Chicken Shop Diplomacy: How Amelia Dimoldenberg Accidentally Became Soft Power in a Deep-Fried World By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk LONDON—In the grand, gilded tradition of British exports—colonialism, the Beatles, and whatever Boris Johnson is—comes Amelia Dimoldenberg, a 30-year-old journalist armed only with a microphone, a deadpan stare, and the caloric equivalent of a NATO stockpile….
Tim Curry: The Transatlantic Villain Who Conquered the World, One Cackle at a Time By Our Man in the Green Room, Somewhere Between Belgrade and Burbank In the grand, grease-painted theater of global pop culture, certain figures transcend mere stardom and become diplomatic incidents waiting to happen. Enter Tim Curry: the Cheshire grin in a…
PARIS—If you drew a straight line from the Kremlin war room to the Hollywood Hills, you’d find Perrie Edwards somewhere on the flight path, sipping an oat-milk latte and accidentally destabilising the algorithmic order of the known world. The former Little Mix soprano—now solo artist, fashion house muse, and walking soft-power missile—has become a case…
Bobby Witt Jr. and the Last Empire: How a Kid from Texas Became the World’s Unwitting Soft-Power Asset By Dave’s International Sourpuss-in-Residence Somewhere between a NATO summit and a TikTok dance-off, the planet’s attention economy pivoted last week to a 24-year-old shortstop who still looks like he ought to be carded at a Kansas City…
Amber Davies: The Reality-Star Ripple Effect Sweeping the Globe’s Shallow End BYLINE – Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, via a hotel bar in Heathrow Terminal 5 If you missed the Amber Davies phenomenon, congratulations: you probably still own attention span. For the rest of us—those who doom-scroll in three languages and measure time in algorithmic updates—Ms….
The Geopolitics of Chest Hair: How Peter Andre Became an Unlikely Soft-Power Asset for a Post-Brexit Britain By the time the sun rises over the marble colonnades of the European Parliament, negotiators in Brussels are already whispering about “The Andre Doctrine.” Not, as one might hope, a radical new trade policy, but rather the quiet…
AJ ODUDU AND THE GLOBAL PARADOX OF FAMOUSLY ALMOST FAMOUS PEOPLE By Our Slightly Jet-Lagged Correspondent There are 195 countries on the planet, give or take a disputed micro-state or two, and yet the same name is currently trending from Lagos to Lisbon to Los Angeles: Aj Odudu. If you blinked during the 2021 season…
From the neon canyons of Shibuya to the half-lit favelas of Rio, the phrase “FC 26 PS5” is currently being whispered, screamed, and autocorrect-mangled in more languages than Esperanto ever managed. On the surface it’s just the next annualised instalment of EA Sports’ football sim, freshly varnished for Sony’s shiniest black monolith. But beneath that…
The Empire Strikes a Chord: How BBC Radio 1 Became the World’s Guiltiest Pleasure By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic There’s a moment, usually around 02:47 GMT, when the night-shift nurse in Lagos, the rideshare driver in Jakarta, and the insomniac coder in Vancouver all find themselves humming the same…
PARIS—In the Marais, a barista who normally sneers at anything more commercial than Serge Gainsbourg is humming “Livvy Dunne” to himself while foaming oat milk. In Lagos, a streetwear reseller is hawking knock-off LSU leotards to university freshmen who have never watched a full gymnastics meet. In Seoul, the subway ads for a vitamin drink…
The Ballad of NBA YoungBoy, or How America Exports Its Teenage Apocalypse By Dave’s Locker, International Desk Somewhere between Baton Rouge and the back-alley Wi-Fi of a Manila slum, 24-year-old Kentrell “NBA YoungBoy” Gaulden is live-streaming to 11 million people who collectively owe more in student loans than the GDP of Paraguay. To the uninitiated,…
Steve Harvey, the indefatigable mustache in the gilded cage of American daytime television, has quietly become one of the United States’ most reliable cultural exports—no small feat for a man whose résumé still includes the Miss Universe pageant of 2015, when he crowned the wrong queen in front of a planet that had nothing better…
