The Big E: When America’s Deep-Fried Carnival Becomes a Mirror for a Planet on the Brink By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Still Picking Funnel-Cake Glitter Out of His Notebook Springfield, Massachusetts – Every September, while the rest of the world debates supply-chain collapses, missile trajectories, or whether the COP-whatever will finally outlaw patio heaters, the…
**The Global Phenomenon of Amanda Holden: Britain’s Export of Manufactured Celebrity** In the grand theater of international fame, where nations compete to produce their most marketable cultural ambassadors, Britain has gifted the world Amanda Holden—a woman whose career trajectory suggests that perseverance, strategic positioning, and the ability to cry on cue during televised talent shows…
James Corden: The Empire Exports Its Cheekiest Chappie By Our Man in a State of Permanent Jet Lag The British have a long, proud tradition of sending their most troublesome specimens abroad—convicts to Australia, Gordon Ramsay to Los Angeles, and, most recently, James Corden to the American late-night sofa. While the first two shipments arguably…
Harrison Smith and the Curious Global Cult of the American Safety Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where Wi-Fi costs more than a decent bottle of Moldovan wine and still drops every time the plane hits a cloud. From this altitude, the spectacle of modern fandom looks remarkably uniform: whether you’re in Lagos, Lyon, or Lahore,…
From the vantage point of a hotel bar in Phnom Penh—where the barman insists on playing 1990s American sitcom theme songs at funeral-parlor volume—the Cubs versus Braves tussle feels less like a ballgame and more like an allegory for late-stage capitalism’s greatest hits. Two franchises, each clutching century-old grievances like passports to self-pity, meet in…
COLE BISHOP, THE ACCIDENTAL DIPLOMAT: HOW ONE AMERICAN SAFETY WITH A FRENCH NAME IS REDRAWING THE NFL’S GLOBAL MAP By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from customs in a Reykjavik airport bar) It’s hard to find a more American export these days than the National Football League, that padded pageant of concussions and commercial…
Huskers: How a Corn-Fed College Nickname Took Over the Planet By the time the sun sets over the Shanghai skyline, a 19-year-old in a knock-off scarlet hoodie is live-tweeting Nebraska’s spring practice in Mandarin. Meanwhile, in Lagos, a betting syndicate is crunching play-action tendencies from grainy YouTube clips of the 1995 “Scoring Explosion” squad. Somewhere…
The Boilermakers Abroad: How Purdue Football Became the World’s Most Improbable Soft-Power Asset By the time the Purdue “All-American” Marching Band struck up its halftime rendition of “The William Tell Overture” in Dublin last August, half the spectators were wondering why the corn-fed brass section had smuggled a sousaphone onto sacred Irish soil, and the…
Texas: The World’s Favorite Cautionary Tale That Still Makes Money by Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, somewhere over the Atlantic with a lukewarm Bloody Mary If you watch the planet from 30,000 feet—preferably in business class, because who still flies coach voluntarily—Texas appears less like a U.S. state and more like a fever dream the rest of…
Mumbai: A City-Sized Metaphor for the Planet’s Nervous Breakdown By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged from the last red-eye Mumbai, formerly Bombay, currently “Beta Test for the Apocalypse,” doesn’t so much welcome visitors as it frisks them for loose change and existential dread. Step off the plane at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International—Terminal 2, where the…
