Somewhere between the 24-hour news cycle and the bottomless mimosa brunch of internet outrage sits The Daily Beast, a publication that has spent the last fifteen years convincing the world it is simultaneously a fearless watchdog and the friend who brings the best gossip to the potluck. From an international vantage point—say, a cramped bureau…
Shia LaBeouf: The Accidental Global Citizen Nobody Asked For By Luka Varga, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a Hollywood red carpet and a Baltic film festival, Shia LaBeouf has become the human equivalent of a pop-up ad—ubiquitous, vaguely disorienting, and somehow still profitable. Once merely the kid from a Disney Channel sitcom, he has…
Vinny Dingle Goes Global: How a Yorkshire Lad’s Misery Became the Internet’s Only Universal Currency By Our Man in Doha, Still Recovering from Episode 5,742 There are only three things the entire planet can still agree on: the price of diesel is a scam, every national anthem sounds better in a minor key, and Emmerdale’s…
PARIS—While diplomats in Geneva argued over whose war crimes were more symmetrical and central bankers in Frankfurt debated whether to raise interest rates by a heroic 0.25 % or a cowardly 0.50 %, a more consequential scoreboard flickered to life some 4,000 miles west. In the fluorescent cathedrals of American suburbia, yesterday’s NFL results dropped…
Ozark: A Netflix Parable for the Age of Global Money Laundering By our man in Geneva, where the lake is clean and the numbered accounts cleaner still The Ozark Mountains—once famous for folk music, meth labs, and the kind of poverty that makes EU agricultural subsidies look like a Saudi prince’s pocket money—have become, thanks…
The World’s Most Lethal Dad: How “Sakamoto Days” Became the Planet’s Shared Guilty Pleasure By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk In an era when every other headline reads like a rejected Black Mirror script—“Drone Swarm Delivers Groceries, Also Your Existential Dread”—it takes a special sort of cultural artifact to unite the planet’s exhausted scrollers. Enter “Sakamoto…
Genocide: The World’s Most Reliable Failure of Imagination The word itself sounds clinical—like a pharmaceutical side-effect you might hear whispered over late-night television between ads for restless-leg cream. But genocide isn’t a side-effect; it’s the main course, served hot and repeatedly since someone first noticed that sharpened rocks have multiple uses. From the Herero in…
Raising the Bar on Senescence: How the World Decides When You’re Too Old to Be Useful By Our Correspondent, presently between retirement homes in Geneva GENEVA — Somewhere in the Swiss cantons, actuaries are chain-smoking over spreadsheets that predict when, precisely, the average citizen will shuffle off the mortal coil. Their findings, translated into policy,…
**The Curious Case of Melissa Jefferson-Wooden: When American Bureaucracy Goes Global** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and climate change threatens to turn us all into expensive aquarium exhibits—it’s refreshing when a story emerges that reminds us the real enemy was never Russia or China, but rather…
The American Pastime’s Autumnal Hunger Games: A Globe-Trotting Dispatch on the MLB Playoff Picture By Our Man Who Once Saw a Cricket Match End Because Everyone Got Bored Let us begin with the obvious: most of the planet does not, technically speaking, give a solitary damn about the Major League Baseball postseason. In Lagos traffic,…
The planet woke up yesterday to the latest Set for Life draws, a phrase that scans like a particularly bitter punch-line in an era when most of us are simply set for Tuesday. From Sydney to Sheffield, five fresh millionaires discovered they will receive a drip-feed of wealth—roughly $20,000 a month for twenty years—while the…
A big bold beautiful journey used to mean a silk-lined suitcase, a steamer ticket, and the faint hope that your name wouldn’t be misspelled at Ellis Island. Today it means 4.9 billion smartphones chanting the same algorithmic rosary while their owners scroll through thirty-seven near-identical photos of someone’s brunch in Bali. The distance between romance…
