Burger King Japan’s announcement that it will serve a ¥2,000 (US $15) “Wagyu King” burger landed in my inbox while I was watching grainy footage of Sudanese refugees queueing for sorghum. The juxtaposition was almost too perfect: one civilization reduced to boiled grain, another racing to stuff the planet’s most pampered cow between two sesame-seed…
A Coastal Flood Advisory: The World’s Wettest RSVP By Ignacio “Iggy” Montalbán, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert arrived on every phone from Jakarta to Jacksonville at 03:17 local time—like a drunk ex texting “u up?” at closing time. Coastal Flood Advisory. Nothing says “good morning” quite like the polite promise that your neighborhood may…
The Global Spectrum: How the World Decides Which Autistic Traits Are Genius and Which Get You Fired ZURICH—On the same Tuesday that a Swiss asset-management firm discreetly hired a 24-year-old Kazakh “pattern savant” to spot algorithmic glitches, a Cambodian garment factory quietly fired a 34-year-old seamstress for “excessive rocking.” Both women carry the same formal…
Guatemala vs. The Rest of the World: A David-sized Slingshot Aimed at the Goliath of Global Indifference By Our Correspondent, still brushing volcanic ash off his notebook At first glance, “Guatemala vs” looks like an unfinished Twitter feud—half a headline, half a dare. Yet the open-ended preposition is precisely the point. In courtrooms from Washington…
Bermuda: The Atlantic’s Hand-Painted Mirage of Money, Moss, and Mild Existential Panic By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the jet-stream and the 401(k) statements of hedge-fund divorcees floats Bermuda, a 21-square-mile pastel hallucination that insists—politely, in a crisp accent—on being taken seriously. To global capital, it’s a PO Box with a navy blazer; to…
The View from Everywhere By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, 34A, Altitude 36,000 ft The phrase “the view” used to mean something quaint—an expanse of terraced vineyards, a cathedral spire, maybe your neighbor’s questionable taste in swimwear. Now it is a global Rorschach test: what you see depends on which apocalypse you subscribed to….
Tourists usually flock to the Costa del Sol for sangria, sunburn, and the reassuring fantasy that the Mediterranean is a postcard rather than a crime scene. So when the Spanish press christened last month’s quadruple homicide in Marbella “The Sunshine Murders,” the branding stuck faster than cheap sunscreen. Four bodies—two British crypto-advisers, a retired Danish…
Bill Pulte and the Gospel of Twitter Altruism: How One American Heir Became the Global Patron Saint of 280-Character Generosity By Matteo “Max” Marconi, International Desk, Dave’s Locker It usually takes a papal conclave, a Nobel committee, or at least a moderately corrupt FIFA vote to anoint a new global philanthropist. Yet in 2024 the…
The Global Classroom: Four Walls, Infinite Debt, and the Quiet Collapse of Enlightenment By Santiago “Santi” Valdez, roving correspondent, recently expelled from three continents’ worth of PTA meetings PARIS—Somewhere between the chalk dust and the tear gas, the classroom still pretends it’s the last neutral zone on Earth. From Lagos to Luleå, the ritual is…
New York—The United States Tennis Association announced Tuesday that the 2025 US Open will distribute a record US$75 million in prize money—roughly the GDP of Vanuatu if Vanuatu were populated entirely by Instagram fitness coaches. The headline figure is up 11 % from last year, prompting the usual global gasp: Americans call it “progress,” Europeans…
Skattebo Syndrome: How a Tiny Swedish Tax Shelter Became a Global Morality Play By “Lars-with-the-Burnout,” roving correspondent, Dave’s Locker Stockholm—If you squint hard enough at the map, Skattebo is barely a freckle on the Baltic’s pale cheek: 42 red houses, one ICA supermarket that doubles as post office, and a bus stop optimistically labeled “Central.”…
Tyreek Hill’s 170 km/h Florida Joyride: Why the Whole Planet Should Buckle Up By the time the Miami-Dade Police Department’s helicopter finally caught up with Tyreek Hill on Sunday morning, the Dolphins wide receiver had already treated the MacArthur Causeway like his personal Autobahn, clocked speeds a Gulfstream jet would consider respectable, and reminded the…
