Sun Kings 2.0: How Solar Companies Became the New Petro-Sheikhs—Only Politer and With Better Slides By our correspondent, still wearing SPF-50 in December BARCELONA—Walk along the marina at sunrise and you’ll spot the tell-tale shimmer: entire super-yachts wrapped in photovoltaic panels, their owners sipping cold-brew espresso brewed from the same rays that keep the champagne…
Somewhere above the Arctic Circle—where the permafrost is now merely “perm-ish” and polar bears have started ordering oat-milk lattes—rumors are spreading that Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson might finally, actually, no-kidding-this-time, make a film together. If confirmed, the event would rank somewhere between the discovery of a new habitable exoplanet and the announcement that…
Zion Williamson Lands in Beijing, and the Planet Tilts Three Degrees By our man in the departure lounge, still nursing a ¥38 coffee BEIJING—The first thing you notice when Zion Williamson’s 284-pound frame steps off the charter is that the air-pressure differential actually hiccups. A dozen Chinese smartphones auto-correct to “Godzilla” in real time; one…
The Curious Case of Janice Tjen: How a 21-Year-Old Indonesian Tennis Prodigy Became the Canary in Global Sport’s Coal Mine JAKARTA—In any other epoch, Janice Tjen would be a straightforward sports story: bright kid, big serve, passport full of stamps. But we live in the age of algorithmic outrage, geopolitical ping-pong, and Olympic committees that…
Sebastián Báez and the Global Currency of Small Men with Large Rackets By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the flaming dumpsters of 2024 and the next scheduled apocalypse, a 5-foot-7 Argentine named Sebastián Báez keeps winning tennis matches. To the untrained eye—i.e., most of humanity scrolling past grainy highlights while waiting for the water…
Edge of Empire: How Adam Copeland Wrestled the World into Submission By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, filing from everywhere the WiFi still works There is a moment, somewhere between the fourth suplex and the second broken table, when the average viewer realizes that Adam Copeland—known to the planet’s seven billion-strong peanut gallery as…
**The Final Escape Hatch: How Spacecraft Became Humanity’s Most Expensive Coping Mechanism** While Earth continues its slow-motion implosion—climate negotiations that resemble a particularly tedious dinner party where nobody wants to pick up the check, democracies flirting with authoritarianism like teenagers testing boundaries, and supply chains snapping like cheap rubber bands—the world’s brightest minds have collectively…
**Take That Tickets and the Decline of Western Civilization: A Global Tragedy in Three-Part Harmony** In the grand theater of human existence, where nuclear powers play chicken over grain shipments and cryptocurrency evangelists promise salvation through JPEGs, the announcement of Take That’s 2024 reunion tour might seem inconsequential. Yet here we are, witnessing grown adults—presumably…
Alexandra Burke: How a London Pop Voice Became the World’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure The first time most of the planet noticed Alexandra Burke, she was belting out Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” like a woman who’d just discovered both the gospel and the mortgage payments that come with it. The year was 2008, Lehman Brothers had politely…
Beijing Opens the Door—Just Enough to Peek Inside, Not Enough to Walk Through By Our Man in the Smog, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The People’s Republic has, in its own inimitable style, declared the “Beijing Open.” No, this is not a Grand Slam tennis tournament relocated to a city where the air itself could serve…
Emma Watson’s License to Kill (Time): A Global Morality Play in Six Points and a Speed-Camera Flash By Our Correspondent Who Once Shared a Rickshaw with Three Goats and a Diplomat 1. The Incident, or How the UN’s Favorite Feminist Found Herself in the Naughty Corner Somewhere between the Cotswolds and a Pret à Manger,…
Hayley Williams: The Accidental Ambassador of Global Disillusionment By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent When the Berlin Wall fell, Western teenagers got MTV; when the Syrian civil war turned TikTok into an emergency broadcast channel, Hayley Williams was already there, eyeliner sharp enough to slice through the algorithm. Paramore’s pint-sized frontwoman has never held elected office,…
