Roxanne Perez and the Global Gladiator Economy by L. Marín, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic If you squint hard enough from the window of a red-eye leaving JFK, you can almost see the entire planet orbiting around a 23-year-old in neon kneepads. Roxanne Perez—born Carla Gonzalez in the Rio Grande Valley, now billed from…
Jason Bateman: The World’s Most Reliable Export Since Filter Coffee By our man in the departure lounge, still clutching a boarding pass to nowhere If nations are brands, Jason Bateman is the Switzerland of screen talent: neutral, efficient, and implausibly tidy. While other Hollywood exports arrive with fireworks, sanctions, or at least a meme-ready scandal,…
BBC Newsround: The Empire’s Kindergarten Desk Explains the World While the World Burns By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere between duty-free and existential dread In the grand bazaar of global news, where war correspondents growl over satellite phones and oligarchs purchase entire front pages like impulse gum, BBC Newsround remains the only stall…
Peter Crouch, the 6-foot-7 walking telegraph pole who once admitted his main talent was “being tall in the right place,” has now been officially rubber-stamped as the global mascot of existential dread. Well, technically he’s the “official mascot” of the 2024–25 UEFA Nations League, but after three viral tweets, two Chinese memes involving inflatable giraffes,…
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…
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…
The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards—aka the VMAs, or “Diplomatic Immunity for Sequins”—were held Tuesday night in Newark, New Jersey, a city chosen, rumor has it, because the airport has a direct flight to every nation currently under U.S. sanctions. One might expect a glorified high-school talent show to have limited geopolitical relevance, yet the…
American Football’s Reluctant Messiah: How Josh Allen Became the MVP the World Didn’t Know It Needed by Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere between a NATO summit and the latest cryptocurrency implosion, the planet’s attention was hijacked this week by a 6-foot-5 Nebraskan with the haircut of a Scandinavian death-metal bassist and the arm of…
**The Global Phenomenon of Hunter Doohan: How a Nice Boy from Arkansas Became the World’s Favorite Creep** In the grand theater of global entertainment, where streaming platforms have become the new colonial powers and algorithms serve as modern-day conquistadors, Hunter Doohan has emerged as an unlikely cultural ambassador. The 29-year-old Arkansas native’s journey from community…
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…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine’s grey shimmer and the 19th-century façades that still pretend the world makes sense, Nick Wright has become the planet’s most unlikely export: a Kansas City–bred, New York–polished sports yapper whose hot takes now ricochet off satellite feeds from Lagos to Lahore. On five continents, bleary-eyed traders, displaced taxi drivers, and insomniac…
YUNGBLUD: A NEON MESSIAH FOR THE POST-NATIONAL TEENAGER By “Stringer” McAllister, filing from a budget airline seat somewhere between Düsseldorf and existential dread The first thing you notice when YUNGBLUD storms onstage—whether in Mexico City’s Foro Sol or a half-repurposed communist-era cinema in Prague—is that passports appear to have been declared optional extras. The crowd…
