SUKI WATERHOUSE AND THE GLOBAL SOFT-POWER SYNDROME A Dispatch from the Frontlines of Manufactured Relevance Dateline: Everywhere Wi-Fi reaches and self-regard outruns bandwidth In 2024, the phrase “international incident” no longer requires embassies, trade tariffs, or even a stray missile. All it takes is a British model-actress-singer-entrepreneur-candle-magnate named Suki Waterhouse posting a grainy Polaroid of…
**The Empire Strikes Back… on AM: How a London Talk Station Became the World’s Background Noise** In the grand theater of global media, where Netflix spends more on a single episode than some nations spend on healthcare, there’s something almost quaint about LBC Radio still rattling the airwaves from a former chocolate factory in Battersea….
Robert De Niro, International Man of (Mild) Mystery By Our Correspondent in an Airport Lounge Where the Wi-Fi Charges by the Minute There is a peculiar kind of diplomatic immunity that celebrities acquire once their faces have been projected onto every screen from Lagos to Lagos—yes, both the Nigerian and Portuguese ones. Robert De Niro…
Caitlin Clark and the Global Soft-Power Dunk Heard ’Round the World By: Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Foreign Correspondent Emeritus If you’ve spent the past year orbiting anywhere outside the American sports-media bubble—say, sipping overpriced espresso in Rome or watching North Korean missile parades on mute in a Seoul hotel bar—you may have missed…
Nigella Lawson and the Global Comfort-Industrial Complex By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Heathrow Duty-Free and Existential Dread It takes a special kind of soft power to make a cup of cocoa feel like a geopolitical event, yet Nigella Lawson has been doing exactly that for three decades—quietly exporting British domesticity to a planet that increasingly…
Shakira, the Colombian-Lebanese pop hydra, has spent the last quarter-century proving that geopolitics can indeed be negotiated in seven-inch stilettos. While lesser mortals fret over trade wars and summit communiqués, she has quietly built a soft-power empire that spans five continents, four languages, and—judging by the global involuntary muscle memory triggered by “Waka Waka”—roughly 1.2…
Khaby Lame Has Conquered the Planet Without Saying a Single Word—A Victory Speech No One Needed By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching Civilization Eat Itself in 30-Second Bursts GENEVA—The United Nations may still quarrel over grain corridors and carbon thresholds, but the real diplomatic breakthrough of the decade came when a 23-year-old Senegalese-Italian…
The Curious Case of Alexandra Daddario: A Global Study in Eyeballs, Algorithms, and the End of Civil Discretion By Our Bureau of Soft-Power Archaeology The first time the planet truly synchronized its collective blink was 2014, somewhere between Crimea’s annexation and the last Malaysian Airlines tragedy, when a GIF of Alexandra Daddario’s eyes—those crystalline pools…
The Chlorinated Oracle: How Michael Phelps Became the World’s Wettest Exports Policy By the time Michael Phelps hung up his goggles for good, the planet had quietly agreed on one metric of global power: the number of gold medals a nation could attach to a single human sternum. Eight in Beijing, four more in London,…
Aitana Bonmatí: The Midfield Philosopher Who Makes Dictatorships and Democracies Equally Nervous By Our Correspondent, Currently Hiding from a FIFA Ethics Committee in Tallinn There is a moment, roughly the 73rd minute of most matches, when Aitana Bonmatí stops running and simply begins orbiting. Defenders swear she moves like a satellite that has read their…
Zendaya: The Last American Export That Isn’t a Drone Strike By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between a Cannes after-party and a UN climate summit PARIS—On a continent that still thinks Mickey Mouse is a viable national-security threat, the arrival of Zendaya Coleman on any red carpet instantly triggers the same diplomatic protocol reserved for…
From the vantage point of a café in Sarajevo—where the Wi-Fi is free but the existential dread is extra—one name keeps popping up across the planet’s fractured infosphere: Benny Johnson. To the average Berliner, he’s a punchline; to a Manila call-center worker on his third Monster, he’s background noise; to a retired autocrat in Minsk,…
