Horror Nights Tickets: The Global Scramble to Pay for the Privilege of Being Terrified By D. Locke, Senior Correspondent & Professional Glutton for Punishment If you want proof that the human race has officially run out of real problems to solve, consider this: horror-nights tickets—those overpriced wristbands that grant you entry to pop-up mazes where…
As the planet tilts toward its next geopolitical migraine, Jessica Chastain has become the unlikely Swiss Army knife of global soft power—compact, versatile, and sharp enough to cut through the fog of war, pandemic, and whatever fresh chaos the algorithm served us this morning. While diplomats argue over seating charts at summits nobody watches, Chastain…
Metaverse, Shmetaverse: The Global Circus Where Everyone’s Avatar Is Better Dressed By the time you finish this sentence, another island nation will have announced a “Metaverse Embassy,” another Fortune-500 CEO will have sworn the future is “phygital,” and another teenager in Jakarta will have sold a dragon-scale hoodie NFT for the price of a real…
GLOBAL SMACKDOWN REPORT: The Planet’s Weekly Recap of Who Got Owned, Who Got Lucky, and Who Still Owes Us Rent By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk ZURICH—If you squint hard enough, every news cycle looks like an over-booked wrestling card: the same tired gimmicks, the same surprise run-ins, and a commentary team pretending the outcome wasn’t…
There’s a moment in every empire’s decline when it stops exporting ideology and starts exporting mood. Enter Taylor Sheridan—cowboy-booted, squint-eyed, and minting melancholy like bitcoin for the prestige-TV age. From a windswept trailer in rural Wyoming, the former bit-part actor has become the United States’ single most reliable refinery for distilled machismo and scenic despair,…
Geraint Thomas and the Existential Circus of Modern Sport By our man in the peloton of despair Paris, July — While diplomats in Brussels argue over fish quotas and the planet quietly smolders, a 37-year-old Welshman with the knees of a medieval cathedral has been pedaling through France in a neon jersey, carrying the faint…
A Two-Person Bug Empire Quietly Conquers the Planet By our correspondent in the only café in Reykjavík that still accepts Australian dollars If you want a neat parable for late-stage capitalism, consider this: while the rest of us were panic-buying toilet paper and arguing on the internet, two sleep-deprived programmers from Adelaide—Ari Gibson and William…
Plastic Diplomacy: How a 1:17-Scale Lightning McQueen Became the World’s Most Effective Envoy By the time the first pallet of Lego Speed Champions 76995 “Lightning McQueen” sets cleared customs in Shanghai last month, the little red coupe had already outperformed half the foreign-service corps. While career ambassadors were busy arguing over seating charts at COP28,…
Pete Davidson: the United Nations of Heartbreak and Hickeys By Dave’s Locker, International Bureau of Schadenfreude When the rest of the planet fretted about inflation, energy grids, and whether the Arctic would still exist next Tuesday, Pete Davidson was quietly becoming the only export the United States still managed to deliver on time. From Staten…
The Global Pension: A Promise Written in Disappearing Ink By our Senior Correspondent, still waiting for his first payout in a bar on the Mekong In theory, a pension is the civilized world’s IOU for a lifetime of showing up on time and pretending to enjoy team-building exercises. In practice, it is humanity’s most ambitious…
Suicide Squad, or “Task Force X” if you prefer the sanitized UN-style branding, has always been less a story about super-villains and more a mirror held up to the global habit of outsourcing dirty work. From Washington to Warsaw, from Lagos to Lahore, governments have discovered that the most efficient way to dodge accountability is…
It began, as all resurrections do nowadays, with a press release. Somewhere between a UN climate summit and the latest celebrity apology tour, Showtime announced that Dexter Morgan—beloved blood-spatter analyst, part-time serial killer, full-time metaphor for late-stage capitalism—would rise again in “Dexter: Resurrection.” The planet collectively rolled its eyes so hard that seismographs in Reykjavik…
