Noah Centineo and the Soft-Power Romance Industrial Complex A field report from the Department of Global Heartthrobs and Geopolitical Fluff PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the 13th arrondissement’s last surviving DVD store, a gaggle of Korean exchange students is reenacting that locker-kiss scene from “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Their TikTok hashtag (#CentineoInSeoul)…
Morrissey Takes His Misery on a World Tour: Global Gloom, Local Whining It’s official: the Pope of Mope has mapped his 2024 pilgrimage of pain. Steven Patrick Morrissey—still clinging to that single surname like a life raft of relevance—has announced a fresh itinerary that will drag his baritone lament from Mexico City to Manila, with…
The Slovenian Export No Customs Form Could Ever Contain Luka Dončić is what happens when a small Alpine country, previously famous for ski jumps and being the birthplace of Melania Trump, decides to weaponize irony. At twenty-five, the man has already turned the Dallas Mavericks into a Balkan outpost and the NBA’s marketing department into…
Dion Dublin: The Accidental Prophet of Our Absurd Global Village By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk From the vantage point of a damp Tuesday in Kyiv, where the neon of shuttered nightclubs now spells out air-raid warnings, it feels almost indecent to speak of football and game-show jingles. Yet here we are, because somewhere in…
Rockstar Finally Delivers the Apocalypse Everyone Ordered: GTA VI Locked and Loaded for 2025 By Marcello Verdigris, International Correspondent-at-Large Somewhere between a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf and the latest Central Bank interest-rate panic, humanity received the one piece of news guaranteed to unite us all: Grand Theft Auto VI will officially land in 2025. Rockstar…
The Regency Empire Strikes Back: How Bridgerton Became the Soft-Power Colonialism We Never Knew We Needed By an Underfunded Correspondent Still Bleeding Netflix Subscription Fees PARIS—On a recent evening in the Marais, a French friend dragged me to a “Bridgerton-à-la-française” pop-up ball, promising champagne, powdered wigs, and the faint hope of post-pandemic flirtation. Instead, I…
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…
Tom Ellis: The Devil Who Commutes Between Cardiff and the Apocalypse By Dave’s Foreign Desk (still nursing jet-lag and existential dread) It takes a peculiar species of geopolitical irony that the most convincing Lucifer ever conjured by television hails not from Los Angeles or the Vatican, but from Cardiff—where the rain falls sideways and the…
When the United Nations convened last year to debate whether the 21st century had officially collapsed into satire, the delegate from Luxembourg quietly held up a tablet looping a 1990s infomercial in which Gary Busey—eyes wide as a currency crisis—explained how to cook a steak with a car battery. The room fell silent. No vote…
Michael Chiklis: The Bald Beacon of American Male Anxiety Goes Global By Diego “D.” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Some men buy red convertibles; others invade neighboring countries. Michael Chiklis simply shaved his head, glowered into a camera, and became the unofficial patron saint of every paunchy, middle-management male who secretly believes that, if pushed,…
Try Guys, Try World: How Four Former BuzzFeeders Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By the time the Try Guys announced their split from Ned Fulmer last September, global interest had already turned the scandal into a low-stakes World Cup of Schadenfreude. From Manila to Madrid, timelines filled with incredulous takes: a married man cheats…
Chicago Fire, Global Alarm: How a Midwestern Script Became the World’s Favorite Disaster Comfort Blanket Somewhere between the Baltic Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a commuter in a Seoul subway car is wiping away tears over the death of a fictional firefighter who never drew breath outside a soundstage in Illinois. The scene is…
