Randy Moss: A Meteor Across Every Sky By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, International Desk To the uninitiated, Randy Moss is merely the greatest deep-threat wide receiver the NFL ever produced—an American folk hero who once famously declared, “Straight cash, homey,” while paying a league fine with dollar bills extracted from his sock like…
Strands Hints: The World’s Newest Guilty Pleasure in a Guilt-Free Wrapper By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, nursing a lukewarm espresso in Terminal 3 Somewhere between the collapse of a second regional bank and the third coup rumor of the week, the planet discovered it could still be distracted by a daily puzzle that looks like…
Mozambique’s fisheries minister is weeping into her morning espresso. The yen just hit a 34-year low. Somewhere in Lagos a data-center hums loud enough to drown out the muezzin. And yet, on every continent, a certain strain of disaffected human is still pressing play on “How Soon Is Now?”—proof that even as the planet overheats,…
September 3, 2024 Dispatches from the Puzzle Desk By A. Corvo, Senior Correspondent-at-Large PARIS—While half the planet was busy arguing whether the latest BRICS summit would finally topple the dollar (spoiler: it won’t, the greenback is like a cockroach with a Black Card), the rest of humanity did what it always does when existential dread…
Jimmy Floyd Is Already Everywhere By the time you finish this sentence, the man, the meme, and the metaphysical migraine known as “Jimmy Floyd” will have colonized another time zone. If the name sounds like a budget airline pilot who moonlights in reggaetón, congratulations—you’ve grasped the global absurdity better than most foreign ministries. Because while…
Phil Collins, the balding British everyman whose drumsticks once thundered across stadiums like low-yield artillery, has become an unlikely barometer of planetary decline. While the man himself now shuffles on titanium hips through a quiet life in Switzerland—tax-efficiently close to his Geneva vault—his back-catalogue has metastasised into a global lingua franca of resignation. From Manila…
Jamie Lee Curtis and the Global Supply Chain of Screams By Our Bureau Chief, Still Jet-Lagged in an Airport Lounge Near You Somewhere at 39,000 feet between Singapore and Reykjavík, a cargo manifest quietly lists “Curtis, J. L.—1 unit, cultural icon.” That bureaucratic understatement is how the world now ships its nightmares: neatly shrink-wrapped, Dolby-certified,…
STEVE BUSCEMI: THE ONLY THING HOLDING THE PLANET TOGETHER by our man in the field, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where the in-flight Wi-Fi is patchy and the world below is on fire in at least four time zones. A curious thing happened at last week’s G-7 “emergency cultural summit” (a…
High Potential, Season 2: A Bureaucratic Fairy Tale for Our Disenchanted Planet Dave’s Locker – International Desk (with the windows bolted shut) The algorithmic oracle known as Disney+ has decreed that “High Potential”—a show whose very title sounds like an HR euphemism for “over-promoted intern”—will return for a second season. Cue the synchronized sighs of…
Jessica Sanchez, the Filipino-Mexican-American vocal firecracker who once turned American Idol’s stage into an emergency-room triage for eardrums, has resurfaced—this time not as a contestant, but as a geopolitical Rorschach test. From Manila’s karaoke bars to Mexico City’s plaza loudspeakers to the algorithmic void of global streaming, Sanchez is less a singer now and more…
From the bunkers of Kyiv to the bistros of Buenos Aires, the world’s attention is fixed on a single, burning question: which defense will tilt the balance of power in 2025 fantasy football? Forget sovereign debt, forget election cycles, forget whether your local bakery still remembers what wheat tastes like—what truly matters is whether the…
Craig Mazin and the Global Glow-Up of Nuclear Anxiety By Dave’s Locker, International Desk It takes a peculiar talent to make the world voluntarily re-ignite its nightmares about glowing rain and two-headed livestock, yet Craig Mazin has managed it twice—first with a fungus that turns gamers into clickers, and then, more alarmingly, with a reactor…
