Logan Paul: The Export America Keeps Pretending It Didn’t Ship PARIS – Somewhere between a McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées and a Zara on Istiklal Avenue, it dawned on me that Logan Paul is less a YouTuber than a cultural analogue of the plastic straw: cheap, globally ubiquitous, and—once you’ve seen it jammed up a sea…
In the grand bazaar of global celebrity, where fame is traded like Bitcoin on a Tuesday afternoon, Earvin “Magic” Johnson remains the rarest of coins: one that hasn’t devalued, re-minted, or vanished into a forgotten wallet. From Lagos to Lisbon, Beijing to Bogotá, the man who once spun no-look passes in Forum purple now spins…
WNBA Playoffs 2025: When a Mid-Court Trap Becomes Geopolitical Theater By Our Correspondent, writing from a hotel bar that still thinks “mocktail” is a hate crime FIBA’s headquarters in Mies, Switzerland, is a concrete slab that looks like it was designed during a particularly bitter divorce. Inside, executives have spent the summer watching the 2025…
Nick Kurtz, the American catcher who this week signed a reported $4 million deal with the Oakland Athletics, is not yet famous enough to be recognized in the world’s better hotel lobbies. Give it a nanosecond. In an age when a bored Finnish teenager can tank a multinational bank with a meme, the ripple effects…
The Las Vegas Raiders: America’s Wandering Sin-Eater By Dave’s Locker International Desk For the third time in sixty-five years, the Oakland-turned-Los-Angeles-turned-Oakland-again Raiders have folded their tents, slipped the local bonds of affection, and set up shop in Las Vegas—a city whose civic motto might as well be “Your moral bankruptcy, now with comped drinks.” The…
Omaha, Nebraska – a city whose name most of the planet only recognises from a 1995 Soderbergh film or from Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder jamboree, where billionaires pretend that cherry Coke counts as a food group. Yet this modest Midwestern grid of stockyards and start-ups has quietly become a geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see…
New England, the six-state corner of the United States that once fancied itself the moral cockpit of the Western world, has spent the last 400 years oscillating between revolutionary zeal and artisanal smugness. From a safe remove—say, a café terrace in Lisbon where the espresso still costs less than a Boston parking ticket—its latest incarnation…
**Kendrick Lamar: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Prophet from Compton Who Terrifies Dictators** *From the barrios of Bogotá to the banlieues of Paris, one man’s trauma becomes everyone’s anthem* The first time a Kenyan taxi driver in Nairobi asked if I’d heard “Alright,” I realized Kendrick Lamar had accomplished what American foreign policy never could: convincing the…
Allegiant, or How Budget Airlines Became the World’s Cruelest Geography Lesson by Diego “Still Has Knee Room” Monteverde Somewhere over the Atlantic, Allegiant Air Flight 3472—an Airbus A320 that had already seen more owners than a Malibu timeshare—banked south to avoid a storm and, in doing so, sketched the perfect metaphor for 2024: we are…
Millie Bobby Brown and the Global Commodification of Adolescence By Our Correspondent, Still Jet-Lagged from the Last Apocalypse PARIS—On the Champs-Élysées last week, a billboard the size of a modest Balkan republic showed Millie Bobby Brown clutching a $190 bottle of vegan face cream while smiling like a hostage who has read the terms of…
Ilia Topuria: The Featherweight Who Just Punched a Hole in the Global Order By Dave’s Locker International Desk Valencia, Spain – Somewhere between the old-world cafés serving burnt espresso to tourists and the beach clubs blasting reggaeton at 3 a.m., a 27-year-old Georgian-Spaniard named Ilia Topuria decided the planet needed a new universal language: a…
Michael J. Fox and the Global Parkinson’s Punchline Nobody Signed Up For By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Gate 42 Michael J. Fox—Canada’s most polite cultural export after maple-syrup apologies—has spent four decades proving that even a time-travelling teenager can’t outrun the future. Back to the Future turned 39 this year; its star’s personal…
