Hasbro: How a Rhode Island Toymaker Became the Soft-Power Emperor of a Planet on the Brink By the time the first Ukrainian kid unpacked a donated box containing a My Little Pony action figure still labeled in Cyrillic for the Moscow market, the cosmic joke was already complete. Somewhere in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a middle…
**The Kissing Bug’s Grand World Tour: How a Latin American Parasite Became Everyone’s Problem** By the time you finish your morning espresso, three more people will have joined the 6–7 million already hosting *Trypanosoma cruzi*, the unicellar squatter that causes Chagas disease. Most of them won’t know it yet; the parasite is polite enough to…
**The Curious Case of Katie Abraham: How One Woman’s Digital Footprint Became a Global Mirror** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and central banks perform interpretive dance with interest rates—the saga of Katie Abraham might seem like small potatoes. But then again, history teaches us that revolutions…
**The Wagyu Whitewash: How Burger King Turned Japan’s Sacred Cow into Global Fast-Food Fodder** *By our correspondent in the departure lounge of dietary disillusion* TOKYO—In the beginning, there was the cow, and the cow was good—so good, in fact, that Japanese emperors once forbade commoners from eating it. Fast-forward eight centuries and the same bovine…
McDonald’s Monopoly: How a French Fry Bribe Became a Global Morality Play By Dave’s Locker International Desk From Manila to Manchester, the same ritual unfolds every autumn: otherwise rational citizens queue for lukewarm nuggets in the hope that the paper sleeve will cough up a Boardwalk sticker and finance their escape from late-stage capitalism. Welcome…
The Kissing Bug: A Love Story Written in Blood and Bureaucracy By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you’ve ever felt that romance is dead, meet Triatoma infestans— the “kissing bug,” a creature so devoted it waits until you’re asleep, crawls onto your lips, and gently siphons your blood like a drunk sommelier at last call….
Eric Stonestreet: Kansas Beats Kandahar in the Global Sitcom Arms Race Bylines from Berlin, Bishkek, and Burbank all agree on one thing: if the 21st-century’s most effective soft-power weapon is a well-timed pratfall, then the United States has quietly upgraded its arsenal to DEFCON Dad-Joke. Enter Eric Stonestreet—Midwestern export, Emmy-winner, and living proof that geopolitical…
**The Man Who Built Magic: Stuart Craig’s Architectural Sorcery and the Global Empire of Make-Believe** In an era where the real world increasingly resembles a poorly scripted dystopian fever dream, humanity has found its most reliable escape hatch in the meticulously crafted fantasies of a soft-spoken British production designer who never quite learned to color…
A Coastal Flood Advisory: The World’s Wettest RSVP By Ignacio “Iggy” Montalbán, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert arrived on every phone from Jakarta to Jacksonville at 03:17 local time—like a drunk ex texting “u up?” at closing time. Coastal Flood Advisory. Nothing says “good morning” quite like the polite promise that your neighborhood may…
From the Ruins of Local Truth, a Global Mirror: Chicago Tribune as the World’s Cautionary Comic Strip By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, somewhere between Gate 47 and Existential Dread Chicago—The city that once gave the planet speakeasies, improv comedy, and a certain brand of brisk, sub-zero stoicism—has lately been best known for exporting…
In the grand bazaar of twenty-first-century capitalism, where every human impulse is priced, packaged, and resold at a 400-percent markup, Ticketmaster stands as a cathedral of exquisite disappointment. From São Paulo to Seoul, Dublin to Dubai, the same ritual unfolds: credit-card numbers are tendered like votive offerings, CAPTCHA boxes are genuflected before, and, in the…
Manila, Philippines – At the precise moment delegates in Glasgow were pledging to phase out coal, the Philippines was quietly signing yet another 20-year sweetheart deal to import more of the black stuff. This, in a country already blessed with enough sunshine to tan the entire planet and enough wind to blow every politician’s promises…
