Priyanka Chopra Jonas: The Global Empress of Strategic Ambiguity By Our Resident Bureau Chief, Nursing a Third Espresso in a Hotel Bar Somewhere Between Continents When the United Nations announced its newest Goodwill Ambassador in 2016, diplomats who had spent the morning arguing over the precise definition of “genocide” were treated to the spectacle of…
Appeal: The Last Refuge of the Global Scoundrel By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Hague and Hollywood There is, perhaps, no finer spectator sport than watching the mighty file an appeal. From war-crimes defendants in bespoke suits to TikTok influencers clutching restraining orders, the act of appeal has become the universal pastime of the modern…
Manchester, City of Perpetual Reinvention, Wonders Why the World Still Cares By Matteo “Grimly Amused” Moretti, Dave’s Locker International Desk The rain over Manchester is the same rain that once rinsed gunpowder from the fingers of mill-workers and is now rinsing oat-milk from the beards of tech-entrepreneurs. The droplets haven’t changed; only the currency has—cotton…
DAVID WEIR: THE NAME THAT SPRINTS ACROSS BORDERS, ORDERS, AND DISORDERS From Rio to Reykjavik, the phrase “David Weir” now triggers two quite different reflexes. One half of humanity pictures a Scottish locomotive in carbon-fiber gloves, tearing up Paralympic tracks like a tax-dodging oligarch tears up treaties. The other half—mostly American—imagines an English novelist who…
Global Meltdown: How the World’s Collective Nervous Breakdown Became the Ultimate Status Symbol By the time the WHO upgraded “burnout” from a trendy complaint to an official diagnosis, the planet had already moved on to flashier disorders. From Manila to Minneapolis, mental health has become the new passport stamp: if you’re not anxious, are you…
Express News: The Global Habit of Devouring Yesterday Five Minutes Ago By Santiago “Blink-And-You-Missed-It” Vásquez, International Desk, Dave’s Locker ZURICH—Somewhere between the third push-alert and the fourth espresso, it occurred to me that “Express News” has become the planetary equivalent of a chain-smoking parrot: loud, repetitive, and absolutely convinced the apocalypse is scheduled for 3:17…
Michael Palin: The Diplomat We Forgot We Needed by Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent-at-Large In an age when most global “statesmen” can’t get through a press conference without threatening to glass someone on Twitter, it is instructive to remember that one of Britain’s most effective cultural ambassadors remains the man who once attempted to purchase a…
Garth Brooks and the Global Soft-Power Hat Trick By the Foreign Correspondent Who Once Saw a Kyrgyz Wedding DJ Spin “Friends in Low Places” at 3 a.m., Straight-Faced In the grand, teetering circus of American cultural imperialism, Garth Brooks is the unassuming juggler who managed to turn a ten-gallon Stetson into planetary headgear. From the…
Heath Ledger Died, and the Whole Planet Started Acting Perth, Australia—population two million, give or take a quarrelling quokka—still hasn’t forgiven the rest of us for what happened on 22 January 2008. That morning, a local surfer-turned-global-phenom was found face-down in a SoHo loft, and within minutes the tragedy was being live-tweeted from seventeen time…
Stephen Lawrence: The One Murder Britain Couldn’t Bury – A Global Masterclass in How Not to Run a Justice System By Dave’s Locker International Desk London, United Kingdom – There are only two kinds of murder cases: the ones that quietly rot in filing cabinets, and the ones that metastasize into national identity crises. The…
Ryan Seacrest and the Manufacture of Global Ambivalence By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, at 2:14 a.m. GMT, Ryan Seacrest is probably smiling. Not because he’s awake—he is, thanks to a proprietary blend of cold brew and contractual obligation—but because that smile has become a sort of soft-power export, like corn subsidies or…
In the pantheon of American dynastic surnames, “Kraft” evokes a very particular aroma: not cheese, but the unmistakable scent of money marinated in NFL glory. Josh Kraft—yes, the middle son of Patriots emperor Robert Kraft—has spent most of his 58 years orbiting a football empire the way lesser mortals orbit Wi-Fi. From Lagos boardrooms to…
