Nathaniel Lowe and the Curious American Pastime of Exporting First-Base Anxiety to a Bewildered Planet By Santiago “Sully” Malcontent, International Desk The name Nathaniel Lowe will not, at first glance, trigger emergency sessions at the U.N. Security Council. Yet in the grand bazaar of global soft power—where K-Pop idols, French wine, and German cars jostle…
Yankee, Go Home (But First, Explain Yourself) PARIS — The word “Yankee” has always traveled poorly. At a smoky bar in Istanbul the syllable passes for an insult; in Manila duty-free it’s a credit card; in Caracas it’s the ghost of every coup since 1954. A single term, half-slur, half-brand, now stands in for the…
Will Warren, the understated co-founder of 0x Labs, is the sort of fellow you could sit next to on a trans-Atlantic flight and never suspect he’s quietly re-wiring the planet’s financial plumbing. While the rest of us were busy panic-buying toilet paper and doom-scrolling, Warren was shipping code that allows anyone, anywhere, to trade digital…
Sam Rockwell: The Accidental Everyman in a World That Forgot How to Dance by our correspondent in the Departures Lounge of Civilisation The first time most of the planet noticed Sam Rockwell, he was wearing a tin-foil jumpsuit and murdering lunar clones to a soft-rock soundtrack. That was 2009, the same year Greece discovered it…
White Lotus Season 3: A Bougainvillea-Splattered Mirror Held Up to a Planet on Fire By our Southeast Asia Bureau Chief, still coughing up tropical humidity and moral ambivalence BANGKOK—Mike White’s The White Lotus has finally checked into Thailand, dragging its monogrammed Rimowa of first-world guilt through the jasmine-scented lobby of a fictional Koh Samui resort….
Kansas City, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles—four cities whose names conjure very different flavors of late-stage capitalism, now welded together by a division whose acronym sounds suspiciously like a Swiss bank routing code. Welcome to the AFC West, a quarterly demonstration that even in the age of global supply-chain anxiety, Americans still find time to…
Harrison Ford: The Last American Action Figure Standing Between Us and Planetary Meltdown By the time you finish this sentence, another streaming algorithm will have recommended Indiana Jones to a teenager in Jakarta who’s wondering why the archaeologist doesn’t just use Google Maps. Such is the global afterlife of Harrison Ford: a man whose face…
Somewhere between the 50-yard line and the existential void, a man named Daniel Jones is busy reminding the planet that even in a sport played almost exclusively in one country, the ripple effects can lap at shores from Lagos to Luleå. Jones, the New York Giants’ quarterback and walking embodiment of “maybe this year,” has…
Tyquan Thornton and the Quiet Collapse of the American Dream—One Hamstring at a Time By “Lucky” Lucien Marceau, roving correspondent, somewhere between a Dublin pub and a Jakarta noodle stall In the great global bazaar of human endeavor, where billion-dollar start-ups pivot to vaporware and presidents tweet their own indictments, Tyquan Thornton’s left hamstring has…
Javier Bardem, the Man Who Makes Villainy a Passport In the grand theatre of international cinema—where the house lights flicker between art and commerce like a power grid in a developing nation—Javier Bardem has quietly become the most reliable export Spain never put on a customs form. While other nations weaponize finance or fossil fuels,…
Jason Segel’s Big, Small, and Symbolically Oversized World Tour By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Bureau, Location Redacted Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the last functioning Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon, Jason Segel is still six-foot-four and gently bewildered. For the uninitiated, Segel is the American actor-screenwriter whose résumé reads like a fever dream curated by a…
Spencer Shrader and the Global Art of Missing the Point From a windowless bar in Brussels—where the beer is cold, the Wi-Fi is tepid, and the jukebox thinks “Wonderwall” is still a fresh idea—a television flickers with highlights of yet another American kicker drilling a 59-yard field goal. The patrons, a polyglot mix of Eurocrats…
