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…
Another Thursday, Another Gun: Fremont Joins the Global Chorus of Trigger-Happy Tuesdays By Matteo “Bullets & Bylines” Ricci, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large FREMONT, California—It happened at 4:17 p.m. local time, which was 0:17 a.m. in Kyiv, 6:17 a.m. in Singapore, and precisely cocktail hour on the International Space Station where, presumably, astronauts were too busy admiring the…
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…
Dakar, Senegal – While war correspondents tally artillery shells in Eastern Europe and climate scientists measure glacial retreat in millimeters, a quieter global arms race churns in fluorescent kiosks from Manila to Manchester: the humble Pick 4 lottery. Four digits, one dollar, instant existential audit. From the barrios of Santo Domingo to the commuter belts…
“Mo State” and the Quiet Art of Running Out of Everything From the vantage point of a cramped café in Lisbon—where the Wi-Fi password is still “Brexit2020,” presumably because nobody has had the emotional bandwidth to change it—the phrase “mo state” has begun popping up on stock-ticker chyrons, Indian WhatsApp uncle groups, and, most ominously,…
Amsterdam, Wednesday – While European bureaucrats argue over the precise circumference of a cucumber and American politicians auction off their dignity in thirty-second television spots, the planet’s most cosmopolitan sport keeps quietly exporting a very particular kind of hope: the multilingual, multi-passport, multi-time-zone wide receiver named Amon-Ra St. Brown. Born in Anaheim to a German…
Thunderball Lotto Results: The Global Echo of a Modest British Boom LONDON—While the world’s gaze is fixed on missile trajectories, crypto collapses, and the slow-motion demolition of various rainforests, Britain’s National Lottery quietly coughed up Tuesday’s Thunderball numbers: 06, 09, 14, 23, 39, and the Thunderball itself, 03. A £500,000 jackpot—pocket change next to America’s…
Kevin Hart, the 5-foot-4 human espresso shot, has become the planet’s unofficial ambassador of mild panic. From Lagos traffic jams to Tokyo bullet-train etiquette videos, his face—frozen mid-shriek—now greets roughly 2.3 billion monthly viewers who apparently find existential dread hilarious. UNESCO could declare him a living meme, but that would imply the organization still believes…
Pick 3: A Global Lottery in Miniature Where Hope Is Sold by the Thimbleful By Matteo “Numbers Never Lie” Bianchi, Dave’s Locker International Desk SINGAPORE—Somewhere between the 24-hour currency desks and the hawker stalls that never sleep, a tiny rectangle of paper changes hands for the price of a kopi-o. Three digits, one Singapore dollar,…
Jonah Coleman and the Global Ripple of One Man’s Very Public Mid-Life Crisis by “Lazlo Marquez, roving correspondent for the terminally bemused” ISTANBUL — In the grand bazaar of modern notoriety, every hour now coughs up a new Jonah Coleman. Ours happens to be the 34-year-old former logistics manager from Portland, Oregon who, on the…
The UNLV Football Coach and the Theater of American Dreams By our Las Vegas bureau chief, still recovering from the all-you-can-eat buffet of hope LAS VEGAS—Somewhere between the wedding chapels offering “Marry a Stranger, Get a Free Margarita” coupons and the slot machines that cough out cryptocurrency instead of coins, the University of Nevada, Las…
Kevin Bacon: The Global Village’s Favorite Piece of String By the time the sun rises over the Sea of Japan, a salaryman in Osaka has already discovered he is four steps from Kevin Bacon via a K-drama star who once studied at UCLA. At the same instant, a bleary-eyed student in Lagos updates her thesis…
