Global Village, Local Whistle: How BBC Football Became the World’s Accidental Diplomat by Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between Wembley and the End of Civilisation The first thing you learn while jet-lagged in a Dakar airport lounge is that the BBC’s football coverage is more reliable than the departure boards. A grainy stream…
Latest Scores: Humanity 2 – 98, Gravity 1 – The Planet’s Weekly Tally By the time you finish this sentence, the global scoreboard will already be obsolete—such is the break-neck velocity of our modern misery index. Still, for the sake of tradition (and because editors still pretend readers enjoy tidy ledes), here are the freshest…
Flashscore: The Global Addiction Nobody Talked About At Davos By Dimitri Valenzuela, Senior Correspondent-at-Large There’s a quiet pandemic spreading faster than the last one (and arguably with fewer masks). It isn’t carried by bats, lab leaks, or rogue influencers. It’s called Flashscore, a pocket-sized dopamine IV drip that has turned every human with a smartphone…
Football Today: A 90-Minute Distraction From the Collapse of Civilisation, Now Streaming Worldwide Somewhere between the Arctic ice shelf and the latest cryptocurrency meltdown, 22 millionaires are kicking a $200 ball across a grass rectangle while the rest of us pretend this is still a rational use of planetary resources. Welcome to football in 2024,…
York County, Pennsylvania: The World’s Quietest Geopolitical Fault-Line By Otto “Oblivion” Kessler, Senior Correspondent for Post-Industrial Melancholy YORK, Pennsylvania—There are places on the planet where history lands like a meteor—Berlin, Kyiv, Gaza—and places where it seeps in like cheap linoleum glue, never quite drying. Welcome to York County, a 911-square-mile shrug between Philadelphia and the…
Andy Robertson: The Last Honest Scotsman Running Full-Tilt at Global Capitalism’s Windshield By Dave’s International Desk, still nursing a diplomatic hangover from COP29 If you stand on Calton Hill at 4 a.m. and listen hard, you can almost hear the collective grinding of teeth in boardrooms from Shenzhen to Silicon Valley. The sound is produced…
The Glorious Global Panic of Livescore: Humanity’s Last Collective Reflex by Marco “Doomscrolling” Valenti, International Correspondent-at-Large The alert pings while you’re pretending to work in a Berlin co-working space. In Lagos, it buzzes in the pocket of a boda-boda rider dodging traffic like Frogger on payday. Somewhere in São Paulo, a trader watches the same…
ETH Price: The World’s Favorite Schrödinger’s Asset By Our Correspondent in an Undisclosed Jurisdiction ZURICH—It’s 3:17 a.m. local time, which means every time zone currently awake is either trading, doom-scrolling, or pretending to be above both. Somewhere between a Swiss private bank’s subterranean server farm and a Manila internet café that smells of instant noodles…
Tokyo’s salarymen, Lagos’s side-hustlers, and Frankfurt’s fund managers all woke up this week to the same notification: XRP is on another tear—or tumble, depending on which timezone you happen to be doom-scrolling in. At 06:14 UTC the token flickered 5 % higher, then slid 7 % by the time Jakarta’s mosques issued the second call…
Rahul Chopra, a name that sounds like a polite cough in a Mumbai elevator, has quietly become the poster child for a very 2024 kind of global panic: the fear that your résumé might one day read “CEO, My Own Life, until the algorithm noticed.” Last month the 31-year-old data scientist was escorted out of…
Gold: The Only Thing That Glitters When Everything Else Burns By A. Correspondent, filing from three time zones and still jet-lagged ZURICH—At 9:17 a.m. local time, the electronic board above the UBS bullion desk flashed USD 2,073.42/oz. A collective sigh rippled through the room, equal parts relief and existential dread. For the rest of the…
The question “What channel is the Champions League on?” sounds innocent enough—like asking where one might find a decent cup of coffee in a new city. Yet behind that query lies the entire architecture of 21st-century soft power, geopolitical sausage-making, and the quiet surrender of human attention to whichever media conglomerate has shoveled the most…
