Opie Goes Global: How Ron Howard Became the Accidental Ambassador of American Mediocrity The international community has long grappled with America’s most insidious cultural exports: fast food, reality television, and the persistent belief that louder equals better. Yet perhaps no American has done more to propagate the gospel of competent, utterly unremarkable filmmaking across global…
LORDE: THE TINY NATION THAT PUNCHED ABOVE ITS WEIGHT AND GOT AWAY WITH IT By the time the rest of the planet noticed, the principality of Lorde—population 42,000 if you count the sheep, 38,000 if you don’t—had already rewritten the rules of geopolitical clout. Nestled between two quarrelsome neighbors whose names change depending on which…
The Accidental Statesman: How Michael Keaton Became the World’s Most Unlikely Cultural Ambassador In an era when Hollywood exports everything from superhero fatigue to democracy-flavored entertainment, Michael Keaton stands as perhaps the most improbable American cultural export since McDonald’s tried teaching the French about portion control. The man who once played a sentient snowman has…
Project 2025: The World Watches America Draft Its Own Fan-Fic Constitution By Our Correspondent, Still Jet-Lagged from Three Continents and One Existential Crisis PARIS—In the plush backroom of a café off Rue de Rivoli, a German diplomat sips an €8 espresso and mutters, “The Americans are at it again.” He isn’t referring to the usual…
If you tune into CNN’s late-night election marathons, you’ll see Abby Phillip holding court with the unflappable calm of someone who has already mentally drafted three post-mortems for democracy and a grocery list. To much of the planet she is merely the poised Washington anchor who can call a race in Arizona while the rest…
Abu Dhabi: Where Oil Money Meets Existential Dread The capital of the United Arab Emirates has always been the quieter, more calculating sibling to Dubai’s flamboyant showmanship—a city that built the world’s largest indoor theme park while its neighbors were still figuring out indoor plumbing. But beneath the marble-clad surface of this desert metropolis lies…
Ella al-Shamahi: The Paleopathologist Who Makes Extinction Look Like a Career Move By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk London, Rome, Nairobi, TikTok—wherever you are, the algorithm has probably served you a clip of Ella al-Shamahi: wry grin, hijab tucked under a hard hat, rappelling into a Yemeni sinkhole while explaining that the bones below may rewrite…
Guardians of What, Exactly? A world tour of the people, algorithms, and heavily armed toddlers who claim they’re keeping us safe. From the marble colonnades of Washington to the fluorescent bunkers beneath Seoul, the word “guardian” is having a moment. It appears in press releases like a polite burglar—never announced, always already inside. The American…
Argos, the ancient Greek city-state, has been quietly redefining the phrase “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” While the rest of the world obsesses over quarterly earnings and TikTok algorithms, Argos has been busy demonstrating that history is less a dusty attic and more a revolving door on a particularly vindictive carousel. From…
The Last Chin Standing: Jay Leno and the Global Afterglow of American Late-Night There’s a moment, somewhere between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Japan, when exhausted cargo-ship crews tune their shortwave radios to whatever English chatter they can catch. Over the crackle drifts the unmistakable drone of Jay Leno—still yukking it up about…
The Town That Forgot It Was Global By Our Correspondent in the Only Time Zone That Really Matters Somewhere between the last nonstop flight to Dubai and the first drone-delivery of oat milk, a dot on the map began behaving like it mattered. The locals call it “the town,” as though every other municipality on…
Tim Allen: The Last American Tool Man Standing Between Civilization and the Abyss By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent-at-Large PARIS—While Europe debates heat-pump subsidies and Asia perfects the art of paying for groceries with a blink, the United States still has Tim Allen grunting in syndication across 112 territories, a cultural export as durable as asbestos…
