Catfish Show Goes Global: Digital Deception as the World’s Newest Export By the time the sun rises in Lagos, someone named “Chloe from Miami” is already sliding into the DMs of a lonely oil-rig engineer. By dusk in Sydney, a widowed pensioner is wiring rent money to “Sergeant Brad” stationed in Kabul. And somewhere…
**The Dawson Doctrine: How James Van Der Beek Became an Accidental Global Prophet** From the neon canyons of Tokyo to the crumbling cafés of Athens, humanity has always sought wisdom in unlikely places. Enter James Van Der Beek—that singularly named American actor whose career trajectory from teen heartthrob to cultural Rorschach test tells us more…
Physint: The Planet-Spanning Game Nobody Asked For, Everybody’s Already Playing By the time you finish this sentence, three governments will have re-branded garden-variety espionage as “physint”—the ugly portmanteau now sliding across briefing folders from Brussels to Brasília. Short for “physical intelligence,” physint is what happens when the world’s spooks realize that hacking elections via Facebook…
The world’s clocks now tick in anticipation of a peculiarly North-American ritual—the Major League Baseball playoff schedule—yet the tremor it sends through global supply chains, ad-industry spreadsheets, and crypto-betting syndicates is almost touching in its disproportionate grandeur. From container ships bobbing outside Los Angeles to algorithmic traders in Singapore, an entire invisible economy braces for…
**The Great Global Puzzle: How NYT Connections Became the World’s Favorite Daily Dose of Humble Pie** While the UN General Assembly debates climate change and nuclear proliferation, a quieter form of international diplomacy unfolds daily in the pixelated corners of the New York Times website. September 22nd’s Connections puzzle—the Gray Lady’s daily word association game—has…
Typhoon Nando—now upgraded to “super” status, because apparently the weather gods are binge-watching disaster movies—has taken a hard right into the Philippines with the subtlety of a drunk tourist at karaoke night. Satellite imagery shows a swirling white behemoth roughly the size of Great Britain, which is fitting since both are presently circling the drain,…
Khaby Lame Has Conquered the Planet Without Saying a Single Word—A Victory Speech No One Needed By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching Civilization Eat Itself in 30-Second Bursts GENEVA—The United Nations may still quarrel over grain corridors and carbon thresholds, but the real diplomatic breakthrough of the decade came when a 23-year-old Senegalese-Italian…
The planet is burning, currencies are wobbling like a drunk on a Segway, and yet somewhere in North America grown men in pajamas are sprinting in precise geometric patterns while millions watch with the solemnity of papal conclave. Welcome to the 2024 MLB Postseason, that annual festival where statistical theology meets corporate pantomime and the…
The Curious Case of Gervonta “Tank” Davis: A Pocket-Sized Gladiator in a World That Outgrew Its Arena Dave’s Locker – International Desk By the time the 10-round “exhibition” in Washington D.C. ended with Rolando Romero flat on his back and the referee scrolling for a decent Wi-Fi signal, every timezone from Manila to Montevideo had…
