**The Panopticon Goes Prime-Time: How CBS’s ‘Big Brother’ Became the World’s Accidental Reality Check** While the planet burns through its twenty-first-century adolescence, 16 Americans have volunteered to spend their summer locked in a soundstage bungalow, performing sincerity for cameras that never blink. CBS’s “Big Brother”—now limping into its 26th U.S. season—has become the West’s most…
Rick Davies and the Quiet Implosion of the Anglo-American Dream By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Terminal 3, Somewhere Overpriced The name Rick Davies still rings a faint, ironic bell across five continents—usually in the key of B-minor and accompanied by the clink of an airport lounge ice cube. To the casual observer he…
The Curious Case of Amy Dowden: How One Welsh Dancer Became a Global Metaphor for Resilience in the Age of Spectacle By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you’ve never heard of Amy Dowden, congratulations—you’ve successfully dodged the algorithmic blizzard that is British light-entertainment news. Yet even in the far-flung corners of the planet where Strictly…
The Bills-Ravens Cold War: How a Mid-Atlantic Playoff Spat Became the World’s Most Watched Proxy Skirmish By Matteo “Weather Permitting” Dravos, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker BALTIMORE—In the end, it wasn’t nuclear brinkmanship or a trade embargo that brought Beijing’s midnight-shift baristas, Lagos Uber drivers, and Reykjavik insomniacs together in group chat. It was a football…
Amanita phalloides, the death cap, is the diplomatic envoy no one invited to the potluck of global cuisine, yet keeps RSVP-ing “yes.” From the misty forests of Scandinavia to the suburban cul-de-sacs of Melbourne, this beige-capped diplomat delivers the same lethal communiqué: “Bon appétit, and kindly sign your organ-donor card.” Each year, the mushroom’s toxic…
Ricky Martin: The Glittering Canary in the Global Coal Mine By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still coughing up confetti from 1999 Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the planet agreed on exactly one thing: it was perfectly acceptable—nay, advisable—to scream “¡Un, dos, tres! Un pasito pa’lante, María!” while careening…
Derrick Henry Is the Last Titan Standing While the World Runs Out of Running Backs—and Possibly Civilization Itself YULIN, CHINA—At 4:07 a.m. local time, while most of humanity was doom-scrolling about the next micro-war or the price of eggs, a 6-foot-3, 247-pound American running back named Derrick Henry was bench-pressing Buicks somewhere in Nashville. The…
Minnesota Golden Gophers Football: How a Prairie College Team Quietly Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the Golden Gophers trot onto Huntington Bank Stadium this autumn, most of the planet will be busy pretending to care about something else: the Bundesliga, the Rugby Championship, the latest coup d’état, or that mesmerizing TikTok of…
Facundo and the Global Theater of the Absurd In the great carnival of international news, where every week brings a fresh candidate for the title of “Most Spectacularly Ill-Advised Human Decision,” the name Facundo has lately been flashing in neon. Not the nineteenth-century Argentine strongman Facundo Quiroga—though heaven knows the original was no stranger to…
**The Eternal Prince: How Harry Became the World’s Most Expensive Expat** In the grand theater of modern monarchy—where tiaras meet trauma and bloodlines meet brand lines—Prince Harry has accomplished what no revolutionary, republican, or rational human has managed in centuries: he’s made the British royal family look almost relatable. Almost. From his current perch in…
American Football’s Reluctant Messiah: How Josh Allen Became the MVP the World Didn’t Know It Needed by Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere between a NATO summit and the latest cryptocurrency implosion, the planet’s attention was hijacked this week by a 6-foot-5 Nebraskan with the haircut of a Scandinavian death-metal bassist and the arm of…
From the trading pits of New York to the neon-lit ramen shops of Tokyo, one name keeps popping up in group chats that smell faintly of Red Bull and desperation: Timothy Sykes. The 42-year-old former penny-stock prodigy—who once turned $12,415 of bar mitzvah money into a self-proclaimed $7.3 million—has become the patron saint of laptop-warrior…
