The Last Cassidy Standing: How a 1970s Teen Idol Quietly Became the Global Metaphor We Deserve By *Dave’s Locker International Desk* Somewhere between Tehran’s uranium centrifuges and the latest TikTok dance craze, Shaun Cassidy—yes, that Shaun Cassidy—has improbably become a geopolitical Rorschach test. While diplomats argue over whose missiles can reach whose suburbs, the former…
George Clarke and the Global Architecture of Regret From Glasgow to Guangzhou, the man who made “ugly” a spectator sport has quietly become the unofficial therapist for a planet that can’t look away from its own reflections—especially the mirrored ones that should never have been built. Every Wednesday night from Reykjavík to Riyadh, insomnia sufferers…
The Global Bureaucracy of Fictional Victims: How the Law & Order: SVU Cast Became an International Export Harder to Regulate Than Plutonium PARIS—Across the river from Notre-Dame, a small plaque on the Quai des Orfèvres discreetly announces the Brigade de Protection des Mineurs. Inside, a lieutenant who insists on remaining anonymous admits between drags of…
Law & Order: SVU—Exporting Moral Panic in 21 Languages (Dave’s Locker, World Desk) The opening “dun-dun” has become the sonic passport stamp of late-night insomnia from Lagos to Lisbon, a two-note warning that the worst of human depravity is about to be monetised for your viewing pleasure. While the original Law & Order franchise sold…
Coronation Street: The Last British Empire Still Broadcasting By Our Special Correspondent in Weatherfield-on-the-Wider-World Manchester, England — While the pound sterling flirts with parity against the dollar and Brexit negotiators argue over fish sticks, Britain’s most durable export remains a cobblestoned cul-de-sac where the beer is warm, the accents warmer, and the mortality rate rivals…
The Curious Case of Global Schadenfreude: What Time Is Dancing With the Stars On (And Why the World Secretly Cares) Somewhere between the melting permafrost of Siberia and the latest crypto-bro meltdown in Singapore, a question ricochets through 192 sovereign time zones with the urgency of a UN Security Council resolution: “What time is Dancing…
Dancing With the Stars Time: A Global Pas de Deux Between Apocalypse and Distraction By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the melting Arctic and the latest cryptocurrency collapse, humanity has decided that 8 p.m. on a Monday is the perfect hour to watch moderately famous people attempt a paso doble. Welcome, dear planet, to…
The United States has always excelled at exporting two things: weapons-grade optimism and television. USA Network, the plucky cable channel that once promised “Characters Welcome,” is the softer, more insidious sibling of those F-35s—flying under most foreign radars while still reshaping the global skyline. From its birth in 1977 as the Madison Square Garden Sports…
John Ritter, International Man of Collapsible Furniture By “Diplomatic” Dave, Senior Correspondent for Absurdity Abroad BURBANK—Somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant is still explaining to a bewildered Japanese tourist that, no, the man who died on the set of “8 Simple Rules” was not, in fact, the inventor of Zen minimalism. Such is the…
The Glitterball Diplomacy: How Britain’s Sequined Export Became the World’s Most Effective Soft-Power Weapon By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from the Shock of Seeing a Former Soviet Defence Minister Cha-Cha-Cha LONDON—While the Pentagon budgets $842 billion for hardware that goes bang, the Foreign Office has discovered a cheaper force multiplier: spray tan, fake crystals, and…
Danielle Fishel and the Miraculous Export of American Nostalgia By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large In the grand bazaar of global pop culture, where K-dramas elbow Turkish telenovelas for shelf space and Nigerian Afrobeats drowns out yesterday’s Latin pop, one compact unit of 1990s Americana continues to punch improbably above its weight: Danielle Fishel, forever Topanga, the…
Ant Anstead and the Global Decline of the Hand-Built Dream By Lila Moreau, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you’ve opened any streaming platform in the last decade you’ve probably seen Ant Anstead, the British mechanic-poet who restores vintage metal while wearing the kind of tight T-shirt that makes viewers briefly forget the planet is on…
