Bella Hadid, the 27-year-old supermodel whose cheekbones could slice prosciutto at twenty paces, has spent the last decade converting asymmetrical pouts into a soft-power empire that spans continents—and, inadvertently, into a case study on how fame now outruns passports. While most mortals need visas, Hadid merely boards a Gulfstream and the world rearranges its cultural…
Robin Wright, the accidental oracle of American decline, landed in London last week to promote her latest film and promptly offered the British press a masterclass in how to sound cosmopolitan while selling them their own post-Brexit melancholy back to them. The woman who once embodied the icy perfection of a Beltway power-wife now drifts…
Shia LaBeouf: The Accidental Global Citizen Nobody Asked For By Luka Varga, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a Hollywood red carpet and a Baltic film festival, Shia LaBeouf has become the human equivalent of a pop-up ad—ubiquitous, vaguely disorienting, and somehow still profitable. Once merely the kid from a Disney Channel sitcom, he has…
Helen Skelton: The Last True Brit Standing (and Dancing) While the World Burns From a safe distance—say, a bar in Lisbon where the Wi-Fi is stronger than the espresso—one can watch the curious spectacle of Britain exporting its most durable cultural product: the relentlessly upbeat television presenter who refuses to be cancelled by reality. Enter…
Gal Gadot: The Accidental Geopolitician in Spandex By Dave’s Locker International Desk There’s a moment in every global crisis when the world, exhausted by its own incompetence, decides to outsource its moral compass to a celebrity. In 2020 that moment arrived wearing a satin robe and singing “Imagine” off-key from marble-countered kitchens. The robe belonged…
Paul Mescal and the Great Global Yearning for Earnestness By “Hemlock” O’Donnell, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large DUBLIN—If you stand at the corner of Dame Street and George’s Street at 2:13 a.m., when the kebab grease is still warm and the seagulls have unionised, you can almost hear the planet sigh with relief that Paul Mescal exists. The…
Matthew McConaughey: How a Shirtless Texan Became the World’s Reluctant Prophet of Chill By the time the sun rose over Ulaanbaatar last Tuesday, Matthew McConaughey had already been awake for six hours, sipping yerba mate on a Zoom call with Mongolian throat-singers about “conscious commerce.” The man once paid to bang bongos naked on Venice…
Jamie Laing and the End of Empire: How a Candyman’s Heir Became the Perfect Metaphor for Britain’s Soft-Power Sunset By our correspondent in the departures lounge of Terminal 5 Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, between the soggy remains of a BA breakfast tray and the gravitational pull of Netflix’s algorithm, Jamie Laing is probably filming a…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and a Starbucks that still hasn’t figured out how to spell “Ben,” the planet’s most famous panic-attack-on-legs is being recast as a geopolitical bellwether. Yes, Ben Stiller—once merely the human embodiment of an anxiety dream about airport security—has been upgraded by the United Nations to “Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees,” a title…
Matt Damon, accidental geopolitical barometer and Hollywood’s most over-qualified everyman, has spent the last quarter-century acting as a kind of cinematic Rorschach test for the anxieties of whichever hemisphere happens to be watching. To Americans, he’s the Boston kid who keeps getting left behind on Mars, in Europe, or simply on the wrong side of…
Stacey Doley: How a Former Luton Checkout Girl Accidentally Became the UN’s Favourite Reality-TV Witness PARIS—Sometime between the Brexit referendum and the first TikTok war, the planet quietly agreed to outsource global conscience to a 37-year-old former hairdresser from Bedfordshire. Stacey Doley—once famous primarily for winning Strictly Come Dancing and having a surname that sounds…
Drew Barrymore: The Planet’s Favorite Child Star Turned Global Comfort Blanket By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, Drew Barrymore became the last universally acceptable American export—less carcinogenic than Coke, less bellicose than aircraft carriers, and somehow more soothing than the entire pharmaceutical aisle…
