Buffalo: The Four-Legged Proxy War Shaping the 21st Century By Santiago “Sully” Morales, globe-trotting correspondent First, a quick linguistic disclaimer: when I say “buffalo,” I’m not inviting you to a grammar rodeo where “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” passes for conversation. I mean the actual animal—massive, cud-chewing, and apparently indispensable to every…
ASH BY ELEGANCE: WHEN THE WORLD’S MOST EXCLUSIVE AESTHETIC CULT GOES FULL GLOBAL, EVEN THE VOLCANOES PUT ON TUXEDOS By the time the first shipment of “Ash by Elegance” arrived in Singapore, the customs officer—who had previously confiscated everything from counterfeit Birkins to a full-size giraffe femur—took one look at the matte-black box, sniffed, and…
Pasto – América: The Grass That Grew Up and Ran for Office By the time I reached Pasto, the southernmost Colombian city that still feels like a balcony over the Amazon, the entire hemisphere was already arguing about the same patch of lawn. Locals call it “pasto” in the same offhand way New Yorkers say…
IYO SKY AND THE ART OF SELLING NOTHING TO EVERYONE—A GLOBAL MASTERCLASS IN ABSURDITY By Our Man in the Cloud Layer, still coughing up micro-plastics Tokyo, Paris, Lagos, São Paulo—wherever you are this week, the phrase “iyo sky” is drifting across group chats, TikToks, and boardrooms with the eerie inevitability of radioactive pollen. To the…
The Makai Lemon: A Tiny Fruit’s Grand Tour Through the Collapsing World Order By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk First spotted wilting on a Sri Lankan spice dock in 2019, the “makai lemon”—a golf-ball-sized citrus that tastes like a lime that’s been ghost-peppered by regret—has since become the unofficial mascot of global supply-chain trauma. What…
CHICAGO—Somewhere between the 18th-century fur trapper’s “Checagou” and the modern tourist’s Instagram grid, the Windy City learned to weaponize its own nickname. Locals insist the moniker was originally a dig at bloviating politicians, not the lake-effect gusts that peel toupees off bankers on LaSalle Street. Outsiders, of course, prefer the meteorological interpretation because it’s easier…
Columbus vs. New York City: A Tale of Two American Futures, Viewed From Afar From the vantage point of a café terrace in Lisbon—where the ghosts of empire still argue with the ghosts of debt—watching the United States argue about Columbus versus New York City feels like watching two heirs squabble over the family china…
By the time the sun finally rose over Reykjavik last Tuesday, the Coldwater Cast had already been streaming for nine hours. Somewhere in a dimly lit Oslo basement, “MackerelMikkel” was teaching 23,000 viewers how to debone a fish with a butter knife; in Valparaíso, Chile, an ex-banker named Camila was narrating her descent into artisanal…
Fuerteventura: The Canary in the Globalist Coal Mine By our roving correspondent, still slightly sunburned from a mis-booked Ryanair “cultural exchange” It begins, as all modern pilgrimages do, with a boarding pass and a vague sense of moral compromise. From Oslo to Osaka, the faithful queue for the 737 that will spirit them to Fuerteventura—an…
Call them what you will—emirates, sheikhdoms, pocket kingdoms with a flag and a runway—the seven siblings stitched together by the late Sheikh Zayed into what we now politely call the United Arab Emirates have improbably become the world’s most efficient laboratory for the question: “Just how far can you stretch the adage ‘fake it till…
