Oti Mabuse and the Global Glitter Bomb: How a Pretoria-Born Dancer Became the UN’s Most Unlikely Soft-Power Weapon By A. Correspondent, filing from a hotel bar where the Wi-Fi costs more than the whisky There are, broadly speaking, two ways a country can project power in 2024. Option A: park a carrier group off someone…
If you squint hard enough from the banks of the Bosporus, the Thames looks like any other river: muddy, overpriced, and clotted with influencers pretending to be statesmen. Yet somewhere along its murky bend, Maya Jama has become the latest British export packaged, shrink-wrapped, and air-freighted to the rest of us as proof that the…
The first thing to understand about baseball standings is that nobody outside the contiguous 48 really cares—except, of course, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Dominicans, the Venezuelans, the Cubans who defected, the Canadians who politely pretend, and the Dutch who somehow snuck into the last World Baseball Classic with a roster of Caribbean passport-holders named…
Kat Slater Is Everywhere, and Nowhere: How a Fictional Cockney Matriarch Became the World’s Guilt-Free Rorschach Test Dave’s Locker – Global Affairs Desk Somewhere between the Suez Canal blockage and the fifteenth crypto-crash of the week, an EastEnders clip went viral from Jakarta to Johannesburg. The scene: Kat Slater, leopard-print trench coat flapping like a…
Billy Crudup: The Accidental Global Everyman Somewhere between a Netflix menu and an airport paperback, Billy Crudup keeps turning up like a polite but slightly unnerving houseguest. The American actor—who, for the uninitiated, looks exactly like the man your ex-wife swore was “just a coworker”—has become the quiet export the world didn’t order but now…
From the banks of the Ohio, a polite Midwestern roar rises, and the rest of the planet—busy stockpiling canned beans for the next geopolitical hiccup—barely notices. Yet Louisville volleyball, that tidy constellation of 18-to-22-year-olds who still believe in hydration and pre-game playlists, is quietly staging a small coup on the order of things. While the…
Dublin to Dubai: How Colin Farrell Accidentally Became the Last Universal Leading Man By the time the private jet carrying Colin Farrell touched down in Riyadh last month—courtesy of a film-festival junket so opulent it could make a Bond villain blush—the planet had already decided what it wanted from him. Not another eyebrow-cocked villain, not…
Geneva, Switzerland – While the World Health Organization debates the next pandemic treaty and the IMF recalibrates the global misery index, there is one metric that quietly unites the planet: the gravitational pull of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s biceps. From Lagos bootleg kiosks to Seoul’s 4DX temples of Dolby Atmos, the man who once wrestled…
Dwayne Johnson and the Globalization of Biceps: How One Man’s Pectorals Became a Soft-Power Asset By the time the sun rose over the Sea of Marmara last week, a Turkish meme account had already Photoshopped Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s face onto the body of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, captioning it “The Father of All Nations—Now With…
Papa John’s Croissant Pizza: The Flaky Apotheosis of Late-Stage Globalization By Our Correspondent in the Duty-Free Abyss There are moments—usually while standing in the fluorescent glow of an airport departure lounge, clutching a boarding pass that cost more than the GDP of Nauru—when one realizes civilization has entered its baroque phase. Consider Exhibit A: Papa…
Rosie Jones, the British comedian who also happens to have cerebral palsy, has been touring her latest hour “Delicious” from Adelaide to Zurich, proving that the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals can apparently be achieved one dick joke at a time. While diplomats in Geneva continue drafting strongly worded communiqués about inclusion, Jones is out…
Joanne Froggatt and the Global Cottage-Industry of Whispered Trauma By Our Man in a Perpetually Delayed Departure Lounge There is a moment—usually somewhere over the Caspian Sea, when the in-flight map insists you’re still in Europe but the vodka tastes undeniably post-Soviet—when you realise that Joanne Froggatt has become the unofficial patron saint of repressed…
