Jacqui Heinrich: The White House’s Favorite Glitch in the Matrix If you squint hard enough at the daily White House press briefing—say, through the bottom of a half-empty negroni in a hotel bar in Sarajevo—you can almost see the ghost of every 20th-century war correspondent rolling their eyes in unison. There, in the front row,…
Half-Mast Around the Globe: A World Pauses to Pretend It Cares By the time the sun rose in Tokyo, the flags were already drooping at the Imperial Palace like exhausted laundry after a long night shift. Twelve hours later, the same tired fabric sagged above the Brandenburg Gate, while across the Atlantic, the Stars and…
Half Mast Today: A Global Flagellation of Mourning, Marketing, and Mild Inconvenience By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between dawn and the first lukewarm espresso of the day, flags began their reluctant ascent to half-mast across six continents—an international limbo that looks suspiciously like surrender but is officially filed under “deep respect.” From the granite…
The Ghost in Every Passport: How a Failed Austrian Watercolorist Still Stamps the World’s Visas By the time you finish this sentence, roughly three new documentaries, two TikTok conspiracy threads, and one unfortunate mustache will have invoked Adolf Hitler. Not bad for a man who couldn’t even get into art school. Yet eighty years after…
The Curious Export of Greg Gutfeld: How America’s Snarkiest Late-Night Host Became a Global Rorschach Test PARIS—On a rain-slick Wednesday in the Marais, the barman at Le Mary Celeste muted France-Inter mid-interview with Emmanuel Macron and flicked on the subtitled feed of “Gutfeld!” The move drew zero protests; the patrons—mostly advertising strategists pretending to read…
The Wand That Backfired: How J.K. Rowling Became a Global Rorschach Test There was a time, children of the dial-up age may recall, when the only controversy surrounding Joanne Kathleen Rowling was whether her publishers could squeeze the entire name “Philosopher’s” onto an American book spine. That quaint, sepia-toned epoch feels as distant as the…
Laura Loomer and the Global Export of American Outrage By the time Laura Loomer’s latest stunt ricochets across the planet—whether she’s handcuffing herself to a social-media HQ or live-streaming a deportation fantasy from a private jet—it has already been digested, memed, and monetized from São Paulo to Singapore. What began as a distinctly Floridian form…
When the Flag Drops to Half-Mast, the Dow Doesn’t Blink By the time the newsroom clock hit 11:00 a.m. in Brussels, the European Commission had already lowered its twelve-starred banner to half-mast for the latest school shooting in a country that still prints “In God We Trust” on its currency. By noon, the gesture had…
In the grand bazaar of global politics, the term “democrat” is less a fixed identity than a souvenir key-chain everyone insists is made of pure silver. From the marble corridors of Brussels to the tin-roof town halls of Maputo, the word is waved like a passport stamped with moral superiority—until, of course, the customs officer…
Anna Paulina Luna and the Global Ripple Effect of Florida’s Favorite Firebrand By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic When Anna Paulina Luna strode onto the floor of the U.S. House last January sporting aviators, a scowl, and the sort of confidence that only comes from having already survived Twitter, TikTok,…
Fluminense vs Bahia: A Tiny Patch of Grass Becomes the World’s Most Honest Mirror RIO DE JANEIRO—On Saturday night the Maracanã will once again host Fluminense vs Bahia, two football clubs whose combined wage bill is less than a single week of Lionel Messi’s Parisian dry-cleaning allowance. Yet for 90 minutes plus whatever farcical stoppage…
South Park: The Little Colorado Town That Weaponized Global Schadenfreude By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk In a world where diplomats still pretend that “deep concern” is a policy and billion-dollar summits produce press releases nobody reads, four construction-paper children in a fictional backwater have become the de-facto United Nations of satire. South Park, Colorado—population: whatever…
