The Tyranny of the Tenderloin: How a 3-Word Search Became the Planet’s Most Telling Rorschach Test Bylines from Bangkok to Bogotá are still sizzling over “make chicken nyt,” the cryptic trio that erupted like grease in a hot wok across every time zone. At first glance it reads like an autocorrect hiccup from a half-asleep…
By the time you finish this sentence, the word “aberg” will have been Googled in 37 languages, meme-ified on six continents, and politely ignored by the three governments that actually know what it means. Welcome to the latest linguistic contagion to slip past customs without declaring anything more dangerous than curiosity. Aberg began life as…
Nolan McLean and the Curious Case of the Accidental Global Micro-Celebrity By Quentin “Q” Blackthorne, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker It began, as most twenty-first-century sagas do, with a shaky vertical video shot in a fluorescent-lit dorm hallway somewhere in the American Midwest. Within forty-eight hours, Nolan McLean—previously known only to his RA and the local…
Scott Hastings: The Man Who Accidentally Became a Global Meme and Didn’t Even Notice By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific TOKYO—Somewhere between a Tokyo bullet-train platform and a bar in Reykjavík, a 38-year-old data analyst named Scott Hastings has become the planet’s most involuntary cultural export. Not because he invented a cryptocurrency, toppled a…
