Travis Tritt: The Accidental Geopolitical Barometer No One Asked For In the grand theater of global affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and central banks perform interpretive dance with interest rates—an unlikely oracle has emerged from the pine-scented backroads of Georgia. Travis Tritt, the country music stalwart whose mullet achieved its own diplomatic…
Lisa Cook: How One American Economist Became the World’s Accidental Moral Barometer By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic (Wi-Fi permitting) It began, as most modern morality plays do, on Twitter. When the U.S. Senate confirmed Lisa Cook—previously a quiet Michigan State professor who once compared recessions to bad dates (painful, inevitable, rarely the other…
Amy Grant: The Crossover Queen Who Accidentally Invented Christian Music Diplomacy An international correspondent reflects on how one Nashville singer became an unlikely cultural ambassador in an era when “Christian” and “contemporary” were mutually exclusive terms GENEVA—While the world’s diplomats were busy perfecting the art of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War, an unlikely…
Randy Jackson and the Global Metaphor Nobody Asked For By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic The name Randy Jackson pings differently depending on your passport stamp. In Jakarta, he’s the bass player who once soundtracked a coup-thwarting disco night in ’83. In Berlin techno basements, he’s the punchline to a…
Booker T: The Name That Refuses to Stay on Its Page By Dave’s Locker Global Desk PARIS, 05:12 a.m. local—The espresso machine wheezes like an asthmatic accordion, and somewhere between the second and third sip a stranger leans over and asks, “But which Booker T do you mean?” It is the sort of question that…
NRG Stadium: Houston’s Colossal Petri Dish Where the World Comes to Watch Itself Implode By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk Houston—If you want to see the planet’s contradictions packed under one retractable roof, buy a ticket to NRG Stadium and stand very still. The Texans may or may not fumble away their season, but the…
The Monkees: How Four Fake Americans Accidentally Invented Global Soft Power Before the Pentagon Could Spell “K-Pop” By our man in the cheap seats, Geneva—where even the statues look bored. In 1966, while the Cold War was busy stockpiling canned paranoia, a television producer in Los Angeles glued four vaguely musical actors together, named them…
Charlie Kirk and the Great American Export: Turning Grievance into a Growth Industry by Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you’ve been anywhere near a Wi-Fi connection on five continents lately, you’ve probably seen the haircut: the same side-parted, Lego-polished coif that looks as if it was ordered in bulk from a factory in Guangzhou labeled…
Peter Navarro, the Man Who Weaponized the Spreadsheet From Beijing to Brussels, the world still feels the paper cuts. By the time most Europeans had learned how to pronounce his surname—Na-VAH-roh, rhyming with “guano”—Peter Navarro had already rewritten the operating system of global trade. A Harvard-trained economist who once wrote love letters to the invisible…
From the Pyrenees to the Pacific: How the Word “Espanyol” Became a Global Rorschach Test BARCELONA—Last week, in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Seoul, a teenager practiced rolling the Spanish “r” in the word “espanyol,” blissfully unaware that 10,000 kilometers away a Catalan separatist was spitting it out like cheap vermouth. Meanwhile, on a Reddit thread…
Will Arnett, the Canadian-born baritone of arrested development, has spent two decades perfecting the art of playing men who peaked somewhere between a parking-lot donut franchise and an ill-timed crypto investment. From the vantage point of a planet simultaneously melting and live-streaming the meltdown, Arnett’s career reads like a sly satire of post-imperial decline—delivered in…
The Green, White, and Red Canary in the Global Coal Mine By Our Man in Mexico City, nursing a mezcal and a migraine On paper, the Mexican flag is a tidy tricolor rectangle—green, white, red—bracketed by an eagle, a serpent, and an improbably heroic cactus. In practice, it is the world’s most cheerful-looking panic button….
