England vs South Africa: A Scorecard for the End of Empire By Our Man in the Long Room, nursing a warm gin and a colder worldview The Oval, London – 27 July 2023. When the final wicket cart-wheeled into the Kennington dusk and South Africa’s Marco Jansen pogo-sticked off in triumph, the electronic scoreboard froze…
Dodging alien artillery or congressional subpoenas with the same square-jawed equanimity, Chris Evans has become the world’s most export-ready piece of modern American soft power. From Seoul to São Paulo, the man is less an actor these days than a geopolitical utility: a walking, occasionally shield-flinging reminder that the empire can still package its anxieties…
Countryfile: The BBC’s Rustic Sedative, Exported to a World Already Half-Asleep By the time the opening credits roll—mist over a buttercup meadow, a Labrador doing its best impression of a civic mascot—roughly 82 million people outside the United Kingdom have already seen something today that made them want to lie down in a field and…
THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF HEARTBREAK, NOW WITH BETTER LABS Dispatch from the Bureau of Cosmic Irony, somewhere above the Atlantic If you’ve flown from Lagos to London lately, scrolled TikTok in São Paulo, or queued for ramen in Shibuya at 2 a.m., odds are the same ghostly falsetto floated through the earbuds of the stranger…
Laura Kuenssberg: The BBC’s Political Gladiator in the Global Colosseum By Dave’s Locker International Desk To the uninitiated, Laura Kuenssberg is merely the BBC’s former political editor—now elevated to Sunday-morning inquisitor on *Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg*—a job title that sounds suspiciously like a hostage video. Yet beyond Britain’s damp little island, her significance has metastasized…
Noel Gallagher, the man who once claimed he’d “rather drink petrol straight from the pump” than reform Oasis, has quietly become the United Kingdom’s last functioning export that doesn’t require refrigeration, a customs form, or an emergency IMF bailout. While Downing Street lurches from self-inflicted crisis to crisis like a drunk tourist on the Ramblas,…
Hurricane Kiko, a name that sounds like a failed boy-band member, has decided to treat the Hawaiian archipelago to its own private luau of 120-mile-an-hour misery. From Berlin to Bangkok, commodity traders, insurers, and climate-voyeurs are watching the satellite loops the way teenagers binge true-crime podcasts: equal parts horror and entertainment. Because if a Category-3…
Tour de 4: How a Four-Letter Acronym Rode a Bicycle Around the World and Conquered Absolutely Nothing By Dave’s Locker’s Globetrotting Correspondent, still shaking sand out of his passport PARIS—The Tour de France is old news. This summer, the world’s attention has pivoted to the “Tour de 4,” a rolling circus of four cyclists, four…
A Name That Travels: How “Laken Snelling” Became the World’s Favorite Meme-Cum-MacGuffin By Dave’s Foreign Desk, still jet-lagged in three time zones PARIS—Somewhere between the espresso fumes at Café de Flore and the perpetual drizzle of a British B-road, the words “Laken Snelling” started showing up on every smartphone screen like an unsolicited life-coaching text….
Linkin Park and the Global Soundtrack of Managed Despair By Diego “Dust-to-Digital” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific They say nostalgia is just grief with better marketing. If that’s true, Linkin Park is the platinum-certified grief counselor to a planet that never quite figured out adulthood. When the band’s surviving members announced a new…
Carol Kirkwood: The Weather Oracle the World Didn’t Know It Needed By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand, smoldering tapestry of 2024—where oceans boil, glaciers sulk, and half the planet votes for leaders who treat climatology as a punch line—there stands, improbably, Carol Kirkwood. To the untrained eye she is merely the BBC’s perennially…
Jonas Brothers World Tour: The Last Helicopter Out of Saigon, But Make It Pop If you squint past the confetti cannons, the Jonas Brothers’ 2024-25 world tour looks less like a nostalgia cash-grab and more like a state-sponsored evacuation—only this time the choppers are branded by Pepsi and the evacuees are millennials clutching overpriced VIP…
