It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a royal tea-towel must be in want of a Netflix deal. Enter Paul Burrell—once the Queen’s footman, then Diana’s butler, now the perennial ghost at the Windsor banquet—who has spent three decades turning discretion into a cottage industry and grief into a…
Joel Dommett and the Glorious Banality of Global Fame By our man in the departure lounge, nursing lukewarm prosecco and existential dread KUALA LUMPUR—Somewhere above the Andaman Sea, a satellite beams The Masked Singer UK to seat-back screens on an AirAsia red-eye. In 27C, a Malaysian hedge-fund manager toggles between Joel Dommett’s grin and a…
Pedro Pascal, the Chilean-born actor who now looks permanently exhausted in eight different time zones, has become the first truly global celebrity of the post-hope era. From Seoul subway ads hawking The Last of Us to Berlin bus shelters promising “more daddy issues than you can fit in a Bundesliga stadium,” Pascal has achieved that…
Laura Whitmore and the Global Cottage Industry of Micro-Celebrity By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, somewhere above the Irish Sea Somewhere in the algorithmic ether between Dublin and Dubai, Laura Whitmore has become a case study in how fame now travels lighter than hand luggage and lands heavier than sanctions. To most passport-holding adults,…
The Curious Case of Tiki Barber: How a Former NFL Star Became a Global Metaphor for Second Acts Gone Sideways In a world where the phrase “pivot to media” has become the international equivalent of “I’m writing a screenplay,” Tiki Barber stands as a cautionary monument—equal parts athletic marvel and late-capitalist punchline. Once the pride…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the shattered dreams of every indie-film hopeful who thought raw talent alone could still buy a croissant, Shailene Woodley has become a trans-Atlantic paradox: an American starlet who keeps pretending she’s just a barefoot herbalist with a passport and an opinion on algae. The French cultural attaché at the Quai…
Pete Davidson: the United Nations of Heartbreak and Hickeys By Dave’s Locker, International Bureau of Schadenfreude When the rest of the planet fretted about inflation, energy grids, and whether the Arctic would still exist next Tuesday, Pete Davidson was quietly becoming the only export the United States still managed to deliver on time. From Staten…
Timothée Chalamet: The Accidental Diplomat in a World That Forgot How to Grow Up By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between Cannes and the apocalypse PARIS—On the Croisette last May, citizens of the world’s oldest republic of glamour queued for two hours to watch a 28-year-old New Yorker pout on a 40-foot screen. The film…
Naomi Osaka, the soft-spoken grand-slam dispenser who once made an entire stadium hush like a library in a police raid, has become a global Rorschach test. From Melbourne to Manhattan, Lagos to Lausanne, people peer at the 26-year-old and see whatever the zeitgeist needs: a mental-health pioneer, a corporate cash-cow, a reluctant activist, or—depending on…
Sienna Miller and the End of the Empire’s Last Illusion By Dave’s International Desk London, Rome, Caracas—pick a capital, any capital—and you will find a glossy magazine cover asking, with breathless sincerity, what Sienna Miller wore to a film premiere you’ll never see. The question itself is a Rorschach test for the late-imperial moment: we…
