Desmond Watson and the 400-Pound Shadow He Casts Over the World By: “Lucky” Luca Bianchi, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the manicured fairways of Florida and the fluorescent-lit war rooms of NFL analytics departments, Desmond Watson—Florida State’s 6-foot-5, 410-pound freshman defensive tackle—has become a planetary event. Seismographs in Reykjavik registered a tremor when he…
Jerome Powell took the virtual podium today, and every time zone from Tokyo to Tierra del Fuego leaned in like anxious relatives eavesdropping on the will-reading. The Fed Chair’s semi-annual testimony before Congress is traditionally a Washington ritual, but in 2024 it feels more like a planetary seance: traders in Singapore, pension funds in Oslo,…
From Manila to Manchester, the same little green-and-yellow icon now glows on 90 million phones like a tiny, pixelated promise that tomorrow’s rent can be tripled by a last-minute VAR decision. Welcome to the Church of bet365, the Stoke-on-Trent outfit that has quietly become the Vatican of 24-hour dopamine—a parish whose confessionals are live-chat windows…
The Last Line That Wasn’t Encrypted International dispatch from the Department of Schadenfreude By the time you finish this sentence, three presidential bodyguards in three different time zones will have whispered the same six-digit code into the same brand of Chinese-manufactured earpiece. The code is supposed to change every 12 hours. It doesn’t. Somewhere between…
Sharia Law: The Planet’s Most Misunderstood Legal System Tours the Globe By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between the Duty-Free and the Departure Gate If jurisprudence were pop music, Sharia would be the aging rock star who still fills stadiums decades after the critics declared him washed-up. From the marble courthouses of Aceh…
Hussain Talat: The Unlikely Diplomat Carrying Pakistan’s Cricket Bat onto the World Stage By the time most of us have had our second espresso, Hussain Talat has already been praised, vilified, forgotten, and resurrected on three different continents. Such is the modern fate of a Pakistani all-rounder whose career arc resembles less a tidy sine…
Zurich—At 3:47 a.m. local time, while most Europeans were dreaming about cheaper gas bills or the return of decent olives, SoundHound AI’s stock ticker SOUN sneezed on the Nasdaq and triggered a domino fit that ricocheted from Singaporean quant desks to a pension fund in Reykjavík. One hedge-fund manager in Geneva later confessed he woke…
Trump, Kim, and the Art of the Nuclear Handshake A field report from the Department of Diminishing Returns There are moments when the planet holds its breath, and there are moments—rarer still—when it exhales in a collective snort of derision. The latest Trump–Kim episode falls squarely into the second category. From Singapore to Hanoi, and…
The Ballad of Mauricio Fernández: How One Man’s Death Sentence Became the World’s Favourite Morality Play By the time Mauricio Fernández Garza’s name trended in Lagos, London, and (for reasons still debated) Reykjavík, he had already been declared terminally ill by a Mexican public prosecutor, resurrected by a skeptical press corps, and immortalised by Twitter…
Lululemon’s Yoga Pants Are Now a Geopolitical Flashpoint *How a Canadian athleisure label became a proxy in the great U.S.–China decoupling—and why your downward dog might soon require a customs form.* PARIS—There are, broadly speaking, two ways to interpret Lululemon’s ticker (LULU) touching a fresh all-time high last week. The optimistic take is that a…
From the Antipodes to the Abyss: Sandy Brondello’s Quiet Reign Over Global Women’s Hoops By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There’s a special flavor of irony in the fact that the most influential Australian in world sport right now is a soft-spoken coach who still sounds like she’s ordering a flat white even when she’s drawing…
When the United States started firing $1,400 digital confetti poppers directly into citizens’ bank accounts last month, the rest of the planet simultaneously felt two things: envy for the free money and schadenfreude for the circus that preceded it. From Berlin to Bogotá, heads of state—most of whom would sell a kidney for the privilege…
