Ryan Gosling, the Canadian export who looks like a boy-band hologram left in the sun just long enough to gain existential dread, has become the planet’s universal reflection surface: every nation now projects its own neuroses onto that eerily symmetrical face. From Lagos cineplexes to a repurposed Siberian gulag that now streams Netflix originals, Gosling…
The Hyatt Hotel chain—those gleaming lobbies of engineered tranquility and overpriced club sandwiches—has quietly become the canary in the coal mine of global capitalism. Once merely a Midwestern family business peddling clean sheets and watered-down bourbon, Hyatt now operates as a diplomatic back-channel, money-laundering laundromat, and soft-power projection screen from Jakarta to Johannesburg. The potted…
The Universal Language Nobody Asked For A world tour of the 21st-century’s most democratic art form: the shaky vertical rectangle that ends civil discourse, launches revolutions, and lets your aunt in Jakarta rate your soufflé. PARIS – In the beginning was the Word; now it’s the 15-second clip set to royalty-free ukulele. From the favelas…
Christian Brueckner: The Alleged Boogeyman Europe Keeps Under Its Bed By Our Man in the Cheap Seats Somewhere between the 7-Eleven in Braunschweig and the crumbling Praia da Luz apartment blocks, the name Christian Brueckner stopped being merely German and became an international Rorschach test. To British tabloids he is the mustachioed villain straight out…
Sally Nugent: The BBC Anchor Who Proves the World Still Cares About Breakfast Television By the time the sun cracks over the Sea of Okhotsk, Sally Nugent has already greeted more people than most diplomats manage in a week. From Murmansk to Montevideo, insomniacs, jet-lagged consultants and that one guy in Manila who swears he’s…
The Man Who Sold Britishness to the World and Still Feels a Bit Guilty About It Lord David Puttnam, the former film producer turned unelected conscience of the House of Lords, has spent the last four decades trying to convince the planet that culture is not a garnish on the platter of geopolitics but the…
Chance Perdomo’s Final Curtain Call: A Post-National Tragedy in the Age of Global Streaming By the time the news pinged from a fan-run Twitter account in Jakarta to my phone in an under-heated Lisbon café, Chance Perdomo had already been mourned in six languages, subtitled, clipped, and monetised. The 27-year-old British-American actor—best known for playing…
Calm prevailed in Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium on Friday evening, the sort of hush normally reserved for tax audits or UN Security Council vetoes. India’s women had just beaten Australia’s women by five wickets, and the planet’s collective shrug was almost audible. Still, the scorecard—India 187/5 chasing Australia’s 183/8—managed to ripple outward across continents like a…
Cameron Norrie: The Quiet Englishman Quietly Redrawing the Global Map of Tennis Mediocrity By Dave’s International Desk of Slightly Bruised Hopes PARIS—In a world where geopolitics is mostly played by men who can’t find their own car keys, it’s refreshing—if mildly disorienting—to watch a soft-spoken left-hander from Johannesburg via Auckland via London via Texas calmly…
The Ice-Cream Empire That Melted Geopolitics: A Global Postcard from Ben & Jerry There are few things more reliably universal than the human desire for cold, sweet fat—second only, perhaps, to the human desire to argue about it. And so Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, two underachieving gym-class refugees from Merrick, Long Island, accidentally built…
The Man Who Taught Windows to Apologize: Satya Nadella’s Grand Tour of Global Contrition By Our Correspondent in a Café with Suspiciously Fast Wi-Fi When Satya Nadella slipped into the CEO seat at Microsoft in 2014, most of the planet assumed the corporation would keep lumbering along like a T-rex on lithium—impressive, but doomed to…
Aaron’s, the rent-to-own furniture empire that began in 1955 Georgia, now spans three continents and 1,300 stores. From the outside it looks like a cheerful beige box peddling sectional sofas to people whose credit scores have been mugged by life. Step inside, however, and you’re touring a museum of planetary precarity: beds still warm from…
