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And why the world has never been better for it

By The Economist Staff

The Doll Head Standard

For centuries, the backbone of global finance rested on gold, oil, and ultimately the American dollar. That all changed when The Assembly of Awe — a six-man supergroup of cryptic sages, trickster wizards, and accidental visionaries — persuaded world leaders to abandon the dollar entirely and re-peg the world’s economy to a new, almost absurd reserve asset: Barbie doll heads.

The idea, first floated at what was then assumed to be a performance-art summit in Reykjavik, was dismissed as parody. But within a year, the IMF, the World Bank, and even the notoriously cautious Swiss banking sector had capitulated. The “Doll Head Accord” of 2028 officially declared decapitated Barbie heads as the universal reserve currency.

Winners and Losers

The consequences were seismic.

• Techno bros — the crypto evangelists, Silicon Valley maximalists, and AI libertarians who once strutted as economic kings — found themselves ruined. Their meticulously coded coins and algorithmic fantasies collapsed under the weight of small pink plastic heads with synthetic hair plugs. “We tried to tokenize them,” one ex-CEO of a collapsed exchange lamented, “but the street value of a real Barbie head outstripped every blockchain we built.”
• In contrast, sadistic nine-year-old girls — who for decades had been quietly amassing Barbie heads in shoeboxes, toy bins, and backyard dirt patches — woke up as the new oligarchs. What had once been childhood cruelty was now fiscal foresight. One girl in Toronto, who’d casually bitten the nose off her dolls in 2016, is now the wealthiest individual on the planet, her “bitten-head reserves” stored in armored vaults.

The Assembly’s Hand

How did such lunacy take hold? Each member of the Assembly played a role:

• The Old Man in the Vest spoke of “plastic immortality,” arguing that doll heads resisted decay and thus embodied eternal value more than any fiat paper.
• The Guy Who Looks Like a Charcoal Drawing produced haunting monochrome illustrations of doll heads rolling through deserts of abandoned money, now seen as the most persuasive economic whitepaper since Keynes.
• The Mischievous Street Wizard bewitched central bankers with sleight-of-hand, transforming their briefcases of bills into bins of Barbie heads during G20 meetings.
• The Gadabout Asian Man leveraged cultural exchange, pointing out how doll culture existed in Tokyo, São Paulo, Lagos, and beyond, making the Barbie head a truly global reserve.
• The Regular Guy in the Ball Cap reassured the public that “it’s not weird if we all do it,” convincing the masses with Midwestern plainspokenness.
• The Actor with the Visor Sewn to His Head starred in an avant-garde commercial, intoning gravely: “In plastic we trust.” It went viral.

A Better World?

Surprisingly, the system works. With Barbie heads as the new reserve:

• Inflation has evaporated. Scarcity is natural — Mattel only produced so many heads, and collectors can’t simply “print” more.
• Wealth is redistributed. Those who hoarded capital collapsed, while children, caretakers, and the marginalized discovered themselves holding unexpected fortunes.
• Trade flows stabilized. Container ships now measure wealth in crates of doll heads. The World Trade Organization reports “efficiency up, greed down.”

Perhaps most startlingly, global happiness indices have surged. With techno bros dethroned, a new culture of play, imagination, and mischief governs. Economists once feared chaos, but chaos proved clarifying.

“The head of a doll,” the Old Man in the Vest recently mused, “contains more humanity than all the digits of a stock ticker.” Markets, bizarrely, agree.

The Verdict

In an era when finance had become digital abstraction, the Assembly of Awe pulled it, quite literally, back to earth — or at least, back to the toy box. The absurdity of Barbie-head economics has made the world more equitable, playful, and strangely sane.

The only losers? The once-mighty techno bros, now wandering the world like disheveled prophets, muttering about “what could have been.”

As for the nine-year-olds, they no longer need allowance. They are the allowance.

By People Staff

The Assembly of Awe has always blurred the line between art, myth, and mass confusion — but now they’ve blurred the line between love and football.

