Timothée Chalamet: The Accidental Diplomat in a World That Forgot How to Grow Up By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between Cannes and the apocalypse PARIS—On the Croisette last May, citizens of the world’s oldest republic of glamour queued for two hours to watch a 28-year-old New Yorker pout on a 40-foot screen. The film…
Meghan Trainor and the Global Bass Line of Late-Stage Capitalism By our man in the departure lounge Somewhere above the North Atlantic, between the in-flight sushi and the eighth rewatch of “All About That Bass,” it hit me: Meghan Trainor is the perfect sonic ambassador for an era when geopolitical borders are closing but pop…
Jennifer Garner and the Geopolitics of Nice: How America’s Sweetheart Became a Soft-Power WMD By our correspondent in the neutral wasteland between Hollywood and reality PARIS—While the Northern Hemisphere frets over ballistic missile tests and the Southern Hemisphere drowns in micro-plastics, the United States has quietly deployed its most destabilizing weapon yet: Jennifer Garner. Not…
Tonight, while most of the planet sleeps or pretends to, a small but disproportionately loud slice of humanity will gather around glowing rectangles to watch American college football. From Lagos to Lahore, expatriate alumni bars will swell with the nostalgic aroma of overpriced wings and the quiet desperation of mid-level executives clinging to alma-mater identity…
Norman, Oklahoma—population 128,000, longitude 35.22° N, latitude 97.44° W—doesn’t usually appear on the radar of the average Berlin stockbroker, Lagos software contractor, or Singaporean port-logistics clerk. Yet every autumn, when the Sooner Schooner rolls onto Owen Field and 80,000 crimson-clad pilgrims howl at a sky the color of dried blood, the University of Oklahoma football…
Global Bulletin: Sheinelle Jones and the Glorious Mundanity of the 24-Hour Apocalypse Watch By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk NEW YORK—In the same week that the Arctic registered its first 30-degree-Celsius February temperature and the Bank of Japan toyed with negative interest rates like a cat batting a dead mouse, American morning television offered its own…
The Curious Case of Nik Bonitto, or How a Linebacker Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man at the End of the Bar, Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Somewhere between the 104th meridian west and the Prime Meridian, Nik Bonitto has become an unlikely export—Denver’s 6’3″, 240-pound outside linebacker now haunting the sleep cycles…
PARIS — In a world where geopolitical alliances crumble faster than a croissant in July, one American export has managed to retain diplomatic immunity: Hailee Steinfeld’s face. The 27-year-old singer-actress-emoji-enthusiast has quietly become the soft-power equivalent of an aircraft carrier, bobbing along the 24-hour news cycle projecting cultural hegemony without ever firing a shot—unless you…
Nate Bargatze and the Soft Power of the American Mumble: How One Tennessee Everyman Quietly Became the Planet’s Preferred Sedative By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—On any given Thursday, while ministers in Brussels argue over grain tariffs and Beijing’s censors sharpen their knives for the next celebrity, a 44-year-old man from Old Hickory, Tennessee, is…
