Karl-Anthony Towns, or KAT as the marketing departments insist on calling him, is what happens when a basketball prodigy collides with the 21st-century attention economy. Born in Edison, New Jersey, to a Dominican mother and an African-American father, he carries three passports’ worth of expectations before he’s even laced up a sneaker. The Dominican Republic…
Mexico City, Paris, Tatooine—pick your coordinate, Diego Luna’s passport has probably been stamped there in the last decade. While most actors are content to chase the next green-screen paycheck, Luna has quietly morphed into a one-man soft-power syndicate, exporting Mexican charisma at scale and reminding the planet that “Latin American talent” is not a charitable…
Typhoon Ragasa, the latest atmospheric tantrum in the Pacific’s long-running soap opera, swept through the Philippines last week with the theatrical flair of a Hollywood divorce: wind speeds of 220 km/h, a storm surge that redecorated entire coastlines, and enough rainfall to make Noah reach for his contractor’s license. Manila’s stock exchange suspended trading, the…
Bollywoes: How the World Learns to Love and Loathe India’s Glittering Guilt Machine By Our Correspondent in a Safe House Somewhere Between Bandra and Netflix HQ If the global film industry were a bar at closing time, Hollywood would be the loud American bragging about his IPO, Nollywood the Nigerian hustler selling you miracle watches,…
Charlie Kirk’s “Last Interview”: A Globe-Trotting Autopsy on the Death of Nuance By Matteo Deluca, Contributing Cynic-at-Large If the world were a bar, Charlie Kirk just knocked over the last stool, shouted the house special into a bullhorn, and called it a closing-time confession. His much-hyped “final interview” (filmed in a Dallas studio that looks…
Xavier Worthy: The 4.21-Second Passport That Just Got Every Continent’s Attention By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Immigration Control and the 40-Yard Dash PARIS—In the same week that the UN admitted it will miss every sustainable-development target and the Doomsday Clock nudged to 89 seconds from midnight, a 20-year-old from Fresno, California, reminded the planet that…
EasyJet and the Great Orange Descent: How a Budget Airline Became a Global Mood Ring By Our Man in the Departure Lounge It is 06:47 at Gatwick, and the queue for EasyJet flight EZY9001 to Dubrovnik already resembles a UN refugee camp sponsored by Pret A Manger. The passengers—German backpackers, French retirees, a Ghanaian wedding…
If you squint hard enough from the top of the Hollywood Hills, the Pacific looks like a giant flat-screen TV showing a rerun of the Roman Empire. Down below, the Banc of California Stadium is staging its own miniature collapse of civilization: LAFC versus Real Salt Lake, a fixture that matters far more to passport-toting…
PARIS—While the rest of the planet obsesses over wars, elections, and whatever Elon Musk tweeted at 3 a.m., the United States is already busy rehearsing pageantry for the 2026 NFL Draft in Las Vegas. Yes, the same city whose water supply is evaporating faster than a crypto wallet will soon welcome 32 billionaires and their…
The phrase “a Palestinian state” has spent so many decades on the global to-do list that it now feels like a diplomatic heirloom—polished once a year for the cameras and then tucked back into the drawer next to the Kyoto Protocol’s mittens. Yet every so often the headlines insist the heirloom might actually leave the…
Andre Agassi: The Bald Prophet Who Sold Reeboks to Beijing While Teaching Us How to Lose Gracefully on a Global Scale By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough from a rooftop bar in Dubai, the arc of Andre Agassi’s career looks less like a tennis parabola and more like a geopolitical fever…
Mike Kafka: The Quarterback Whisperer Who Refused to Yell “Fire” in a Crowded Theater By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret If you squint at the NFL hard enough, it starts to look like the United Nations with shoulder pads: every autumn, billionaires in luxury boxes vote on the future…
