Tomorrow London voters will cast their ballots for mayor, and it looks like incumbent Boris Johnson is a fairly sure bet to be reelected. "Boris," our Emma Garman wrote back in December, "has achieved the hallowed celebrity niche of single-name recognition via a lethal combination of gold-plated charisma and an unshakable belief in his native exemption from the conventions—social, professional, legal, personal—to which everyone else must conform." Learn more about him here.

A series dedicated to explaining Britain's manufactured celebrities to an American audience.

Of the various cultural metrics used by future historians to define our current, turbulent era—the remarkable epidemic of citizen protests, imploding free market capitalism, the dominance of the single-camera sitcom, America’s strange obsession with why some lady with bangs might not get married like she totes always thought she would—among the most significant will surely be the cult of personality’s global decline. Castro has finally hung up his beret, Gaddafi’s been unceremoniously bumped off, and Russian voters have signaled their disenchantment with Vladimir Putin's Stalinist ubiquity. As for Obama, has any leader ever slid quite so precipitously [...]