PARIS—If you drew a straight line from the Kremlin war room to the Hollywood Hills, you’d find Perrie Edwards somewhere on the flight path, sipping an oat-milk latte and accidentally destabilising the algorithmic order of the known world. The former Little Mix soprano—now solo artist, fashion house muse, and walking soft-power missile—has become a case…
International Dispatch – National Pancake Day By H. V. Loring, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of TikTok dances, humanity collectively decided that the best way to commemorate its fragile existence was to dedicate a Tuesday—yes, a Tuesday—to batter fried in butter. Welcome, dear reader, to…
In Praise of the American South’s Slow-Motion Car Crash: Ethel Cain as Global Warning Label By the time the first church bell tolls in Perry, Florida, the rest of the planet has already turned the page—stock markets in Shenzhen, lunch lines in Lagos, TikTok teenagers in São Paulo scrolling past another clip of some girl…
Priscilla Presley and the Global Alchemy of Tragedy Chic By Marisol Vega, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you want to understand how the world metabolises American heartbreak, watch Priscilla Presley doing press in Seoul, Tokyo, or—God help us—Dubai. At 78, she glides through luxury-hotel lobbies like a diplomat from the sovereign nation of Nostalgia, flanked…
Amber Davis and the Algorithmic Afterlife of a Name By Our Sardonically Jet-Lagged Correspondent PARIS—Somewhere between the croissant crumbs and the existential dread that coats every European breakfast, the name “Amber Davis” started trending on five continents at once. Not the Amber Davis who teaches pilates in Wichita, nor the Amber Davis who sells artisanal…
Argyle Street Ash: The Tiny Cigarette Butt That Went Viral and Took the World With It By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Minibar, Somewhere Over the Pacific It began, as most modern catastrophes do, with a single flick—an idle gesture from a Scottish tourist outside a shuttered noodle shop in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district….
Kasabian: The Word That Refuses to Stay Buried By Dave’s Foreign Desk PARIS—Every so often a single syllable ricochets across continents like a drunken tourist who’s lost his passport. “Kasabian” is that syllable—pronounced kuh-SAH-bee-un to the Brits, ka-SAH-bian to the Americans, and “turn that racket down” to anyone over 55. Internationally, the word now carries…
Amber Davies: The Reality-Star Ripple Effect Sweeping the Globe’s Shallow End BYLINE – Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, via a hotel bar in Heathrow Terminal 5 If you missed the Amber Davies phenomenon, congratulations: you probably still own attention span. For the rest of us—those who doom-scroll in three languages and measure time in algorithmic updates—Ms….
AJ ODUDU AND THE GLOBAL PARADOX OF FAMOUSLY ALMOST FAMOUS PEOPLE By Our Slightly Jet-Lagged Correspondent There are 195 countries on the planet, give or take a disputed micro-state or two, and yet the same name is currently trending from Lagos to Lisbon to Los Angeles: Aj Odudu. If you blinked during the 2021 season…
The Empire Strikes a Chord: How BBC Radio 1 Became the World’s Guiltiest Pleasure By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic There’s a moment, usually around 02:47 GMT, when the night-shift nurse in Lagos, the rideshare driver in Jakarta, and the insomniac coder in Vancouver all find themselves humming the same…
PARIS—In the Marais, a barista who normally sneers at anything more commercial than Serge Gainsbourg is humming “Livvy Dunne” to himself while foaming oat milk. In Lagos, a streetwear reseller is hawking knock-off LSU leotards to university freshmen who have never watched a full gymnastics meet. In Seoul, the subway ads for a vitamin drink…
Chappell Roan and the Age of Manufactured Authenticity A dispatch from the front lines of pop’s new Cold War By the time Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” cracked the Global Spotify Top 50 last week, diplomats in Brussels were already drafting memos: a drag-tinged Midwestern torch song had somehow become a soft-power bargaining chip. From…
