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…
Affleck, the Accidental Geopolitician: How One Bostonian Became the UN’s Unwilling Rorschach Test It began, like most modern tragedies, on a red carpet: Ben Affleck—actor, director, tabloid chew-toy, and, improbably, global policy Rorschach—stood outside the Venice Film Festival in 2023 wearing a face that looked like it had just read the IMF’s latest outlook. The…
Tre Harris and the Great Global Redistribution of Hope By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you haven’t yet heard of Tre Harris, congratulations—you still possess the blissful ignorance that 7.9 billion other people lost somewhere between the third TikTok remix and the seventeenth think-piece. Harris, a 20-year-old wide receiver out of Mississippi State, has spent…
Keegan-Michael Key and the Export-Grade Laugh Track: How One Detroit Kid Became a Geopolitical Asset Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the United States stumbled on a novel soft-power strategy: weaponize its funniest biracial Midwesterner and ship him abroad with a grin sharp enough to slice trade tariffs….
Quentin Johnston’s Name Travels Faster Than a Diplomatic Cable—And That’s the Problem By the time you read this, Quentin Johnston—wide receiver, Los Angeles Chargers, owner of a 4.3-second 40-yard dash—has already been misfiled by at least three foreign ministries as a new Pacific micro-nation. Somewhere in Brussels, a junior attaché is drafting a memo titled…
