MSNBC: America’s Cable Therapy Session, Exported An international correspondent’s notebook on the channel that turned partisan outrage into a 24-hour spectator sport—and accidentally became a soft-power export. The first time I watched MSNBC in a hotel bar in Nairobi, the closed-captioning was in Swahili and the chyron screamed “BREAKING: DEMOCRACY IN PERIL.” The patrons, mostly…
Slovenia, a country whose greatest historical export until recently was existential dread packaged as ski-jumping medals, has given the planet Luka Dončić: a 6’7″ reminder that the global economy now runs on highlight reels and schadenfreude. While the United Nations still pretends to solve crises with communiqués nobody reads, Dončić quietly exports Slovenian soft power…
Emmerdale Spoilers, Geopolitics, and the Collapse of the Post-War Order By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Leeds and the End of the World In the grand tapestry of human folly, where superpowers trade nuclear threats in 280 characters and central banks treat inflation like a misbehaving spaniel, it is comforting—almost perversely noble—that a Yorkshire village soap…
Evergreen High School Isn’t Just a Building—It’s a Global Metaphor We Keep Pretending Not to Notice By Santiago Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Evergreen High sits 47 minutes south of Seattle, a modest cluster of brick and optimism wedged between a wetland the district keeps trying to pave and a Starbucks built, with admirable civic…
Charlie Kirk and the Export-Grade American Outrage Machine By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Terminal B Someone, somewhere, is making money off the fact that we are all talking about Charlie Kirk again. That is the only global constant in the saga of a 30-year-old American activist whose superpower is turning campus mic-drop moments…
The Hogwarts Diaspora: How a Cast of Child Wizards Grew Up to Run the World (or at Least Its Meme Cycle) By the time you finish this sentence, someone in Jakarta will have tattooed Daniel Radcliffe’s 2004 haircut on their calf, a São Paulo startup will have launched a Potter-themed fintech, and a Brussels think…
PARIS — If you had told the average café philosopher here last year that a 44-year-old Indian-American prosecutor from Long Island would soon be whispering in the ear of the next U.S. president, they would have snorted their espresso into the Seine. Yet Kash Patel—pronounced “cash” by people who enjoy cheap puns and “kaash” by…
Florida’s New Fashion Week: Open-Carry Chic Goes Global Word Count: 603 From the air-conditioned corridors of Davos to the humid queue for a Cuban sandwich in Little Havana, the Sunshine State’s freshly inked open-carry law is causing more double-takes than an alligator on a Jet Ski. Effective July 1, Floridians may now sport their favorite…
Sardonic Dispatch: How a Southern Waitress Named Polly Holliday Accidentally Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time the Berlin Wall was being jack-hammered into souvenir chunks, a middle-aged woman in Alabama was still fielding dinner orders with the same two-word dismissal that had already circled the planet like a spiteful satellite. “Kiss my grits”…
Dublin – Somewhere between a Guinness tap and an IMF spreadsheet – A small island nation that once exported priests, potatoes and property bubbles has, in the last quarter-century, quietly perfected a far more recession-proof commodity: the Gleeson. Not a tax loophole, not a cryptocurrency—just Brendan Gleeson, the 6-foot-2 walking rebuke to every Hollywood algorithm…
The sun never sets on the Margot Robbie empire. Somewhere between a Bondi Beach surf shack and the marble boardrooms of Burbank, the Australian export has quietly become the most efficient soft-power weapon the Commonwealth never budgeted for. While Canberra argues over submarines it may never receive, Robbie has already infiltrated multiplexes from Mumbai to…
Child Care: The Global Relay Race Where the Baton Is a Screaming Toddler COPENHAGEN—Walk into any co-working space from Brooklyn to Bangalore and you’ll find the same tableau: a laptop glowing with quarterly sales decks while, just off-camera, a diapered time bomb counts down to detonation. Across the planet, child care has become the shared…
