Jane McDonald and the Curious Soft Power of a Cruise-Ship Chanteuse Dave’s Locker – International Desk, somewhere between the buffet and the lifeboats If you mention “Jane McDonald” in a Manchester pub, someone will involuntarily hum “Cruise,” raise an imaginary piña colada, and reminisce about 1998—the year Britain briefly convinced itself that nautical karaoke could…
Time Zones, Tyrants, and Tire Strategy: The Existential Question of “What Time Is F1 Today?” By our jaded correspondent in the cheap seats with a warm beer and a hotter passport Every race weekend, the planet’s most affluent insomniacs raise the same plaintive query: “What time is F1 today?” It sounds innocent—almost childlike—yet the question…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the shattered dreams of every indie-film hopeful who thought raw talent alone could still buy a croissant, Shailene Woodley has become a trans-Atlantic paradox: an American starlet who keeps pretending she’s just a barefoot herbalist with a passport and an opinion on algae. The French cultural attaché at the Quai…
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…
Jennifer Lopez and the Global Mirage of Endless Reinvention By Our Correspondent, drinking airport coffee that tastes like geopolitics Somewhere over the Atlantic, the in-flight entertainment system lurches into life and there she is again: Jennifer Lopez, ageless and suspiciously pore-free, gyrating through a medley that has already been adopted as the unofficial soundtrack in…
**The Gentle Art of Global Domination: How Alan Titchmarsh Conquered the World One Petunia at a Time** While the planet burns and democracy crumbles like overbaked shortbread, there’s something almost subversive about a 74-year-old British gardener who has quietly become more influential than most world leaders. Alan Titchmarsh—yes, that affable chap with the perpetual tan…
The world’s collective attention span, already shorter than a TikTok reel, has latched onto Eilish McColgan with the same ferocity it reserves for missing submersibles and celebrity divorces. From a windswept track in Eugene, Oregon, to a floodlit stadium in Doha, the Scottish distance runner has become an unlikely geopolitical weather vane: whichever way she…
Giants vs. Commanders: A Microcosm of Empire, Ego, and the Eternal Art of Missing the Point By Our Correspondent, filed from a press box that smells faintly of spilled lager and geopolitical anxiety The contest between the New York Giants and the Washington Commanders is, on paper, a mid-table NFC East scuffle with playoff implications…
Manchester United: The Empire That Won’t Stop Rebranding Itself By our man in the global bazaar, nursing a lukewarm lager and a colder sense of inevitability Every empire eventually becomes a parody of its own founding myths. Rome minted coins with dead emperors; Manchester United prints third kits in a shade of bruised mango and…
KANSAS, USA—From a distance of 6,000 miles, the place looks like a sociological petri dish left too long under the heat-lamp of good intentions. Europeans who can’t tell Topeka from TikTok still speak of Kansas in the hushed tones normally reserved for extinct volcanoes: it blew once—something about The Wizard of Oz, wheat, and the…
Mike Huckabee: The World’s Favorite American Uncle—Whether It Invited Him or Not By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged in Terminal B Mike Huckabee has never held a passport stamped by the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, yet somehow his presence is felt from the bazaars of Istanbul to the karaoke bars of Manila. In an…
