The Global Afterlife of Jodie Sweetin, or How America Exports Nostalgia One Half-Hug at a Time It is 3:17 a.m. in Kyiv, and a twenty-three-year-old drone-pilot named Yevhen is watching grainy reruns of Full House to stay awake on a twelve-hour shift. When Stephanie Tanner waltzes in with her catchphrase arsenal—“How rude!”—Yevhen laughs into his…
The Curious Case of Zoe Slater: How a Fictional East-End Teenager Became a Global Rorschach Test By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Mini-Bar, Somewhere Over the Atlantic In the grand bazaar of global pop culture, where K-Pop idols moonlight as UN envoys and Scandinavian noir detectives moon over existentialism, a British soap-opera character named Zoe…
Billie Eilish’s latest tour has become the planet’s most efficient grief-delivery mechanism since the invention of the push-notification. Across five continents, 92 dates, and roughly 2.3 million ticket holders who each paid the equivalent of a month’s rent in Jakarta or a weekend in Zurich—depending on which hemisphere’s inflation index you favor—the 22-year-old pop nihilist…
The Cinematic Cold War Nobody Asked For: Why the Planet Is Re-Watching the Same 1977 Space Opera Until the Sun Explodes By the time you finish reading this sentence, “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” will have been screened somewhere on Earth at least three times—in an art-deco cinema in Buenos Aires, on…
Fat Bear Week: When the World’s Most Powerful Democracies Pause to Crown a Chonky Omnivore By our Foreign Desk, still slightly jet-lagged from a redeye out of Tbilisi Every autumn, as the Arctic melts at a record clip and half the planet argues over whose election was stolen by whom, the earth’s most consequential vote…
**Hell Goes Global: How Hades 2 Has the World’s Gamers Queueing for Eternal Damnation** In a world where actual international relations resemble a particularly vindictive game of musical chairs, humanity has found its latest collective coping mechanism: queueing for digital damnation. Hades 2, Supergiant Games’ sequel to their 2020 indie darling, has achieved what decades…
A Cuban-American dancer glides across a British ballroom, watched by 11 million Britons clutching their cups of tea and existential dread, while WhatsApp groups from Manila to Mexico City ping with the same question: “Who the hell is Janette Manrara, and why is my algorithm suddenly obsessed?” Welcome to the 21st-century fame centrifuge, where a…
Eric Church’s 2024 tour—blandly christened the “Outsiders Revival” despite being bankrolled by Live Nation, Pepsi, and a constellation of hedge funds—kicked off in Nashville last month and will soon drag its coliseum-sized honky-tonk across three continents. To the casual observer it’s just another American country singer hauling 300 tons of steel truss, LED panels, and…
**Jesse Williams: The Global Aftershocks of an American Actor’s Activism** *By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from the Irony* It’s a peculiar hallmark of our times that a speech delivered at a second-tier American awards show can ricochet from Lagos living rooms to Berlin bars, sparking think-pieces in languages that don’t even share an alphabet. Yet…
**The Global Significance of Mrs. Xander Schauffele: How One Woman’s Handbag Choices Apparently Matter to Civilization** In a world where nuclear powers exchange threats over social media and climate change is busy remodeling our coastlines, humanity has collectively decided that the most pressing question requiring international investigation is: who exactly is married to professional golfer…
The Mega Millions jackpot—now swollen to a cartoonish $1.35 billion—has once again achieved what UNESCO summits and Davos panels can only fantasize about: uniting the planet in a single, perfectly synchronized daydream. From Lagos to Lisbon, from Manila to Manitoba, office printers wheeze out identical spreadsheets of “lucky” numbers, and grandmothers who have never set…
Errol Musk, the 79-year-old patriarch of the world’s most famous surname with a silent “k,” has spent the last week making the global gossip circuit feel like it missed a software update. From a sun-bleached patio in Pretoria, South Africa, he cheerfully confirmed to the tabloid *Die Son* that he has quietly fathered a second…
