Bills vs. Dolphins: A Sunday Opera Staged for a World That Can’t Look Away By Diego “The Miserable Optimist” Marín, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau Let us begin with the obvious: in a week when the planet’s average temperature is flirting with numbers normally reserved for sous-vide recipes, two American football teams have nonetheless convinced half…
The Chair Company That’s Sitting on the World By “Correspondent-at-Large with Chronic Back Pain” GENEVA—Somewhere between the fifteenth espresso of the week and the forty-seventh UN resolution on sustainable furniture, it became clear that the world’s most powerful seat of power is, quite literally, a seat. The Chair Company—officially known as Sedis Universalis S.A., though…
Thursday night in the Europa League’s velvet-rope district, Eintracht Frankfurt and Galatasaray meet in a fixture that sounds like a regional spat but reverberates well beyond the Rhine and the Bosphorus. On paper it’s merely Matchday Whatever—three points, a clean sheet, maybe a souvenir scar for the physio’s scrapbook—but in our end-stage-capitalism era of football,…
Michael Chiklis: The Bald Beacon of American Male Anxiety Goes Global By Diego “D.” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Some men buy red convertibles; others invade neighboring countries. Michael Chiklis simply shaved his head, glowered into a camera, and became the unofficial patron saint of every paunchy, middle-management male who secretly believes that, if pushed,…
Black Rabbit: Netflix’s New Gamble and the Global Art of Selling Nostalgia with a Side of Existential Dread PARIS—If you spotted bleary-eyed commuters on the Métro this week, staring at their phones as though the screen held the secret to a painless death, odds are they were binge-watching Black Rabbit. Netflix’s eight-part limited series—equal parts…
The Ticket That Launched a Thousand Scams An International Field Guide to the Most Over-Printed Scrap of Paper Since Monopoly Money PARIS—On any given morning, the line outside the Louvre snakes like a colonoscopy camera, and every pilgrim clutches the same talisman: a crumpled ticket. The same ritual repeats in Lima, Lagos, and Lahore. From…
The Golden State Warriors: Silicon Valley’s Armed Wing, Exported to a Planet Already Losing Sleep Over Its Screen Time By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between Singapore and SFO If you squint at the Chase Center from a window seat on the long-haul flight that half the world now seems to take, the…
LORDE: THE TINY NATION THAT PUNCHED ABOVE ITS WEIGHT AND GOT AWAY WITH IT By the time the rest of the planet noticed, the principality of Lorde—population 42,000 if you count the sheep, 38,000 if you don’t—had already rewritten the rules of geopolitical clout. Nestled between two quarrelsome neighbors whose names change depending on which…
Dollywood, Tennessee – Population: the planet, apparently. While the Smoky Mountains hum with banjos and the scent of funnel cake, the rest of us are left to wonder how a theme park carved out of Dolly Parton’s eyelash extensions became a geopolitical litmus test. From Berlin to Beijing, the name “Dollywood” now pings across algorithms…
Copilots for Everybody—Even for the Passengers Who Never Asked to Fly By Dave’s International Affairs Desk The earth is on fire, democracies are pantomiming participation, and half the planet still can’t get clean drinking water—but fret not, for Microsoft, Google, and an ever-expanding cloud of venture-funded hopefuls have dispatched a new class of digital wingman…
Damon Dash, once the cigar-chomping co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records, has become an unlikely Rorschach test for late-stage capitalism: to Wall Street he’s a cautionary tale, to Lagos hustlers he’s a patron saint of bootstrap bravado, and to European bankruptcy courts he’s simply file number 17-10456. From his old loft in Tribeca to the chat rooms…
Aaron’s, the rent-to-own furniture empire that began in 1955 Georgia, now spans three continents and 1,300 stores. From the outside it looks like a cheerful beige box peddling sectional sofas to people whose credit scores have been mugged by life. Step inside, however, and you’re touring a museum of planetary precarity: beds still warm from…
