Generation Z, the planet’s first true digital natives, arrived squalling somewhere between the late-1990s and the early-2010s, depending on which demographer you bribe. They are now roughly 12 to 27 years old—old enough to vote, drink (where legal), and still be sent to bed without Wi-Fi. Internationally, they are the largest generational cohort in human…
Olivia Colman: The Crown’s Reluctant Diplomat in an Age of Global Dysfunction By Our Woman in the Cheap Seats, Watching Civilization Unravel on a Cracked Samsung LONDON—When Olivia Colman scooped up her Oscar in 2019, she apologized to Glenn Close in the same breath she used to thank her “bitches”—her word, not ours—thereby confirming what…
**The Global Theater of American Football: NFL Power Rankings as a Mirror of Civilizational Decline** While the rest of the planet grapples with climate change, democratic backsliding, and the inexorable march toward late-stage capitalism, America’s greatest export—after diabetes and military interventions—continues to be its peculiar form of organized violence known as professional football. The NFL’s…
Somewhere between the 24-hour news cycle and the bottomless mimosa brunch of internet outrage sits The Daily Beast, a publication that has spent the last fifteen years convincing the world it is simultaneously a fearless watchdog and the friend who brings the best gossip to the potluck. From an international vantage point—say, a cramped bureau…
Shia LaBeouf: The Accidental Global Citizen Nobody Asked For By Luka Varga, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a Hollywood red carpet and a Baltic film festival, Shia LaBeouf has become the human equivalent of a pop-up ad—ubiquitous, vaguely disorienting, and somehow still profitable. Once merely the kid from a Disney Channel sitcom, he has…
Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia—home of the Phillies—has, improbably, become the planet’s most honest geopolitical forum. While the United Nations keeps its microphones politely muted and Davos serves canapés to the same 200 people, 44,000 Philadelphians gather 81 times a year to scream unprintable truths about the human condition at nine men in red pinstripes. The…
Valley Forge Military Academy: Where the World Sends Its Sons to Learn the Ancient Art of Marching in Circles By Dave’s Foreign Desk, still jet-lagged from a diplomatic reception in Ulaanbaatar that featured fermented yak milk and PowerPoint slides on “synergistic deterrence.” Wayne, Pennsylvania – On a crisp morning that smells faintly of wet wool…
The Asia Cup schedule has dropped like a well-timed Yorker on the fragile stumps of geopolitics, and the planet—already juggling inflation, wars, and the slow-motion car crash we call “climate diplomacy”—has paused to check its cricket calendar. Yes, the six-nation tournament (plus a token qualifier that invariably loses every match and still pockets enough TV…
Is Taylor Swift Pregnant? An Entire Planet Holds Its Breath While Rome (and Everywhere Else) Burns PARIS—Somewhere between the latest IPCC report and the IMF’s warning that global debt is now larger than Jupiter, the question “Is Taylor Swift pregnant?” has vaulted past war, famine, and the price of eggs to become the single most…
The Orix Buffaloes: A Metaphor for Global Ambition Wrapped in a Cow Suit By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, Nursing a Third Suntory in the Press Box Kobe – In a nation that once tried to buy the Rockefeller Center and later apologised for existing too loudly, the Orix Buffaloes have quietly become baseball’s most accidentally geopolitical…
Maria Caulfield, MP for Lewes and—until recently—Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women’s Health Strategy, has become the latest sacrificial offering in the great global pageant of political self-immolation. Her resignation on 30 November 2023, ostensibly over the Rwanda deportation bill, arrived with the punctuality of a Swiss train and the predictability of a Hollywood sequel….
The Prince Who Wouldn’t Die A dispatch from the borderless kingdom of nostalgia, where heirs are manufactured, rebels are branded, and the revolution will be trademarked. By the time the news reached Ulan Bator, Prince Rogers Nelson had already been reincarnated twice: once as a hologram spinning “Purple Rain” over a Saudi luxury festival, and…
