Jo Joyner and the Quiet Diplomacy of a British Soap Star in a World Gone Mad By our London-to-Lagos-to-Lima correspondent, still jet-lagged and morally compromised In the grand casino of global fame—where TikTok teenagers sell crypto to oligarchs and retired footballers become UN envoys for gastronomy—Jo Joyner’s career looks almost quaint, like a polite hand-written…
WNBA Playoff Schedule: The World Watches as Tall Women Remind Us That Time Zones Still Exist By Li Wei, International Desk The WNBA playoffs have arrived, which means roughly 12 time zones are now engaged in the delicate art of pretending to care about women’s professional basketball at 3 a.m. local time. From Manila sports…
As the sun sets on another humid Caracas evening, a taxi driver toggles between the national news—where the bolívar’s latest cliff-dive is politely described as “volatility”—and a pixelated feed of the Yankees-Red Sox running on a cracked Samsung tablet. The stream stutters, buffers, then delivers Aaron Judge in 720p glory. The driver grins, because for…
Black Rabbit: Netflix’s New Gamble and the Global Art of Selling Nostalgia with a Side of Existential Dread PARIS—If you spotted bleary-eyed commuters on the Métro this week, staring at their phones as though the screen held the secret to a painless death, odds are they were binge-watching Black Rabbit. Netflix’s eight-part limited series—equal parts…
High Potential, Season 2: A Globally Viral IQ Test That Most of Us Are Still Failing By “International” Correspondent Who Has Read Too Many Subtitles The planet’s streaming algorithms quietly agreed on one thing last week: Season 2 of *High Potential*—the U.S. remake of the French *HPI*—should be force-fed to 190 countries faster than a…
The Prison-Industrial Theme Park Nobody Asked For An International Dispatch on “Mayor of Kingstown” and the Quiet Global Scream It Represents By the time the third season of “Mayor of Kingstown” dropped, the show had already been subtitled, memed, and binge-watched on every continent that still has reliable Wi-Fi. From Lagos living rooms to Lapland…
Hannah Einbinder Is the Canary in Netflix’s Global Coal Mine By Our Foreign Desk, Somewhere between the 405 and the International Date Line In the grand, tragicomic opera of 21st-century streaming, Hannah Einbinder has become an unlikely soprano—belting out punch lines sharp enough to draw blood across five continents and counting. The 29-year-old stand-up and…
From the Seine to the Yangtze, the name Justin Hartley is being murmured in hotel lobbies where the Wi-Fi still works and the mini-bar charges in dollars. To the average Parisian barista he is merely “le mec de This Is Us,” but to the global streaming-industrial complex he is a data packet that refuses to…
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the Mirage of Multilateral Hope By Our Man in Geneva, nursing a lukewarm espresso and an even colder view of humanity Somewhere between the drone of the UN Human Rights Council’s afternoon session and the faint smell of over-boiled cafeteria broccoli, I found myself streaming the latest episode of…
When TRT1 Izle Becomes the Global Village’s Guilty Pleasure A dispatch from the front lines of couch-bound internationalism By the time the muezzin’s fifth reminder drifts over Istanbul, the rest of Earth’s insomniacs have already hijacked TRT1’s live stream. In São Paulo it’s 3 a.m., prime hour for Brazilian crypto traders to unwind with a…
**BAFTA Winner Sophie Willan: Proof the Apocalypse Has a Sense of Humor** In a world where democracy teeters like a drunk tourist in Magaluf and billionaires play space tourism while the oceans boil, Sophie Willan has emerged as Britain’s latest cultural export—because apparently, we needed another reminder that the UK excels at turning trauma into…
Billy Crudup: The Accidental Global Everyman Somewhere between a Netflix menu and an airport paperback, Billy Crudup keeps turning up like a polite but slightly unnerving houseguest. The American actor—who, for the uninitiated, looks exactly like the man your ex-wife swore was “just a coworker”—has become the quiet export the world didn’t order but now…
