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…
The EuroMillions lottery—Europe’s weekly exercise in collective delusion—draws punters from nine countries who hand over small change in exchange for the statistically negligible possibility that their lives will suddenly resemble a private-jet commercial. Every Tuesday and Friday night the continent pauses, breath baited, to discover which accidental plutocrat will be granted the GDP of a…
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max: The World Pauses, Blinks, Then Lines Up Anyway By Matteo “Mac” Alvarez, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk GENEVA — Somewhere between the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf and the third attempted coup of the week in West Africa, humanity has quietly agreed that the only date that truly…
**LAS VEGAS WEATHER: WHERE THE WORLD COMES TO MELT** *By our correspondent who has filed stories from actual deserts that were more hospitable* Las Vegas—that glittering monument to human optimism in Nevada’s Mojave Desert—has been experiencing weather that makes one wonder if the city finally negotiated an exclusive deal with the sun. While temperatures flirt…
Rachel Reilly: The Global Echo of a Reality-TV Gladiator It begins, as so many modern nightmares do, on a soundstage in Los Angeles. The year is 2010, the franchise is Big Brother, and the contestant is Rachel Reilly—a bottle-blonde hurricane of strategic tears, chemical self-confidence, and the sort of laugh that makes diplomats reach for…
