The Curious Case of Zoe Slater: How a Fictional East-End Teenager Became a Global Rorschach Test By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Mini-Bar, Somewhere Over the Atlantic In the grand bazaar of global pop culture, where K-Pop idols moonlight as UN envoys and Scandinavian noir detectives moon over existentialism, a British soap-opera character named Zoe…
Sheryl Underwood and the Infinite Scroll of Global Empathy Fatigue By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Room with One Working Lightbulb Somewhere between the burnt-coffee time zone of U.S. breakfast television and the 3 a.m. doom-scroll in Jakarta, Sheryl Underwood cracked a joke about her own wig budget and accidentally became a diplomatic incident. It…
Jim Carrey: A One-Man Sanctions Package on Hollywood and the Planet By the time you read this, somewhere between Mumbai and Montevideo somebody is still quoting “Alrighty then!” as if it were a UN resolution. That’s the geopolitical reach of James Eugene Carrey, the rubber-faced Canadian export whose greatest trick was convincing the world that…
Somewhere between the fluorescent glow of a Long Island Walgreens and the flickering LED of a Tokyo gaming café, the name “Matt Cardona” still surfaces—an improbable passport stamp on the battered itinerary of global pop culture. To the uninitiated, he’s merely a professional wrestler who once moonlighted as a zombie, a YouTuber who unboxed action…
In the grand, ever-expanding circus that is global celebrity, Lindsay Arnold Cusick—known to passport officers and gossip columnists alike as simply Lindsay Arnold—performs a neat trick: she is both everywhere and nowhere at once. To the average citizen of Ouagadougou or Osaka, the name registers as a soft ping on the pop-cultural Richter scale, somewhere…
Michael Bublé: The Last Crooner Standing Between Earth and the Void By Dave’s International Desk, sipping flat prosecco in Terminal 3 Somewhere above the Sea of Japan, Air Canada flight 003 is running out of gin and—more critically—patience. The in-flight entertainment system has frozen on Michael Bublé’s Christmas special, looping an endless close-up of the…
Claudia Cardinale, 85, is still being wheeled out on red carpets like a priceless Roman statue that refuses to crumble. Cannes, Venice, Marrakech—wherever the champagne is overpriced and the egos are under-oxygenated, a camera-ready cardinal in designer silk appears, smiling the same Sphinx-like smile she patented in 1963. The world has changed four or five…
Noel Fielding and the End of the World as We Know It By Dave’s International Desk, somewhere over the Atlantic, nursing lukewarm coffee and existential dread PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant and a Gauloise, it struck me that Noel Fielding might be the only British export currently outperforming inflation. While sterling stumbles like a drunk tourist…
Raye’s world tour is the latest proof that a British woman with a laptop full of heartbreak and a TikTok algorithm can still make the planet shudder. In an age when most pop acts outsource their charisma to LED walls, Raye—born Rachel Keen, South London, classically trained, statistically underpaid until last year—has managed to stitch…
The Rainbow Menace Goes Global: How One Snitching Soundcloud Leprechaun Became the World’s Most Unwanted Tourist By the time Daniel “6ix9ine” Hernández landed at Mexico City’s Aeropuerto Internacional in early 2023—hair re-dyed like a Skittles crime scene and ankle monitor blinking like a budget disco ball—customs officials greeted him with the weary resignation usually reserved…
Olivia Dean and the Great British Export Boom Nobody Ordered By our London Bureau Chief, nursing a lukewarm Negroni and the last of his optimism If you’ve spent the last five years doom-scrolling through global headlines—plague, war, crypto implosions, that Belgian health minister who insisted on jogging during lockdown—you may have missed a quieter British…
Across six time zones and in languages that still can’t agree on how many “l”s belong in “travelling,” the planet’s chattering classes have lately fixed on a single, improbable unifier: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the 33-year-old Englishman who looks like he was drawn by a committee of hormonal Renaissance masters. From Berlin’s U-Bahn ad panels to Seoul’s…
