South Park’s Return: A Diplomatic Incident in Four Acts and a Streaming War By L. V. Mercier, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Desk The new batch of South Park episodes that dropped last week did not merely land on Paramount+; they crash-landed, parachute-first, into a planet already teetering on its axis. From Lagos living rooms…
Marvel Zombies Season 2: When the World’s Favorite Superheroes Finally Eat Each Other and the Rest of Us Cheer By the time the first episode of “Marvel Zombies Season 2” dropped—simultaneously in 190 territories at 3 a.m. local time, because Disney has transcended circadian biology—four different governments had already issued travel advisories for fictional nations….
Russell Howard and the Global Giggle-Industrial Complex A dispatch from the front lines of exported British mirth By the time the plane begins its descent into Singapore, the in-flight entertainment system has already offered me three separate Russell Howard stand-up specials in three different languages. Somewhere over the Bay of Bengal, a Malaysian teenager is…
One Battle After Another: The Cinematic Requiem for a World That Never Stops Fighting By Our Man in the Projection Booth, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the popcorn-scented lobby of a multiplex in Manila, “One Battle After Another” has become more than a movie title—it’s a geopolitical weather forecast. The…
**The People’s Streaming Service: How Pluto TV Became Global Capitalism’s Guilty Pleasure** In the grand theater of late-stage capitalism, where subscription fatigue has become a legitimate medical condition and Netflix passwords are traded like cigarettes in a digital prison yard, Pluto TV has emerged as the streaming equivalent of finding a twenty-dollar bill in your…
GENEVA—The World Health Organization’s emergency session this week was supposed to tackle boringly terrestrial viruses, but delegates spent most of the coffee breaks asking one another the same question: if Earth’s mightiest superheroes can be zombified, what chance does the average taxpayer have? The release of the streaming series “Marvel Zombies” has triggered the kind…
NFL Week 4: When the World Pauses to Watch Millionaires in Tights Argue About Yardage By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic If you’ve ever wondered how many diplomats it takes to explain a holding penalty to a bewildered trade attaché from Ulaanbaatar, NFL Week 4 is your answer. While Europe…
Sling: The World’s Most Understated Weapon of Mass Distribution By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk From the marble colonnades of Rome to the fluorescent aisles of a 24-hour Walmart in suburban Manila, the humble sling has spent three millennia perfecting the art of looking harmless while rearranging human geography. Today, it serves coffee in Copenhagen,…
The planet’s most expensive parade has always been a travelling circus, but until recently you had to bribe a local satellite guy, learn three dialects of buffering, or actually buy a ticket to the grandstands just to watch it. Enter F1 TV, Liberty Media’s attempt to let the entire globe mainline carbon-fiber drama straight into…
The Ballad of Duc Phuc: How a Vietnamese Pop Star Accidentally Became the World’s Mood Ring By Dave’s International Desk (still hung-over from last night’s geopolitical karaoke) HANOI—On the face of it, the rise of Nguyễn Đức Phúc—stage name Duc Phuc, a moniker that sounds like a minor Scandinavian deity or an IKEA lamp—should be…
The Bads of Bollywood: A Global Tragedy in Three Acts and a Dance Number By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Mumbai, India — If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a $2.4-billion-a-year dream factory begins to snore loudly in public, look no further than Bollywood. Once the planet’s most reliable export of synchronized pelvic thrusts and family-friendly…
Amazon Video: The Streaming Colonizer Quietly Redrawing the Planet’s Cultural Borders By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between a Co-Working Couch and Existential Despair PARIS—Somewhere on the 17th arrospécial of a Haussmannian walk-up, a Senegalese-French data-scientist is binge-watching “The Boys” instead of finishing the code that might keep Mali’s largest hospital online. In São Paulo’s 3 a.m….
