Across the planet—whether you’re sipping cortado in Madrid, slurping borscht in Minsk, or pretending to enjoy oat-milk flat whites in Los Angeles—one truth unites us: somewhere, a screen is playing Kate Beckinsale in slow-motion, hair billowing like a UN flag for our collective existential dread. The British actress, once a polite Oxford ingenue, has become…
Michael Sheen: The Welsh Actor Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Hotspot If you’ve spent any time on the Anglophone internet this week, you may have noticed an unusual spike in searches for “Michael Sheen + Palestine + Gaza + genocide + boycott.” No, the beloved Welsh thespian hasn’t suddenly pivoted to arms dealing; rather, he’s…
Benicio del Toro: The Last Smuggler of Global Cool by “The Unimpressed Correspondent” filing from somewhere with questionable Wi-Fi and excellent rum There are two kinds of passports on Earth: the blue ones that guarantee you will stand in the “All Others” lane at immigration, and the one that Benicio del Toro carries in his…
If you wanted to invent a one-man case study in global soft-power projection, you could do worse than Jared Leto: a Louisiana-born Oscar winner who moonlights as the frontman of an arena band, dresses like a Tokyo street preacher, and is currently on a world tour that’s less about music than about proving the elasticity…
The name Karen Hauer is not, on first inspection, the sort that rattles the chandeliers at Davos, triggers emergency summits in Brussels, or causes a run on the yen. Yet if you lean in, the way a seasoned war correspondent leans in to a half-empty glass of raki, you’ll detect tremors that reach well beyond…
Dakota Johnson, the woman who once had to feign chemistry with a malfunctioning Bluetooth-enabled necktie in Fifty Shades of Grey, has quietly become a one-woman soft-power export—proof that America can still ship something abroad besides inflation and unsolicited military advice. From the neon karaoke bars of Seoul to the mildewed arthouse screens of Zagreb, her…
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: The Accidental Empress of Soft Power By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—The last time an Italian-born woman caused this much diplomatic fluttering in Europe, she arrived with dowries, cannon fire, and a Papal blessing. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy merely showed up in 2008 with a guitar, a Dior coat, and a back-catalogue of ex-lovers that…
The Geopolitics of Contouring: How Kim Kardashian Became a One-Woman Soft-Power Program By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic If the Cold War was fought with missiles and manifestos, the current era is being waged with lip kits and 4K contour tutorials. Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok,…
The Global Afterlife of Jodie Sweetin, or How America Exports Nostalgia One Half-Hug at a Time It is 3:17 a.m. in Kyiv, and a twenty-three-year-old drone-pilot named Yevhen is watching grainy reruns of Full House to stay awake on a twelve-hour shift. When Stephanie Tanner waltzes in with her catchphrase arsenal—“How rude!”—Yevhen laughs into his…
The Geopolitics of Dylan Efron’s New Girlfriend: A Dispatch from the Front Lines of Irrelevance By Santiago del Muerto, International Correspondent (Currently Somewhere with Spotty Wi-Fi) VIENNA—In a world where the Doomsday Clock is two ticks from midnight and the Arctic is auditioning for a role as the next Mediterranean, humanity has once again demonstrated…
Idris Elba and the Mirage of Post-National Stardom Dave’s Locker – International Desk Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, between the deflated croissant of Brexit Britain and the algorithmic optimism of Los Angeles, Idris Elba is probably on a Wi-Fi call telling his agent he’d like to be the first Bond who moonlights as a DJ while…
Halsey at the Border: How a Pop Star Became a Geopolitical Flash-Mob It began, as most millennial crises do, with a tweet. Ashley Frangipane—stage name Halsey, for those who still confuse her with a British motorway—posted a grainy video from a muddy field outside Rafah, Gaza, insisting that the world “look up.” Within minutes, the…
