Sally Dynevor: The Cobblestone Diplomat Quietly Redrawing Global Maps in a Weatherfield Cardigan By “Dave’s International Despatch & Ironing Service” LONDON—While the rest of us doom-scroll through cascading crises—crypto tsunamis in Montenegro, methane burps in Siberia, election cycles that feel like recurring hangovers—one woman in a sensible pastel twinset has been exporting a uniquely British…
Mark Ruffalo: The Accidental Superpower the World Has to Live With By Dave’s Foreign Bureau Chief, still jet-lagged in Copenhagen Somewhere between the red carpets and the climate summits, Mark Ruffalo mutated from affable character actor into a one-man NGO with excellent cheekbones. While other Hollywood exports sell protein powder or failed streaming services, Ruffalo…
**The Bella Epoch: How a WWE Diva Became the Perfect Metaphor for Our Global Identity Crisis** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken in the Taiwan Strait and central banks perform interpretive dance with inflation rates—it’s oddly fitting that Nikki Bella, a professional wrestler from Scottsdale, Arizona, has emerged as our…
Rupert Murdoch, 93, has announced—again, with the weary inevitability of a Bond villain returning for one last sequel—that he will finally loosen his grip on the Death Star of global media. Or, more accurately, he’ll shuffle sideways into the honorary title of “Chairman Emeritus” of Fox and News Corp while his son Lachlan assumes the…
SYDNEY—If you squint at the skyline long enough, you can almost see the Murdoch empire’s shadow lengthening across three oceans, a Rorschach blot of satellites, tabloids, and streaming pixels. At the blot’s center stands Lachlan Murdoch: heir, enigma, and—depending on which brunch table you pollute—either the last lion tamer of legacy media or the trust-fund…
Tom Hanks, West Point, and the Global Theater of Soft Power By Our Bureau Chief for Existential Irony, Geneva It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a beloved American actor dons a cadet-grey uniform, the world leans in—partly out of curiosity, mostly out of the same rubber-necking instinct that makes us watch multi-car pile-ups…
Tom Phillips, the man who once turned the entire internet into a participatory art installation called “A Humument,” has died at 87, leaving behind a planet-wide game of exquisite corpse that none of us realized we were playing. From Lagos to Lima, Beijing to Bognor Regis, his legacy is less a tombstone than a Post-it…
Walter Payton, the Chicago Bears’ spectral tailback, has been dead for nearly a quarter-century, yet the planet keeps spinning him into fresh geopolitical relevance—an irony the man himself, forever self-deprecating, would have appreciated. From Lagos to Lahore, his highlight reels still flicker on cracked phone screens, soundtracked by lo-fi trap beats and the universal sigh…
PARIS—While French farmers were dumping manure on the A7 to protest diesel taxes, and while Japanese teenagers queued for ramen-flavored Coca-Cola in Shibuya, a 23-year-old from New Jersey quietly became the G-7 summit of the algorithm age. Her name is Alix Earle, and if you don’t know it, congratulations: you still possess the ancient luxury…
Kouvr Annon and the Great Global Fame Recycling Plant By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, filing from a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “Password123” If you’ve never heard of Kouvr Annon, congratulations—you have just proven you own a life. Regrettably, that life is about to be colonised anyway. Annon, a 23-year-old American content apparition, has…
The Last Full-Contact Diplomat: Why the World Still Cares About Jim Brown, Dead or Alive By our man in the cheap seats of global memory Cleveland, Ohio, is not, by any stretch of diplomacy, a world capital. Its river once caught fire—twice—an achievement even Beirut politely calls déclassé. Yet when news of Jim Brown’s death…
The Geopolitics of Glitter: Madison Square Garden as Planet Earth’s Loudest Embassy By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere above Section 412, nursing a US$17 bottle of water From the outside, Madison Square Garden looks like a brick-and-mortar shrug at the skyscraper orgy surrounding it—an unimpressive box that swallowed a city block and never…
