Ant Anstead and the Global Decline of the Hand-Built Dream By Lila Moreau, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you’ve opened any streaming platform in the last decade you’ve probably seen Ant Anstead, the British mechanic-poet who restores vintage metal while wearing the kind of tight T-shirt that makes viewers briefly forget the planet is on…
Wayne Rooney, a name that once rolled off tongues from Liverpool to Lagos like a holy chant, has now become a sort of geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see in the man says more about your longitude and mental state than it does about him. At 38, the former boy-wonder has already been a prodigy,…
**The Gospel According to Jen: How a Utah Housewife Became the World’s Most Reluctant Prophet** In the grand theater of global absurdity, where billionaires rocket themselves into space while children starve below, fate has delivered its latest punchline: a 25-year-old Mormon mom from Utah has accidentally become the world’s most famous woman named Jennifer Affleck….
**The Global Ripple Effect of a Sheen: How One Teenager’s OnlyFans Became a Mirror for the World’s Weirdest Values** *By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Civilization* PARIS—In the grand amphitheater of geopolitics—where nuclear doctrines are drafted, supply chains are weaponized, and the Arctic melts faster than a gelato in August—the entry of one 19-year-old Sami…
**The Global Symphony of Chris Brown: A Concert Tour in the Key of Cognitive Dissonance** The international community has long prided itself on its ability to compartmentalize moral outrage—after all, how else could we justify buying cheap T-shirts while condemning sweatshops? This particular brand of selective amnesia reached new heights recently as Chris Brown, the…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Avenue Montaigne and a Malibu rehab facility, the name Brooke Mueller keeps ricocheting across the planet like a designer boomerang that refuses to come down. To most of the world she is simply “that woman who married the tiger-blooded warlock,” a footnote in the Charlie Sheen global meltdown franchise. Yet from Berlin…
The Earth tilts on its axis, oceans rise and fall, currencies collapse and re-inflate like cheap balloons, and yet somewhere a 34-year-old man-child from upstate New York is still spiking a synthetic leather football into the turf as though it personally insulted his mother. To the rest of the planet—where fútbol is a religion, rugby…
Matt Leinart: The Cautionary Tale of American Excess Exported Worldwide The international community has long observed America’s peculiar habit of transforming collegiate athletes into demigods, only to later wonder why they crumble under the weight of expectations. Few exemplify this phenomenon better than Matt Leinart, the USC quarterback who briefly embodied the American Dream before…
Alejandro Garnacho, the 19-year-old Argentine winger who still looks like he should be sneaking into bars with a fake ID, has managed to become a geopolitical metaphor in shin pads. While most teenagers are busy failing their driving tests or discovering that love hurts, Garnacho is busy reminding us that the world’s most volatile economies…
**Property Empress Sarah Beeny and the Global Cult of Domestic Aspiration** In the grand theater of late capitalism, where we collectively pretend that watching strangers renovate their homes constitutes entertainment, Sarah Beeny emerges as something of a minor deity. The British property guru has spent two decades transforming the mundane act of buying and selling…
Lisa Snowdon: How a British Breakfast-Radio Voice Accidentally Became the Planet’s Morale Barometer By our man in the departure lounge, filing from somewhere with overpriced coffee and suspiciously cheerful piped music. If you mention “Lisa Snowdon” in Peckham, the response is an involuntary shudder of recognition—like hearing the opening bars of an alarm clock you…
**The Global Jennifer Aniston Doctrine: How America’s Sweetheart Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test** While the world burns through its third consecutive year of “unprecedented times,” Jennifer Aniston remains our most reliable international constant—like Switzerland with better hair, or gravity, but with more lucrative endorsement deals. From the bombed-out suburbs of Damascus to the overpriced cafés…
