The Pacific’s latest mood swing—Hurricane Kiko, a name that sounds more like a trendy Tokyo café than a Category-4 air punch—skimmed past Hawaii this week with the polite indifference of a tourist who realizes the luau is overpriced. From Sydney to São Paulo, the collective global reaction was a shrug that registered on seismographs: another…
**Balkans Roulette: Why the World Still Keeps One Nervous Eye on Serbia** BELGRADE—Walk the length of Knez Mihailova on any given afternoon and you’ll witness the full, glorious contradiction that is modern Serbia: teenagers in Supreme hoodies filming TikToks against 19th-century facades, pensioners feeding pigeons next to a Nike store, and—if you linger long enough—some…
Daniel Craig, Wake Up Dead Man: A Requiem for the World’s Last Action Hero By L. Marchetti, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—Somewhere above the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a billboard the size of Liechtenstein shows Daniel Craig in a tuxedo, eyes narrowed like a man who’s just read the room and found it catastrophically understocked with martinis….
Renee Rapp, the North-Carolina-born soprano with a voice sharp enough to slice NATO red tape, has become an unlikely export commodity—one that even the most protectionist regimes haven’t bothered to tariff. From Berlin basement clubs to Seoul karaoke booths, her vocal runs are now traded like cultural cryptocurrency, a soft-power asset whose market cap rises…
The Accidental Ambulance Chasers: How Injury Attorneys Became the World’s Dark Tourists of Disaster By the time the ambulance arrives in São Paulo, the WhatsApp group titled “Global Slip-and-Fall Avengers” has already exchanged 47 voice notes in four languages, two memes comparing the pavement to Swiss cheese, and one GIF of a lawyer diving into…
**The Global Phenomenon of Amanda Holden: Britain’s Export of Manufactured Celebrity** In the grand theater of international fame, where nations compete to produce their most marketable cultural ambassadors, Britain has gifted the world Amanda Holden—a woman whose career trajectory suggests that perseverance, strategic positioning, and the ability to cry on cue during televised talent shows…
Carlos Acosta, the Cuban bullet in tights who pirouetted out of a crumbling Havana housing block and onto the gilded stages of Europe, is now the man the Royal Ballet quietly hopes will save classical dance from TikTok. That’s a tall order for anyone, let alone a 51-year-old whose knees once belonged to the gods…
If you type “Russian” into a search bar in 2024, the autocomplete suggestions read like a fever dream: “Russian oil price cap,” “Russian war crimes,” “Russian salad dressing – still safe?” Somewhere between the sanctions and the dill, the word itself has become a geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see tells the world exactly where…
Ozzy’s Lullaby Goes Global: How Four Brummies from the Black Country Accidentally Invented the Soundtrack to Modern Dystopia By the time the first distorted chord of “Black Sabbath” crawled out of Tony Iommi’s amputated fingertips in 1970, the planet was already busy rehearsing its own apocalypse. Vietnam was on television nightly, the Cold War had…
Auckland, Wednesday – Somewhere in the Pacific, two sheep-shackled nations are squaring off again like estranged siblings arguing over who forgot to return the family boomerang. To the rest of the planet, the New Zealand vs Australia rivalry is a quaint sideshow—cute accents, excellent coffee, and the faint possibility that one of them might actually…
Adam Driver and the Global Cult of the Unlikely Leading Man By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently self-exiled in a Reykjavik basement) PARIS—Somewhere between a NATO summit and the collapse of the third streaming platform this week, the planet decided its most bankable export is a 6-foot-3 former Marine with the gait of an irritated…
The planet has always been a messy chessboard, but lately it feels as though someone upended the pieces, set the board on fire, and then demanded we keep playing. From the Black Sea to the South China Sea, from the Sahel to the Amazon, the refrain is the same: one battle after another, each marketed…
