Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, where the map turns from cobalt blue to a suspiciously Instagram-filtered turquoise, the Hawaiian archipelago is once again auditioning for the part of “Earth’s Paradise” in humanity’s fever-dream tourism reel. From a safe distance—say, a glass-walled lounge in Dubai or a commuter train snaking through Seoul—Hawaii looks like…
Angels Game: How a California Baseball Club Became the Global Poster Child for Bad Luck, Bad Law, and Very Bad PR By Dave’s Locker International Desk SANTA ANA, California—If you had “Angels” and “criminal negligence” in the same bingo card this year, congratulations: you’ve just won the geopolitical version of the Powerball. The Los Angeles…
HONOLULU—While European ultras were torching stadium toilets and Qatari sheikhs were gold-plating their private boxes, the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors spent Saturday night doing something far more subversive: playing earnest, mid-tier American football on the outer rim of civilization, 2,400 miles from the nearest conference rival and precisely one ocean away from anyone who…
When the planets of Hollywood’s two most reluctant supernovae finally align, the resulting gravitational pull is felt in multiplexes from Mumbai to Montevideo. Word has it that Robert Pattinson—professional brooder, part-time bat, full-time reluctant poster boy for damp-haired angst—will share the screen with Jennifer Lawrence, America’s sweetheart turned professional tripping hazard turned Oscar-winning chaos magnet….
**The Global Monarchy: How Disney Princesses Became the World’s Most Successful Soft Power Export** While the United Nations struggles to achieve consensus on climate change, Disney has managed to get 195 countries to agree on one thing: the commercial viability of a tiara. From the bustling markets of Mumbai to the quiet villages of rural…
Another Thursday, Another Gun: Fremont Joins the Global Chorus of Trigger-Happy Tuesdays By Matteo “Bullets & Bylines” Ricci, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large FREMONT, California—It happened at 4:17 p.m. local time, which was 0:17 a.m. in Kyiv, 6:17 a.m. in Singapore, and precisely cocktail hour on the International Space Station where, presumably, astronauts were too busy admiring the…
It’s tempting, when watching Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman, to file it under “Only in America” and change the channel to something less combustible—say, a documentary on competitive cheese-rolling. After all, the film’s central gag is so brazenly farcical that even Monty Python would have rejected it for being too on-the-nose: in 1970s Colorado Springs, a Black…
Dakar, Senegal – While war correspondents tally artillery shells in Eastern Europe and climate scientists measure glacial retreat in millimeters, a quieter global arms race churns in fluorescent kiosks from Manila to Manchester: the humble Pick 4 lottery. Four digits, one dollar, instant existential audit. From the barrios of Santo Domingo to the commuter belts…
“Mo State” and the Quiet Art of Running Out of Everything From the vantage point of a cramped café in Lisbon—where the Wi-Fi password is still “Brexit2020,” presumably because nobody has had the emotional bandwidth to change it—the phrase “mo state” has begun popping up on stock-ticker chyrons, Indian WhatsApp uncle groups, and, most ominously,…
Amsterdam, Wednesday – While European bureaucrats argue over the precise circumference of a cucumber and American politicians auction off their dignity in thirty-second television spots, the planet’s most cosmopolitan sport keeps quietly exporting a very particular kind of hope: the multilingual, multi-passport, multi-time-zone wide receiver named Amon-Ra St. Brown. Born in Anaheim to a German…
Johnny Depp: The Last Pirate of Global Celebrity By the time the sun rose over the French Riviera last May, Johnny Depp had already been applauded by European cineastes for seven minutes straight—an ovation longer than most of his recent films’ combined running times in Chinese multiplexes. Cannes was signaling something the rest of the…
**Thunderball Lotto Results: The Global Echo of a Modest British Boom** LONDON—While the world’s gaze is fixed on missile trajectories, crypto collapses, and the slow-motion demolition of various rainforests, Britain’s National Lottery quietly coughed up Tuesday’s Thunderball numbers: 06, 09, 14, 23, 39, and the Thunderball itself, 03. A £500,000 jackpot—pocket change next to America’s…
