**The Age of Gridiron Diplomacy: How JJ McCarthy’s 21 Years Shook the Geopolitical Chessboard** In a world where nuclear codes rest in the hands of men who can’t operate TikTok, the international community found itself breathlessly consulting Wikipedia today to answer the burning question: exactly how old is University of Michigan quarterback JJ McCarthy? The…
Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar-Nomination-by-Whisper: A Masterclass in Global Soft Power and the Fine Art of Not Campaigning Too Loudly By *Dave’s Locker International Desk* PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant and a contemptuous shrug, the 2023 Academy Awards briefly became an international diplomatic incident because a British actress most people had to Google managed to crash the Best…
Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed “King of All Media,” has spent four decades proving that shamelessness is the only renewable resource never subject to sanctions. From a converted Long Island basement to a SiriusXM satellite orbiting somewhere above the equator, his signal ricochets across continents like a cosmic fart in a crowded elevator—impossible to ignore and,…
**The Accidental Tourist: Paul Nowak and the Global Search for Meaning in a Meaningless World** In the grand theater of international affairs, where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and billionaires rocket themselves into space for sport, the curious case of Paul Nowak emerges as a peculiar footnote to our collective existential crisis. While…
**The Panopticon Goes Prime-Time: How CBS’s ‘Big Brother’ Became the World’s Accidental Reality Check** While the planet burns through its twenty-first-century adolescence, 16 Americans have volunteered to spend their summer locked in a soundstage bungalow, performing sincerity for cameras that never blink. CBS’s “Big Brother”—now limping into its 26th U.S. season—has become the West’s most…
Snow Falls in July: How One American Actress Became a Global Rorschach Test by our man in the cheap seats, Frankfurt When the name Brittany Snow first ping-ped across the international newswires last week—courtesy of a perfectly timed divorce filing in Los Angeles that landed during NATO’s summit in Vilnius—foreign correspondents from Lagos to Ljubljana…
YouTube TV: The Cloud That Rains Channels on a Burning Planet By Our Man in Geneva, Still Counting Subscriptions Instead of Sheep Geneva, 3 a.m.—while the rest of the city pretends to sleep, the Palais des Nations flickers with a different kind of diplomacy: a delegate from Fiji is haggling over the precise definition of…
The World According to Margaret Brennan: How One Irish-American Interrogator Became the Planet’s Unofficial Fact-Checker DUBLIN – If you’ve ever watched the global spin cycle and wondered who still bothers separating colors from whites, meet Margaret Brennan, CBS News’ senior foreign affairs correspondent and moderator of Face the Nation. In an era when most national…
Formula One cars may be engineered in wind tunnels, but the BBC’s F1 coverage is engineered in the court of global public opinion—an arena that makes the Monaco tunnel look like a Sunday drive. When the Beeb wrestles with broadcasting rights, the tremor ricochets from Silverstone to Singapore like a carbon-fiber shrapnel blast, reminding us…
**The Gentle Art of Global Domination: How Alan Titchmarsh Conquered the World One Petunia at a Time** While the planet burns and democracy crumbles like overbaked shortbread, there’s something almost subversive about a 74-year-old British gardener who has quietly become more influential than most world leaders. Alan Titchmarsh—yes, that affable chap with the perpetual tan…
ESPN.com: The Imperial Colosseum in Pixel Form By The (Jaded) Foreign Correspondent Who Once Watched a Mongolian Yak Polo Stream at 3 a.m. PARIS—If you have ever tried to explain to a French existentialist why grown men in Milwaukee cry over a last-second fadeaway, or why a Senegalese taxi driver in Dubai keeps refreshing a…
When Sling TV launched in 2015, the world was still innocent enough to believe that “cord-cutting” was a liberation movement rather than a rebranding of the same old leash. Nine years later, the Atlanta-based service has quietly become the little Trojan horse that keeps U.S. media inside everyone else’s living room, proving that imperialism now…
