The Golden Arches’ Trojan Horse: How a Cardboard Box Became the Most Effective Soft-Power Tool Since the Marshall Plan By the time the Tokyo McDonald’s in Harajuku handed out its first Pikachu Happy Meal in 1998, the Pokémon toy was already worth more on the secondary market than the yen itself. That, dear reader, is…
Paris, 07:33 CEST — Somewhere between the Seine and the seventh arrondissement’s last surviving boulangerie, a queue of bleary-eyed exchange students has formed. Their phones glow with the same three words in seventeen languages: “free croissant pizza Papa Johns.” It sounds like an avant-garde haiku dreamed up by an algorithm on a sugar crash, yet…
McDonald’s: The Empire That Salted the World By—Our Correspondent Who Has Eaten More Filets-O-Fish Than Is Medically Advisable Somewhere between the Volga and the Mekong, the same aroma of reheated fryer fat drifts through the air, as recognizable as the opening riff of “Smoke on the Water.” It is the perfume of McDonald’s, the golden-arched…
McDonald’s Near Me: A Dispatch from the United Caliphate of the Golden Arches By Our Man in Anywhere, Earth Type “McDonald’s near me” from a rooftop in Cairo, a rain-soaked tram in Glasgow, or the back of a tuk-tuk weaving through Jakarta’s diesel dusk and the same cartographic genie appears—pin-dropping a promise of identical salt,…
