Ravens Injury Report: When a Torn ACL Becomes Geopolitical Theatre By the time the Baltimore Ravens released their latest injury report, the news had already ping-ponged across six continents, ricocheted through 37 group chats, and been mistranslated into three dialects of emoji. Somewhere in Jakarta a futures trader dumped frozen concentrated orange juice, convinced that…
The Scroll: Humanity’s Eternal Down-Thumb by Hugo Valdez, International Desk, somewhere between Caracas and a buffering Wi-Fi signal PARIS—At 2:47 a.m. local time, while the Eiffel Tower’s lights obediently powered down to save electricity the French government swears it still has, a junior policy adviser named Céline discovered she had just scrolled the equivalent of…
Eric Gentry: The Accidental Prophet of a World That Forgot How to Blink By “Deadeye” Delgado, roving correspondent for Dave’s Locker Somewhere in the thin air above the Sea of Okhotsk, a Russian oligarch’s private jet flickers on a NATO radar like a guilty conscience. In Lagos, a cryptocurrency scammer refreshes his phone to see…
Gamer After: How the World’s Thumb-Warriors Are Re-Engineering Reality Once the Console Clicks Off By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret In the beginning was the joystick, and the joystick was with the teenager, and the joystick was the teenager. Then the pandemic arrived like an overdue DLC nobody asked…
Welcome to the post-post-apocalypse, dear reader. While most of the planet is still busy arguing about vaccine passports and the correct pronunciation of “Kyiv,” a small but determined slice of humanity has decided the real geopolitical flashpoint is a downloadable texture pack called Cyberpunk 2077: Chrome. CD Projekt Red’s latest free update—essentially a digital spa…
The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Cousin: Why the Whole World Is Now a Fantasy Premier League Colony By Our Man in the Ether Somewhere between the collapse of the post-war order and the rise of oat-milk lattes, the Premier League stopped being a mere English pastime and became the planet’s largest secular religion. The liturgy is…
Jayden Federline: The Unlikely Geopolitical Barometer of Our Distracted Age By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand, slightly mildewed theatre of global affairs—where currencies convulse, glaciers defect southward, and diplomats pretend to read the footnotes—there now appears, stage left, a seventeen-year-old guitarist named Jayden Federline. He is the second son of Britney Spears and…
Alex Clark and the Quiet Implosion of the Western Attention Span By Our Correspondent in Transit, Somewhere Between Reykjavík and Regret PARIS—Somewhere in the algorithmic ether, a man named Alex Clark—British by passport, algorithmic by necessity—became the latest proof that global civilization can no longer agree on what matters, only on how quickly it must…
Am I the Drama? A Geopolitical Self-Interrogation Played Out in 195 Seats at the U.N. By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least six governments will have tweeted the phrase “Am I the drama?”—three ironically, two in panicked self-defence, and one because the social-media intern thought it sounded hip in English. What began…
The Curious Case of Jonah Tong: A Man Who Accidentally Became the Planet’s Refrigerator Lightbulb By the International Desk Somewhere between the 14th floor of a WeWork in Singapore and a noodle stall in Taipei’s underground mall, Jonah Tong became the most discussed non-entity in global affairs. No one elected him, no one hired him,…
The outage began, as all cataclysms now do, with a single emoji: 🔧. Posted at 07:13 UTC on a Tuesday, it was the universal symbol that Fortnite’s servers had slipped into the digital void, taking with them the daily dopamine rations of 230 million registered souls from Reykjavík to Riyadh. Within minutes, #WhereIsMyBattleBus was trending…
The Glorious Global Panic of Livescore: Humanity’s Last Collective Reflex by Marco “Doomscrolling” Valenti, International Correspondent-at-Large The alert pings while you’re pretending to work in a Berlin co-working space. In Lagos, it buzzes in the pocket of a boda-boda rider dodging traffic like Frogger on payday. Somewhere in São Paulo, a trader watches the same…
