DONALD TRUMP, DEEPFAKED AND DEEP-FRIED: HOW ONE AI VIDEO UNMASKED PLANET EARTH’S COLLECTIVE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN by Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic The 45-second clip dropped at 3:07 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, which is of course the universal witching hour for questionable life choices. There was the former U.S. president, improbably svelte, wearing a sash…
PARIS—While delegates at UNESCO bicker over whether streaming performances deserve World-Heritage status, a quiet American named Tom Pelphrey is busy exporting something far trickier to tariff: the existential meltdown of the white, male anti-hero. From a soundstage in Burbank to a flat-screen in Bali, Pelphrey’s specialty is turning the implosion of U.S. masculinity into binge-worthy…
Ghost of Yotei: The Specter Haunting Every Boardroom from Tokyo to Timbuktu By Our Far-Too-Frequent-Flyer Correspondent Tokyo—In the smoky backroom of a Shibuya izakaya last Friday, three salarymen toasted the quietest apocalypse in modern finance. Their clink of lowball glasses barely rose above the J-Pop B-side warbling from a 1990s-era karaoke machine, yet the gesture…
BREAKING: Swine Supremacy Achieved—Peppa Pig Now De Facto Ruler of Earth’s Toddlers, Emerging Markets, and, Alas, Your Last Nerve By Our Man in the Cultural Swill Dateline: Everywhere, Tuesday, 08:17 GMT—While the United Nations debates carbon credits and the IMF frets about sovereign debt, an unholy pink alliance has already conquered the planet. Peppa Pig—two…
The iPhone 13 Pro Max: A 240-Gramme Passport to the End of History Bylines from Lagos, Shenzhen, Cupertino, and the back of a tuk-tuk in Phnom Penh Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, seat 42B is scrolling through macro-economic charts on a screen the size of a small paperback. The passenger—French-Malian venture capitalist, dual citizenships, three vaccine…
A Comcast Cable Goes Slack: How One Midwestern Outage Became a Global Parable by Daria Voss, Dave’s Locker International Desk CINCINNATI—When the Xfinity network in Ohio’s Hamilton County dropped dead at 07:14 local time last Tuesday, the immediate victims numbered roughly 1.2 million souls—give or take a few remote workers who swear they were “just…
Leo Rivas, the 25-year-old switch-hitting infielder now plying his trade for the Hanwha Eagles of the Korea Baseball Organization, is exactly the sort of footnote your favorite club’s analytics department prays you never Google. A career .232 hitter in the minors, Rivas has been traded, waived, or outright released more times than most people change…
**The Global Brotherhood of Bumper-Car Barristers** *From Lagos to Los Angeles, an army of tailored suits has perfected the art of turning twisted metal into tuition fees.* There are two universal constants in the 21st-century metropolis: traffic lights that exist only as decorative suggestions, and the business card of a car-accident lawyer wedged between your…
**The Earth Tilts Slightly Off-Axis as Stacey Solomon Wins an NTA, Confusing Continents Everywhere** By the time the news pinged across fiber-optic cables from London’s O2 Arena to Lagos, Lima, and Laos, the planet’s collective response could be summarised in one elegant, multilingual shrug: “Who, exactly, is Stacey Solomon—and why does her shiny new National…
From the vantage point of a bar in Brussels that still smells faintly of tear-gas from last week’s farmers’ protest, the Uvalde school massacre looks less like a uniquely American tragedy and more like the loudest episode in a planetary sitcom titled “Humans: The Director’s Cut.” Nineteen children and two teachers were erased on 24…
**Alaska’s Permanent Fund: The Welfare State That Republicans Forgot to Hate** *By our correspondent who once cashed a dividend check and still feels dirty about it* ANCHORAGE—While the rest of the planet guts social programs faster than you can say “austerity,” America’s northernmost petro-colony has been quietly mailing free money to every resident—toddlers included—since 1982….
Car Injury Attorneys: The Globe’s New Ambassadors of Ambulance-Chasing Diplomacy By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Traffic Circle in Paris and the World’s Longest Tailback Outside Lagos It begins, as most modern tragedies do, with a notification. Somewhere between the squeal of rubber and the ping of an airbag sensor, a fender-bender in São Paulo…
