MADRID—At 08:37 local time, while Spain’s commuter trains were packed with people pretending to scroll their phones instead of making eye contact, a photograph of Julia Roberts sipping iced coffee appeared on the front page of El País. The headline, translated loosely, read “America’s Smile Lands in Ibiza.” Somewhere in Lagos a WhatsApp group lit…
Natalie Portman: The Accidental Geopolitical Weapon By the time most passports have collected three sad visa stamps, Natalie Portman has already rewritten the foreign-policy syllabus. Born in Jerusalem, passport-stamped in Washington, educated at Harvard, Oscar-polished in Los Angeles, and now—because the world insists on tidy narratives—drafted into the culture wars of half a dozen capitals….
Pete Wicks: The Existential Haircut Roaming a Planet on Fire By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, somewhere between duty-free vodka and the abyss In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call “current affairs,” certain names ricochet across the Anglosphere’s algorithmic echo chamber with the inexplicable persistence of a drunk uncle at a wedding. One such name…
Josh Brolin’s Chin Has More Passport Stamps Than Your LinkedIn Profile By Our Bureau of Expensive Mid-Life Crises, Geneva When the World Economic Forum wants a mood board for “late-capitalist gravitas,” it apparently just air-drops a 4K still of Josh Brolin squinting at a green screen. From the neon sewers of Seoul to the tax…
Leonardo DiCaprio: the last global movie star who still pretends climate change is a side gig PARIS—In a world where most screen idols have traded mystique for Instagram Q&As, Leonardo DiCaprio remains stubbornly cinematic: a man who can charter a private jet to pick up an environmental award and still be applauded for his carbon…
Liz Hurley at 59: How One British Actress Became the Planet’s Last Remaining Geopolitical Constant By the time the International Monetary Fund finished recalculating Argentina’s debt for the ninth time this decade, Liz Hurley had already posted another bikini selfie from an undisclosed Caribbean tax haven. While COP28 delegates argued over which hemisphere should foot…
Orlando Bloom: The Last Global Elf Standing Between Us and Total Cultural Collapse By the time the sun rises over the Bosphorus, Orlando Bloom has already been pirated in seventeen languages. Somewhere in Jakarta, a bootleg Legolas screensaver flickers across a cracked Huawei monitor; in Lagos, a street vendor hawks laminated wallet-sized photographs of Will…
Dublin to Dubai, Vegas to Vladivostok: Conor McGregor and the Global Theater of One-Liners and Lawsuits By Diego “The Diplomat” Salgado, for Dave’s Locker When Conor McGregor first laced up gloves in a threadbare Crumlin gym, the planet was busy worrying about Greek debt, Beyoncé’s surprise album, and whether the Large Hadron Collider would accidentally…
Dwayne “The Smashing Machine” Johnson: When a Hollywood Titan Picks Up a Hammer, the World Listens By the time the first grainy TikTok clip surfaced—Dwayne Johnson, all 260 pounds of him, demolishing a cinder-block wall with a single, oddly elegant swing—global markets had already priced in the tremor. Tokyo’s Nikkei dipped 0.4% on “construction-volatility fears.”…
