Marvel Tokon Beta: When the World’s Favorite Superhero Franchise Decides to Issue Its Own Currency (and Nobody Tells the IMF) By the time most of you woke up this morning, some kid in Lagos had already flipped a pixelated Captain America shield NFT for enough Marvel Tokon Beta (MTB) to buy three weeks of actual…
The Postcode Lottery: How Five Digits Decide Your Fate on This Spinning Rock By the time you finish reading this sentence, three babies will have drawn the cosmic short straw and been born in postal zones where life expectancy is already wheezing twenty years behind the luckier infants wailing a few alphanumeric characters away. Welcome…
Josh Brolin’s Chin Has More Passport Stamps Than Your LinkedIn Profile By Our Bureau of Expensive Mid-Life Crises, Geneva When the World Economic Forum wants a mood board for “late-capitalist gravitas,” it apparently just air-drops a 4K still of Josh Brolin squinting at a green screen. From the neon sewers of Seoul to the tax…
DAVID BOWIE, CITIZEN OF NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE by our itinerant correspondent still trying to find a payphone that works PARIS—At 3 a.m. in a Marais dive bar, the jukebox coughs up “Heroes” for the fourth time tonight. A German banker in a bespoke suit weeps quietly into his pastis; two Senegalese buskers argue about the…
Dallas, Texas—never the shy type—has spent the last few weeks auditioning for the Four Horsemen. One moment it’s 28 °C and the cicadas are gossiping like hedge-fund analysts at a rooftop bar; the next, marble-sized hail is auditioning for the lead role in “The Day After Tomorrow: Suburban Edition.” International observers, once content to treat…
In Houston, under a roof that cost more than the GDP of several Pacific island nations, the Astros played baseball last night. That sentence already contains enough contradictions—indoor baseball, billion-dollar air-conditioning, a sport once exported as a metaphor for American innocence now wrapped in retractable steel—to make any foreign correspondent reach for the antacid and…
Dallas, Texas— The forecast here is so cartoonishly extreme that it feels like the city is auditioning for a spot in the United Nations Climate Hall of Infamy. One day the mercury tickles 110°F (43°C), the next a derecho rewinds the thermostat to 68°F and flips every patio umbrella into low-orbit lawn art. From a…
The Curious Case of Trevor Lawrence: How a Quarterback from Cartersville, Georgia Briefly Became the UN Secretary-General of American Soft Power By the time Trevor Lawrence trotted onto the Wembley pitch last October for the Jacksonville Jaguars’ annual hostage-taking of British NFL fans, the global temperature had risen another 0.2°C, two more democracies had quietly…
The People’s Lottery: When the Whole Planet Buys the Same Ticket By Diego “Lucky” Morales, International Correspondent-at-Large, currently hiding from my bookie in Lisbon They say lotteries are taxes on people who are bad at math. If that’s true, the newly christened “People’s Lottery” is the first truly global fiscal policy—voluntary, enthusiastic, and administered not…
**The Punk Paradox: How a Chicago Loudmouth Became the World’s Most Reluctant Cultural Ambassador** In the grand theater of global entertainment, where authenticity is manufactured in boardrooms and rebellion comes with a barcode, CM Punk stands as perhaps our most delicious contradiction—a man who made a career out of telling his audience they’re idiots for…
In a world where grain freighters reroute around the Red Sea to avoid drone hobbyists and the Arctic Council meets via Zoom because the polar ice has melted too much for a physical quorum, the Denver Broncos’ freshly released 2024 schedule lands on my desk like a glossy brochure from a saner planet. It promises…
Paul Thomas Anderson: The Last American Auteur Selling Existential Dread to a Streaming Planet Byline: Dave’s Locker International Desk If you want to understand how the 21st-century world consumes anxiety, buy a ticket—assuming your local multiplex hasn’t been converted into a Bitcoin mine—to a Paul Thomas Anderson film. From the oil-slick nihilism of There Will…
