Tallahassee, Florida – While most of the planet was busy watching glaciers retreat faster than a French general at dawn, the Florida State Seminoles managed to score 41 points against the University of California, Berkeley. In any other week this would register somewhere between “mildly interesting” and “local sports filler,” yet in our hyper-connected age…
The Curious Case of Alexandra Daddario: A Global Study in Eyeballs, Algorithms, and the End of Civil Discretion By Our Bureau of Soft-Power Archaeology The first time the planet truly synchronized its collective blink was 2014, somewhere between Crimea’s annexation and the last Malaysian Airlines tragedy, when a GIF of Alexandra Daddario’s eyes—those crystalline pools…
Rauw Alejandro: The Last Caribbean Export That Isn’t a Tax Haven By the time you read this, the young man born Raúl Alejandro Ocasio Ruiz in San Juan has already racked up another million streams, another fashion-week cameo, another TikTok challenge that will eventually be cited by behavioral economists as proof that attention spans now…
The Algorithmic Silk Road: How TikTok Became the World’s Most Efficient Delivery System for Cultural Fentanyl From the marble lobbies of Brussels to the tin-roofed cyber cafés of Lagos, one 15-second clip at a time, TikTok is quietly finishing the job that the East India Company started with opium and Netflix continues with Korean dating…
Jordan Davis and the Accidental Anthem That Went Everywhere By our Bureau Chief for Songs That Outrun Their Authors It started in Warner/Chappell’s London office, ping-ponged through Stockholm’s songwriting camps, and ended up rattling TikTok from Jakarta to Johannesburg: Jordan Davis’s “Next Thing You Know” has become the rare Nashville export that travels with a…
Yves Tumor and the Quiet Collapse of Borders by “Marco Vélez, International Cultural Correspondent, currently hiding in a Lisbon hostel that still smells of 2019 optimism” When the first distorted guitar loop of Yves Tumor’s latest single crackled out of a weather-beaten radio in Dakar last month, a Senegalese taxi driver told me it sounded…
