Ellen DeGeneres and the Global Collapse of the Nice-Industrial Complex By our correspondent, still scrubbing glitter off the passport There was a moment—brief, like the lifespan of a housefly in August—when Ellen DeGeneres was the planet’s designated goodwill ambassador. From Lagos to Lapland, schoolchildren learned the verb “to Ellen,” meaning to dance yourself dizzy in…
The M6: a 230-mile asphalt scar running from Rugby to Gretna, now elevated—if that word can be used for something that averages 34 mph—to a global symbol of humanity’s talent for turning simple forward motion into existential purgatory. While diplomats in Geneva argue over carbon budgets and container ships queue politely outside Los Angeles, the…
CBeebies: The Soft-Power Kindergarten That Conquered the Planet By Dave’s International Affairs Desk In the great geopolitical nursery rhyme, CBeebies is the pastel-colored Trojan horse you never saw coming. Produced by the BBC and beamed into 100-plus territories from Lagos to Lapland, the channel is technically aimed at humans who still think “property rights” means…
**The Curious Case of Melissa Jefferson-Wooden: When American Bureaucracy Goes Global** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and climate change threatens to turn us all into expensive aquarium exhibits—it’s refreshing when a story emerges that reminds us the real enemy was never Russia or China, but rather…
Turnstiles: The World’s Tiniest Border Guards By the time you finish reading this sentence, roughly 2,700 people will have pushed through a turnstile somewhere on the planet. They will do so in languages that span 180 alphabets, under currencies that may collapse by suppertime, and with pockets containing everything from expired metro cards to emergency…
David Byrne, the perpetually wide-eyed Scot turned New Yorker, has spent four decades turning the planet’s anxiety into dance music. From the fever dreams of Talking Heads to his current collabs with Congolese thumb-piano wizards, Byrne has become the unofficial cartographer of global neurosis—mapping dread, delight, and debt into polyrhythms you can hum while queuing…
Affleck, the Accidental Geopolitician: How One Bostonian Became the UN’s Unwilling Rorschach Test It began, like most modern tragedies, on a red carpet: Ben Affleck—actor, director, tabloid chew-toy, and, improbably, global policy Rorschach—stood outside the Venice Film Festival in 2023 wearing a face that looked like it had just read the IMF’s latest outlook. The…
John Oliver, the bespectacled Englishman who somehow convinced HBO to fund weekly therapy sessions disguised as comedy, has become the planet’s unofficial translator for American dysfunction. From Lagos to Ljubljana, millions tune in not for his punch lines—though those are surgical—but for the reassurance that somewhere an over-caffeinated Brit is screaming into the void on…
Keegan-Michael Key and the Export-Grade Laugh Track: How One Detroit Kid Became a Geopolitical Asset Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the United States stumbled on a novel soft-power strategy: weaponize its funniest biracial Midwesterner and ship him abroad with a grin sharp enough to slice trade tariffs….
**The Paper Bag Princess Goes to Gaza: How Robert Munsch Accidentally Became the World’s Most Subversive Diplomat** While diplomats in Geneva negotiate ceasefires over canapés, a Canadian children’s author has achieved what the United Nations never could: teaching generations of kids that princes are often useless, dragons can be outwitted by clever girls, and love…
**From the Caucasus to the Cosmos: How a Georgian Kid Named Ladd McConkey Became the World’s Most Unlikely Geopolitical Rorschach Test** While the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants were busy arguing about whether democracy is dying or merely on life support, a 21-year-old from Chatsworth, Georgia—population 4,696, or roughly the same number of people who claim…
**Nashville’s Soft-Power Envoy: How Brad Paisley Became the Accidental Soundtrack of a Fracturing Planet** By the time the first chorus of “American Saturday Night” reaches a dive bar in Lagos, the beer is warm, the generator is coughing diesel, and nobody in the room has ever seen a Chevy—yet they still mouth the words “French…
