Dwayne “The Smashing Machine” Johnson: When a Hollywood Titan Picks Up a Hammer, the World Listens By the time the first grainy TikTok clip surfaced—Dwayne Johnson, all 260 pounds of him, demolishing a cinder-block wall with a single, oddly elegant swing—global markets had already priced in the tremor. Tokyo’s Nikkei dipped 0.4% on “construction-volatility fears.”…
The United Nations has climate summits, Davos has its alpine power brunches, and the global poor have… MrBeast. Somewhere between the two-billionth view and the latest video in which he cures 1,000 blind people with the casual flourish of a man ordering dim sum, Jimmy Donaldson has quietly become the most influential foreign-aid program the…
MrBeast Tackles the NFL: When YouTube Philanthropy Meets America’s Most Sacred Violence Circus By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you woke up last week to learn that Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson had purchased the Carolina Panthers, congratulations—you’ve just witnessed late-stage capitalism’s newest halftime show. The rumor mill began whirring after Beast dropped a teaser video titled…
Julia Bradbury, the erstwhile queen of British rambling television, has unwittingly become the global canary in our collective coal mine. While she once merely guided middle-class English pensioners through Cotswold cowpats, her recent public battle with breast cancer has transformed her into an unlikely geopolitical barometer—proof that even the most anodyne celebrity can’t escape the…
The Gloria Funicular: Lisbon’s Vertical Escalator to the Human Condition By our Special Correspondent, still waiting for the elevator to self-respect If you stand at the foot of Calçada da Glória on any given afternoon, you will witness a tableau so perfectly absurd it could be commissioned by the United Nations as a cautionary exhibit….
PARIS — In a world where geopolitical alliances crumble faster than a croissant in July, one American export has managed to retain diplomatic immunity: Hailee Steinfeld’s face. The 27-year-old singer-actress-emoji-enthusiast has quietly become the soft-power equivalent of an aircraft carrier, bobbing along the 24-hour news cycle projecting cultural hegemony without ever firing a shot—unless you…
Radiohead’s 2025 World Tour: A Post-Apocalyptic Pilgrimage for the Disillusioned Masses By Lucía “Lucky” Valenti, International Cynic-at-Large, currently marooned in an airport lounge that smells of wet carpet and broken dreams. LONDON—In a move that simultaneously reassures and terrifies the planet, Radiohead have announced their first full world tour since 2018, a 33-date slog across…
The World According to Iga By our Warsaw-to-Wimbledon correspondent, still wondering why the coffee tastes like geopolitics. It’s 2024 and the planet’s usual cast of calamities—proxy wars, rogue algorithms, runaway inflation—have been momentarily shoved to the margins of the global attention economy by a 22-year-old Pole with a topspin forehand that sounds like a microwave…
The Red Machine Reboots: Liverpool’s Champions League Squad as Global Metaphor By Our Man in Every Departure Lounge Liverpool, England – While the rest of the planet debates whether democracy is clinging to life support or merely on a smoke break, 25 men in matching tracksuits have quietly re-certified themselves as a planetary spectacle. Jürgen…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Basque barricades and the manicured lawns of Roland-Garros, a 27-year-old Californian-Moroccan-Filipina with a passport thicker than a Michelin guide has become tennis’s latest geopolitical Rorschach test. Nina Ghaibi doesn’t just hit balls; she ricochets through the fault lines of identity politics, oligarchic sponsorship, and the eternal human urge to package diaspora trauma…
The Curious Case of Sophie Turner, or How the North Remembers the Global Soap Opera By the time the news alerts pinged from Reykjavík to Rabat, Sophie Turner—once best known for looking stoically miserable in a fur cloak—had already become a trans-Atlantic custody piñata. A routine divorce filing in Miami-Dade County ricocheted across time zones,…
Robert Half: The Global Talent Broker Quietly Redrawing the Map of Work When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, history books breathlessly announced the end of ideology. They were half right: ideology simply moved to LinkedIn. Into that vacuum stepped Robert Half, the San Ramon–born staffing firm that has spent 75 years persuading CFOs in…
