The Summer I Turned Pretty, Episode 10: A Dispatch from the End of the Empire’s Beach Towel By Dave’s Locker’s Senior Correspondent for Soft Power and Coastal Melodrama Geneva, 03:14 a.m. local time—while COP delegates in Bonn argue over half-degree Celsius increments and the Indian monsoon politely drowns another election cycle, the true geopolitical fault…
Coup de Foudre on the Chesapeake: How a Beach-House Kiss Became the Planet’s Most Watched Geopolitical Fault Line By Livia Moreau, Senior Coastal-Collapse Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—While the European Central Bank hiked rates again and the Sahel’s newest junta was still arguing over whose turn it is to shut down Facebook, a statistically impressive slice…
Dispatch from the Department of Global Eyebrow Affairs: How Eugene Levy Became the Planet’s Last Reliably Unifying Asset By Marcel “Marbles” Delacroix, Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, currently in self-imposed exile from polite society It is late May, 2024. The Arctic Council is hurling snowballs at itself over drilling rights, the European Central Bank is printing…
When the World Ends, Bravo Will Still Be Green-Lighting Reunions by our correspondent in the last functioning embassy bar, somewhere between Reykjavík and oblivion Somewhere in the rubble of 2024, while governments topple, oceans acidify, and TikTok teenagers auction their bathwater as NFTs, one American man keeps the global living-room lamp on. His name is…
Charlie Sheen: A One-Man Sanctions Regime the World Keeps Negotiating With By “Lucky” Lucinda Marín, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The name Carlos Irwin Estévez—better known to Interpol, hotel security cameras, and late-night subtitle writers as Charlie Sheen—functions as a sort of transnational Rorschach test. To Los Angeles he is an errant sitcom warhead; to Bangkok…
Love Island Games: Humanity’s Diplomatic Breakthrough—Or Just Another Reason to Question Evolution By [REDACTED], Senior Cynic-at-Large Dateline: Everywhere Wi-Fi still reaches It began, as most global crises now do, with a push notification: “Love Island Games is live on Peacock.” Within minutes, VPN servers from Reykjavík to Rangoon lit up like Christmas trees in a…
Jerry O’Connell, the American actor whose career trajectory has careened from precocious child star to genial television fixture, is hardly the sort of person one would expect to find at the center of a geopolitical Rorschach test. Yet, as streaming algorithms colonize living rooms from Lagos to Lahore and late-night talk-show clips ricochet across Weibo…
Chad Powers Goes Global: How a Mustachioed Quarterback Is Quietly Re-Writing Soft-Power Playbooks COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between a NATO summit and the latest climate meltdown, the planet has discovered its newest diplomatic weapon: a 27-year-old American wearing wrap-around shades and a fake mustache that looks like it was stolen from a 1970s adult-film extra. “Chad Powers,” the…
A Zombie-Proof British Export: How Andrew Lincoln Became the Post-Apocalyptic Everyman the World Never Asked For By the time the credits rolled on the final episode of The Walking Dead’s flagship series, Andrew Lincoln had spent more time pretending to dodge flesh-eating Georgians than most Georgian politicians spend dodging actual accountability. In the grand bazaar…
The Crawleys Go Global: How a Yorkshire Country House Became the Planet’s Favorite Fever Dream Picture it: while the Middle East was being carved into protectorates with the precision of a drunk cartographer, and Europe was busy stockpiling munitions like a housewife hoarding canned beans before Y2K, a fictional Earl of Grantham was worrying about…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the shattered dreams of every indie-film hopeful who thought raw talent alone could still buy a croissant, Shailene Woodley has become a trans-Atlantic paradox: an American starlet who keeps pretending she’s just a barefoot herbalist with a passport and an opinion on algae. The French cultural attaché at the Quai…
Brendan Cole: the name that once echoed through British living rooms like the clink of a teacup has now drifted into the broader, bleaker auditorium of global pop culture. For those who missed the memo between missile launches and crypto crashes, Cole is the New Zealand-born ballroom dancer who spent fifteen years gliding across the…
