Kevin Durant: The 7-Foot Export the World Never Put on a Customs Form By our Bureau of Trans-Pacific Existentialism PARIS—Somewhere between the 14-hour layover in Doha and the security line at Charles de Gaulle that smells faintly of Gauloises and regret, Kevin Durant has become less a basketball player and more a walking, scoring trade…
Michael Palin: The Diplomat We Forgot We Needed by Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent-at-Large In an age when most global “statesmen” can’t get through a press conference without threatening to glass someone on Twitter, it is instructive to remember that one of Britain’s most effective cultural ambassadors remains the man who once attempted to purchase a…
Garth Brooks and the Global Soft-Power Hat Trick By the Foreign Correspondent Who Once Saw a Kyrgyz Wedding DJ Spin “Friends in Low Places” at 3 a.m., Straight-Faced In the grand, teetering circus of American cultural imperialism, Garth Brooks is the unassuming juggler who managed to turn a ten-gallon Stetson into planetary headgear. From the…
Marvel Rivals Season 4: The Planet-Wide Pacifier That Keeps Us From Inhaling Each Other By Our Correspondent, currently hiding in a neutral airport lounge Geneva—While the UN Security Council spent the week arguing over whose turn it is to veto sunlight, 42 million humans in 194 countries did something far more constructive: they logged on…
Ryan Seacrest and the Manufacture of Global Ambivalence By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, at 2:14 a.m. GMT, Ryan Seacrest is probably smiling. Not because he’s awake—he is, thanks to a proprietary blend of cold brew and contractual obligation—but because that smile has become a sort of soft-power export, like corn subsidies or…
In the pantheon of American dynastic surnames, “Kraft” evokes a very particular aroma: not cheese, but the unmistakable scent of money marinated in NFL glory. Josh Kraft—yes, the middle son of Patriots emperor Robert Kraft—has spent most of his 58 years orbiting a football empire the way lesser mortals orbit Wi-Fi. From Lagos boardrooms to…
Matthew Golden: The Quarterback Who Makes NATO Look Underfunded By Henrietta “Hank” Voss, Senior Foreign Correspondent ZURICH—Somewhere between the Alps and yet another Davos coffee bar that charges in Swiss francs what most nations spend on vaccines, Matthew Golden is busy redefining the word “projection.” Not the psychological kind—though anyone who’s watched game film of…
NFL Tonight: The Empire’s Colosseum Goes Global, Again By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Tonight, as another autumn Monday unfolds beneath floodlights and corporate banners, the National Football League will once again beam its three-hour melodrama into 180 countries. From a tin-roofed bar in Lagos where generators cough like dying camels, to a sleek Tokyo bachelor…
Romeo Doubs and the Global Art of Suspended Disbelief By Special Correspondent, Somewhere over the Pacific In the grand geopolitical telenovela we all pretend is “normal life,” the most consequential act of the past week was not the BRICS summit, the latest crypto-currency implosion, or even the surprise merger of two shipping cartels that will…
The Accidental Geopolitics of Panna Udvardy Or How a 24-Year-Old Hungarian with a Two-Handed Backhand Became a Soft-Power Weapon in a World That’s Already on Fire By the time Panna Udvardy hoisted the Bogotá Open trophy last April, most of the northern hemisphere was busy doom-scrolling through grainy satellite pictures of a stalled 40-mile Russian…
In the grand geopolitical chessboard, where Beijing buys ports like children collect trading cards and Silicon Valley titans trade privacy for market share, one must look to Amherst, Massachusetts, to understand how the empire really sustains itself—through parking tickets, artisanal ramen, and a quiet, almost British refusal to acknowledge anything unpleasant. The University of Massachusetts…
The Curious Case of Saiyaara: How a Mid-Budget Pakistani Road Movie Quietly Became a Global Mood Ring By the time Saiyaara slipped onto Netflix’s “Because You Watched” ghetto last March, most of us were already doom-scrolling through our third currency collapse of the week. A modest Urdu-language caper about two mismatched truckers hauling contraband antibiotics…
