WrestlePalooza: When the World’s Problems Enter the Ring in Spandex PARIS—While the planet busied itself with minor inconveniences like climate tipping points and the slow-motion disintegration of the rules-based order, 65,000 pilgrims descended on a purpose-built arena in Riyadh for WWE WrestlePalooza. There, under 2,000 LED panels and the watchful eye of a sovereign wealth…
Anthony Boyle: The Belfast Ghost Who Haunts Every Screen on Earth By Our Man in the Last Row of Economy Class If you’ve flown long-haul recently and accidentally pressed “play” on the in-flight entertainment menu, you’ve met Anthony Boyle. There he is, a pale, red-haired specter in 4K, whispering Shakespearean menace in *Danny Boy*, then…
Nicholas Roske: When a Californian Knocks on the Door of the Supreme Court, the Whole World Learns the Wi-Fi Password PARIS—Among the many diplomatic cables that crossed my desk this week, one humble police report from Maryland managed to eclipse wars, coups, and crypto crashes. It concerned Nicholas John Roske, 26, a recent export from…
Perth—population 2.2 million, give or take a few FIFO* miners who’ve lost track of what day it is—sits alone on the planet’s loneliest edge: closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, closer to the Antarctic research station’s lonely beer fridge than to Canberra’s warmer political ambitions. To the rest of the world, Western Australia’s capital is…
From Oslo to Outer Darkness: Casper Ruud and the Global Tennis Afterlife By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large Somewhere beyond customs in Terminal 2, Charles de Gaulle, a Norwegian passport flutters like a polite surrender flag. It belongs—this week at least—to Casper Ruud, the 25-year-old Nordic metronome whose game is so relentlessly correct it makes Scandinavian social…
Rage Goes Global: How a Low-Budget British Zombie Flick Forecasted the Present Apocalypse When Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” limped onto UK screens back in 2002, most of the planet was busy stockpiling duct tape for the looming Iraq war and arguing over whether Nokia or Motorola made the sturdier brick-phone. Few noticed that a…
M&T Bank’s mobile banking app decided to take an unscheduled sabbatical last Tuesday, and the ripples reached well beyond Buffalo, New York. From a sidewalk café in Lisbon to a co-working pod in Nairobi, expatriates who still keep their paychecks in upstate New York suddenly discovered that money—once the world’s most dependable fiction—had gone on…
Dispatch from the Global Swipe-Right Industrial Complex by our correspondent in exile, still waiting for someone to reply Whitney Wolfe Herd is not, despite the headlines, the patron saint of empowered single women from Jakarta to Johannesburg. She is merely the woman who figured out how to monetize the universal human fear of dying alone—then…
Dodgers Baseball: The Empire of Overpriced Sunscreen and Existential Dread From the vantage point of a press box that smells faintly of garlic fries and the slow decay of hope, the Los Angeles Dodgers—once a humble Brooklyn trolley dodger and now a $4.8 billion global content platform—look less like a ball club and more like…
The World’s Longest IOU: A Global Tour of Government Borrowing, or How to Run Up a Tab in Every Time Zone By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk If the planet ever files for collective bankruptcy, the hearing will be held in five languages, chaired by a Swiss accountant, and catered—on credit—by the same governments that…
Dion Dublin: The Accidental Prophet of Our Absurd Global Village By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk From the vantage point of a damp Tuesday in Kyiv, where the neon of shuttered nightclubs now spells out air-raid warnings, it feels almost indecent to speak of football and game-show jingles. Yet here we are, because somewhere in…
Tulsa vs Oklahoma State: A Microscopic Powder Keg in the Heartland That the World Pretends Not to Notice From a safe distance—say, a café in Lisbon or a metro platform in Seoul—tonight’s tilt between the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane and the Oklahoma State Cowboys looks like a statistical tremor in a subreddit no one…
