The Upside Down World Order: How Stranger Things Became Our Global Reality Show If you’ve been wondering why the world feels increasingly like we’re all trapped in a supernatural 80s fever dream, congratulations—you’ve been paying attention. While Netflix’s Stranger Things ostensibly chronicles the paranormal adventures of precocious children battling interdimensional monsters, it’s become something far…
Carrie Underwood: How a Farm-Girl Soprano Became the UN’s Unofficial Soundtrack for Late-Stage Capitalism By Our Correspondent in Exile, Currently Somewhere Between Nashville and Narnia MOSCOW—Somewhere between the Kremlin’s nightly news and the latest oligarch yacht auction, a familiar voice crackles over a tinny radio in a Lada dashboard: “Jesus, take the wheel.” It is…
Michelle Williams: The Woman the World Can’t Stop Misplacing By Our Correspondent in Perpetual Transit Somewhere between the duty-free mazes of Incheon, the baggage carousels of Charles de Gaulle, and the red-carpet vacuum of Cannes, Michelle Williams is quietly becoming the planet’s most elusive export. Not the Destiny’s Child alum (she’s busy healing the world…
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…
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…
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,…
The Kennedy Center: Marble Mausoleum of American Soft Power, Now Streaming to a Planet Near You From a satellite’s-eye view—roughly the same altitude from which Washington habitually lectures the rest of us—the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts looks like a moated palace built to outlast the empire that commissioned it. The Potomac…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and a Starbucks that still hasn’t figured out how to spell “Ben,” the planet’s most famous panic-attack-on-legs is being recast as a geopolitical bellwether. Yes, Ben Stiller—once merely the human embodiment of an anxiety dream about airport security—has been upgraded by the United Nations to “Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees,” a title…
Querétaro vs. Monterrey: A Football Fixture That Explains Global Capitalism Better Than an MBA By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from the Guacamole Hangover If you squint at the Liga MX calendar just right, the clash between Querétaro and Monterrey looks like a polite regional derby. Zoom out, however, and it resembles a quarterly earnings call…
Tyler Warren and the Quiet Implosion of the American Dream, Viewed from Abroad By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the gate where dreams go to die, the name Tyler Warren keeps popping up on departure boards from Dubai to Dublin. Not the man himself—his passport, like most things…
Oldbury: The Town That Accidentally Became a Global Metaphor By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently self-medicating with vending-machine coffee) Oldbury—population 25,000, two Greggs, and a suspiciously large number of seagulls who look like they’ve read Nietzsche—sits eight miles west of Birmingham, England, a place the UN once described as “aggressively beige.” To the casual eye it…
Jimmy Johnson: How One Man’s Hair Helped the World Pretend the 1990s Never Ended By Our Man in the Hotel Bar, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic If you whisper “Jimmy Johnson” in a Floridian sports bar, the patrons will instinctively look up at the nearest flat-screen, half-expecting a Fox NFL Sunday graphic to explode into view….
