Marshall Manning – the very name sounds like a Pentagon program that was quietly cancelled once the invoices hit eight figures. Yet in the past 72 hours this previously un-Googleable American teenager has become the planet’s most unlikely Rorschach test. From Lagos trading floors to Seoul crypto cafés, everyone is projecting something onto the kid…
Strands Hint: The Global Game of Whispers, Wiretaps, and Whatever’s Left of Your Privacy By Dave’s Locker International Desk Geneva, Tuesday, 03:14 a.m. local time—In the fluorescent bowels of the Palais des Nations, a junior diplomat from a mid-sized republic (name withheld to protect the tragically ambitious) slides a single sheet of paper across the…
The world’s most dangerous flower isn’t the poppy blooming in Helmand or the one on a Remembrance Day lapel; it’s the poppy that installs itself on every corporate laptop from Lisbon to Lagos and quietly calls home to Cambridge. Poppy Gustafsson—yes, that is her real, almost too-perfect name—has turned nation-state-grade espionage into a subscription service,…
Unknown Number: The High-School Catfish Who Trolled the Planet By Our Jaded Correspondent, Currently Suffering from Déjà Vu in Three Time Zones It began, as all twenty-first-century disasters do, with a vibrating rectangle. Somewhere in the fluorescent-lit limbo of an American high school—a place that doubles as a petri dish for future congressional interns—an “unknown…
