The Curious Case of Bradley Walsh: How a Cheeky Chappy from Watford Accidentally Became a Soft-Power Superweapon By the time the chyron reading “BRADLEY WALSH LAUGHS AT OWN JOKE FOR 47th TIME” flashed across Japanese breakfast television, it was already too late. The planet had been colonised—politely, inexorably—by a 63-year-old former Pontins Bluecoat whose greatest…
A Stone’s Throw from the Capitol, the Good Book Gets a Theme Park Washington D.C. –– The Museum of the Bible rises eight stories of caramel-colored limestone a block from the National Mall, looking for all the world like a cruise ship that took a wrong turn and ran aground on Independence Avenue. The $500-million…
The World According to Martin Short: How One Canadian Dwarfed the Globe PARIS—In the grand tradition of small men making outsized noise, Martin Short has managed to become the planet’s unofficial court jester without ever holding elected office or firing a single drone. While diplomats in Geneva trade sternly worded communiqués about carbon emissions and…
The Global Pastime Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific Baseball, that pastoral hallucination of America’s 19th-century leisure class, has spent the last century smuggling itself across borders like a bored customs officer with a side hustle. What began as an excuse for Union soldiers to avoid Civil…
Jason Bateman: The World’s Most Reliable Export Since Filter Coffee By our man in the departure lounge, still clutching a boarding pass to nowhere If nations are brands, Jason Bateman is the Switzerland of screen talent: neutral, efficient, and implausibly tidy. While other Hollywood exports arrive with fireworks, sanctions, or at least a meme-ready scandal,…
Bailey Zimmerman, the 23-year-old from Louisville, Illinois (population 1,100, two stoplights, and an almost heroic commitment to corn), has somehow become the sonic passport stamp for a planet that can’t quite decide if it’s ending or just rebooting. His gravel-road baritone drifts from Lagos Uber speakers, Manila jeepneys, and Berlin U-Bahn headphones alike—proof that heartbreak,…
When the University of Michigan announced the “indefinite suspension” of its head football coach, Jim Harbaugh, the initial reaction in Ann Arbor was predictable: grown men in maize-and-blue jerseys weeping into their overpriced IPAs. Yet halfway around the world, the tremor registered differently. In Singapore, traders at the Marina Bay futures desk briefly paused their…
Baker Mayfield and the Global Theater of Quarterbacking Dave’s Locker International Desk | June 2024 From the upper deck of Raymond James Stadium you can spot cruise ships gliding toward the Gulf of Mexico, their passengers clutching watered-down margaritas and pretending Florida is still exotic. Down on the field, Baker Reagan Mayfield—6-foot-1, 215 pounds, and…
From the banks of the River Seine to the neon canyons of Seoul, the autumn ritual is the same: a hush falls, smartphones glow, and millions of otherwise rational adults rearrange their circadian rhythms around a patch of grass in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Crimson Tide’s 2024 schedule—released last week like a papal bull—has already ricocheted…
The Palmetto Putsch: How One Tiny U.S. College Rivalry Quietly Explains the End of the World As We Know It By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Columbia, South Carolina—population 136,632, humidity 200 percent, general bewilderment immeasurable—was briefly mistaken for a geopolitical flashpoint last Saturday when South Carolina State and the University of South Carolina met…
Courteney Cox and the Global Architecture of Nostalgia By Santiago V. Alarcón, International Desk It is a truth universally acknowledged—if only because the internet keeps repeating it—that a single actress in possession of a hair-straightener and a Netflix deal must be in want of a reboot. Thus Courteney Cox, the Alabama-born woman once tasked with…
There was a moment—around the time the Berlin Wall was still chucking chunks of concrete at history’s shins—when a Glasgow shipyard welder-turned-banjo-strumming-folk-singer strode onto a London stage and essentially annexed the English language for his own comic empire. Sir William Connolly, CBE, knight-errant of the one-liner and hair like a dandelion that’s seen things, was…
