Virgin Territory: How the World’s Last Un-Wi-Fied Corners Became the Final Frontier of Late-Stage Capitalism By our correspondent, still nursing a €7 airport espresso and a grudge Dateline: Everywhere with lousy bandwidth The phrase “virgin media” once conjured missionary-era missionaries, chaste pop stars, or that awkward DVD you hid under the bed. Today it is…
The Global Hustle of Renting a Set of Wheels By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently hiding the fuel receipt from accounting In the beginning there was the wheel, and it was good. Then someone invented the surcharge, and the wheel required collision coverage, a credit-card imprint, and a 45-minute queue at Antalya Airport. Welcome, weary traveler,…
SoFi Stadium: The $5-Billion Coliseum Where the World Comes to Watch America Argue with Itself by “Marco ‘Bleachers’ Delgado,” filing from a press box that smells faintly of truffle oil and existential dread LOS ANGELES—On the edge of Inglewood, a neighborhood once famous for gang injunctions and now for artisanal coffee, rises SoFi Stadium: a…
NATO, Russian Drones, and the Beautiful Irony of Flying Death Machines They say the future arrived on silent propellers—quiet enough to be polite, lethal enough to be final. From the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk, the sky is now a crowded cocktail party where NATO recon drones and Russian loitering munitions mingle like…
Manila, Singapore, Reykjavík—three cities that have never met Britt Lower, yet each has already drafted her for their own geopolitical fantasies. In the Philippines she is the face of imported prestige, proof that American streaming services still bother to remember the archipelago exists. In Singapore she is an efficiency benchmark for local talent agencies: “Could…
**Swansea’s Soggy Rebellion: When the Sea Knocks on Wales’ Door (Again)** By the time the River Tawe had finished redecorating Swansea city centre—rust-coloured water lapping against kebab-shop menus and half-submerged bus shelters—local councillors were already promising “world-class flood resilience” to anyone who still owned a pair of dry shoes. Translation: another round of PowerPoint presentations…
Hannah Einbinder Is the Canary in Netflix’s Global Coal Mine By Our Foreign Desk, Somewhere between the 405 and the International Date Line In the grand, tragicomic opera of 21st-century streaming, Hannah Einbinder has become an unlikely soprano—belting out punch lines sharp enough to draw blood across five continents and counting. The 29-year-old stand-up and…
Cinema, the art form that once asked us to sit in the dark and pretend the world made sense, is now the planet’s most reliable export of delusion. From Lagos to Lapland, humans still queue—online or in the rain—to watch other humans pretend the rent is paid and the planet isn’t on fire. Call it…
Rebel Ridge: The Tiny Appalachian Town That Just Declared War on the World (and the World Barely Noticed) By the time satellite imagery confirmed the smoke curling above Rebel Ridge, Kentucky, the international community had already moved on from the latest IEA oil report and was busy arguing over whether a TikTok ban constituted a…
**The Accidental Diplomat: How Chris Collinsworth Became America’s Most Unlikely Cultural Export** In the grand theater of American exceptionalism, where we export democracy, fast food, and inexplicable reality TV shows with equal enthusiasm, one man has somehow managed to become our most perplexing cultural ambassador without anyone quite noticing. Chris Collinsworth—the former Cincinnati Bengals wide…
Guardians of the Galaxy: How a Talking Raccoon Became the UN’s Most Reliable Diplomat By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker BRUSSELS—Somewhere between the collapse of the Doha trade talks and the fifteenth emergency session on Syrian grain shortages, the assembled foreign ministers of the G-77 discovered they had a new favorite metaphor for multilateral cooperation: a tree,…
VIKINGS VS FALCONS: A TIRED SCRIPT IN A WORLD THAT’S ALREADY ON FIRE By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently self-medicating with fermented yak butter in Reykjavík) Somewhere between the first drone strike of the morning and the last cryptocurrency crash of the night, roughly 66,000 Americans—plus a few bewildered tourists who thought “NFL” was a…
