Cape Verde vs. Cameroon: A Tiny Archipelago Punches Up, a Continental Heavyweight Stumbles, and the World Watches with Popcorn By the time the final whistle blew in Yaoundé, the scoreboard said 1-1, but the ledger of global meaning told a more entertaining story: David had just bloodied Goliath’s nose with a borrowed sling, and Goliath—never…
Burger King Japan’s announcement that it will serve a ¥2,000 (US $15) “Wagyu King” burger landed in my inbox while I was watching grainy footage of Sudanese refugees queueing for sorghum. The juxtaposition was almost too perfect: one civilization reduced to boiled grain, another racing to stuff the planet’s most pampered cow between two sesame-seed…
Estonia vs Andorra: Two Tiny Nations, One Giant Mirror to the World’s Midlife Crisis Tallinn and Andorra la Vella sit 2,600 kilometers apart, but in the grand geopolitical waiting room they might as well be sharing the same cracked vinyl couch. One is a post-Soviet start-up that discovered capitalism the way a teenager discovers espresso—wide-eyed,…
Baku to Kyiv: Two Wars, One Playbook, Zero Refunds By Our Man Who’s Stopped Expecting Miracles If the planet were a casino, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe would be those smoky back tables where the house always wins and the players keep doubling down on losing hands. This week, while the world’s attention swung like…
Ouagadougou’s Stade du 4 Août, 10 p.m. local time, and the mercury is still flirting with 38°C. The turf looks like it’s been blow-dried by a Saharan hair-dryer, which is fitting: everything about Burkina Faso vs Egypt these days feels like a slow-motion tumbleweed of geopolitical slapstick. On paper it’s a football qualifier—2026 World Cup,…
Kinshasa and Dakar are not, to the casual eye, obvious rivals. One is a humid sprawl of eight million souls perched on the Congo River, where traffic lights are decorative suggestions and power cuts arrive with Swiss punctuality. The other is a breezy Atlantic capital where the ocean smells of fish, hip-hop, and the faint…
**Earth to Athens: When the Cradle of Civilization Rocks and Rolls** The earth moved in Athens this week, and for once it wasn’t because of another austerity protest. A 5.2 magnitude earthquake rattled Greece’s capital, sending residents fleeing into the streets and reminding everyone that while democracy may have been born here, Mother Nature remains…
2026 Lexus IS: A Luxury Sedan for the End Times (or at Least the Next Recession) By Our Correspondent Somewhere between the Duty-Free and the Apocalypse Let us begin with a universal truth: every nation believes its traffic is the worst. From Jakarta’s scooter tsunamis to Los Angeles’ parking-lot freeways, drivers worldwide cling to the…
Armenia vs. Ireland: The Friendly That Wasn’t—A Global Post-Mortem on a Football Match Nobody Wanted to Win DUBLIN—On a damp Tuesday evening in the Aviva Stadium, the Republic of Ireland and Armenia played out a 1-1 draw so gloriously mediocre that UEFA briefly considered awarding both teams negative points. The match was billed as a…
NEWS FROM THE NUMBERS COALFACE 10-Year Treasury Yield: A Moody Barometer for a World That Can’t Decide If It’s Dying or Just Napping SINGAPORE—Every morning, somewhere between the first espresso and the last muttered curse at Bloomberg, traders around the planet glance at one figure the way medieval sailors once checked the North Star: the…
Yerevan to Dublin: Two Nations, One Shared Talent for Existential Despair By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, still nursing a suspiciously metallic in-flight coffee The world’s attention—what little remains after the latest celebrity asteroid scare—has pivoted to a football qualifier that sounds less like a fixture and more like the set-up to an Ionesco…
Nigeria vs South Africa: A Fever-Pitch Rivalry That Outshines Your Netflix Queue The world’s attention has once again pivoted to the patch of Earth that cartographers once labelled “sub-Saharan” but marketing teams now call “Africa’s Growth Belt.” This week, Lagos and Johannesburg are locked in the sort of contest that makes Eurovision look like a…
