The Spy Who Never Retired: How James Bond Became the Last Remaining Global Soft-Power Superpower By Our Man in Geneva with the Hangover When the credits rolled on *No Time to Die* in 2021, MI6’s most flamboyant employee technically ceased to exist in the continuity—blown to a respectful, socially-distanced mist somewhere off the coast of…
Down Under and Further Down: How Australia vs New Zealand Became the World’s Nicest Blood Feud By Our Correspondent, filing from a press lounge that still smells faintly of burned flat white SYDNEY—Somewhere between the 1,400-kilometre stretch of the Tasman Sea, two of Earth’s most agreeable nations have spent the past century locked in a…
T20 World Cup Dispatch: When Pakistan Meets UAE, and the World Pretends It’s Just Cricket By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the endless Dubai construction cranes and a Karachi heatwave that could melt ball bearings, Pakistan and the UAE are scheduled to face off in a T20 match that the International Cricket Council insists…
Supreme Court, Supreme Leader, Supreme Pizza—somewhere in the bureaucratic ether the word “supreme” has been upgraded from adjective to sovereign noun, and the planet is dutifully genuflecting. From the marble colonnades of Washington to the neon alleyways of Tokyo, “supreme” has become the ultimate linguistic passport: it opens doors, empties wallets, and occasionally topples governments….
The Curious Case of Nik Bonitto, or How a Linebacker Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man at the End of the Bar, Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Somewhere between the 104th meridian west and the Prime Meridian, Nik Bonitto has become an unlikely export—Denver’s 6’3″, 240-pound outside linebacker now haunting the sleep cycles…
BBC iPlayer: The Empire Streams Back By Our Man in the Ether, somewhere between GMT+8 jet-lag and existential dread The British Broadcasting Corporation, once content to beam clipped vowels into crackling short-wave radios from Lagos to Lahore, has quietly reinvented itself as the Netflix your history teacher warned you about. BBC iPlayer—originally pitched in 2007…
Martha Plimpton: The Accidental Global Cassandra If you mention Martha Plimpton at a dinner party in Lagos, Berlin, or Buenos Aires, you are statistically more likely to be met with polite confusion than if you mention “climate change” or “crypto bankruptcy.” Yet the actress-activist—once the snarling teen outlaw of 1980s suburban cinema—has quietly become a…
The Global Joke Index: How One-Liners Are Quietly Steering Geopolitics By Our Correspondent in Perpetual Transit VIENNA—While the rest of the press corps was busy dissecting grainy satellite photos of missile silos last week, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe quietly released a more explosive document: the first-ever Global Joke Index (GJI). The…
The Beautiful Catastrophe: How 22 Millionaires Chasing a Ball Became the Planet’s Last Universal Language By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When the lights go up in Doha, Dortmund, or downtown Dakar, the same curious ritual unfolds: grown adults scream at a sphere while other grown adults scream at screens showing the sphere. From the marble…
Good Morning, World: How “GMA Deals & Steals” Became the Soft Power Bargain Basement of the 21st Century By Henrietta “Hank” Delacroix, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker NEW YORK—While the United Nations Security Council bickers over commas in draft resolutions, a far more efficient form of geopolitics is unfolding at 8:07 a.m. Eastern inside a Times…
Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, Is the Last Global Fairy Tale Standing—And That Should Terrify Us All By Our Correspondent in Self-Imposed Exile from Several Commonwealth Realms Somewhere between the collapse of the British pound and the collapse of British politics lies Catherine, Princess of Wales—still smiling that serene, orthodontically perfect smile while the rest…
The NFL’s Global Roadshow: How One League Exports Helmeted Capitalism to a Bewildered Planet By Dave’s Locker International Desk Every September, while most of the world is busy arguing about energy prices, coups, or the correct pronunciation of “GIF,” roughly 120 million humans from Minsk to Manila suddenly acquire opinions on third-string cornerbacks. The culprit:…
