Geralt of Rivia, the silver-haired contract killer with the moral compass of a hung-over Jesuit, has quietly become the most successful Polish export since Marie Curie’s radium—and unlike radium, he only destroys people who arguably deserve it. Originally concocted by Andrzej Sapkowski in the late 1980s as an antidote to Tolkien cosplay, the Witcher franchise…
From the Souk to the Streaming Queue: Barbara Eden’s Accidental Diplomacy in a Post-Genie World By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Somewhere between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the latest TikTok cease-fire, a perky brunette in harem pants blinked into existence and never quite blinked out. Barbara Eden—actress, accidental soft-power envoy, and…
The Drummer Who Outlasted Empires: Roger Taylor’s Quiet Reign Over a Planet in 4/4 Time By “International” Ed Malone, somewhere over the Atlantic, still waiting for the seat-belt sign to turn off Mention the name “Roger Taylor” in a bar in Buenos Aires and you’ll get a Queen medley hummed by a septuagenarian with a…
The 2025 series of *Strictly Come Dancing* premiered last Saturday, and the planet—still busy juggling wars, elections, and the slow-motion car crash formerly known as “the climate”—paused for two hours to watch celebrities in diamanté try not to fall over. From Kyiv to Caracas, viewers tuned in to see whether a former oligarch’s niece could…
The World According to Taylor, or How One Pop Star Became a Soft-Power Superpower By Dave’s Locker International Desk While diplomats in Geneva were busy politely disagreeing over whose war crimes were more regrettable this week, the real multilateral summit was unfolding on a stage in Buenos Aires. Taylor Swift—yes, that Taylor Swift—was simultaneously crashing…
Noah Wyle and the Last ER: How One American Actor Quietly Became the Global Hospital’s Patron Saint of Controlled Chaos By the time most of the planet had locked its doors in March 2020, Noah Wyle—once television’s most over-qualified pediatric ER resident—was in Amman, shooting a refugee-camp miniseries that nobody outside the Arab world had…
Sabrina Carpenter and the Dunkin’ Cup: The Last Straw That Broke International Order By Dave’s Foreign Affairs Desk (with caffeine shakes) VIENNA, AUSTRIA – In a world where the Doomsday Clock is perpetually stuck at 11:59:56 and diplomats treat sleep like a quaint hobby, the latest tremor in global stability came not from a ballistic…
Steven Spielberg, the man who taught the planet that extraterrestrials can be cuddly and that sharks have personal vendettas, turns seventy-eight this year. From the vantage point of a world that now binge-watches apocalypses on handheld rectangles, his career looks less like a mere filmography and more like a 50-year-long geopolitical weather report. Every time…
When the first Spinal Tap documentary dropped in 1984, the Berlin Wall was still standing, CNN was barely four years old, and most of the planet still believed rock stars were demigods rather than tax exiles with tinnitus. Thirty-nine years later, the surviving members of England’s loudest semi-fictional band are reuniting for Spinal Tap 2—an…
Christopher Lloyd: The Man Who Put Time Travel on the Global Balance Sheet By Our Man at the End of the Universe PARIS—While most of the planet’s 8.1 billion souls were busy doom-scrolling through inflation charts and celebrity divorces last week, one Christopher Lloyd quietly celebrated his 85th birthday. Not the disgraced FTX coder, mind…
Sardonic Dispatch: How a Southern Waitress Named Polly Holliday Accidentally Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time the Berlin Wall was being jack-hammered into souvenir chunks, a middle-aged woman in Alabama was still fielding dinner orders with the same two-word dismissal that had already circled the planet like a spiteful satellite. “Kiss my grits”…
The planet has, at long last, received the cosmic equivalent of a “save the date” card: Avengers: Doomsday is officially penciled in for May 2026. Naturally, the announcement did not arrive via diplomatic cable or UN press release, but via a carefully choreographed livestream from the Sanctum Sanctorum of Brand Synergy—Disney’s Investor Day—where Robert Downey…
