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…
Skate 4, now politely renamed skate. (yes, the period is part of the branding—because nothing says “we’re relaxed” like terminal punctuation), has finally ollied onto PlayStation after a two-year PC beta that looked suspiciously like an outsourced QA internship. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, millions of thumbs are blistering in unison, proving once again that the…
Tyri Donovan and the Age of the Accidental Geopolitician By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a viral dance challenge and an inter-continental trade dispute, Tyri Donovan—previously known only to her 2.3 million followers as “the girl who turned her panic attack into a banger”—became the first civilian to trigger an emergency session of the…
The Universal Language Nobody Asked For A world tour of the 21st-century’s most democratic art form: the shaky vertical rectangle that ends civil discourse, launches revolutions, and lets your aunt in Jakarta rate your soufflé. PARIS – In the beginning was the Word; now it’s the 15-second clip set to royalty-free ukulele. From the favelas…
iOS 26 Wallpaper: The Earth’s Most Expensive National Flag, Now Available in 12K By the time you finish reading this sentence, Apple’s design team in Cupertino will have changed its mind about the default wallpaper twice and scheduled three emergency all-hands meetings about shade #2F4F4F. Yet somewhere between the smog of Delhi and the smog…
Generation Z, the planet’s first true digital natives, arrived squalling somewhere between the late-1990s and the early-2010s, depending on which demographer you bribe. They are now roughly 12 to 27 years old—old enough to vote, drink (where legal), and still be sent to bed without Wi-Fi. Internationally, they are the largest generational cohort in human…
RUMBLE: THE WORLD’S NEWEST GLADIATOR RING, SPONSORED BY YOUR AUNT’S FACEBOOK FEED Dave’s Locker – International Desk PARIS—If you squint at the Place de la République on a Friday night, you can watch two realities collide with the grace of a shopping cart down a flight of stairs. On one side, a gilet jaune live-streams…
Austin Metcalf and the Great American Talent Vacuum By our Special Correspondent in Existential Airports Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the third watered-down espresso at Gate C12, a name flashed across the departure board: “Austin Metcalf.” Not the man himself—he’s still safely marooned in whichever mid-tier U.S. city currently markets itself as “the next…
iOS 26: The Global Countdown to an Imaginary Upgrade By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk In the fluorescent corridors of tech conferences from Seoul to São Paulo, the same question now echoes like a ritual chant: “When does iOS 26 come out?” It is, of course, a phantom release—Apple’s roadmap currently stalls at the far less…
