Matthew McConaughey: How a Shirtless Texan Became the World’s Reluctant Prophet of Chill By the time the sun rose over Ulaanbaatar last Tuesday, Matthew McConaughey had already been awake for six hours, sipping yerba mate on a Zoom call with Mongolian throat-singers about “conscious commerce.” The man once paid to bang bongos naked on Venice…
Harrison Ford: The Last American Action Figure Standing Between Us and Planetary Meltdown By the time you finish this sentence, another streaming algorithm will have recommended Indiana Jones to a teenager in Jakarta who’s wondering why the archaeologist doesn’t just use Google Maps. Such is the global afterlife of Harrison Ford: a man whose face…
Sagapolutele: The Last Name That’s Too Long for Twitter and Too Heavy for Globalization By Dave’s Locker International Desk (with a stiff drink still in hand) The Pacific, that quaint blue puddle where super-powers now play Battleship for real estate, has coughed up another linguistic speed bump: Sagapolutele. Try typing it on a smartphone while…
Amtrak: How a Rust-Belt Railroad Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor From the bullet-train penthouses of Tokyo to the velvety sleepers of the Moscow–Paris route, the planet has more or less agreed on what a national rail service should do: move citizens quickly, cheaply, and without the existential dread that accompanies a middle seat on…
Germany vs Slovenia: A Quiet Collision of Alpine Pretensions and Baltic Hubris By Dave’s Locker International Desk, somewhere between Frankfurt’s finance bros and Ljubljana’s ironic cafés Europe, that antique chessboard where every pawn believes it’s a rook, is once again arranging its pieces. This time the matchup is Germany vs Slovenia—two countries that, on the…
Mark Ruffalo: The Accidental Superpower the World Has to Live With By Dave’s Foreign Bureau Chief, still jet-lagged in Copenhagen Somewhere between the red carpets and the climate summits, Mark Ruffalo mutated from affable character actor into a one-man NGO with excellent cheekbones. While other Hollywood exports sell protein powder or failed streaming services, Ruffalo…
Norway, the postcard nation that keeps the rest of the planet honest—and slightly annoyed—about its own life choices, has quietly become the world’s moral GPS. While other countries fumble for direction, Norway just keeps recalculating, politely suggesting we take the next exit toward decency. The rest of us, naturally, ignore the instructions and end up…
Omaha, Nebraska—population 486,051, or roughly the same number of people who will claim today to have “always loved” whatever K-pop band just broke Spotify—woke up yesterday to discover its weather behaving like a geopolitical superpower with abandonment issues. One moment, the city was basking in an unseasonable 21 °C (70 °F) springtime flirtation; the next,…
WASHINGTON—If you want to know how the rest of the planet is faring, skip Davos and just loiter on the National Mall for an hour. The air itself has become the world’s most honest diplomat: it imports Saharan dust, Canadian wildfire smoke, and Gulf Stream humidity like a black-market bazaar of atmospheric contraband. Locals call…
Down Under and Further Down: How Australia vs New Zealand Became the World’s Nicest Blood Feud By Our Correspondent, filing from a press lounge that still smells faintly of burned flat white SYDNEY—Somewhere between the 1,400-kilometre stretch of the Tasman Sea, two of Earth’s most agreeable nations have spent the past century locked in a…
ConocoPhillips: The Friendly Neighborhood Oil Giant Quietly Reshaping the Planet Byline: From a press-room somewhere between Houston and Hades There’s a moment, somewhere between the third espresso and the fourth climate report, when you realize ConocoPhillips is less an energy company and more a planetary-scale bartender—mixing equal parts liquefied dinosaurs, shareholder dividends, and geopolitical hangover….
GAVIN NEWSOM: AMERICA’S PRETTIEST POLITICAL WEATHER-VANE SWINGS INTO GLOBAL CROSSWINDS By Diego Serrano, Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk There are places—say, a Berlin traffic light, a Lagos street market, a Kyoto tea house—where the name Gavin Newsom lands with the faint pop of a distant champagne cork: pleasant, bubbly, and immediately forgotten. Yet for the…
