Kate Hudson, the American actress forever frozen in the collective unconscious as the manic-pixie record-store girl from “Almost Famous,” has spent the last two decades proving that a single cinematic sunbeam can illuminate a surprisingly large swath of the planet. From the neon canyons of Tokyo’s Shibuya—where her Fabletics athleisure line is hawked on jumbotrons…
BBC Athletics: The Empire Strikes Track By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between a rain-soaked Zurich stadium and a Lagos bar with suspiciously good Wi-Fi. It begins, as most modern tragedies do, with a push notification: “BBC SPORT LIVE – Follow every stride of the Diamond League!” Somewhere in the time zones, an…
Pittsburgh: How a Rust-Belt Relic Became the Canary in Everyone’s Post-Industrial Coal Mine By our Man in the Terminal Bar, filing under a bridge that has more Wi-Fi than Rio’s favelas Somewhere on the flight from Singapore to Pittsburgh International—yes, they have one, and yes, it still calls itself “international” with the same charming optimism…
Titanic’s Ghost: How One C-list Heart-Throb Became the Accidental Oracle of the End Times by C. Álvarez-Muntaner, roaming correspondent PARIS—In the early hours of a rainy Tuesday, a tourist boat on the Seine drifted past Notre-Dame, its loudspeaker proudly announcing that “Billy Zane once filmed here.” No one aboard could name the project, but the…
The Global Empire of Tiny Squares: How the New York Times Crossword Quietly Colonized the Planet By the time the first sip of Monday-morning espresso hits a bleary-eyed banker in Singapore, a retiree in São Paulo has already penciled 1-Across in Portuguese and muttered something unprintable about the clue “Oscar winner Paquin.” The New York…
Uber Stock: The Global Hustle Gets a Valuation Somewhere between Jakarta gridlock and a Parisian taxi strike, Uber Technologies Inc. is still pretending to be a tech company rather than the world’s most sophisticated labor arbitrage scheme. Yet Wall Street keeps pricing the stock as if every scooter in Bogotá will someday sprout wings and…
From São Paulo to Seoul, the phrase “Lyft stock” is muttered with the same reverence once reserved for tulip bulbs, South Sea shares, and any other botanical or nautical folly that promised to turn cab rides into castles. The ticker LYFT—listed in New York but traded in every sleepless brokerage from Dubai to Dublin—has become…
Skate 4, now politely renamed skate. (yes, the period is part of the branding—because nothing says “we’re relaxed” like terminal punctuation), has finally ollied onto PlayStation after a two-year PC beta that looked suspiciously like an outsourced QA internship. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, millions of thumbs are blistering in unison, proving once again that the…
Tyri Donovan and the Age of the Accidental Geopolitician By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a viral dance challenge and an inter-continental trade dispute, Tyri Donovan—previously known only to her 2.3 million followers as “the girl who turned her panic attack into a banger”—became the first civilian to trigger an emergency session of the…
Preston Smith, the man who turned phonics into a Silicon Valley fever dream, is once again making the planet feel slightly under-educated. From the gleaming co-working temples of San José to the fluorescent-lit cram schools of Seoul, Smith’s shadow looms over every eight-year-old who still thinks “cat” starts with a K. How did a mild-mannered…
The DJI Mini 5 Pro: A Pocket-Sized Eye in the Sky for the Age of Perpetual Surveillance By “World-Weary” Wu, roving correspondent for Dave’s Locker Somewhere over the Sea of Marmara, a bored Turkish customs agent is watching a YouTube livestream in which a Dutch influencer uses a DJI Mini 5 Pro to chase seagulls…
**The Septuagenarian Elephant in Every Room: How One Man’s Birth Certificate Became a Global Geopolitical Flashpoint** While most 77-year-olds argue with pigeons in the park about breadcrumb subsidies, Donald J. Trump has transformed his golden years into what international observers diplomatically call “a fascinating case study in geriatric geopolitics.” From Tokyo trading floors to Berlin…
