Karoline Leavitt and the Great American Time Warp By our correspondent in the corner booth of a 24-hour diner that still serves hope with a side of fries If you squint hard enough at the White House briefing podium, you can almost see the curvature of history bending backwards. There stands Karoline Leavitt—press secretary, Gen-Z…
Eric Stonestreet: Kansas Beats Kandahar in the Global Sitcom Arms Race Bylines from Berlin, Bishkek, and Burbank all agree on one thing: if the 21st-century’s most effective soft-power weapon is a well-timed pratfall, then the United States has quietly upgraded its arsenal to DEFCON Dad-Joke. Enter Eric Stonestreet—Midwestern export, Emmy-winner, and living proof that geopolitical…
Set for Life Results: A Global Lottery of Hope and Despair in Six Numbers By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Des Moines and Dar es Salaam Every Friday night, a modest surge of electricity ripples across GMT+0 through GMT+12 as Australia’s Set for Life draws its six polite little digits. The numbers themselves—2, 11, 19, 27,…
Weatherford-on-the-Med, Tuesday, 3:47 a.m.—Somewhere between a NATO summit in Vilnius and the latest BRICS currency pow-wow in Johannesburg, a far more seismic tremor is rattling the tectonic plates of soft-power diplomacy: the rumor, denied, confirmed, denied again, and finally upgraded to “pretty much certain” that Tyrone Dobbs is packing his spanners and quitting Coronation Street….
Scorpio, the Moon is in your second house of money, whispering that your crypto wallet is about as stable as the Turkish lira on a particularly creative Monday. Roughly 2.1 billion people woke up this morning to find their preferred astrologer had already posted a pastel infographic promising “transformation,” “unexpected encounters,” or—if you live in…
The World According to Martin Short: How One Canadian Dwarfed the Globe PARIS—In the grand tradition of small men making outsized noise, Martin Short has managed to become the planet’s unofficial court jester without ever holding elected office or firing a single drone. While diplomats in Geneva trade sternly worded communiqués about carbon emissions and…
Miss America 2026: When the World’s Prettiest Diplomat Waves the Flag for Soft Power Atlantic City, January 2026 – The sash industry is booming again. While half the planet argues over water rights and the other half wonders which streaming service will cancel them next, the Miss America Pageant has quietly re-branded itself as “Global…
2026 Miss America: The World Watches a Nation Crown Another Brand Ambassador in a Swimsuit Las Vegas—If you squint past the LED glare and the mandatory smiles, the 2026 Miss America Pageant looks less like a beauty contest and more like an annual shareholders’ meeting for the United States’ soft-power division. Delegates from fifty states—plus…
The Jelly Roll Doctrine: How a Swirled Pastry Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time you finish this sentence, approximately 2.7 metric tons of jelly rolls will have been consumed somewhere between Jakarta and Jacksonville. That’s the kind of useless statistic international correspondents like me toss around to sound worldly while secretly Googling “what is…
New York—The United States Tennis Association announced Tuesday that the 2025 US Open will distribute a record US$75 million in prize money—roughly the GDP of Vanuatu if Vanuatu were populated entirely by Instagram fitness coaches. The headline figure is up 11 % from last year, prompting the usual global gasp: Americans call it “progress,” Europeans…
Mason Taylor and the Quiet Collapse of the Borderless Résumé By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent If you squint at LinkedIn long enough, every Mason Taylor on earth starts to look like the same politely smiling algorithmic ghost. The name itself could be the default setting on a factory-fresh passport: Mason—solid, vaguely colonial; Taylor—an occupation that…
The AP Poll Is the World’s Most Tolerated Lie—And Everyone Keeps Pretending Otherwise By “Globetrotting” G. M. Lefèvre, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS, FRANCE—Every Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (7 p.m. GMT, 3 a.m. Tuesday in Pyongyang for the truly committed), a cabal of 62 American sportswriters and broadcasters releases a ranking that…
