The Name That Echoes from Kyiv to Caracas John Solomon, American by passport, has become a sort of global Rorschach test: everyone peers at the same inkblot and sees whatever scandal they need to survive the news cycle. In Washington he is either the last honest gumshoe or a walking conflict-of-interest dressed in a trench…
Sage Steele: From Bristol to the World—How One ESPN Exit Became a Global Rorschach Test Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, halfway between the Connecticut campus where Disney keeps its talking heads on ice and the Qatari capital that just bankrolled the last World Cup, Sage Steele’s lawsuit quietly expired this spring. No trumpet, no ticker-tape—just a…
The New York Times: A Very American Empire That Still Pretends to Be Shocked By Our Correspondent in a Café Where the Wi-Fi Costs Extra Somewhere between the croissant crumbs and the existential dread that passes for breakfast in most of the world, the international press corps has learned to treat The New York Times…
From the vantage point of a rickety café terrace in Sarajevo—where bullet-pocked walls still tell 1990s bedtime stories—watching Tomi Lahren’s latest TikTok rant pop up on a cracked iPhone feels like cultural whiplash served with extra foam. One moment, locals debate EU grain tariffs; the next, a blonde commentator in Dallas is yelling that the…
When the world wants to feel civilised, it opens a tab on The New York Times. From Lagos to Lima, the faint glow of its blue masthead is the modern equivalent of a Victorian parlour lamp: reassuring, slightly smug, and reassuringly smug. The ritual is global—tap, skim, nod knowingly at a headline about deforestation, then…
CBS News: America’s Square-Jawed Butler Still Polishing the Silver While the Mansion Burns By our man in the departure lounge, passport stamps blurred by espresso and regret From Singapore’s gleaming Changi to Addis Ababa’s bumpy midnight tarmac, screens flicker with the same familiar three letters: C-B-S. The font hasn’t changed since Cronkite warned your grandparents…
MSNBC: America’s Cable Therapy Session, Exported An international correspondent’s notebook on the channel that turned partisan outrage into a 24-hour spectator sport—and accidentally became a soft-power export. The first time I watched MSNBC in a hotel bar in Nairobi, the closed-captioning was in Swahili and the chyron screamed “BREAKING: DEMOCRACY IN PERIL.” The patrons, mostly…
Evergreen High School Isn’t Just a Building—It’s a Global Metaphor We Keep Pretending Not to Notice By Santiago Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Evergreen High sits 47 minutes south of Seattle, a modest cluster of brick and optimism wedged between a wetland the district keeps trying to pave and a Starbucks built, with admirable civic…
Sardonic Dispatch: How a Southern Waitress Named Polly Holliday Accidentally Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time the Berlin Wall was being jack-hammered into souvenir chunks, a middle-aged woman in Alabama was still fielding dinner orders with the same two-word dismissal that had already circled the planet like a spiteful satellite. “Kiss my grits”…
Dublin – Somewhere between a Guinness tap and an IMF spreadsheet – A small island nation that once exported priests, potatoes and property bubbles has, in the last quarter-century, quietly perfected a far more recession-proof commodity: the Gleeson. Not a tax loophole, not a cryptocurrency—just Brendan Gleeson, the 6-foot-2 walking rebuke to every Hollywood algorithm…
The sun never sets on the Margot Robbie empire. Somewhere between a Bondi Beach surf shack and the marble boardrooms of Burbank, the Australian export has quietly become the most efficient soft-power weapon the Commonwealth never budgeted for. While Canberra argues over submarines it may never receive, Robbie has already infiltrated multiplexes from Mumbai to…
Dublin to Dubai: How Colin Farrell Accidentally Became the Last Universal Leading Man By the time the private jet carrying Colin Farrell touched down in Riyadh last month—courtesy of a film-festival junket so opulent it could make a Bond villain blush—the planet had already decided what it wanted from him. Not another eyebrow-cocked villain, not…
