Lori Harvey’s Passport to Influence: How a Memphis-Born Influencer Became a Global Case Study in Soft Power By the time the private jet carrying Lori Harvey touched down in Milan last February, the Instagram geotag had already beaten her to the tarmac. Within minutes, #LoriInMilan was trending from Lagos to Lima, proving that the 26-year-old’s…
Hunter Schafer and the Great Global Branding of Trans Resilience By Dave’s Locker’s Doha bureau chief, nursing a lukewarm espresso and mild jet lag Doha International Airport, 03:14 local time—somewhere between the Chanel boutique and the Harrods outpost that looks suspiciously like a bank vault, a billboard of Hunter Schafer stares down at bleary-eyed transit…
Millie Bobby Brown and the Global Commodification of Adolescence By Our Correspondent, Still Jet-Lagged from the Last Apocalypse PARIS—On the Champs-Élysées last week, a billboard the size of a modest Balkan republic showed Millie Bobby Brown clutching a $190 bottle of vegan face cream while smiling like a hostage who has read the terms of…
Ryan Reynolds: The Canadian Export That Conquered the World, One Snarky Tweet at a Time In a world where soft-power is measured in streaming numbers and algorithmic loyalty, the planet has quietly surrendered to a 46-year-old Vancouverite who looks like he was carved from marble and then left in the rain just long enough to…
The Curious Case of Russell Wilson: An American Quarterback as Global Metaphor By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere above the North Atlantic, at 38,000 feet, a cargo Boeing 747 hums eastward carrying 7.4 metric tons of Wilson-branded “Dangerwich” sandwich boxes bound for discount supermarket freezers in Poland. The manifest has no entry for irony, but…
Julianne Hough, the Utah-born dancer who once glided across American living rooms in sequined anonymity, has now pirouetted onto a far larger stage: the planet’s collective nervous breakdown. From the Dolby Theatre to Davos, from TikTok’s algorithmic abyss to a sweat lodge in the Swiss Alps, Hough’s recent career pivot—part corporate-wellness messiah, part high-end grief…
Selena Gomez and the Global Supply Chain of Tears By Our Jaded Correspondent Who Has Spent Too Much Time in Airport Lounges There is, apparently, no corner of the planet where a 31-year-old Texan can quietly release a Spanish-language single without causing seismic tremors across three continents. When Selena Gomez dropped “Baila Conmigo” back in…
