Rob Lowe Has Finally Gone Global, and No, We’re Not Talking About the Actor By the time the sun rose over the Strait of Malacca last Tuesday, three separate governments had already issued “Rob Lowe” advisories. Singapore’s port authority warned of “anomalous drone signatures.” Jakarta’s air-traffic control logged an object “the size of an Airbus…
**The Global Talent Lottery: Why “High Potential” Is the New International Currency** In a world where cryptocurrency crashes faster than a Russian oligarch’s yacht budget and democracy feels as stable as a Jenga tower in an earthquake, humanity has latched onto its latest obsession: identifying and cultivating “high potential” individuals. Because apparently, betting on human…
Chicago Fire, Global Alarm: How a Midwestern Script Became the World’s Favorite Disaster Comfort Blanket Somewhere between the Baltic Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a commuter in a Seoul subway car is wiping away tears over the death of a fictional firefighter who never drew breath outside a soundstage in Illinois. The scene is…
Twins Game: The Global Spectacle of One Body Politic in Two Places at Once By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the DMZ and a Danish design fair, humanity has discovered the perfect cheat code for being in two places simultaneously: call it the Twins Game. No longer the quaint curiosity of Minnesota baseball fans…
From the Banks of the Bosporus to the Beaches of Bali, the world has many pressing questions: will the BRICS dethrone the dollar, can COP agreements survive another American election cycle, and—most urgent—how did a 27-year-old Georgian with frosted tips and a podcast about “holy testosterone” become a diplomatic curiosity in six languages? Meet Chase…
**The Global Hailey Baldwin Phenomenon: How One Woman’s Name Became an International Symbol of Our Collective Existential Crisis** In the grand theater of human civilization, where nuclear powers play chicken over trade routes and climate scientists scream into the void, the international community has found its true north: obsessing over whether a 27-year-old model should…
Demi Lovato and the Global Soft-Power Industrial Complex By Dave’s Locker, International Desk It is 03:14 a.m. in Jakarta and a ride-hailing driver named Bayu is blasting “Sorry Not Sorry” through a cracked Samsung while ferrying a diplomat to the airport. At the exact same second, a teenager in Lagos is lip-syncing the same track…
Jan Ravnik, the Slovenian fashion designer who melted the internet faster than a popsicle on a Ljubljana sidewalk, has become the latest proof that the global attention economy has the memory of a goldfish with Alzheimer’s. One day you’re an obscure tailor stitching avant-garde silhouettes in a country most Americans still confuse with Slovakia; the…
**The International Incident of Hilaria Baldwin, or How America Exported Its Identity Crisis to Spain** In the grand theater of global absurdities, where nuclear powers play chicken over fishing boats and billionaires race to Mars while Earth burns, the saga of Hilaria Baldwin stands as a peculiar testament to our collective identity crisis—a sort of…
The Glorious Collapse of Distance, Now Served on Tap By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the 38th Parallel and Happy Hour Type “pub near me” into your glowing rectangle and you’ll summon an algorithmic genie that has already cross-referenced your GPS coordinates, your credit-card limit, and, if you’re in Beijing, your social-credit score. In that single…
Danielle Fishel and the Miraculous Export of American Nostalgia By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large In the grand bazaar of global pop culture, where K-dramas elbow Turkish telenovelas for shelf space and Nigerian Afrobeats drowns out yesterday’s Latin pop, one compact unit of 1990s Americana continues to punch improbably above its weight: Danielle Fishel, forever Topanga, the…
Mark Ballas and the Global Ballet of Manufactured Fame By R. S. Mortensen, Dave’s Locker International Bureau On any given Tuesday, while Sri Lanka’s tea prices wobble like a drunk tourist in Galle, and German factory orders shrink faster than a TikTok attention span, a 37-year-old man in Los Angeles rehearses a cha-cha in shoes…
