How Ashlee Simpson’s Lip-Sync Fiasco Became America’s Soft-Power Suez Moment
Ashlee Simpson and the Geopolitics of a Saturday-Night Snafu By our correspondent still recovering from 2004 PARIS—Every empire eventually faces its Suez moment: a live, televised humiliation so crisp that satellites beam the collapse of confidence into living rooms from Lagos to Lima. For the American behemoth known as “late-aughts pop culture,” that moment arrived…