Liechtenstein: The Micro-Monarchy Quietly Running the World’s Off-Balance Sheet By the time you finish this sentence, Liechtenstein’s 39,000 citizens will have collectively earned another million francs, most of it from accounts whose owners would rather you not know their names. That’s the speed at which the planet’s sixth-smallest sovereign state moves money—fast enough to make…
Luanda, Thursday – Somewhere between the oil rigs and the rusting Soviet apartment blocks, Angola has quietly become the punch-line the world pretends it isn’t in on. Once the Cold War’s favorite proxy slug-fest, the country now exports two commodities in bulk: crude petroleum and sardonic lessons in how to survive the twenty-first century with…
The Bear Is Global Now: How Ayo Edebiri Became the Accidental Diplomat of Kitchen Rage By Dave’s International Correspondent, still picking confit out of his passport PARIS—In the grand tradition of soft-power exports, the United States has previously given the world jazz, jeans, and that nagging suspicion that democracy ships with optional upgrades. Now, courtesy…
Paris, 03:47 local time – The Daily Telegraph, that stately British broadsheet once nicknamed “The Torygraph” by people who thought they were being original, has been having what the tabloids would call “a moment.” Not the sort of moment that involves a prime minister’s aide, a suitcase of rosé, and a Downing Street swing set—more…
Laila Cunningham Doesn’t Exist (And That’s the Whole Point) By the time the Reuters alert pinged in Lagos, the Financial Times had already drafted her obituary, and a Berlin think-tank had scheduled a webinar on “Cunninghamism and the Collapse of Western Soft Power.” The only snag: no one has ever been able to prove that…
The World’s Smallest Great Power: Montenegro as a Geopolitical Punchline By Our Correspondent, still hung-over from a rakija-soaked night in Kotor The Adriatic has always been Europe’s liquid catwalk: Venice glides by in designer decay, Croatia flaunts newly-acquired EU pins, and then—barely visible unless you squint—Montenegro struts in borrowed shoes two sizes too big. At…
**The Global Empire of Tiaras: How Disney Princesses Became the Most Effective Soft Power Tool Since the British Navy** While the world’s superpowers jostle for influence through trade wars and military posturing, a far more insidious force has been quietly colonizing the collective imagination of children across every continent: the Disney Princess Industrial Complex. From…
**Fredericksburg: Where History Goes to Get Selfie-Sticked and Monetized** The international press corps has witnessed many peculiar American rituals—Super Bowl Sunday, Black Friday stampedes, the quadrennial democratic pageant they call “finding the least objectionable billionaire to govern us”—but few spectacles rival the anthropological wonder of Fredericksburg, Virginia, during tourist season. Here, in this colonial hamlet…
Anna Wintour, the bobbed sphinx of the Condé Nast elevator, has become less a magazine editor and more a floating exchange rate for global vanity. From Lagos to Lima, her name is whispered with the reverence otherwise reserved for tax havens or antibiotic-resistant bacteria—proof that influence, like dengue fever, can travel first-class. Every September, when…
Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, where the map turns from cobalt blue to a suspiciously Instagram-filtered turquoise, the Hawaiian archipelago is once again auditioning for the part of “Earth’s Paradise” in humanity’s fever-dream tourism reel. From a safe distance—say, a glass-walled lounge in Dubai or a commuter train snaking through Seoul—Hawaii looks like…
**The Global Monarchy: How Disney Princesses Became the World’s Most Successful Soft Power Export** While the United Nations struggles to achieve consensus on climate change, Disney has managed to get 195 countries to agree on one thing: the commercial viability of a tiara. From the bustling markets of Mumbai to the quiet villages of rural…
It’s tempting, when watching Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman, to file it under “Only in America” and change the channel to something less combustible—say, a documentary on competitive cheese-rolling. After all, the film’s central gag is so brazenly farcical that even Monty Python would have rejected it for being too on-the-nose: in 1970s Colorado Springs, a Black…
