The Strokes: How Five Rich Kids from Manhattan Accidentally Became the Soundtrack to a Planet That Forgot What It Was Rebelling Against By the time Is This It dropped in July 2001, the world was already busy stockpiling duct tape and rehearsing new lines about freedom fries. While NATO ministers huddled in Brussels drafting press…
Tesla’s Share Price: A Global Mood Ring for the Age of Uncertainty By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding in a Geneva safe house after asking too many questions) If you want to know how the planet is feeling, skip the UN General Assembly and just glance at Tesla’s stock ticker. On any given morning…
9/11/01: The Day the World Got a New Calendar By the time the second plane hit, foreign newsrooms had already stopped pretending it was an accident. In London, editors watched the feed with the grim satisfaction of people who’d warned the Americans for decades that their skyscrapers were basically vertical bullseyes. In Moscow, vodka glasses…
A Governor in Harrisburg, a President in Budapest, and the World in the Cheap Seats By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged from three connecting flights and one regrettable pierogi in Warsaw. It is 3 a.m. in Kyiv when Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania tweets a photo of himself ladling chipped-ham sandwiches at a Pittsburgh fire…
Germany vs Slovenia: A Quiet Collision of Alpine Pretensions and Baltic Hubris By Dave’s Locker International Desk, somewhere between Frankfurt’s finance bros and Ljubljana’s ironic cafés Europe, that antique chessboard where every pawn believes it’s a rook, is once again arranging its pieces. This time the matchup is Germany vs Slovenia—two countries that, on the…
2026 Lexus IS: A Luxury Sedan for the End Times (or at Least the Next Recession) By Our Correspondent Somewhere between the Duty-Free and the Apocalypse Let us begin with a universal truth: every nation believes its traffic is the worst. From Jakarta’s scooter tsunamis to Los Angeles’ parking-lot freeways, drivers worldwide cling to the…
Liechtenstein: The Micro-Monarchy Quietly Running the World’s Off-Balance Sheet By the time you finish this sentence, Liechtenstein’s 39,000 citizens will have collectively earned another million francs, most of it from accounts whose owners would rather you not know their names. That’s the speed at which the planet’s sixth-smallest sovereign state moves money—fast enough to make…
Cal Poly vs Utah: A Collegiate Gladiator Match Observed by a Warming Planet By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk When the Cal Poly Mustangs and the Utah Utes trot onto the same patch of turf this weekend, the clash will be broadcast on a half-dozen satellites and streamed to bunkers, boardrooms, and basement bars from…
Haití and Honduras: A Tale of Two Hemispheres United by the Art of Being Forgotten By the International Desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the breakfast tables of Geneva and the barstools of Brooklyn, the names Haiti and Honduras are politely excused from conversation like relatives who drank too much at last year’s wedding. Yet, on…
ConocoPhillips: The Friendly Neighborhood Oil Giant Quietly Reshaping the Planet Byline: From a press-room somewhere between Houston and Hades There’s a moment, somewhere between the third espresso and the fourth climate report, when you realize ConocoPhillips is less an energy company and more a planetary-scale bartender—mixing equal parts liquefied dinosaurs, shareholder dividends, and geopolitical hangover….
