Danielle Fishel and the Miraculous Export of American Nostalgia By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large In the grand bazaar of global pop culture, where K-dramas elbow Turkish telenovelas for shelf space and Nigerian Afrobeats drowns out yesterday’s Latin pop, one compact unit of 1990s Americana continues to punch improbably above its weight: Danielle Fishel, forever Topanga, the…
Mark Ballas and the Global Ballet of Manufactured Fame By R. S. Mortensen, Dave’s Locker International Bureau On any given Tuesday, while Sri Lanka’s tea prices wobble like a drunk tourist in Galle, and German factory orders shrink faster than a TikTok attention span, a 37-year-old man in Los Angeles rehearses a cha-cha in shoes…
**SALT LAKE CITY, WE HAVE A PROBLEM: The Global Fallout When Mormon Wives Go Off-Script** The international diplomatic community has weathered its share of crises—wars, famines, that unfortunate incident with the Australian Prime Minister and the raw onion. But nothing quite prepared the global village for the seismic tremors emanating from Utah, where a cadre…
Bruno Tonioli: The Last Global Diplomat We Didn’t Know We Needed By Our Man in Perpetual Transit Somewhere between the collapse of multilateral trade talks and the moment a former U.S. president tried to trademark the word “freedom,” Bruno Tonioli pirouetted onto the world stage like a sequined neutron bomb—small, glittering, and impossible to ignore….
The Pennsylvania Lottery—PA Lottery to the locals—has quietly become a case study in how even earnest, middle-American gambling can reverberate from Lagos to London. On the surface it’s the same old heart-warming fairy-tale: scratch-offs that fund senior-citizen prescriptions, televised drawings presided over by a grinning host who looks like he teaches middle-school civics on the…
Corey Feldman, International Man of Mystery and Allegation, Tours the Globe Like a Pop-Up Ad You Can’t Close By Dave’s Locker’s Resident Globetrotter with a Hangover The name Corey Feldman still triggers a very specific generational wince: a two-step of nostalgia and second-hand embarrassment that travels faster than any passport stamp. In 2024, Feldman isn’t…
Dylan Efron: The Accidental Globalist No One Ordered but Everyone Received By our correspondent in a hotel bar where the Wi-Fi is stronger than the gin In the grand, indifferent casino of global celebrity, some chips are placed deliberately—your Beyoncés, your Kims, your Messis—while others tumble in by sheer centrifugal force of someone else’s fame….
The Mouse That Roared in 4K: How Disney+ Conquered the World One Toddler at a Time SÃO PAULO—At 2:17 a.m., while most of this city’s favelas slept under flickering streetlights, nine-year-old Júlia was wide awake, clutching a cracked Android and humming “Let It Go” in Portuguese with the fervor of a Cold-War radio operator. Somewhere…
Brittney Griner and the Art of the Hostage-for-Oligarch Swap By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Sheremetyevo Duty-Free When the news broke that the 6-foot-9 Phoenix Mercury center had been marched off to a penal colony outside Moscow for the crime of packing 0.7 grams of hashish oil, the planet reacted with the collective gasp…
Passport to Purgatory: Why Your “Nationality” Is the World’s Most Expensive Participation Trophy By Santiago V. Black, roving correspondent for Dave’s Locker, presently marooned in Terminal 3 If the planet were a nightclub, nationality would be the velvet-rope policy—arbitrary, mood-dependent, and enforced by bouncers who’ve never read the dress code. One queue snakes toward free-trade…
Volleyball, the sport most often confused with an elaborate excuse to wear knee-pads, has found an improbable geopolitical epicenter in Lincoln, Nebraska—a city whose previous claim to global fame was inventing Kool-Aid. Yet inside the Devaney Center, 92,003 spectators recently set a world record for watching women slap a synthetic sphere back and forth, eclipsing…
Sir Alex Ferguson: The Last Emperor of an Empire That Wasn’t Even His By our man in the cheap seats, watching from a safe diplomatic distance There is a moment—usually just after the third glass of something brown and Scottish—when foreign correspondents admit that the most durable empire of the late 20th century was not…
