Glazed Hegemony: How Krispy Kreme Became the Soft Power the State Department Never Ordered By C. Valdez, Senior Carbohydrate Correspondent PARIS—While the Quai d’Orsay was busy negotiating submarine deals and the Élysée was lecturing the world on gastronomic purity, an American doughnut quietly rolled off a secret production line in the Paris suburbs and into…
**The Global Empire of Sparkly Drawers: How Clea Shearer Tidied Her Way Into the Geopolitical Conversation** *By Our Correspondent Who Keeps His Socks Rolled in Rebellion* PARIS—In a world where nuclear treaties collapse via tweet and central banks print money the way teenagers print TikToks, it takes a special kind of cultural juggernaut to make…
Boots: The Quiet Conquerors Marching Across a Fractured Globe By Our Correspondent Who Has Spent Too Much Time in Airport Security Lines From the frost-cracked tundra of Yakutsk to the sweat-slick barrios of Bogotá, one sound unites humanity more reliably than any anthem or app: the rhythmic thud of a boot meeting earth. Not the…
The Pumpkin-Spice Pax Americana Rolls Out Again From Jakarta to Johannesburg, the same matte-black cup—this year embossed with a witch that looks suspiciously like a venture capitalist—has landed on 37,000 reclaimed-wood counters. Starbucks’ 2025 Halloween collection is here, and the planet has once again agreed to treat a Seattle marketing memo as a planetary liturgical…
In the marble-clad lobby of the Geneva International Motor Show—an event that now feels as quaint as a telegraph convention—a Hyundai Palisade sat under surgical-grade LED light, politely pretending it wasn’t a three-ton metaphor for the global middle class’s midlife crisis. Delegates in lanyards shuffled past, each clutching a brochure promising “premium serenity,” which is…
Pumas – Tigres: The Global Derby Where National Identity Goes to Die By Miles “Kneecap” McAllister, International Desk, Dave’s Locker If you’ve never watched Club Universidad Nacional (the Pumas) trade shin-guards with Tigres UANL, congratulations—you’ve preserved a sliver of innocence most mortals misplace around the fourth overpriced beer. This is not merely a Mexican football…
Travis Scott: The Global Pied Piper of Retail Therapy By: Our Man in the Duty-Free Lounge Astroworld isn’t just a theme park Travis bulldozed back to life in his own image—it’s now the operating system for a planet that can’t decide if it wants to rage or just return the sneakers. From Lagos to Ljubljana,…
The Cult of “Prime” – How One Word Became a Global Status Symbol, Dystopian Membership Card, and Possibly a Religion They say Latin is dead, but in 2024 the lingua franca of power, convenience, and mild existential dread is a five-letter English word that once merely meant “first in order.” From São Paulo to Seoul,…
Red Robin, the globe-trotting mascot of American casual-dining excess, has landed in fourteen countries and counting—proof that if you fry it, they will come. The chain’s crimson-capped robin now perches above the neon streets of Dubai, the megamall food courts of Manila, and a repurposed Cold-War bunker in Riga that still smells faintly of surplus…
Skims: How Shapewear Became the New Soft Power The planet has plenty of pressing garments—diplomatic cables, ballistic vests, papal vestments—but none travel as far, as fast, or as lucratively as the $4 billion waist-whittling spandex empire known simply as Skims. What began in 2019 as Kim Kardashian West’s side hustle has quietly metastasized into a…
The Ticket That Launched a Thousand Scams An International Field Guide to the Most Over-Printed Scrap of Paper Since Monopoly Money PARIS—On any given morning, the line outside the Louvre snakes like a colonoscopy camera, and every pilgrim clutches the same talisman: a crumpled ticket. The same ritual repeats in Lima, Lagos, and Lahore. From…
Omaze: The Golden Ticket Factory Where Dreams Are Packaged in USD, EUR, and Existential Dread by our correspondent in the Duty-Free Lounge of Disillusionment Somewhere between the duty-free Bulgari store and Gate 42B at Heathrow, an email pings: “Win a Tuscan villa & a Lamborghini for £10.” The sender is Omaze, the Los Angeles-based sweepstake-cum-conscience…
