Jack Thorne, the British playwright-screenwriter who once cheerfully admitted he can’t write a happy ending without feeling like he’s selling snake-oil, has quietly become the unofficial dramatist of our planetary nervous breakdown. From the neon-lit council estates of “This Is England ’90” to the snow-blind trauma of “His Dark Materials,” Thorne has exported a particularly…
Sterling K. Brown: The Global Export Nobody Knew They Needed By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent PARIS — Somewhere in the Marais, a Senegalese cabbie is watching This Is Us reruns on Canal+, wiping his eyes at 3 a.m. because Randall Pearson has just reminded him of the cousin he hasn’t hugged since Dakar’s airport ran…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine’s reflection of a burning Citroën and the clink of overpriced rosé at Café de Flore sits Eva Longoria, proving that when America exports its sitcom leftovers, the rest of the world graciously reheats them into haute cuisine. Two decades after she sashayed across Wisteria Lane in stilettos sharp enough to qualify…
**SmackDown Diplomacy: How WWE’s Traveling Circus Became the Last Universal Language** GENEVA—While the UN Security Council spent Friday night bickering over whose turn it is to veto humanitarian aid, 1.3 million people from Lagos to Lahore tuned into WWE SmackDown to watch a man in neon spandex pretend-break another man’s spine over a folding chair….
The 2025 series of *Strictly Come Dancing* premiered last Saturday, and the planet—still busy juggling wars, elections, and the slow-motion car crash formerly known as “the climate”—paused for two hours to watch celebrities in diamanté try not to fall over. From Kyiv to Caracas, viewers tuned in to see whether a former oligarch’s niece could…
Movies Streaming This Weekend: A Global Guide to Sitting Very, Very Still By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar is more expensive than the GDP of Tuvalu It is Friday afternoon somewhere—probably in Kiribati, the first nation to greet the weekend—and billions of humans are preparing for the same heroic act:…
The Mushroom Kingdom Goes Multilateral: How a “Super Mario Galaxy” Film Became the UN of Blockbusters By Paolo “Warp-Pipe” Ricci, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Rome—In the same week that the G7 couldn’t agree on a dessert menu, Universal and Nintendo quietly announced a global release slate for their still-untitled Super Mario Galaxy movie. The timing…
The Housemaid, Sydney Sweeney, and the Global Sweatshop of Desire By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, still jet-lagged in three time zones PARIS—At 3 a.m. local time, while the rest of humanity doom-scrolls itself to sleep, the phrase “the housemaid sydney sweeney” is rocketing up Google trends in 37 languages. The search spike is equal parts…
Oti Mabuse and the Global Glitter Bomb: How a Pretoria-Born Dancer Became the UN’s Most Unlikely Soft-Power Weapon By A. Correspondent, filing from a hotel bar where the Wi-Fi costs more than the whisky There are, broadly speaking, two ways a country can project power in 2024. Option A: park a carrier group off someone…
In the grand, looping telenovela that is global pop culture, Jonathan Majors has managed the rare trick of becoming both protagonist and cliff-hanger. One minute the 34-year-old Texan is the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s designated multiversal tyrant, grinning from Lagos billboards and Seoul subway ads; the next he’s a cautionary tale retweeted by law-school seminar groups…
**The Gentle Art of American Apology: Jimmy Kimmel’s Global Comedy Empire** While the world burns through its third year of what historians will generously call “unprecedented times,” one man in Hollywood has perfected the delicate balance of making Americans laugh at themselves while collecting enough international goodwill to qualify as a minor diplomatic asset. Jimmy…
Joanne Froggatt and the Global Cottage-Industry of Whispered Trauma By Our Man in a Perpetually Delayed Departure Lounge There is a moment—usually somewhere over the Caspian Sea, when the in-flight map insists you’re still in Europe but the vodka tastes undeniably post-Soviet—when you realise that Joanne Froggatt has become the unofficial patron saint of repressed…
