America’s Got Talent, the sequin-drenched carnival that has colonized more than 190 territories, is no longer merely a TV show. It is a planetary referendum on what the human race chooses to applaud when the bombs are falling, the ice caps are dripping into cocktails, and the algorithm has already decided who’s going to cry…
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…
TOKYO—In a cramped conference room high above Shibuya Crossing, where pedestrian herds jay-walk in perfect, pixelated choreography, Nintendo’s stock ticker flashed emerald green. The occasion? The 40th anniversary of a short, mustachioed Italian plumber who has never actually fixed a pipe. Instead, Mario Mario—yes, that redundant baptism is canon—has spent four decades hopping over geopolitical…
Dancing on the Precipice: How a Sparkly Ballroom Show Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time the glitter settles on the latest season of “Dancing with the Stars,” more international treaties have been negotiated on that parquet than in most Geneva conference rooms. From the Kremlin-green room where Russian influencers rehearse cha-chas between sanctions, to…
Stacey Solomon and the Global Collapse of Meaning By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the North Atlantic Somewhere between the fifteenth recycled clip of Stacey Solomon turning an empty jam jar into a tasteful bathroom organiser and a breaking-news ticker announcing fresh atrocities on three continents, the world quietly agreed that this was the cultural equilibrium…
From Lagos to Lisbon, finance ministers are quietly grateful that Nick Cannon’s prolific fatherhood is not a transmissible fiscal liability. While the rest of us watch interest rates climb like caffeinated capuchins, Cannon has managed to produce a small sovereign nation of offspring—twelve, at last audit—without triggering a single IMF bailout. In a world where…
Tom Hardy: The Last Action Figure Standing Between Us and Global Thermonuclear Boredom From the smoking rubble of what used to be called “cinema,” one man emerges wearing three layers of knitwear, a Bane mask repurposed as a tea-cozy, and the weary expression of someone who has just realized the Doomsday Clock is running on…
Coachella: The World’s Most Expensive Apocalypse Dress-Rehearsal by “Diego del Muerto,” Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific Every April, while half the planet still argues over whose refugees are more inconvenient, 125,000 of the planet’s best-looking carbon footprints descend on the Coachella Valley to practice the end of the world in fringe and feather. From…
From the banks of the Danube to the back alleys of Dakar, the world’s attention has lately been arrested by the improbable global phenomenon known as C.J. Gardner-Johnson. Not a vaccine, not a crypto-coin, not even a new streaming war—just a 5-foot-11, safety-sized bundle of swagger who has, with almost malicious ease, turned the NFL’s…
PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant crumb and a NATO communiqué, Jennifer Coolidge has become a trans-Atlantic bargaining chip. The White Lotus matriarch, once America’s favorite ditzy aunt, now operates as soft-power currency in every capital that still pretends to care about culture. Berlin DJs remix her sighs into techno; Lagos hair-braiders sell “Tanya waves”; Tokyo teens…
Carrie Underwood: How a Farm-Girl Soprano Became the UN’s Unofficial Soundtrack for Late-Stage Capitalism By Our Correspondent in Exile, Currently Somewhere Between Nashville and Narnia MOSCOW—Somewhere between the Kremlin’s nightly news and the latest oligarch yacht auction, a familiar voice crackles over a tinny radio in a Lada dashboard: “Jesus, take the wheel.” It is…
Jason Segel’s Big, Small, and Symbolically Oversized World Tour By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Bureau, Location Redacted Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the last functioning Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon, Jason Segel is still six-foot-four and gently bewildered. For the uninitiated, Segel is the American actor-screenwriter whose résumé reads like a fever dream curated by a…
