Tommy Fleetwood’s Hair, the Ryder Cup, and the Fragile Illusion of National Pride By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Manchester and Marseille If you squint through the smog of geopolitical despair, the name “Tommy Fleetwood” sounds less like a golfer and more like a failed 19th-century British trade policy—something that accidentally colonized…
**The Danish Delight: How Rasmus Højlund Became Football’s Latest Answer to Existential Dread** In a world where billionaires play space tourism while the planet burns and artificial intelligence threatens to make journalists obsolete (hello, irony), humanity has found its newest distraction: a 20-year-old Danish striker who runs like he’s being chased by Denmark’s collective tax…
Kathmandu’s air this week tastes of tear gas and generational disappointment, a pairing that vintners of global unrest will recognize from Beirut to Bogotá. While the rest of the planet binge-watched AI launch events and congratulated itself on surviving another quarterly earnings cycle, Gen Z in Nepal decided that waiting politely for the future was…
Sailing the Algorithmic Abyss: How Etsy’s Witch-Mariner Trend Became a Global Metaphor for Our Times By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the Suez Canal and the Sea of Cortez, a new maritime subculture has slipped anchor: the Etsy witch mariner. Equal parts tarot reader, rope-work hobbyist, and drop-ship entrepreneur, these nautical neopagans are hawking…
Deuce Vaughn, 5-foot-5 on a good hair day, has become the shortest running back in the modern NFL. From a distance it looks like a clerical error: surely the Dallas Cowboys meant to list him as 6-foot-5 and the decimal point just got drunk. Yet here we are, in a world where TikTok decides elections…
Bristol, England – In the genteel world of British fund supermarkets, where the tea is strong, the accents clipped, and the commissions once as stealthy as pickpockets at a royal wedding, Hargreaves Lansdown has long played the role of the impeccably mannered butler: discreet, indispensable, and quietly skimming the silver. Yet from Jakarta to Johannesburg,…
DONALD TRUMP, DEEPFAKED AND DEEP-FRIED: HOW ONE AI VIDEO UNMASKED PLANET EARTH’S COLLECTIVE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN by Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic The 45-second clip dropped at 3:07 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, which is of course the universal witching hour for questionable life choices. There was the former U.S. president, improbably svelte, wearing a sash…
PARIS—While delegates at UNESCO bicker over whether streaming performances deserve World-Heritage status, a quiet American named Tom Pelphrey is busy exporting something far trickier to tariff: the existential meltdown of the white, male anti-hero. From a soundstage in Burbank to a flat-screen in Bali, Pelphrey’s specialty is turning the implosion of U.S. masculinity into binge-worthy…
Ghost of Yotei: The Specter Haunting Every Boardroom from Tokyo to Timbuktu By Our Far-Too-Frequent-Flyer Correspondent Tokyo—In the smoky backroom of a Shibuya izakaya last Friday, three salarymen toasted the quietest apocalypse in modern finance. Their clink of lowball glasses barely rose above the J-Pop B-side warbling from a 1990s-era karaoke machine, yet the gesture…
BREAKING: Swine Supremacy Achieved—Peppa Pig Now De Facto Ruler of Earth’s Toddlers, Emerging Markets, and, Alas, Your Last Nerve By Our Man in the Cultural Swill Dateline: Everywhere, Tuesday, 08:17 GMT—While the United Nations debates carbon credits and the IMF frets about sovereign debt, an unholy pink alliance has already conquered the planet. Peppa Pig—two…
The iPhone 13 Pro Max: A 240-Gramme Passport to the End of History Bylines from Lagos, Shenzhen, Cupertino, and the back of a tuk-tuk in Phnom Penh Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, seat 42B is scrolling through macro-economic charts on a screen the size of a small paperback. The passenger—French-Malian venture capitalist, dual citizenships, three vaccine…
A Comcast Cable Goes Slack: How One Midwestern Outage Became a Global Parable by Daria Voss, Dave’s Locker International Desk CINCINNATI—When the Xfinity network in Ohio’s Hamilton County dropped dead at 07:14 local time last Tuesday, the immediate victims numbered roughly 1.2 million souls—give or take a few remote workers who swear they were “just…
