The Curious Global Footprint of Jimmy Kimmel’s Wife (Yes, That One) PARIS—On paper, Molly McNearney is simply the co-head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and the woman who married a man famous for pranking children into believing their Halloween candy has vanished. Yet in the grand, malfunctioning kaleidoscope of international celebrity, her name now pings…
The Leo High School Choir’s Spring Concert Is Quietly Terrifying the World By Our Man at the Back Row, Still Recovering from the Soprano Section From the cracked parking lot of Leo Catholic High School on Chicago’s South Side, you can almost hear the planet’s tectonic plates grinding in anxiety. That’s not seismic activity; it’s…
Caitlin Clark and the Global Soft-Power Dunk Heard ’Round the World By: Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Foreign Correspondent Emeritus If you’ve spent the past year orbiting anywhere outside the American sports-media bubble—say, sipping overpriced espresso in Rome or watching North Korean missile parades on mute in a Seoul hotel bar—you may have missed…
In the grand, ever-expanding circus that is global celebrity, Lindsay Arnold Cusick—known to passport officers and gossip columnists alike as simply Lindsay Arnold—performs a neat trick: she is both everywhere and nowhere at once. To the average citizen of Ouagadougou or Osaka, the name registers as a soft ping on the pop-cultural Richter scale, somewhere…
Coronation Street: The Last British Empire Still Broadcasting By Our Special Correspondent in Weatherfield-on-the-Wider-World Manchester, England — While the pound sterling flirts with parity against the dollar and Brexit negotiators argue over fish sticks, Britain’s most durable export remains a cobblestoned cul-de-sac where the beer is warm, the accents warmer, and the mortality rate rivals…
**The Global Ballet of Britt Stewart: How One Dancer Became America’s Accidental Diplomat** While the world’s superpowers engage in their usual diplomatic dance of sanctions, summits, and subtle threats, an unlikely ambassador has emerged from the glittering excess of Los Angeles, armed with nothing more lethal than choreography and charisma. Britt Stewart, the first Black…
Carrie Ann Inaba and the Global Choreography of Soft Power By Marisol “Lucky” Vega, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker It is 3:17 a.m. in Singapore, the hour when even the durian vendors are asleep, yet a WhatsApp group of Filipino choreographers is dissecting last night’s Dancing with the Stars finale with the solemnity of a G-7…
Kayla McBride and the Quiet American Art of Global Soft Power By the time Kayla McBride drilled her fourth three-pointer in a single EuroLeague quarterfinal—an act that sent Istanbul’s Ülker Sports Arena into a polite, socially-distanced frenzy—half the planet was already asleep, dreaming of everything except women’s basketball. Yet somewhere in Lagos a barista checked…
Monte Morris and the Quiet Art of Not Destroying Civilization: A Global Dispatch By the time you finish this sentence, three governments will have changed hands, two crypto exchanges will have imploded, and one influencer will have declared war on the concept of breakfast. Somewhere in the middle of that maelstrom stands Monte Morris, 6-foot-2,…
Sarah McLachlan and the Global Export of Wistful Melancholy ————————————————————- Somewhere between a UN peacekeeping convoy and a container ship of tear-stained Kleenex, the British Columbian soprano has become Canada’s most reliable soft-power weapon. Sarah McLachlan’s voice—equal parts lullaby and guilt trip—now drifts through taxicabs from Lagos to Lahore, duty-free lounges in Dubai, and boutique…
The Curious Case of Global Schadenfreude: What Time Is Dancing With the Stars On (And Why the World Secretly Cares) Somewhere between the melting permafrost of Siberia and the latest crypto-bro meltdown in Singapore, a question ricochets through 192 sovereign time zones with the urgency of a UN Security Council resolution: “What time is Dancing…
Shilo Sanders and the Global Theater of Second-Gen Stardom by Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic When Shilo Sanders sauntered onto the field last season wearing the sort of diamond-studded grill normally reserved for Dubai mall openings, the moment was live-streamed from Boulder to Bangalore, dissected in Seoul sports bars, and…
