Ashlee Simpson and the Geopolitics of a Saturday-Night Snafu By our correspondent still recovering from 2004 PARIS—Every empire eventually faces its Suez moment: a live, televised humiliation so crisp that satellites beam the collapse of confidence into living rooms from Lagos to Lima. For the American behemoth known as “late-aughts pop culture,” that moment arrived…
The world’s newest diplomatic crisis isn’t being negotiated in Geneva, Vienna, or even Davos; it’s unfolding on a California soundstage where a 72-year-old widower in suspiciously white sneakers is handing out roses like a geriatric Zeus doling out lightning bolts. ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor” has landed—an octogenarian remix of the franchise that once gave us…
Dodging alien artillery or congressional subpoenas with the same square-jawed equanimity, Chris Evans has become the world’s most export-ready piece of modern American soft power. From Seoul to São Paulo, the man is less an actor these days than a geopolitical utility: a walking, occasionally shield-flinging reminder that the empire can still package its anxieties…
The Global Countdown to Westeros: How House of the Dragon Season 3 Became the World’s Most Expensive Collective Therapy Session Winter, that old reliable PR agent for existential dread, is still coming. Yet from the frostbitten suburbs of Helsinki to the sweat-glazed favelas of Rio, humanity has decided the best use of its remaining fossil-fuel…
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND — Somewhere between the Black Forest and the Black Sea, a pension-age Irishman is still being asked to kidnap Europe’s collective anxieties and ransom them back in ninety-minute installments. Liam Neeson—Ballymena’s most famous export since guilt—has become a walking Rorschach test for a planet that can’t decide whether it wants to be…
