# Rockstar: The Global Phenomenon That’s More Than Just a Stage Name In the vast, chaotic symphony of internet culture, few terms resonate as universally as “rockstar.” But why is this term trending globally, and what does it mean beyond the realm of music? Buckle up, folks, because we’re about to dive into the cultural…
**Why the Vikings Are Having a Moment (Again) – And Why We’re Here for It** Ah, the Vikings. Those bearded, mead-chugging, horn-helmet-wearing (okay, maybe not the helmets) warriors have stormed back into our collective consciousness, and it’s not just because you’ve been binge-watching *Vikings* on Netflix again. The Viking trend is everywhere – from fashion…
Eric McCormack, International Man of Mild Intrigue By “Señorita Crónica,” roving correspondent, somewhere between a jet-lagged departure lounge and the existential void We open on a Tuesday in Luxembourg, where a minor diplomat—second-tier, the kind who gets invited to embassy cocktail parties only when the ambassador’s cat is sick—leans over his Negroni and whispers, “You…
Anthony McGill: The Clarinet in the Bunker By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Apocalypse and the Encore PARIS—On the same April morning the IMF announced that global debt had quietly surpassed the weight of the moon, Anthony McGill lifted his clarinet in a Manhattan practice room and played a single, perfectly tuned A. Half a…
Wordle #1,348: A Five-Letter Rorschach Test for the End Times By our International Desk, 14 June 2025 Sometime around 04:17 UTC, while half of humanity was asleep and the other half doom-scrolling, a fresh five-letter slab of linguistic tofu dropped onto 3.2 million screens. The word was “GRAFT.” Cue the synchronized global gasp, the quiet…
Across the planet—whether you’re sipping cortado in Madrid, slurping borscht in Minsk, or pretending to enjoy oat-milk flat whites in Los Angeles—one truth unites us: somewhere, a screen is playing Kate Beckinsale in slow-motion, hair billowing like a UN flag for our collective existential dread. The British actress, once a polite Oxford ingenue, has become…
The Curious Case of the Vanishing Finale: Netflix’s Wayward Pines and the Global Art of Self-Cancellation By Our Cynical Correspondent, Somewhere Between Reykjavík and Recife When Netflix quietly yanked the third season of *Wayward Pines* from the platform last month—no press release, no commemorative montage, just a brief 404 where Matt Dillon’s worried face used…
Elizabeth Day: The Accidental International Holiday That Tells Us Everything About Ourselves If you had told a London literary agent in 2018 that her name would eventually be invoked by small-business owners in Manila, podcast addicts in São Paulo, and that one guy in Reykjavik who still thinks irony is a personality, she would probably…
A Console for the End Times: How the Nintendo Switch Became the Planet’s Shared Tamagotchi By Our Man in the Departures Lounge You can tell a lot about a civilization by what its commuters clutch on the 07:23 to anywhere. In Tokyo it’s a slim pastel rectangle; in São Paulo it’s wedged between empanada crumbs…
Wayward Netflix, Wayward Pines: A Parable for the Streaming Apocalypse By Our Bureau Chief Emeritus, still technically on sabbatical in Geneva The news that Netflix has quietly shuffled *Wayward Pines*—that M. Night Shyamalan-produced fever dream about a town where time, ethics, and plot coherence all go to die—into its “Leaving Soon” carousel should have registered…
In the shadow of real-world supply-chain meltdowns, drone strikes on grain silos, and the slow-motion car crash we politely call “global governance,” one multinational conflict rages on with the moral clarity of a sugar-crazed toddler: Mario Kart. Yes, the Nintendo confection that debuted in 1992 has quietly become the planet’s most reliable diplomatic summit—equal parts…
THE SUMMER HIKARU DIED: A GLOBAL POST-MORTEM ON A VERY LOCAL GHOST By Our Correspondent Who Has Definitely Read the Manga, Thank You Tokyo, 2024 – Somewhere between the Olympic hangover and the next Godzilla reboot, Japan quietly buried a 17-year-old boy named Hikaru, and the rest of the planet barely blinked. Which is ironic,…
