Duluth, Minnesota—population 86,000, annual snowfall measured in existential dread—has spent the last four days pretending the planet isn’t busy rehearsing for the apocalypse. The 48th Duluth Fall Festival wrapped Sunday night with the traditional release of biodegradable lanterns that promptly drifted into Canadian airspace, causing NORAD to scramble two CF-18s and at least one very…
Chappell Roan and the Age of Manufactured Authenticity A dispatch from the front lines of pop’s new Cold War By the time Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” cracked the Global Spotify Top 50 last week, diplomats in Brussels were already drafting memos: a drag-tinged Midwestern torch song had somehow become a soft-power bargaining chip. From…
Friday night in Fort Worth, Texas, smells like mesquite smoke, hormone sweat, and the faint whiff of geopolitical anxiety. North Crowley High’s Panthers—whose roster is now 30 % first-generation Americans—run their Wing-T offense with the precision of a Swiss watch assembled by underpaid Malaysian subcontractors. To the casual observer it’s just another 5A district game,…
Jacory Croskey-Merritt and the Quiet Weaponization of an American Name By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic The first time a European customs officer squints at the passport of Jacory Croskey-Merritt, two things happen. First, the officer silently congratulates himself for correctly guessing the traveler’s nationality before the blue cover even…
Sardonic Dispatch: How a Southern Waitress Named Polly Holliday Accidentally Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time the Berlin Wall was being jack-hammered into souvenir chunks, a middle-aged woman in Alabama was still fielding dinner orders with the same two-word dismissal that had already circled the planet like a spiteful satellite. “Kiss my grits”…
Mitrovic: A Name that Travels Like a Bad Passport Photo By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (Sarajevo bureau, second‐floor bar) The surname Mitrovic—Serbian in its DNA, Balkan in its swagger—has recently slipped past the border guards of regional gossip and is now loitering in the departure lounge of global conversation. Whether you first met it while…
