Lily James and the Global Factory of Want PARIS—While the Seine continues to cough up Olympic debris like a hung-over river god, delegates at the nearby UNESCO summit are locked in a far weightier debate: the planetary export of English Rose nostalgia. Exhibit A sits on a velvet stool in a Montmartre hotel lobby, politely…
**The Hillsborough Disaster: When Football’s Global Cathedral Became a Death Trap** On April 15, 1989, while the Berlin Wall was still stubbornly standing and Tiananmen Square protesters were plotting their spring awakening, 96 Liverpool fans decided to catch a football match and never came home. The Hillsborough disaster—Britain’s deadliest sporting tragedy—didn’t just expose the rot…
David Byrne, the perpetually wide-eyed Scot turned New Yorker, has spent four decades turning the planet’s anxiety into dance music. From the fever dreams of Talking Heads to his current collabs with Congolese thumb-piano wizards, Byrne has become the unofficial cartographer of global neurosis—mapping dread, delight, and debt into polyrhythms you can hum while queuing…
Affleck, the Accidental Geopolitician: How One Bostonian Became the UN’s Unwilling Rorschach Test It began, like most modern tragedies, on a red carpet: Ben Affleck—actor, director, tabloid chew-toy, and, improbably, global policy Rorschach—stood outside the Venice Film Festival in 2023 wearing a face that looked like it had just read the IMF’s latest outlook. The…
The Strokes: How Five Rich Kids from Manhattan Accidentally Became the Soundtrack to a Planet That Forgot What It Was Rebelling Against By the time Is This It dropped in July 2001, the world was already busy stockpiling duct tape and rehearsing new lines about freedom fries. While NATO ministers huddled in Brussels drafting press…
Taemin, the Eternal Boy Who Outlived the End of the World (and Still Dances in the Ashes) The calendar says 2024, but somewhere in a Seoul rehearsal studio the clock stopped on 26 May 2022 and has been tap-dancing in place ever since. That was the day SHINee’s youngest—legal adult, eternal sprite, industry-wide cautionary tale…
The Ballad of Jhoan Durán: How One Right Arm Became a Geopolitical Weapon Somewhere in the bowels of Estadio Quisqueya in Santo Domingo, a radar-gun operator once clocked a 16-year-old at 97 mph and quietly crossed himself. That teenager—Jhoan Durán—has since turned that teenage lightning bolt into a full-scale diplomatic crisis for opposing hitters, a…
Dodgers Games: The Global Circus Where Baseball Meets Geopolitical Theater By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen More Bullpens Than Bull Markets LOS ANGELES—While the rest of the planet obsesses over missiles, microchips, and methane, 53,000 sunburned pilgrims still shuffle into Chavez Ravine each night to watch grown men in pajamas swing sculpted lumber at a sphere…
Cade Cunningham’s Quiet Insurrection: How a 22-Year-Old from Arlington Is Redrawing the NBA’s World Map By Matteo “Machiavelli” Marconi, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—On the morning after the Pistons’ 14th straight loss, the boulanger on Rue des Abbesses was still discussing Cade Cunningham’s step-back three as if it were a new strain of existentialism. The…
John Oliver, the bespectacled Englishman who somehow convinced HBO to fund weekly therapy sessions disguised as comedy, has become the planet’s unofficial translator for American dysfunction. From Lagos to Ljubljana, millions tune in not for his punch lines—though those are surgical—but for the reassurance that somewhere an over-caffeinated Brit is screaming into the void on…
**The Gospel According to Jen: How a Utah Housewife Became the World’s Most Reluctant Prophet** In the grand theater of global absurdity, where billionaires rocket themselves into space while children starve below, fate has delivered its latest punchline: a 25-year-old Mormon mom from Utah has accidentally become the world’s most famous woman named Jennifer Affleck….
Google Gemini: The World’s Newest Polyglot, Poly-currency, Poly-problem Child by L. V. “Vesper” Moreau, Senior International Chronicler of Algorithmic Misbehavior PARIS—On a rainy Thursday that felt suspiciously like the last rainy Thursday, Google unveiled Gemini, its latest multilingual, multimodal, and multi-continent artificial intelligence. The launch party—streamed from a loft in Mountain View and simultaneously simulcast…
