Lil Tay, the nine-year-old “flexer” who once bragged about owning a Lamborghini she could neither legally drive nor spell, has returned from a five-year digital exile like a pop-culture Lazarus—except the stone has been rolled away by marketing consultants instead of angels. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, the announcement that the child influencer is “back and…
Emmerdale Spoilers: John Sugden’s Return and the Global Village That Won’t Stop Watching by Dave’s Locker International Desk If a tree falls in the Yorkshire Dales and nobody live-tweets it, did it really happen? Apparently not—because when ITV accidentally let slip that John Sugden is scheduled to lurch back into Emmerdale sometime this summer, the…
The Ballad of Zubeen Garg, or How One Man From Assam Accidentally Became a Pan-Asian Soft Power Weapon By Our Man in Guwahati, Nursing His Third Kingfisher of the Morning Guwahati, Assam – While the rest of the planet obsesses over whether Taylor Swift’s carbon footprint can be offset by planting a forest the size…
Iris Law, the 23-year-old daughter of Jude Law and Sadie Frost, has been quietly colonizing the world’s billboards one eyeball at a time. While the rest of us argue over which democracy will implode first, Ms Law has been perfecting the ancient art of looking devastatingly bored in couture. To the untrained observer, this might…
Alex Clark and the Quiet Implosion of the Western Attention Span By Our Correspondent in Transit, Somewhere Between Reykjavík and Regret PARIS—Somewhere in the algorithmic ether, a man named Alex Clark—British by passport, algorithmic by necessity—became the latest proof that global civilization can no longer agree on what matters, only on how quickly it must…
Kym Marsh: The Pop-Culture Glitch That Refuses to Buffer By our jaded correspondent who has watched nations rise, fall, and still somehow vote by text message LONDON—While the northern hemisphere teeters on the brink of recession and the southern hemisphere literally burns, the United Kingdom has once again demonstrated its imperial talent for exporting the…
**Lewis Capaldi at Hyde Park: A Global Gathering of the Emotionally Exhausted** Lewis Capaldi’s recent Hyde Park performance wasn’t just another concert—it was a planetary summit of the perpetually heartbroken, a United Nations of romantic disappointment where delegates arrived armed with tissues rather than briefcases. While the Scottish singer-songwriter belted out his signature melancholic anthems…
The BBC’s Radio 2, that venerable sound-track to British middle age, has lately become a diplomatic incident waiting to happen. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, expats tune in via VPNs, pretending the shipping forecast still concerns them, while governments from Brasília to Beijing monitor its playlist for signs of imperial relapse. After all, when a 55-year-old…
The Curious Afterlife of Adnan Syed, International Man of Mystery (and Misdemeanour) From the comfort of a café in Copenhagen, where the pastries are perfect and the police still knock politely, one can afford the luxury of contemplating a man who has become a Rorschach test for the entire Anglosphere. Adnan Masud Syed—once just another…
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…
