GENEVA—Somewhere inside the Palais des Nations, a printer the size of a Fiat 500 spits out a single sheet of paper every quarter. On that sheet is a number between 0 and 100 that no consumer will ever see, yet that quietly decides how many children will go to bed hungry tonight, whether your pension…
Jan Ravnik, the Slovenian fashion designer who melted the internet faster than a popsicle on a Ljubljana sidewalk, has become the latest proof that the global attention economy has the memory of a goldfish with Alzheimer’s. One day you’re an obscure tailor stitching avant-garde silhouettes in a country most Americans still confuse with Slovakia; the…
America’s Got Talent, the sequin-drenched carnival that has colonized more than 190 territories, is no longer merely a TV show. It is a planetary referendum on what the human race chooses to applaud when the bombs are falling, the ice caps are dripping into cocktails, and the algorithm has already decided who’s going to cry…
Miami, USA – In the grand geopolitical chessboard of planetary affairs, Braxton Berrios is not a piece anyone would have circled in red. The Miami Dolphins’ 5-foot-9 special-teams mercenary is, by any conventional metric, a glorified punt-catcher whose career yardage could fit comfortably inside a Swiss bank vault. Yet on a planet where hedge-fund prophets…
The World According to Andy Richter: How One Man’s Sidekick Gig Quietly Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time the first cruise missile of the Gulf War arced over Baghdad in 1991, Andy Richter was already perfecting the art of the perfectly timed shrug on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. While diplomats haggled over no-fly…
**The International Incident of Hilaria Baldwin, or How America Exported Its Identity Crisis to Spain** In the grand theater of global absurdities, where nuclear powers play chicken over fishing boats and billionaires race to Mars while Earth burns, the saga of Hilaria Baldwin stands as a peculiar testament to our collective identity crisis—a sort of…
The Glorious Collapse of Distance, Now Served on Tap By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the 38th Parallel and Happy Hour Type “pub near me” into your glowing rectangle and you’ll summon an algorithmic genie that has already cross-referenced your GPS coordinates, your credit-card limit, and, if you’re in Beijing, your social-credit score. In that single…
Danielle Fishel and the Miraculous Export of American Nostalgia By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large In the grand bazaar of global pop culture, where K-dramas elbow Turkish telenovelas for shelf space and Nigerian Afrobeats drowns out yesterday’s Latin pop, one compact unit of 1990s Americana continues to punch improbably above its weight: Danielle Fishel, forever Topanga, the…
Mark Ballas and the Global Ballet of Manufactured Fame By R. S. Mortensen, Dave’s Locker International Bureau On any given Tuesday, while Sri Lanka’s tea prices wobble like a drunk tourist in Galle, and German factory orders shrink faster than a TikTok attention span, a 37-year-old man in Los Angeles rehearses a cha-cha in shoes…
**SALT LAKE CITY, WE HAVE A PROBLEM: The Global Fallout When Mormon Wives Go Off-Script** The international diplomatic community has weathered its share of crises—wars, famines, that unfortunate incident with the Australian Prime Minister and the raw onion. But nothing quite prepared the global village for the seismic tremors emanating from Utah, where a cadre…
Bruno Tonioli: The Last Global Diplomat We Didn’t Know We Needed By Our Man in Perpetual Transit Somewhere between the collapse of multilateral trade talks and the moment a former U.S. president tried to trademark the word “freedom,” Bruno Tonioli pirouetted onto the world stage like a sequined neutron bomb—small, glittering, and impossible to ignore….
The Pennsylvania Lottery—PA Lottery to the locals—has quietly become a case study in how even earnest, middle-American gambling can reverberate from Lagos to London. On the surface it’s the same old heart-warming fairy-tale: scratch-offs that fund senior-citizen prescriptions, televised drawings presided over by a grinning host who looks like he teaches middle-school civics on the…
