Alexandra Burke: How a London Pop Voice Became the World’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure The first time most of the planet noticed Alexandra Burke, she was belting out Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” like a woman who’d just discovered both the gospel and the mortgage payments that come with it. The year was 2008, Lehman Brothers had politely…
Beijing Opens the Door—Just Enough to Peek Inside, Not Enough to Walk Through By Our Man in the Smog, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The People’s Republic has, in its own inimitable style, declared the “Beijing Open.” No, this is not a Grand Slam tennis tournament relocated to a city where the air itself could serve…
Emma Watson’s License to Kill (Time): A Global Morality Play in Six Points and a Speed-Camera Flash By Our Correspondent Who Once Shared a Rickshaw with Three Goats and a Diplomat 1. The Incident, or How the UN’s Favorite Feminist Found Herself in the Naughty Corner Somewhere between the Cotswolds and a Pret à Manger,…
Hayley Williams: The Accidental Ambassador of Global Disillusionment By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent When the Berlin Wall fell, Western teenagers got MTV; when the Syrian civil war turned TikTok into an emergency broadcast channel, Hayley Williams was already there, eyeliner sharp enough to slice through the algorithm. Paramore’s pint-sized frontwoman has never held elected office,…
The Global Rebrand of a Meltdown: How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fritz by H. L. “Hapless” Delacroix, International Desk Somewhere between a Tokyo bullet-train delay and a Frankfurt baggage carousel jammed by one rebellious Samsonite, the word “fritz” slipped out of its Teutonic cradle and became the planet’s favorite euphemism…
Gordon Ramsay: The Last British Empire Still Conquering the World, One Swear at a Time By Dave’s Locker International Desk He arrives on every continent like a marauding red-cheeked warlord, brandishing a sauté pan instead of a sabre. From Lagos to Lima, Seoul to Skopje, Gordon Ramsay’s face—equal parts sunburn and righteous fury—now beams from…
# Wales Online: How a Small Nation’s Digital Mirror Reflects Our Global Neuroses **International Desk, Dave’s Locker** — While the world’s superpowers were busy weaponizing satellites and algorithmically dividing their citizens into bite-sized demographic snacks, Wales quietly built something revolutionary: a regional news website that somehow manages to be both utterly parochial and accidentally profound….
GENEVA—While Washington practiced its favorite ritual dance of self-immolation last weekend, the rest of the planet watched with the same polite horror one reserves for a tipsy uncle lighting the Christmas pudding a little too enthusiastically. The Office of Management and Budget’s 127-page shutdown memo—equal parts bureaucratic lullaby and fiscal ransom note—was greeted from Nairobi…
**Earth’s Season Finale: Aliens Drop the Cliff-Hanger We All Secretly Wanted** GENEVA—The final episode of *Planet Earth* apparently aired last night when a coalition of extraterrestrial focus groups announced, with the polite urgency of a Swiss flight attendant, that humanity’s multi-millennium run has been “declined renewal.” Viewers—that would be eight billion of us—were informed via…
Every season, the Atlantic coughs up another cyclonic tantrum, and the planet’s newsrooms perform their synchronized grimace: cue stock footage of palm fronds doing interpretive dance, cut to a soaked correspondent shouting into a GoPro like a maritime influencer. Meanwhile, in places where English is merely the language of subtitles, hurricane season is less a…
The planet’s most successful export after melancholy and micro-plastics is, apparently, a small black box that hums like a refrigerator in heat. From Lagos living rooms to the prefab flats of Helsinki, Sony’s PlayStation has become the shared altar at which humanity now genuflectes instead of, say, fixing the climate or learning the neighbor’s name….
**The Torch, the Tracks, and the Great National Therapy Session: Cathy Freeman’s 400-Meter Appointment with History** *By our correspondent, still recovering from watching nations outsource their self-esteem to people in Lycra* Sydney, 25 September 2000. The planet had survived Y2K only to be confronted by something equally apocalyptic: an Olympic Games where the host nation’s…
