The Regency Empire Strikes Back: How Bridgerton Became the Soft-Power Colonialism We Never Knew We Needed By an Underfunded Correspondent Still Bleeding Netflix Subscription Fees PARIS—On a recent evening in the Marais, a French friend dragged me to a “Bridgerton-à-la-française” pop-up ball, promising champagne, powdered wigs, and the faint hope of post-pandemic flirtation. Instead, I…
The Glitterball Diplomacy: How Britain’s Sequined Export Became the World’s Most Effective Soft-Power Weapon By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from the Shock of Seeing a Former Soviet Defence Minister Cha-Cha-Cha LONDON—While the Pentagon budgets $842 billion for hardware that goes bang, the Foreign Office has discovered a cheaper force multiplier: spray tan, fake crystals, and…
Somewhere between a viral TikTok dance and the latest cryptocurrency meltdown, the planet briefly paused to wonder where, exactly, Lilly Higgins went. The 29-year-old Irish food-blogger-turned-UNESCO-adjunct—famous for posting Michelin-grade colcannon while lecturing the Global South on sustainable quinoa—vanished last Tuesday from a boutique eco-lodge in southern Portugal. One moment she was livestreaming “zero-waste octopus,” the…
PARIS—Somewhere between the cigarette smoke of a Tokyo after-hours club and the algorithmic afterglow of a Lagos TikTok feed, the name Diane Martel still carries the faint whiff of cultural nitroglycerin. Most readers will greet it with the same blank nod they reserve for the fine print on their antidepressants, but that is precisely the…
The Hague, May 2024 – While half the planet debates whether the International Court of Justice still has teeth and the other half wonders if the World Cup will be played on an ice floe by 2030, India has quietly green-lit “Jolly LLB 3,” a film whose very existence feels like a referendum on the…
London, UK — At first glance, Joy Crookes is just another precocious 25-year-old with a record deal, a South London postcode, and an Instagram account that makes you wonder why you ever bothered with breakfast. Yet the moment her contralto—equal parts cigarette smoke and lullaby—slides across a track like “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now,” you…
Julia Fox: The Accidental Geopolitical Barometer No One Asked For By Our Correspondent in the Department of Late-Stage Everything PARIS—If you had told any foreign-policy analyst in 2019 that the woman best known for peeling off a cling-film dress in Uncut Gems would one day be interpreted as a planetary mood ring, they would have…
Am I the Drama? A Geopolitical Self-Interrogation Played Out in 195 Seats at the U.N. By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least six governments will have tweeted the phrase “Am I the drama?”—three ironically, two in panicked self-defence, and one because the social-media intern thought it sounded hip in English. What began…
**The Global Arithmetic of Heartbreak: How a Teenager’s Diary Became a Multi-Million Dollar Empire** In the grand casino of modern capitalism, where trauma is currency and vulnerability trades at premium rates, 18-year-old d4vd has managed to parlay bedroom heartbreak into a net worth that would make small-nation treasury ministers weep into their spreadsheets. The Houston…
# The Ballad of Erica Wheeler: How a Forgotten Folk Singer Became the World’s Most Accidental Revolutionary *From our international correspondent who still owns a functioning cassette player* GENEVA—While the world’s nuclear powers were busy updating their apocalypse apps and billionaires were racing to see who could reach space with the smallest carbon footprint, something…
The Boys Season 5: A Mirror Held Up to a World Already Smirking at Itself By Diego “Black-Mirror-on-a-Budget” Valenzuela It’s fitting that Amazon’s blood-spattered satire returns just as the planet’s real superheroes—central bankers, tech oligarchs, and whichever oil prince bought another Premier League club—finish their annual dress rehearsal for moral bankruptcy. Season 5 of The…
Black Rabbit, Jude Law, and the Global Supply Chain of Cool: A Dispatch from the Front Lines of Fandom By the time you finish this sentence, someone in Jakarta will have re-posted a grainy TikTok of Jude Law strolling through Borough Market in a charcoal hoodie stamped with a silhouette of a black rabbit. Within…
