The Kissing Bug: A Love Story Written in Blood and Bureaucracy By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you’ve ever felt that romance is dead, meet Triatoma infestans— the “kissing bug,” a creature so devoted it waits until you’re asleep, crawls onto your lips, and gently siphons your blood like a drunk sommelier at last call….
A Coastal Flood Advisory: The World’s Wettest RSVP By Ignacio “Iggy” Montalbán, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert arrived on every phone from Jakarta to Jacksonville at 03:17 local time—like a drunk ex texting “u up?” at closing time. Coastal Flood Advisory. Nothing says “good morning” quite like the polite promise that your neighborhood may…
In the grand bazaar of twenty-first-century capitalism, where every human impulse is priced, packaged, and resold at a 400-percent markup, Ticketmaster stands as a cathedral of exquisite disappointment. From São Paulo to Seoul, Dublin to Dubai, the same ritual unfolds: credit-card numbers are tendered like votive offerings, CAPTCHA boxes are genuflected before, and, in the…
Adam Sandler: The Last American Export That Even Trade Wars Can’t Kill By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the collapse of the global liberal order and the day Netflix’s algorithm achieved sentience, the planet quietly agreed on one point of consensus: Adam Sandler is inevitable. From the air-conditioned multiplexes of Riyadh—where his latest comedy…
The Empty Silo: A Hollow Monument to a World That Forgot to Eat By Our Man in the Global Pantry, filing from everywhere and nowhere. Somewhere between the 45th parallel and the 19th nervous breakdown, another grain silo stands empty. Its corrugated ribs catch the sunrise like a rusted xylophone, playing a tune no one…
The Tractor Also Rises: How a Middle-Aged British Blowhard Became the World’s Accidental Agricultural Prophet By Our Man in the Manure PARIS — In a week when the UN warns that soil degradation could shave 10 % off global GDP by 2050, the hottest export out of the United Kingdom is neither whisky nor royal…
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,…
Juwan Johnson and the Cheerful Apocalypse of the Global Touchdown By Our Man in the End-Zone, filing from a bar with suspiciously sticky floors in Paris It is 3:17 a.m. Central European Time when Juwan Johnson, 6’4″ and technically a New Orleans Saint, hauls in his seventh touchdown catch of the season somewhere above the…
IKEA’s Gustaf Westman: How a Swedish Flat-Packer Became the Unlikely Geopolitical Punch-Line By our correspondent, still recovering from a 17-hour layover in a terminal that smelled of meatballs and regret Stockholm—While the rest of us were busy panic-buying tinned beans and wondering which hemisphere would catch fire next, IKEA quietly appointed Gustaf Westman—yes, that Westman,…
The Weeknd Tickets: How a Scarborough Kid’s Tour Became the New Global Reserve Currency By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between a Shanghai scalper’s WeChat group and a Berlin club kid’s burner phone, The Weeknd’s 2024 “After Hours Til Dawn” tickets are trading hands like miniature bearer bonds—only with more glitter and a higher failure…
The World According to Miriam Margolyes: How One Roly-Poly British Dame Became the Planet’s Guilt-Free Conscience By L. V. Salinger, International Correspondent, Somewhere Between Heathrow and Existential Despair There are ambassadors who arrive in gilded limousines, and then there is Miriam Margolyes—stout, septuagenarian, and armed with the vocal register of a Victorian foghorn—who simply materialises…
Somewhere between the first crunch of metal in São Paulo rush-hour and the eleventh WhatsApp ping from a Lagos “claims specialist,” the accident attorney has become the new traveling diplomat of our battered planet. Their briefcases now contain more passports than most spies: one for each jurisdiction where human error meets human litigiousness. From the…
