**The Global Gloom Boom: How Wednesday Addams Became the Patron Saint of a World on Fire** *International Correspondent’s Dispatch from the Cultural Frontlines* In a world where nuclear powers play chicken with red buttons and climate change is delivering punchlines nobody asked for, humanity has collectively decided that the most logical response is to romanticize…
Mega Millions Winning Numbers: The Global Lottery Where Everyone Loses Except One Guy in Ohio By the time the white balls tumbled out of the gravity chamber in Atlanta, the planet had already placed its bets. In Manila, a call-center agent on his smoke break refreshed the app six times, convinced that 07-15-24-41-43 + 22…
GLOBAL SMACKDOWN REPORT: The Planet’s Weekly Recap of Who Got Owned, Who Got Lucky, and Who Still Owes Us Rent By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk ZURICH—If you squint hard enough, every news cycle looks like an over-booked wrestling card: the same tired gimmicks, the same surprise run-ins, and a commentary team pretending the outcome wasn’t…
The Global Pension: A Promise Written in Disappearing Ink By our Senior Correspondent, still waiting for his first payout in a bar on the Mekong In theory, a pension is the civilized world’s IOU for a lifetime of showing up on time and pretending to enjoy team-building exercises. In practice, it is humanity’s most ambitious…
Suicide Squad, or “Task Force X” if you prefer the sanitized UN-style branding, has always been less a story about super-villains and more a mirror held up to the global habit of outsourcing dirty work. From Washington to Warsaw, from Lagos to Lahore, governments have discovered that the most efficient way to dodge accountability is…
It began, as all resurrections do nowadays, with a press release. Somewhere between a UN climate summit and the latest celebrity apology tour, Showtime announced that Dexter Morgan—beloved blood-spatter analyst, part-time serial killer, full-time metaphor for late-stage capitalism—would rise again in “Dexter: Resurrection.” The planet collectively rolled its eyes so hard that seismographs in Reykjavik…
Rachel Reilly: The Global Echo of a Reality-TV Gladiator It begins, as so many modern nightmares do, on a soundstage in Los Angeles. The year is 2010, the franchise is Big Brother, and the contestant is Rachel Reilly—a bottle-blonde hurricane of strategic tears, chemical self-confidence, and the sort of laugh that makes diplomats reach for…
The Curse of the Dbacks: How One Awkward Acronym Went Global and Nobody Noticed By Diego V. Serrano, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker In a world where acronyms multiply faster than conspiracy theories, the humble “dbacks” has quietly slipped past immigration control and embedded itself in the lingua franca of the terminally online. Originally a shorthand…
Big Brother Is Streaming—And He’s Got 8K Resolution By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 1.3 petabytes of face-recognition data will be filed away in places you’ve never heard of, with names like “Project Lavender Mist” or “Operation Helpful Walrus.” From Singapore’s lamp posts that scold jaywalkers in real time to Detroit’s “Green Light”…
Big Brother Live Feeds: The Planet’s Longest Unscripted UN Security Council Meeting by Our Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar items are also under 24/7 surveillance There was a time, quaint as a rotary phone, when the phrase “Big Brother live feeds” conjured up grainy shots of twenty-something strangers arguing about dishwater in…
The Postcode Lottery: How Five Digits Decide Your Fate on This Spinning Rock By the time you finish reading this sentence, three babies will have drawn the cosmic short straw and been born in postal zones where life expectancy is already wheezing twenty years behind the luckier infants wailing a few alphanumeric characters away. Welcome…
Dallas, Texas—never the shy type—has spent the last few weeks auditioning for the Four Horsemen. One moment it’s 28 °C and the cicadas are gossiping like hedge-fund analysts at a rooftop bar; the next, marble-sized hail is auditioning for the lead role in “The Day After Tomorrow: Suburban Edition.” International observers, once content to treat…
