iPhone 17: Because the Planet Wasn’t Dystopian Enough Already By Our Correspondent in a Bunker Somewhere Neutral-ish GENEVA—Apple’s marketing department, fresh from convincing half the Northern Hemisphere that “courage” means removing headphone jacks, has now confirmed the iPhone 17 will launch this autumn in a palette of colors named after endangered species. (Arctic Fox White…
Indianapolis Weather: A Midwestern Microdrama Staged for the World Stage By Correspondent R. Valdez, filing from somewhere colder than your conscience While COP delegates in Dubai haggle over half-degree increments, Indianapolis has decided to audition for all four seasons in a single Tuesday. This morning the city awoke to 14 °F (-10 °C), a temperature…
Jannik Sinner: Italy’s Ice-Cool Prodigy and the Global Gladiator Games By our Special Correspondent in the Cheap Seats When Jannik Sinner hoisted the Australian Open trophy at 3:14 a.m. Melbourne time, the rest of the planet was busy doom-scrolling through wars, recessions, and whatever fresh hell Elon Musk had tweeted that day. Yet for one…
Jamie Lee Curtis and the Global Supply Chain of Screams By Our Bureau Chief, Still Jet-Lagged in an Airport Lounge Near You Somewhere at 39,000 feet between Singapore and Reykjavík, a cargo manifest quietly lists “Curtis, J. L.—1 unit, cultural icon.” That bureaucratic understatement is how the world now ships its nightmares: neatly shrink-wrapped, Dolby-certified,…
NL Wild Card: The Last Gasp of American Exceptionalism, Now Streaming Worldwide by Dave’s Locker International Desk If you tune in from Paris at 3 a.m. or from Lagos at 9 p.m.—thanks to the miracle of geo-pirated streams and unquenchable insomnia—you’ll discover the same tableau: grown men in poly-blend pajamas sprinting across manicured Kentucky bluegrass…
STEVE BUSCEMI: THE ONLY THING HOLDING THE PLANET TOGETHER by our man in the field, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where the in-flight Wi-Fi is patchy and the world below is on fire in at least four time zones. A curious thing happened at last week’s G-7 “emergency cultural summit” (a…
Mark Hamill, the Man Who Weaponized Nostalgia and Accidentally Became the Internet’s Guilt-Free Dad By Our Correspondent in Low-Earth Orbit Look up at the right moment—somewhere between the malfunctioning Chinese booster and Elon’s latest swarm of broadband pigeons—and you’ll see him: the lone Jedi emoji, orbiting the planet like a sarcastic satellite. Mark Hamill, age…
Severe Thunderstorm Warning: The Planet’s Mood Ring Flashes Amber Again By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—Somewhere in the bureaucratic hush of the World Meteorological Organization, a color-coded map the size of Monaco just turned a queasy shade of puce. That, dear reader, is the international signal for “severe thunderstorm warning,” a phrase now so routinely…
Lotto Texas: A Lone-Star Fever Dream in an Age of Global Discontent By Our Senior Correspondent, Somewhere between Houston and Helsinki AUSTIN—Every Wednesday and Saturday night, while most of the planet is doom-scrolling through war-crime footage or calculating how many euros are left before civilization’s next rolling blackout, the good people of Texas gather around…
Dust Storm Warning: A Global Brown-Out By the time the meteorologists in Beijing, Baghdad, and Bakersfield finish their morning Zoom, the sky has already turned the color of an overcooked latte. A dust-storm warning is now less a regional inconvenience and more an international group chat nobody asked to join. From the Sahel to suburban…
Houston, We Have a Brand Problem: Astros vs Yankees as Global Morality Play by Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (still jet-lagged from a nonstop via Reykjavik) When the Houston Astros and New York Yankees renew their blood feud this week, most of the planet will be busy keeping the lights on, the bombs off, or the…
Mega Millions: How a $1.6 Billion Mirage Seduces the Planet By Our Man in the Cheap Seats At 11 p.m. Eastern last night, a single American lottery draw produced more overnight billionaires than most African stock exchanges manage in a decade. The Mega Millions jackpot—$1.6 billion and change—had swollen to the kind of figure normally…
