From the banks of the Tyne to the TikTok feeds of Jakarta, Chloe Ferry has become a one-woman soft-power export whose primary raw material is precisely calibrated chaos. Once merely the most pneumatic cast member of MTV UK’s Geordie Shore, she now circulates globally as a living, lip-glossed metaphor for the age of algorithmic fame:…
It’s 3 a.m. in Singapore, 9 p.m. in Lagos, and somewhere over the mid-Atlantic a red-eye cabin is vibrating to the tinny leakage of a teenager’s AirPods: “I’m so Julia, I’m so Julia…” Charli XCX—born Charlotte Aitchison in Cambridge, raised on dial-up and the death rattles of Cool Britannia—has become the unofficial soundtrack to a…
Tate McRae at the 2025 VMAs: A Tiny Canadian Teaches the World to Panic in Sync By Dave’s Locker International Desk NEW YORK—On paper, the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards were just another late-summer pageant of sequins, corporate synergy, and the faint smell of desperation. In practice, they became the moment the planet realized it…
Kingdom Hearts 4: The Planet-Spanning Power Fantasy We Can’t Quit By Cora Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Bureau It’s 2025, half the Northern Hemisphere is either on fire or underwater, and the other half is arguing on Discord about whether Sora’s new sneakers constitute cultural appropriation. Yet here we are—again—salivating over a fresh trailer…
The Curious Case of Dan Brown: How One Man’s Airport-Bookstore Alchemy Became a Global Sacrament By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Tuesday, 03:17 GMT PARIS—If the Louvre ever installs a self-guided “Da Vinci Code” audio tour narrated by a smug Tom Hanks, you will know that civilization has finally completed its descent into gift-shop…
The Curious Afterlife of Robert Howard on a Planet That Keeps Reinventing Barbarism By Our Special Correspondent in the Global Cynics’ Lounge Let us begin with a confession: typing “Robert Howard” into any search engine is like tossing a flaming skull into a barrel of cultural gasoline. Half the planet thinks you mean the Texan…
Renee Rapp, the North-Carolina-born soprano with a voice sharp enough to slice NATO red tape, has become an unlikely export commodity—one that even the most protectionist regimes haven’t bothered to tariff. From Berlin basement clubs to Seoul karaoke booths, her vocal runs are now traded like cultural cryptocurrency, a soft-power asset whose market cap rises…
Michelle Beisner-Buck: The Sideline Reporter Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time most of the planet’s 195 nations had finished arguing about the shape of the COP28 negotiating table, Michelle Beisner-Buck was already on a tarmac in Qatar, squinting into a desert sunset and asking an NFL linebacker how he planned to “finish…
Raymond Cruz: The Man Who Weaponised Soap By the time the first shipment of Tuco Salamanca’s infamous blue meth reached the docks of Rotterdam, Raymond Cruz had already become a household name in places where subtitles are a way of life. From the favelas of Rio to the rooftop bars of Mumbai, someone is right…
Peter Crouch, the 6-foot-7 walking telegraph pole who once admitted his main talent was “being tall in the right place,” has now been officially rubber-stamped as the global mascot of existential dread. Well, technically he’s the “official mascot” of the 2024–25 UEFA Nations League, but after three viral tweets, two Chinese memes involving inflatable giraffes,…
The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards—aka the VMAs, or “Diplomatic Immunity for Sequins”—were held Tuesday night in Newark, New Jersey, a city chosen, rumor has it, because the airport has a direct flight to every nation currently under U.S. sanctions. One might expect a glorified high-school talent show to have limited geopolitical relevance, yet the…
Ricky Martin: The Glittering Canary in the Global Coal Mine By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still coughing up confetti from 1999 Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the planet agreed on exactly one thing: it was perfectly acceptable—nay, advisable—to scream “¡Un, dos, tres! Un pasito pa’lante, María!” while careening…
