Lesley Manville: The Empire’s Quietest Weapon of Mass Instruction By the time the credits rolled on “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” a frothy confection about a widowed charwoman who buys a Dior dress, viewers in Wichita and Wuhan were wiping away the same sentimental tear. It’s a miracle of late-stage capitalism that a 67-year-old Englishwoman…
Calm prevailed in Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium on Friday evening, the sort of hush normally reserved for tax audits or UN Security Council vetoes. India’s women had just beaten Australia’s women by five wickets, and the planet’s collective shrug was almost audible. Still, the scorecard—India 187/5 chasing Australia’s 183/8—managed to ripple outward across continents like a…
Alison Hammond: Britain’s Human Diplomatic Weapon Quietly Conquering the Planet By Dave’s Locker International Desk When the history of the early-21st century is written, historians will probably dwell on pandemics, populism, and the slow-motion car crash we politely call “the climate.” Yet somewhere between the footnotes on supply-chain collapses and the chapter titled “Everyone Was…
Dustin Hoffman: The Accidental Everyman Who Conquered a Planet That Barely Agreed on Anything By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching the World Burn in Subtitles PARIS—Try explaining Dustin Hoffman to a Gen-Z Berliner who thinks “The Graduate” is a crypto-scam and “Rain Man” a TikTok filter. You’ll discover, as I did over flat…
BFI London Film Festival: One More Glittering Mirage in the Wreckage of the World By our man in the press pen, nursing a lukewarm prosecco and existential dread. London, mid-October—when the Thames smells faintly of diesel and the last of the empire’s optimism is auctioned off in NFT form—rolls out its annual crimson carpet for…
Keegan-Michael Key and the Export-Grade Laugh Track: How One Detroit Kid Became a Geopolitical Asset Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the United States stumbled on a novel soft-power strategy: weaponize its funniest biracial Midwesterner and ship him abroad with a grin sharp enough to slice trade tariffs….
Quentin Johnston’s Name Travels Faster Than a Diplomatic Cable—And That’s the Problem By the time you read this, Quentin Johnston—wide receiver, Los Angeles Chargers, owner of a 4.3-second 40-yard dash—has already been misfiled by at least three foreign ministries as a new Pacific micro-nation. Somewhere in Brussels, a junior attaché is drafting a memo titled…
The Invisible Man Goes Global: John Cena, Soft Power, and the Art of Never Being There By Dave’s Locker Global Bureau Somewhere between a détente summit and a TikTok dance tutorial, John Cena has become the United States’ most improbable export since the McRib. To the uninitiated, he’s the 250-pound slab of muscle who once…
Luke Combs: The Accidental Diplomat in a Cowboy Hat By Our Correspondent Who Once Spent 36 Hours in Nashville and Still Isn’t Sure Why Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the latest cryptocurrency implosion, a 34-year-old North Carolinian with the silhouette of a friendly bison has become the most quietly influential American abroad who…
**Amy Grant: The Crossover Queen Who Accidentally Invented Christian Music Diplomacy** *An international correspondent reflects on how one Nashville singer became an unlikely cultural ambassador in an era when “Christian” and “contemporary” were mutually exclusive terms* GENEVA—While the world’s diplomats were busy perfecting the art of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War, an unlikely…
Hugh Jackman: The Last Global Movie Star Standing Between Us and Catastrophic Boredom By Our Cynical Correspondent, filing from three time zones and still jet-lagged Somewhere over the Pacific, wedged between a snoring hedge-fund manager and a toddler who speaks four languages better than I do, it occurred to me that Hugh Jackman might be…
Kate McKinnon, the elastic-faced chameleon whose impression of Hillary Clinton once made an entire planet wince in collective recognition, is quietly becoming the United States’ most successful cultural export since fast food and crippling student debt. While American late-night hosts still shout at their own electorate, McKinnon’s sketches ricochet through WhatsApp groups from Lagos to…
