Is Taylor Swift Pregnant? An Entire Planet Holds Its Breath While Rome (and Everywhere Else) Burns PARIS—Somewhere between the latest IPCC report and the IMF’s warning that global debt is now larger than Jupiter, the question “Is Taylor Swift pregnant?” has vaulted past war, famine, and the price of eggs to become the single most…
BFI London Film Festival: One More Glittering Mirage in the Wreckage of the World By our man in the press pen, nursing a lukewarm prosecco and existential dread. London, mid-October—when the Thames smells faintly of diesel and the last of the empire’s optimism is auctioned off in NFT form—rolls out its annual crimson carpet for…
Vinny Dingle Goes Global: How a Yorkshire Lad’s Misery Became the Internet’s Only Universal Currency By Our Man in Doha, Still Recovering from Episode 5,742 There are only three things the entire planet can still agree on: the price of diesel is a scam, every national anthem sounds better in a minor key, and Emmerdale’s…
Helen Skelton: The Last True Brit Standing (and Dancing) While the World Burns From a safe distance—say, a bar in Lisbon where the Wi-Fi is stronger than the espresso—one can watch the curious spectacle of Britain exporting its most durable cultural product: the relentlessly upbeat television presenter who refuses to be cancelled by reality. Enter…
SEOUL—Somewhere between the DMZ’s razor wire and Gangnam’s Botox, the 2024 Korea Open unfolded this week like a geopolitical fever dream sponsored by a credit-card conglomerate that promises “borderless rewards.” Tennis balls flew, K-pop idols waved from corporate suites, and delegates from 47 countries pretended not to notice that the stadium Wi-Fi still routes through…
Gal Gadot: The Accidental Geopolitician in Spandex By Dave’s Locker International Desk There’s a moment in every global crisis when the world, exhausted by its own incompetence, decides to outsource its moral compass to a celebrity. In 2020 that moment arrived wearing a satin robe and singing “Imagine” off-key from marble-countered kitchens. The robe belonged…
Ant Anstead and the Global Decline of the Hand-Built Dream By Lila Moreau, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you’ve opened any streaming platform in the last decade you’ve probably seen Ant Anstead, the British mechanic-poet who restores vintage metal while wearing the kind of tight T-shirt that makes viewers briefly forget the planet is on…
Ellen DeGeneres and the Global Collapse of the Nice-Industrial Complex By our correspondent, still scrubbing glitter off the passport There was a moment—brief, like the lifespan of a housefly in August—when Ellen DeGeneres was the planet’s designated goodwill ambassador. From Lagos to Lapland, schoolchildren learned the verb “to Ellen,” meaning to dance yourself dizzy in…
CBeebies: The Soft-Power Kindergarten That Conquered the Planet By Dave’s International Affairs Desk In the great geopolitical nursery rhyme, CBeebies is the pastel-colored Trojan horse you never saw coming. Produced by the BBC and beamed into 100-plus territories from Lagos to Lapland, the channel is technically aimed at humans who still think “property rights” means…
Paul Mescal and the Great Global Yearning for Earnestness By “Hemlock” O’Donnell, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large DUBLIN—If you stand at the corner of Dame Street and George’s Street at 2:13 a.m., when the kebab grease is still warm and the seagulls have unionised, you can almost hear the planet sigh with relief that Paul Mescal exists. The…
Tom Hardy: The Last Action Figure Standing Between Us and Global Thermonuclear Boredom From the smoking rubble of what used to be called “cinema,” one man emerges wearing three layers of knitwear, a Bane mask repurposed as a tea-cozy, and the weary expression of someone who has just realized the Doomsday Clock is running on…
Lily James and the Global Factory of Want PARIS—While the Seine continues to cough up Olympic debris like a hung-over river god, delegates at the nearby UNESCO summit are locked in a far weightier debate: the planetary export of English Rose nostalgia. Exhibit A sits on a velvet stool in a Montmartre hotel lobby, politely…
