Colin Firth: The Last Englishman the World Still Pretends to Admire By Elias Moreau, Senior Continental Correspondent PARIS—Every few years the planet’s streaming algorithms decide we need another reminder that Britain once ruled the waves by giving Colin Firth a new costume and a tragic backstory. From Delhi duplexes to São Paulo sublets, subtitles flicker…
David Giuntoli: The Accidental Diplomat America Never Knew It Needed By Matteo “Gravedigger” Rossi, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic If the 21st century has taught us anything, it’s that soft power now arrives in the form of streaming thumbnails. Somewhere between NATO communiqués and whatever passes for a UN cease-fire these days, a 43-year-old…
CANNAVALE, THE ACCIDENTAL DIPLOMAT: HOW ONE BROOKLYN-BORN ACTOR BECAME A GLOBAL TROJAN HORSE By the time Bobby Cannavale walked the red carpet at Cannes for the second time, diplomats from three continents were quietly asking the same question: how did a loud-mouthed kid from Union Street become the soft-power equivalent of a trade deal? It…
The American Football Coach, the Global Catharsis, and the Collapsing Empire We All Pretend to Ignore By “Still Employed” Correspondent, filed from a Copenhagen hotel that still charges for Wi-Fi Ted Lasso, the fictional Kansas-born optimist who once coached Wichita State to a middling bowl game and now ministers to fictional AFC Richmond, has become…
The Mandalorian and Grogu: A Galactic Refugee Crisis We Can All Pretend to Care About DAVOS, Switzerland—While the planet’s assembled elites sip champagne and congratulate themselves on “building back better,” a small green child and his heavily armed foster father have quietly become the most successful export the United States has managed since democracy.exe stopped…
Sterling K. Brown: The Global Export Nobody Knew They Needed By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent PARIS — Somewhere in the Marais, a Senegalese cabbie is watching This Is Us reruns on Canal+, wiping his eyes at 3 a.m. because Randall Pearson has just reminded him of the cousin he hasn’t hugged since Dakar’s airport ran…
The Ballad of Conan Gray, or How a Texan Teen Became the Planet’s Shared Diary By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent In the same week that the Arctic Council admitted it can no longer find the Arctic and the IMF downgraded global growth to “eh, whatever,” Conan Lee Gray—age twenty-five going on eternal adolescence—released “Found Heaven,”…
