The Kimmel Conundrum: How a Late-Night Punchline Became a Global Barometer of American Decay By “Jet-Lagged” Jonah Verhoeven, Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent If you had told the ghosts of the Cold War that, three decades after the Wall fell, the free world’s most exportable cultural product would be a 56-year-old Brooklyn wise-ass named Jimmy Kimmel,…
Lesley Manville: The Empire’s Quietest Weapon of Mass Instruction By the time the credits rolled on “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” a frothy confection about a widowed charwoman who buys a Dior dress, viewers in Wichita and Wuhan were wiping away the same sentimental tear. It’s a miracle of late-stage capitalism that a 67-year-old Englishwoman…
Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s 189-minute carnival of cocaine, elephant dung, and jazz trumpets, arrived in 2022 like a glitter-flecked hangover: loud, expensive, and somehow both shameless and ashamed of itself. The film’s $80-million fever dream about 1920s Hollywood excess was marketed as “international event cinema.” In truth, it is a perfect allegory for the global film…
Frank Turek, the American apologist who insists that morality can’t exist without a cosmic referee, has lately become the improbable export the world never ordered but keeps receiving—like those plastic-wrapped “American cheese slices” that appear on supermarket shelves from Lagos to Lahore. To most of humanity, which wakes up each morning to inflation, drought, or…
The Copa Sudamericana lands on our screens each July like a late-night infomercial for existential dread—half-continent talent show, half-arms bazaar for European scouts. From the outside it looks like South America’s plucky little brother to the Champions League, but step closer and you’ll notice the bruises under the foundation: debt-laden clubs selling tomorrow’s stars for…
Penny Mordaunt and the Global Art of Falling on One’s Ceremonial Sword By Our Special Correspondent, still jet-lagged from watching Britannia rearrange the deckchairs LONDON—When Penny Mordaunt strode into Westminster last week clutching a 17th-century sword the size of a small flagpole, half the planet wondered if the British had finally decided to auction off…
South Park’s latest export, “Charlie Kirk: The Moisture Crisis,” landed on Paramount+ last night with the delicacy of a drone strike in a gated community. From Nairobi to Naples, viewers watched Colorado’s most culturally insensitive fourth-graders skewer America’s most moisturized conservative influencer, proving once again that satire remains the United States’ most reliable soft-power weapon—second…
Somewhere between the 23rd UN Climate Summit and the 42nd COP press release, the planet decided to outsource its last remaining postcard weather to San Diego, California. Delegates who have spent years arguing over half-degree Celsius targets in windowless halls in Bonn or Dubai now step off the plane at Lindbergh Field, inhale 72 °F…
Botafogo vs. Mirassol: The Quiet Apocalypse of a Tuesday Night in Rio By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough—past the floodlights, past the cocaine-laced energy-drink sponsorship banners—you can almost see the geopolitical fault lines tremble beneath the Maracanã turf. Botafogo versus Mirassol, a mid-table Campeonato Carioca fixture that barely registers on the…
Chivas vs Tigres: When Two Mexican Football Brands Duke It Out, the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Peek Estadio Akron, Guadalajara, 21:06 local—while global attention was busy rubber-necking between a European Super League that refuses to die and the Champions League anthem being used as background music for crypto-scams, Club Deportivo Guadalajara and…
SURVIVOR 49: THE WORLD’S MOST RELIABLE DIPLOMATIC CHANNEL, NOW IN ULTRA-HD Somewhere over the South Pacific, a customs agent in Nadi is stamping the 47th passport of a contestant who claims her profession is “influencer–slash–crypto-visionary.” She’s heading to a Fijian sand-spit so small it doesn’t appear on Google Earth unless you zoom in on the…
Bolívar vs. Atlético-MG: When a Mountain City Learns the World Is Watching By Our Man in La Paz (who keeps a spare oxygen tank and a spare liver) The first thing foreigners forget about La Paz is that the stadium is 3,600 metres closer to the satellites than their own living rooms. The second is…
