Opendoor, the American digital flipper that will buy your house faster than you can say “negative equity,” has been quietly exporting its algorithmic appetite for other people’s drywall across the planet. What started in Phoenix—because, of course, the city most famous for mirages would spawn a real-estate unicorn—now stalks listings from Toronto to Tel Aviv….
The Red Sox–Athletics tilt has always been a quaint sideshow of American provincialism—two teams named after socks and accountants, respectively, playing a children’s pastime while the planet burns. Yet on Wednesday night in Oakland, as the smoke from Canada’s record-breaking wildfires drifted south like an apologetic surrender note, the game acquired the faint whiff of…
The Quiet Bureaucrat with the Planet in His Briefcase By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When the Director of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation takes the podium these days, the live feed is carried on every continent except Antarctica—and even the penguins have requested the transcript. That is…
A Governor in Harrisburg, a President in Budapest, and the World in the Cheap Seats By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged from three connecting flights and one regrettable pierogi in Warsaw. It is 3 a.m. in Kyiv when Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania tweets a photo of himself ladling chipped-ham sandwiches at a Pittsburgh fire…
Joe Walsh: The Global Brand Nobody Ordered, Yet Here We Are Somewhere between a forgotten Eagles guitar riff and a half-remembered U.S. congressman lies the name Joe Walsh—two syllables now ricocheting across continents like a linguistic boomerang nobody asked to throw. In Berlin coffee shops, the barista hums “Life’s Been Good” while wondering if the…
Provo, Utah: Where the World’s Moral Panic Gets a Parking Pass By Dave’s Locker International Desk, 14 June 2024 If you squint hard enough at the Wasatch Range, the peaks look like the Alps having an identity crisis—too polite, suspiciously sober, and funded by a venture-capital trust fund. Provo, Utah, population 115,000 and home to…
The Man Who Swiped Right on the Global Economy: Kaz Nejatian’s Grand Tour of Power, Algorithms, and Mild Existential Dread By the time most of us had finished doom-scrolling through another Tuesday, Kaz Nejatian had already negotiated new payment rails for three continents, politely reminded a G7 minister why sovereign currencies still matter, and—if the…
Flags at half-mast are the world’s most diplomatic shrug: a cloth semaphore that says “something bad happened, but we’re still open for business.” Today, the gesture is as global as overpriced airport coffee, stretching from the maple-leaf bureaucracy of Ottawa to the bureaucratic maple syrup of Bern. The reason? Take your pick—there are more bereaved…
Paris, 07:33 CEST — Somewhere between the Seine and the seventh arrondissement’s last surviving boulangerie, a queue of bleary-eyed exchange students has formed. Their phones glow with the same three words in seventeen languages: “free croissant pizza Papa Johns.” It sounds like an avant-garde haiku dreamed up by an algorithm on a sugar crash, yet…
Notre-Dame: The Cathedral That Went Viral Before the Internet By Dave’s Locker International Bureau Paris—On 15 April 2019, while the planet was busy arguing about Brexit, trade wars, and which Kardashian had unfollowed whom, an 850-year-old lady in the heart of Paris caught fire. Within minutes, the spire of Notre-Dame de Paris folded like a…
Dispatch from the Global Giggleplex: Chris Pratt as the Planet’s Punchline-in-Chief By Dave’s Locker, International Affairs (and Occasional Existential Dread) Desk Somewhere between the first Avengers box-office billion and the fifteenth Jurassic sequel, Chris Pratt evolved from genial sitcom sidekick to a geopolitical constant—like climate change, but with better teeth and a dedicated meme department….
Keir Starmer, the human grey cardigan who now runs the United Kingdom, has suddenly become the most talked-about man in every chancellery, embassy, and WhatsApp group chat from Washington to Warsaw. After fourteen years of Conservative governments that resembled a slow-motion Netflix documentary on aristocratic self-harm, Labour’s victory feels less like a political swing and…
