Jimmy Fallon, the Man Who Laughs So We Don’t Have To By Our Correspondent in the Global Chuckleplex Somewhere between a toothpaste commercial and the last helicopter out of Saigon sits James Thomas Fallon, the American talk-show host whose nightly giggle-track is beamed to 176 territories and, according to UNESCO’s most recent cultural-risk index, “poses…
Al Davis, the late czar of the Oakland Raiders, never held elected office, never commanded armies, and—astonishingly—never learned how to use e-mail. Yet his silhouette still looms across the planet like a stubborn smog cloud, proof that the most durable empires are sometimes stitched from shoulder pads and bad attitude. From the dockyards of Naples…
From Manila to Madrid, the arena lights dim to a conspiratorial hush just before the three-point line becomes a geopolitical fault line. Enter Wardell Stephen Curry II, a 6’2″ Californian with the diplomatic passport of a rock star and the jump shot of an intercontinental ballistic missile. While lesser mortals debate tariffs and troop deployments,…
Bill Cowher: When a Steel-City Warlord Conquers the World’s Couch By the time Bill Cowher’s gap-toothed snarl first appeared on an NFL sideline in 1992, the planet was already busy dismantling itself elsewhere. The Soviet Union had just officially expired, leaving fifteen orphaned republics to argue over who kept the family nukes. Yugoslavia was auditioning…
**The Global Courtroom: How Judge Judy Became America’s Most Successful Legal Export Since the Drone Strike** While the world grapples with war crimes tribunals in The Hague and the International Court of Justice’s lengthy deliberations on genocide, somewhere in the collective consciousness of humanity, a 5-foot-tall former family court judge from Brooklyn has been dispensing…
Paul Thomas Anderson: The Last American Auteur Selling Existential Dread to a Streaming Planet Byline: Dave’s Locker International Desk If you want to understand how the 21st-century world consumes anxiety, buy a ticket—assuming your local multiplex hasn’t been converted into a Bitcoin mine—to a Paul Thomas Anderson film. From the oil-slick nihilism of There Will…
Jordan Peele’s horror is the only American export that terrifies both Beijing’s censors and Davos’ keynote speakers—proof that fear, like debt, is borderless. While Washington still pretends soft power means jazz diplomacy and Marvel post-credit scenes, Peele quietly weaponized popcorn anxiety into a global mirror. The result? A Ugandan film student in Kampala cites Get…
PARIS – In the long, tedious annals of human attention‐seeking, few phenomena travel faster than a twenty-something American who can contort his face like Silly Putty and speak fluent internet. Enter Drew “Druski” Desbordes, a Georgian (the state, not the country) whose primary export is the sort of manic befuddlement that translates into every language…
The NFL’s Global Roadshow: How One League Exports Helmeted Capitalism to a Bewildered Planet By Dave’s Locker International Desk Every September, while most of the world is busy arguing about energy prices, coups, or the correct pronunciation of “GIF,” roughly 120 million humans from Minsk to Manila suddenly acquire opinions on third-string cornerbacks. The culprit:…
Jesse Watters and the Global Export of Performative Outrage A field report from the international desk By the time Jesse Watters’ latest prime-time monologue ricocheted from a Fox studio in Midtown Manhattan to a phone screen in Lagos, then to a bar television in Warsaw, and finally to a group-chat in Manila, the clip had…
