Dublin to Dubai: How Colin Farrell Accidentally Became the Last Universal Leading Man By the time the private jet carrying Colin Farrell touched down in Riyadh last month—courtesy of a film-festival junket so opulent it could make a Bond villain blush—the planet had already decided what it wanted from him. Not another eyebrow-cocked villain, not…
Geneva, Switzerland – While the World Health Organization debates the next pandemic treaty and the IMF recalibrates the global misery index, there is one metric that quietly unites the planet: the gravitational pull of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s biceps. From Lagos bootleg kiosks to Seoul’s 4DX temples of Dolby Atmos, the man who once wrestled…
Dwayne Johnson and the Globalization of Biceps: How One Man’s Pectorals Became a Soft-Power Asset By the time the sun rose over the Sea of Marmara last week, a Turkish meme account had already Photoshopped Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s face onto the body of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, captioning it “The Father of All Nations—Now With…
Clarence House: A 200-Year-Old London Address the Whole Planet Still Uses as a Mood Ring By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau LONDON—On any given Tuesday, you can watch the global economy twitch by simply loitering outside Clarence House with a decent Wi-Fi signal and a stiff upper lip. The cream-brick pile at…
Billy Lange, an American basketball coach from the Philadelphia suburbs, woke up last Tuesday to discover he had become a geopolitical Rorschach test. Overnight, a grainy clip of Lange’s sideline gesticulations—equal parts interpretive dance and mild seizure—was looped on every continent except Antarctica, which still only streams penguins. In Nairobi sports bars, patrons now toast…
Shivam Dube and the Great Global Hype Recycling Machine By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Arabian Sea In the grand bazaar of 21st-century sport, where attention is the only currency that never devalues, Shivam Dube has become the latest commodity to be shrink-wrapped, bar-coded, and shipped from Chennai to Calgary. At 6’4″ and built like…
Mandy Moore, the former teen-pop apparition turned respected actress, has become an unlikely barometer of planetary anxiety. While she tours talk-show sofas to promote the final season of This Is Us, foreign-policy think tanks in Brussels quietly monitor her interviews for any stray remark about multilateralism. Why? Because if even America’s sweetheart starts fretting aloud…
The World According to Ayesha Curry By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats In the grand, glittering circus of global celebrity, where the clowns are billionaires and the tightrope walkers are influencers in sponsored athleisure, Ayesha Curry has quietly become something more interesting than a mere NBA wife turned lifestyle guru. She has become, without…
Rosie Jones, the British comedian who also happens to have cerebral palsy, has been touring her latest hour “Delicious” from Adelaide to Zurich, proving that the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals can apparently be achieved one dick joke at a time. While diplomats in Geneva continue drafting strongly worded communiqués about inclusion, Jones is out…
Jadeveon Clowney: A One-Man Trade War in Shoulder Pads Bylines from Beijing to Berlin are, for once, writing the same headline—only the currencies differ. In Shanghai, state tabloids translate his name as “the Jade Avalanche,” a moniker that sounds like a Bond villain but is closer to an export commodity: raw American athletic surplus now…
Dubai, Thursday, 04:17 a.m. local—The phrase “UAE vs India” usually conjures a cricket scorecard, but the real match is being played in boardrooms, oil futures pits, and WhatsApp family groups scattered from Sharjah to Silicon Valley. One side fields sovereign wealth funds the size of small nations’ GDPs; the other dispatches humans in roughly the…
Joanne Froggatt and the Global Cottage-Industry of Whispered Trauma By Our Man in a Perpetually Delayed Departure Lounge There is a moment—usually somewhere over the Caspian Sea, when the in-flight map insists you’re still in Europe but the vodka tastes undeniably post-Soviet—when you realise that Joanne Froggatt has become the unofficial patron saint of repressed…