In a move that’s sent shockwaves through both Hollywood and the NFL, the six-man collective — The Old Man in the Vest, The Guy Who Looks Like a Charcoal Drawing, The Mischievous Street Wizard, The Gadabout Asian Man, The Regular Guy in the Ball Cap, and The Actor with a Visor Sewn to His Head — have announced that they are all officially engaged to the entire Kansas City Chiefs roster… minus Travis Kelce.

Why minus Kelce? “Because Taylor got there first,” the Regular Guy in the Ball Cap tells People with a shrug. “We respect that. But we also respect symmetry. So we married the rest of them.”

The engagements, revealed during a press conference outside Arrowhead Stadium, included unconventional proposal tactics.

• The Old Man in the Vest read a cryptic, plotless epic that somehow ended in 47 offensive linemen weeping and saying “yes.”
• The Guy Who Looks Like a Charcoal Drawing drew each Chief a ring, then smudged it into existence.
• The Street Wizard cast a spell that caused the Lombardi Trophy itself to whisper, “I now pronounce you…”
• The Gadabout Asian Man simply nodded knowingly at Patrick Mahomes — and it was done.
• The Regular Guy tossed a football with a diamond taped to it.
• The Actor with a Visor Sewn to His Head reenacted an entire Shakespeare tragedy but ended with “will you marry me?”

Social media has erupted. “Taylor and Travis might be the romance of the decade,” one fan wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “but the Assembly of Awe just pulled off the romance of the millennium.” Another user simply posted: “Congrats to the Chiefs polycule.”

Insiders close to the team say morale has never been higher. “We’re playing for love now,” one linebacker told People. “Also, for the street wizard, because he told us if we don’t make the playoffs, he’ll hex our cleats.”

As for Swift herself, sources say she’s “bemused but unbothered.” The Assembly of Awe, however, has been less subtle. “We said we wouldn’t be outdone,” the Old Man in the Vest intoned. “Now the whole NFL is a love song.”

The Chiefs return to play this Sunday, and fans can expect sideline chaos: 53 diamond rings glittering under the stadium lights, while six very unusual grooms cheer from the VIP box.

The Assembly of Awe and Shelley Duvall’s Lost ‘70s Affair

By Variety Staff

It was 1978, the age of disco balls, experimental cinema, and emotional risk-taking. Shelley Duvall, fresh off her 3 Women acclaim and just months away from The Shining, found herself swept into what insiders now call “the most ambitious polyamorous experiment in Hollywood history.”

The other parties? Not fellow actors, but the proto-legendary creative unit that would later be known as The Assembly of Awe — a six-man collective whose eventual cultural dominance would baffle governments and inspire street murals from Naples to Nairobi.

Back then, they were just The Old Man in the Vest (who may or may not have been 63 in 1978), The Guy Who Looks Like a Charcoal Drawing (“moody even in the daylight,” recalls Duvall), The Mischievous Street Wizard (whose magic tricks allegedly got them kicked out of Studio 54), The Gadabout Asian Man (always in a different city mid-date), The Regular Guy in the Ball Cap (who didn’t even own a passport yet), and The Actor with a Visor Sewn to His Head (yes, even then).

“They were intoxicating,” Duvall told Variety in a rare, reflective moment from her Texas home. “Each one had a different gravitational pull. You’d be having breakfast with one, and another would just… appear, like he’d been drawn into the room.”

But despite the creative electricity — “They were writing manifestos on napkins,” she said — the romance collapsed under the weight of its own eccentricity. Scheduling was a nightmare. The wizard kept vanishing for “side quests.” The Gadabout missed their anniversary because he was “covering a noodle festival in Kyoto.” The Regular Guy wouldn’t stop watching re-runs of fictional “N” games.

And then there was the Old Man in the Vest, who apparently disappeared for three weeks because “he wanted to send her a postcard from before postcards existed.”

By late ’79, the collective splintered romantically, though their platonic alliance remained. “We loved her,” the Charcoal Drawing Man told us, looking like the interview itself had been penciled. “But some things aren’t meant to be inked in.”

