NFL Week 4: When the World Pauses to Watch Millionaires in Tights Argue About Yardage By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic If you’ve ever wondered how many diplomats it takes to explain a holding penalty to a bewildered trade attaché from Ulaanbaatar, NFL Week 4 is your answer. While Europe…
Sling: The World’s Most Understated Weapon of Mass Distribution By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk From the marble colonnades of Rome to the fluorescent aisles of a 24-hour Walmart in suburban Manila, the humble sling has spent three millennia perfecting the art of looking harmless while rearranging human geography. Today, it serves coffee in Copenhagen,…
The planet’s most expensive parade has always been a travelling circus, but until recently you had to bribe a local satellite guy, learn three dialects of buffering, or actually buy a ticket to the grandstands just to watch it. Enter F1 TV, Liberty Media’s attempt to let the entire globe mainline carbon-fiber drama straight into…
The Ballad of Duc Phuc: How a Vietnamese Pop Star Accidentally Became the World’s Mood Ring By Dave’s International Desk (still hung-over from last night’s geopolitical karaoke) HANOI—On the face of it, the rise of Nguyễn Đức Phúc—stage name Duc Phuc, a moniker that sounds like a minor Scandinavian deity or an IKEA lamp—should be…
The Bads of Bollywood: A Global Tragedy in Three Acts and a Dance Number By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Mumbai, India — If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a $2.4-billion-a-year dream factory begins to snore loudly in public, look no further than Bollywood. Once the planet’s most reliable export of synchronized pelvic thrusts and family-friendly…
Amazon Video: The Streaming Colonizer Quietly Redrawing the Planet’s Cultural Borders By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between a Co-Working Couch and Existential Despair PARIS—Somewhere on the 17th arrospécial of a Haussmannian walk-up, a Senegalese-French data-scientist is binge-watching “The Boys” instead of finishing the code that might keep Mali’s largest hospital online. In São Paulo’s 3 a.m….
BBC iPlayer: The Last Empire Still Broadcasting in Glorious Standard Definition of British Guilt By the time you read this, iPlayer has already expired on your cousin’s smart fridge in São Paulo. The BBC’s flagship streaming service—once a plucky national catch-up platform—now functions as a sort of 21st-century East India Company, only with more buffering…
The United States has always excelled at exporting two things: weapons-grade optimism and television. USA Network, the plucky cable channel that once promised “Characters Welcome,” is the softer, more insidious sibling of those F-35s—flying under most foreign radars while still reshaping the global skyline. From its birth in 1977 as the Madison Square Garden Sports…
Steve Netflix Is Not a Man—He’s a Metaphor with a Broadband Addiction By our jaded correspondent in the Hotel Bar That Never Closes, Geneva The planet woke up last Monday to discover that “Steve Netflix” was trending in 47 languages, three of which are spoken only by algorithmically generated customer-service avatars. Within hours, #SteveNetflix outranked…
d4vd’s “Update”: A Casual Memo from the End of the World By “International” Dave’s Correspondent, currently hiding in a Lisbon café that still accepts cash Lisbon – If you’ve been doom-scrolling between the COP28 hangover, the slow-motion TikTok ban kabuki in Washington, and whatever fresh horror is trending in the group chat, you may have…
John Ritter, International Man of Collapsible Furniture By “Diplomatic” Dave, Senior Correspondent for Absurdity Abroad BURBANK—Somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant is still explaining to a bewildered Japanese tourist that, no, the man who died on the set of “8 Simple Rules” was not, in fact, the inventor of Zen minimalism. Such is the…
Chief of War Season 2: How One Streaming Series Became the UN’s Favorite Punching Bag By a Correspondent Who’s Spent Too Much Time in Airport Lounges Geneva, 3 a.m.—the hour when diplomats realize the buffet has run out of shrimp and their talking points are as stale as the croissants. That’s precisely when the trailer…
