The BBC’s rugby coverage usually opens with a brassy fanfare and a slow-motion montage of glistening foreheads, but zoom out a few thousand miles and the same footage looks less like sport and more like a ritual re-enactment of Empire—performed, naturally, in four languages and beamed to 180 territories where nobody has ever knowingly scrummed….
Big Brother Live Feeds: The Planet’s Longest Unscripted UN Security Council Meeting by Our Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar items are also under 24/7 surveillance There was a time, quaint as a rotary phone, when the phrase “Big Brother live feeds” conjured up grainy shots of twenty-something strangers arguing about dishwater in…
YouTube TV: A Very American Export That Thinks It’s the World By our correspondent who has watched the same three commercials in three languages and still doesn’t know what a “cord-cutter” is PARIS—From a sidewalk café where the espresso costs less than the data roaming, I clicked into YouTube TV this week and was greeted…
YouTube TV: The Planet’s Couch Potato Imperialism (Dave’s Locker International Desk, 14 June 2024) From the smog-choked high-rises of Jakarta to the one-bar villages of rural Moldova, humanity has finally agreed on something: the best way to see the world is to sit perfectly still and let Google beam it into your retinas. YouTube TV—Alphabet’s…
It’s 3 a.m. in a Nairobi newsroom, and the overnight editor is scanning a live feed from Washington, watching Jeanine Pirro bark at a camera about “globalist conspiracies” with the volume of a small jet engine. Halfway across the planet, a Brussels policy wonk pours another espresso, wondering how a former small-town district attorney turned…
The Last Emperor of Cable: John Malone’s Quiet World Domination Tour By Our Man in Luxembourg, still wondering why his hotel TV has 900 channels and nothing on Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the favelas of Rio, your monthly broadband bill is being stage-managed by a 83-year-old Coloradan who looks less like Darth…
The Guardian: A Small Island Paper That Grew Up to Lecture the Planet By Our Correspondent in a Café with Suspiciously Fast Wi-Fi, Somewhere between Gatwick and Geopolitics LONDON—In most countries, a newspaper that still calls itself “The Manchester Guardian” on its masthead would be dismissed as regional nostalgia, the print equivalent of a pub…
BBC News UK: The Empire’s Last Polite Broadcaster Tries to Stay Relevant While the World Burns by Our Correspondent in a Café with Suspiciously Imperial Décor, Somewhere East of Calais The planet tunes in each day—via shortwave, TikTok clip, or the backseat screen of a Delhi Uber—to watch a small island politely explain itself to…
Global Bulletin: Sheinelle Jones and the Glorious Mundanity of the 24-Hour Apocalypse Watch By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk NEW YORK—In the same week that the Arctic registered its first 30-degree-Celsius February temperature and the Bank of Japan toyed with negative interest rates like a cat batting a dead mouse, American morning television offered its own…
BBC iPlayer: The Empire Streams Back By Our Man in the Ether, somewhere between GMT+8 jet-lag and existential dread The British Broadcasting Corporation, once content to beam clipped vowels into crackling short-wave radios from Lagos to Lahore, has quietly reinvented itself as the Netflix your history teacher warned you about. BBC iPlayer—originally pitched in 2007…
Kelly Ripa, Live from the End of the World By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Atlantic and Existential Dread NEW YORK—At precisely 9:00 a.m. Eastern, while glaciers calve and supply chains snap like cheap bracelets, Kelly Ripa greets America with the smile of someone who has already finished her Pilates and her Pinot. The studio…
BBC Cricket: The Empire Strikes Back—With Sponsors and a Theme Tune By Our Man in the Pavilion Bar, Nursing a Warm G&T and Existential Dread When the BBC’s Test Match Special crackles back onto long-wave each May, you can almost hear the collective sigh of a planet that has quietly agreed to pretend the 21st…
