PARIS—Somewhere between the fifth croissant and the third existential crisis of the week, the name Kellen Moore ping-ponged through the global sports-commentariat like a ricocheting drone strike. To the average Parisian barista, the phrase “Kellen Moore” sounds like the latest Scandinavian furniture line—minimalist, vaguely threatening, and guaranteed to fall apart after four seasons. Yet on…
Tyrese Haliburton and the Quiet Americanization of the World’s Living Room By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When a 23-year-old from Oshkosh, Wisconsin—yes, the place that still manufactures overalls—drops 43 points on the NBA’s most marketable franchise while wearing sneakers named after a Japanese manga demon, you begin to understand why geopolitics now comes with a…
Marvel Tokon Beta: When the World’s Favorite Superhero Franchise Decides to Issue Its Own Currency (and Nobody Tells the IMF) By the time most of you woke up this morning, some kid in Lagos had already flipped a pixelated Captain America shield NFT for enough Marvel Tokon Beta (MTB) to buy three weeks of actual…
Tyler Bass and the Curious Global Aftershock of a 27-Yard Miss By “Globetrotting” G. Mallory, Senior Field Correspondent When Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass hooked a 27-yard field-goal attempt wide right last January, the ball did not simply sail into the Kansas City night. It kept traveling—across oceans, borders, and time zones—picking up symbolic baggage…
Jason Manford: The Comedian Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Weathervane When the first missiles landed in Kyiv last February, global Twitter feeds briefly synchronized around a single, improbable question: “What would Jason Manford do?” The query, posted by a bored Ukrainian conscript from a Lviv bomb shelter, trended in 42 countries within hours—not because Manford…
As the sun rose over five continents this morning, so did a familiar, slightly guilty thrill: Rockstar has finally deigned to show us Grand Theft Auto VI—or, as foreign-exchange desks immediately rebranded it, “the single most reliable dollar-drain since Taylor Swift’s travel itinerary.” From Lagos broadband cafés to Seoul’s PC-bangs, from São Paulo’s favela LAN…
Orlando Bloom: The Last Global Elf Standing Between Us and Total Cultural Collapse By the time the sun rises over the Bosphorus, Orlando Bloom has already been pirated in seventeen languages. Somewhere in Jakarta, a bootleg Legolas screensaver flickers across a cracked Huawei monitor; in Lagos, a street vendor hawks laminated wallet-sized photographs of Will…
Victoria: A Name That Conquered the World and Still Won’t Pick Up the Check By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent Somewhere between Duty-Free and Disillusionment There are, at last count, roughly 1.3 million Victorias on LinkedIn alone—enough to fill a medium-sized authoritarian parade and still have a queue outside the bar. From the diamond mines of…
Horror Nights, Global Franchise of Dread, Celebrate Humanity’s Unpaid Therapy Bill by Matteo “Graveyard” Moreau, International Correspondent, somewhere between the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca and a fog-shrouded U.K. theme park If you’ve ever wondered what a billion-dollar coping mechanism looks like, buy a ticket to any Horror Night on the planet this season….
The Weeknd in San Antonio: A Global Pop Ritual in the Shadow of Collapse Dave’s Locker International, filed from somewhere between the Alamo and TikTok San Antonio—where the ghosts of 1836 mingle with vape smoke and the faint smell of churros—played host this week to Abel Tesfaye, the Canadian R&B warlock who answers to “The…
Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian-born pop-intellectual with the hair of a startled alpaca and the delivery of a bedtime-storyteller who moonlights as a management consultant, has managed to export a very particular brand of reassuring explanation to every corner of the globe. From Lagos traffic jams to Tokyo bullet-train lounges, airport bookstores still stack The Tipping…
Marvel Rivals: When Super-Powers Collide in the Shadow of Real-World Chaos By Our Man in the Multiverse In the grand tradition of pitting gods against each other for our mild amusement, Marvel Entertainment has once again invited the planet to watch its costumed demigods punch each other through digital skyscrapers. Marvel Rivals—the freshly announced 6-v-6…
