Los Angeles Weather: The Planet’s Smog-Covered Canary in a Cashmere Hoodie By Dave’s Foreign Bureau, filed from a patio heater in Silver Lake LOS ANGELES—While the rest of the planet haggles over carbon budgets and argues whether 1.5 °C is a target or a punchline, Los Angeles has skipped ahead to the deluxe edition: 34…
Square Enix: The Japanese Dragon Still Trying to Breathe Fire in a World of Mobile Micro-Transactions Tokyo, Japan – On the 18th floor of the Shinjuku Eastside Square tower, the air smells faintly of matcha, desperation, and freshly unwrapped PlayStation 5 dev kits. This is the headquarters of Square Enix Holdings, a company that once…
High Potential, Season 2: A Globally Viral IQ Test That Most of Us Are Still Failing By “International” Correspondent Who Has Read Too Many Subtitles The planet’s streaming algorithms quietly agreed on one thing last week: Season 2 of *High Potential*—the U.S. remake of the French *HPI*—should be force-fed to 190 countries faster than a…
**The Global Spectacle of Whitney Rose’s Failed Business: A Cautionary Tale for the Age of Influencer Capitalism** From the neon-lit boardrooms of Tokyo to the sun-bleached patios of Los Angeles, the international business community has witnessed yet another influencer’s entrepreneurial dreams dissolve faster than a sugar cube in espresso. Whitney Rose—whose claim to fame apparently…
The Prison-Industrial Theme Park Nobody Asked For An International Dispatch on “Mayor of Kingstown” and the Quiet Global Scream It Represents By the time the third season of “Mayor of Kingstown” dropped, the show had already been subtitled, memed, and binge-watched on every continent that still has reliable Wi-Fi. From Lagos living rooms to Lapland…
iOS 26 Wallpaper: The Earth’s Most Expensive National Flag, Now Available in 12K By the time you finish reading this sentence, Apple’s design team in Cupertino will have changed its mind about the default wallpaper twice and scheduled three emergency all-hands meetings about shade #2F4F4F. Yet somewhere between the smog of Delhi and the smog…
Blake Treinen and the Curious Diplomacy of 95-mph Sliders By Our Man in the Dugout, currently hiding from both MLB Security and Interpol If you were trying to explain 21st-century America to a Martian anthropologist—or, more realistically, to a Chinese semiconductor executive who just bought a controlling stake in the Dodgers—you could do worse than…
**The Desert Diamond: How a Phoenix Baseball Team Became the World’s Most Improbable Metaphor** In the grand theater of American excess, where sports franchises operate as municipal extortion rackets disguised as civic pride, the Arizona Diamondbacks represent something refreshingly honest: a failure so complete it’s practically performance art. While European football clubs serve as soft-power…
A Hundred Microclimates of Melancholy: Liverpool Weather as Global Weather Report By Our Man in the Drizzle, somewhere between the Mersey and the Apocalypse Liverpool, England – The first thing you notice, after the maritime gulls have mugged you for your chips, is that Liverpool’s weather can’t quite decide whether it’s rehearsing for climate catastrophe…
**The Global Choreography: How Jen Affleck’s Dancing with the Stars Debut Became the World’s Favorite Distraction** While Ukrainian drones dance through Russian airspace and Chinese balloons pirouette across American skies, humanity has found its true north: watching a woman named Jennifer Affleck—who married into the Affleck dynasty like some sort of Hollywood Habsburg—attempt the cha-cha…
LOS ANGELES—Somewhere between the sushi bars of Ginza and the steakhouses of Buenos Aires, the phrase “¡Vamos Dodgers!” has become as common a toast as any local battle cry. That a baseball team from a city that also exports Marvel franchises and micro-influencers now functions as a de-facto cultural attaché tells you everything about America’s…
Somewhere above the Indian Ocean, a Boeing 777 freighter hums with the refrigerated sighs of Chilean cherries headed for Chinese New Year, while—in the cargo hold of a separate flight—a single replacement phone charger rattles around in a box the size of a microwave, bound for a London flat whose occupant forgot to tick “eco-friendly…
