The planet woke up yesterday to the latest Set for Life draws, a phrase that scans like a particularly bitter punch-line in an era when most of us are simply set for Tuesday. From Sydney to Sheffield, five fresh millionaires discovered they will receive a drip-feed of wealth—roughly $20,000 a month for twenty years—while the…
A big bold beautiful journey used to mean a silk-lined suitcase, a steamer ticket, and the faint hope that your name wouldn’t be misspelled at Ellis Island. Today it means 4.9 billion smartphones chanting the same algorithmic rosary while their owners scroll through thirty-seven near-identical photos of someone’s brunch in Bali. The distance between romance…
Matthew McConaughey: How a Shirtless Texan Became the World’s Reluctant Prophet of Chill By the time the sun rose over Ulaanbaatar last Tuesday, Matthew McConaughey had already been awake for six hours, sipping yerba mate on a Zoom call with Mongolian throat-singers about “conscious commerce.” The man once paid to bang bongos naked on Venice…
Week 3 Fantasy Rankings: The World’s Most Popular Export Since Disappointment By: Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk GENEVA – While the UN Security Council argues over grain corridors and carbon ceilings, half a billion otherwise rational adults are locked in a far more consequential struggle: whether to start a Chicago third-string running back ahead of…
Geneva, Switzerland — Somewhere between a Swiss banker’s yawn and a climate refugee’s cough, Apple quietly dropped iOS 26, the operating system that promises to unite the planet in a shared hallucination of progress. The keynote was streamed live from a carbon-neutral bunker 30 meters beneath Lake Lucerne—because nothing says “global harmony” like an underground…
**The Global Brotherhood of Phillie: How One Man’s Nickname Became the World’s Favorite Identity Crisis** In a world where nations rise and fall on the whims of algorithms and the most powerful man in any room is usually holding a smartphone, humanity has found a new unifying force: the humble “Phillie.” From the cigarette-tinged backrooms…
Lily James and the Global Factory of Want PARIS—While the Seine continues to cough up Olympic debris like a hung-over river god, delegates at the nearby UNESCO summit are locked in a far weightier debate: the planetary export of English Rose nostalgia. Exhibit A sits on a velvet stool in a Montmartre hotel lobby, politely…
**The Hillsborough Disaster: When Football’s Global Cathedral Became a Death Trap** On April 15, 1989, while the Berlin Wall was still stubbornly standing and Tiananmen Square protesters were plotting their spring awakening, 96 Liverpool fans decided to catch a football match and never came home. The Hillsborough disaster—Britain’s deadliest sporting tragedy—didn’t just expose the rot…
David Byrne, the perpetually wide-eyed Scot turned New Yorker, has spent four decades turning the planet’s anxiety into dance music. From the fever dreams of Talking Heads to his current collabs with Congolese thumb-piano wizards, Byrne has become the unofficial cartographer of global neurosis—mapping dread, delight, and debt into polyrhythms you can hum while queuing…
Affleck, the Accidental Geopolitician: How One Bostonian Became the UN’s Unwilling Rorschach Test It began, like most modern tragedies, on a red carpet: Ben Affleck—actor, director, tabloid chew-toy, and, improbably, global policy Rorschach—stood outside the Venice Film Festival in 2023 wearing a face that looked like it had just read the IMF’s latest outlook. The…
The Strokes: How Five Rich Kids from Manhattan Accidentally Became the Soundtrack to a Planet That Forgot What It Was Rebelling Against By the time Is This It dropped in July 2001, the world was already busy stockpiling duct tape and rehearsing new lines about freedom fries. While NATO ministers huddled in Brussels drafting press…
Taemin, the Eternal Boy Who Outlived the End of the World (and Still Dances in the Ashes) The calendar says 2024, but somewhere in a Seoul rehearsal studio the clock stopped on 26 May 2022 and has been tap-dancing in place ever since. That was the day SHINee’s youngest—legal adult, eternal sprite, industry-wide cautionary tale…
