McDonald’s Monopoly: How a French Fry Bribe Became a Global Morality Play By Dave’s Locker International Desk From Manila to Manchester, the same ritual unfolds every autumn: otherwise rational citizens queue for lukewarm nuggets in the hope that the paper sleeve will cough up a Boardwalk sticker and finance their escape from late-stage capitalism. Welcome…
In the grand bazaar of twenty-first-century capitalism, where every human impulse is priced, packaged, and resold at a 400-percent markup, Ticketmaster stands as a cathedral of exquisite disappointment. From São Paulo to Seoul, Dublin to Dubai, the same ritual unfolds: credit-card numbers are tendered like votive offerings, CAPTCHA boxes are genuflected before, and, in the…
Qatar Airways: The World’s Nicest Way to Ignore Geopolitics at 35,000 Feet Doha—Somewhere above the Persian Gulf, the cabin lights dim to a shade called “midnight indigo” and a flight attendant glides down the aisle offering warm almonds as if they were tiny, salted apologies for the last half-century of regional turbulence. Qatar Airways, the…
IKEA’s Gustaf Westman: How a Swedish Flat-Packer Became the Unlikely Geopolitical Punch-Line By our correspondent, still recovering from a 17-hour layover in a terminal that smelled of meatballs and regret Stockholm—While the rest of us were busy panic-buying tinned beans and wondering which hemisphere would catch fire next, IKEA quietly appointed Gustaf Westman—yes, that Westman,…
Global Money Launderettes: How Investment Companies Became the World’s Favorite Laundromat There’s a moment, usually around 3 a.m. in Singapore, when a senior compliance officer at BlackRock—or one of its 73 look-alikes—scrolls through a client’s “Environmental, Social, Governance” questionnaire and discovers the biggest shareholder is a Cayman-registered shell whose only asset is a Panamanian tugboat….
The Crane That Shrank: Lufthansa’s Global Glide from Flag-Carrier to Flagellant By Our Correspondent, Somewhere above the North Atlantic with a plastic cup of “Château de Terminal” There was a time—ask anyone who still clutches a battered Senator card like a rosary—when Lufthansa’s stylized crane suggested something almost mythic: an airborne Teutonic phoenix, immaculately on…
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…
Paddy Power: How a Bookmaker from the Emerald Isle Accidentally Became a Global Barometer of Late-Stage Capitalism By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Thursday DUBLIN—If the world were a casino, Paddy Power would be the loudest, most unapologetic croupier, forever shouting the odds on everything from the next pope to the precise shade of…
Panama: Where the World Goes to Park Its Dirty Laundry By Santiago “Santi” Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The first thing you notice when you land in Panama City is how aggressively new everything looks. Skyscrapers erupt like chrome mushrooms after a rainstorm of offshore cash. The second thing you notice is that half the…
THE LAST SUPPER BEFORE CHAPTER 11: RED LOBSTER SINKS WHILE THE WORLD WATCHES WITH BUTTERED POPCORN By the time the news crawled across my phone at 3 a.m. in a rainswept Istanbul hostel, Red Lobster had already filed for Chapter 11 from the comfort of Orlando—city of theme-park miracles and, apparently, seafood insolvency. Let us…
COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between the hygge glow of a Danish bodega and the neon anxiety of a 24-hour Bloomberg terminal, NBIS stock (Nordic Blockchain Infrastructure Services A/S) has become the world’s favorite new punch line about how we never actually learn. The Copenhagen-based firm, whose logo looks suspiciously like a QR code having a mid-life crisis, claims…
SYDNEY—If you squint at the skyline long enough, you can almost see the Murdoch empire’s shadow lengthening across three oceans, a Rorschach blot of satellites, tabloids, and streaming pixels. At the blot’s center stands Lachlan Murdoch: heir, enigma, and—depending on which brunch table you pollute—either the last lion tamer of legacy media or the trust-fund…
