Son Heung-min: The Smiling Assassin Who Keeps the World’s Billionaires Awake at Night By Dave’s Far-East Correspondent, nursing a soju hangover in a Seoul hotel that still smells faintly of 1988 Somewhere in Riyadh, a sovereign-wealth-fund accountant just spilled his espresso over a spreadsheet. The line item reads: “Acquisition Target – S. Heung-min, ₤200 million…
Pete Wicks: The Existential Haircut Roaming a Planet on Fire By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, somewhere between duty-free vodka and the abyss In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call “current affairs,” certain names ricochet across the Anglosphere’s algorithmic echo chamber with the inexplicable persistence of a drunk uncle at a wedding. One such name…
Tom Holland Is Still Clinging to the Multiverse, and the Rest of Us Are Just Trying to Hang On By the time you finish this sentence, Tom Holland will have signed another three-picture deal, watched his latest blockbuster top the box office in seventeen languages, and politely apologized to a Brussels reporter for spoiling something…
Carey Price and the Unbearable Lightness of Being a National Saint By Dave’s Locker International Desk, somewhere between a Tim Hortons and a UN peacekeeping outpost MONTREAL—If you want to watch a country negotiate with its own mythology, just mention Carey Price’s name in any bar from Chicoutimi to Chilliwack. The man has become a…
Somewhere between the cloud and the couch, humanity has quietly annexed a new country the size of Rhode Island and twice as cynical. It issues no passports, levies no taxes, and still manages to feel overcrowded. Cartographers call it a “digital collaboration platform”; everyone else calls it Interland. Born inside a Google sub-committee that was…
Cooper Hoffman Is Everywhere—Just Ask the Algorithm, Tokyo, and Your Aunt in Buenos Aires By Our Man in Perpetual Transit When the name “Cooper Hoffman” first pinged across the transatlantic Slack channel, I assumed the copy desk had autocorrected yet another crypto-billionaire into existence. Turns out he’s neither a stablecoin nor a failed NFT ape;…
Tokyo, Wednesday, 3:14 a.m.—while the rest of the planet either sleeps fitfully or doom-scrolls itself into a deeper existential debt, an emergency press conference is underway inside MAPPA’s gleaming headquarters. The topic: an as-yet-untitled Jujutsu Kaisen spin-off that promises, in the words of producer Makoto Kimura, “to explore the morally gray corridors of jujutsu society…
Melania Trump: The World’s Most Expensive Sphinx Finally Speaks—Sort Of By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-medicating with Slovenian wine in an undisclosed Balkan café The global press corps collectively dropped its lukewarm espresso this week when Melania Trump—international woman of mystery, former catalogue sphinx, and current resident of a gilded Florida mausoleum—stepped back into the…
Michelle Dockery and the Aristocratic Hangover: How One English Actress Became a Global Rorschach Test PARIS—On a rain-slick Wednesday along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, I watched a French teenager in a knock-off Downton Abbey maid’s apron pose for TikTok beside a homeless man selling knock-off Downton Abbey tea towels. Both were, in their own ways, paying…
The World According to Iga By our Warsaw-to-Wimbledon correspondent, still wondering why the coffee tastes like geopolitics. It’s 2024 and the planet’s usual cast of calamities—proxy wars, rogue algorithms, runaway inflation—have been momentarily shoved to the margins of the global attention economy by a 22-year-old Pole with a topspin forehand that sounds like a microwave…