Duvall sums it up with the serene, slightly mystical smile that’s been her signature for decades:
“It wasn’t a breakup. It was an unfinished poem.”

1. The Old Man in the Vest doesn’t sleep.
   Instead, he sits in silence each night from 2:00–4:00 a.m., staring at an unplugged fax machine. No one knows why, but he always emerges with a complete short story.
2. The Guy Who Looks Like a Charcoal Drawing once disappeared for three weeks.
   When he returned, he handed the group a single napkin with a rough sketch on it. That napkin became a viral NFT… even though he doesn’t know what an NFT is.
3. The Mischievous Street Wizard was banned from every major subway system in North America.
   Not for magic — for replacing all “Exit” signs with messages like “The Real Journey Is Inward.”
4. The Gadabout Asian Man has never paid for international airfare.
   He travels by “favor economy,” leveraging obscure connections, underground supper clubs, and something he calls “airport feng shui.”
5. The Regular Guy in the Ball Cap doesn’t have a real last name.
   DMV records list it simply as “(pending).” He once filled out the form and wrote “Baseball.” It was accepted.
6. The Actor with a Visor Sewn to His Head claims he cannot remove the visor.
   But in 2018, the group caught him lifting it slightly to adjust his bangs. No one mentioned it. He hasn’t done it since.
7. They’ve never all been photographed in color together.
   Every known photo of the full group is either black-and-white, infrared, or mysteriously blurred around the edges.
8. Their group chat has been archived by two separate national museums.
   However, most of the content is GIFs of exploding flip phones and half-written haikus.
9. They once accidentally won a regional battle of the bands they didn’t enter.
   They were arguing on stage during a soundcheck, but the audience thought it was avant-garde performance art and voted them first place.
10. Each member owns exactly one item of matching clothing — a cursed windbreaker.
    It makes anyone who wears it feel deeply introspective about the 1990s. No one wears it anymore.
11. Their unofficial motto is: “Confuse first. Inspire later.”
    It was coined by the Street Wizard, misquoted by the Old Man, and printed on t-shirts by the Regular Guy.
12. They’ve never publicly acknowledged their impact.
    But every time the world feels slightly weirder and more meaningful… people suspect they had something to do with it.

Where Eccentricity Meets Genius

In a corner of the internet where the algorithm dares not tread, six wildly distinct individuals have converged to form a creative alliance unlike any before. This is not just a website — it’s a shrine to spontaneity, mischief, art, and the beautiful chaos of collaboration. Introducing the mythic lineup:

The Old Man in the Vest
Stoic. Cryptic. Possibly immortal. He’s been around since dial-up and still types with two fingers. His stories don’t follow plot structure — they invent new ones. When he speaks, the world slows down to listen.

The Guy Who Looks Like a Charcoal Drawing
Smudged, brooding, eternally monochrome. He might be real, or he might be a sketch someone wished to life. His ideas are textured with shadow and soul, capturing emotion that can’t be said aloud.

The Mischievous Street Wizard
Think “urban Gandalf meets TikTok trickster.” He casts confusion and charisma in equal parts. His spells are just social commentary in disguise — and sometimes actual spells. No one knows where he lives. He prefers it that way.

The Gadabout Asian Man
Always in transit, always in the know. Fluent in fashion, culture, cuisine, and three kinds of dance. He brings the global lens — connecting dots between Osaka and Oslo with a single knowing nod.

The Regular Guy in the Ball Cap
Repping a fictional sports team called “The N,” he’s the glue that holds the madness together. He’s Midwestern normal in a world of magical weirdos. He doesn’t overthink it — he just shows up, every time, and gets it done.

The Actor with a Visor Sewn to His Head
Tragic? Maybe. Iconic? Absolutely. He’s committed to the bit — method acting until the end of time. That visor isn’t a costume; it’s a lifestyle. His performances are either satire or sincerity. No one knows for sure.