**The Global Empire of Tiaras: How Disney Princesses Became the Most Effective Soft Power Tool Since the British Navy** While the world’s superpowers jostle for influence through trade wars and military posturing, a far more insidious force has been quietly colonizing the collective imagination of children across every continent: the Disney Princess Industrial Complex. From…
ESPN.com: The Imperial Colosseum in Pixel Form By The (Jaded) Foreign Correspondent Who Once Watched a Mongolian Yak Polo Stream at 3 a.m. PARIS—If you have ever tried to explain to a French existentialist why grown men in Milwaukee cry over a last-second fadeaway, or why a Senegalese taxi driver in Dubai keeps refreshing a…
The Roman Empire had bread, circuses, and the occasional crucifixion; the modern United States has 17 weeks of NFL football, $18 nacho helmets, and the moral certainty that anyone who kneels during the anthem must hate freedom. From the outside looking in—say, from a rain-soaked Glasgow pub or a Seoul subway car packed with K-League…
Jenna Ortega and the Global Afterlife of Wednesday Addams By a Correspondent Who Once Interviewed a Somali Pirate About Streaming Royalties Somewhere between the first TikTok dance craze and the fourteenth UN Security Council briefing on cultural imperialism, Jenna Ortega became the inadvertent face of planetary adolescence. The 20-year-old actress—born in California to Mexican-Puerto Rican…
