Strands Hints: The World’s Newest Guilty Pleasure in a Guilt-Free Wrapper By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, nursing a lukewarm espresso in Terminal 3 Somewhere between the collapse of a second regional bank and the third coup rumor of the week, the planet discovered it could still be distracted by a daily puzzle that looks like…
The NFL’s Global Roadshow: How One League Exports Helmeted Capitalism to a Bewildered Planet By Dave’s Locker International Desk Every September, while most of the world is busy arguing about energy prices, coups, or the correct pronunciation of “GIF,” roughly 120 million humans from Minsk to Manila suddenly acquire opinions on third-string cornerbacks. The culprit:…
Stephen Colbert Goes Global: How One Satirist Became the World’s Emergency Laugh Track By the time the laughter dies down in Studio 6A, it’s already echoing off the Kremlin’s red bricks, ricocheting around a Lagos co-working space, and slithering into a Berlin bar where expats pretend they’re still shocked by American politics. Stephen Colbert—once merely…
The USMNT Conundrum: America Learns That Soccer Is Not a Tax Write-Off By Our Man in the Global Press Box The United States Men’s National Team—abbreviated like a hedge fund that never quite delivered—has once again wandered onto the world stage, blinking like a tourist who forgot to exchange currency. From Berlin to Bogotá, seasoned…
Ethereum: The World’s Digital Steam Engine, Now Running on Pure Collective Delusion By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk Zug, Switzerland – In a pastel-painted office block that moonlights as a crypto-bro monastery, a dozen hoodie-clad programmers chant “Merge, merge, merge” while burning incense made from shredded fiat currency. This is the global headquarters of Ethereum,…
Pete Hegseth, the Fox & Friends Weekend warrior who once accidentally grenaded a colleague’s career (and the colleague), has been nominated by President-elect Trump to run the Pentagon. The news landed like a free round at an O’Club happy hour: American allies choked on their cucumber sandwiches, adversaries opened fresh spreadsheets, and the global commentariat…
Dublin to Dubai, Vegas to Vladivostok: Conor McGregor and the Global Theater of One-Liners and Lawsuits By Diego “The Diplomat” Salgado, for Dave’s Locker When Conor McGregor first laced up gloves in a threadbare Crumlin gym, the planet was busy worrying about Greek debt, Beyoncé’s surprise album, and whether the Large Hadron Collider would accidentally…
Gen Z Years, or How to Age Gracefully in a World That Never Learned to Adult by Our Correspondent Somewhere Between TikTok and Existential Despair The generational cartographers at Pew finally drew the line: 1997–2012. In other words, if your first phone had Snake instead of Spotify, congratulations—you’re a millennial fossil. If you learned to…
Lucy Lawless and the Fine Art of Global Iconoclasm by “Roving” Rodrigo Valdez, filed from the last decent bar in Auckland that still serves journalists on expense accounts Auckland—Somewhere between the 1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2023 global polycrisis, the planet decided it needed a six-foot Kiwi warrior princess to explain the concept of…
The Mountain State’s Weekly Mirage: How West Virginia’s Lottery Became a Global Parable of Hope and Desperation By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough from the right altitude, the West Virginia Lottery looks like a modest civic ritual: $1 tickets, pastel scratch-offs, and the nightly televised drum-roll that temporarily distracts 1.8 million…
Global Thermostats and Frozen Pockets: The Winter Fuel Payment as a Geopolitical Mood Ring By Your Correspondent, Still Wearing Three Scarves LONDON—While the British government’s annual Winter Fuel Payment (£200–£300 sent to pensioners like an edible bouquet of lukewarm hope) is technically a domestic affair, its reverberations are felt from the slushy streets of Seoul…
Generation Z: The Planet’s First Global Cohort Learns to Live on the Ashes of Optimism By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg If you want to meet Generation Z in the wild, skip the TikTok montages and try the overnight bus from Nairobi to Kampala. You’ll find them trading memes about climate collapse in…
