**Andreessen Horowitz: The Venture Capital Empire That’s Quietly Reshaping Your Digital Future (Whether You Like It or Not)** In a world where billionaires casually purchase social media platforms for fun and your grandmother now asks about cryptocurrency at Sunday dinner, one venture capital firm has mastered the art of being everywhere while remaining largely invisible…
The Champs-Élysées, Paris’s 1.9-kilometre runway of limestone and delusion, has always been less a street than a global stage—equal parts catwalk, battlefield, and cash register. On any given day you can watch a Japanese honeymooner pose with a baguette she’ll never eat, a Gulf-state prince queue for a €12 macaron, and a Parisian waiter perfect…
Damon Dash, once the cigar-chomping co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records, has become an unlikely Rorschach test for late-stage capitalism: to Wall Street he’s a cautionary tale, to Lagos hustlers he’s a patron saint of bootstrap bravado, and to European bankruptcy courts he’s simply file number 17-10456. From his old loft in Tribeca to the chat rooms…
FC 26 Web App: The Quietest Global Border-Crossing Since the Black Death, Now With Pack Odds By the time the first wave of commuters in Lagos have finished bargaining with their bus conductors over 20-naira change, the FC 26 Web App has already logged 1.3 million log-ins from five continents. By the time the Tokyo…
Susie Ma, the London-born skincare tycoon whose surname translates to “horse” in Mandarin, has galloped so far ahead of the pack that even the global beauty industry—an arena not known for modesty—has started clearing its throat and pretending it always believed in her. From a one-woman stall at Greenwich Market hawking £6 sugar scrubs to…
A Needle in the Global Haystack: How One Weekly Jab Became the Planet’s Hottest Status Symbol GENEVA—The newest weapon in humanity’s eternal war against its own waistline isn’t a dusty treadmill or a kale smoothie, but a humble pen-shaped syringe filled with something called semaglutide. Marketed as Wegovy in the United States, Ozempic everywhere else,…
The last time a Romanian woman made global headlines for racket work, it involved a certain Dracula and a wooden stake. This week it’s Jaqueline Cristian—no fangs, just a forehand that slices through hope like an IMF austerity package. While most of the planet was doom-scrolling about submarine implosions and the price of eggs, Cristian…
**When the World’s Largest Economy Forgets to Pay the Electric Bill** *By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen This Movie Before* America, that shining city upon a hill, occasionally likes to switch off its own lights just to remind everyone it’s still the main character. While the rest of the planet scrambles to keep the fluorescent bulbs…
The International Republic of Dolly Parton: How a Rhinestone-Studded Appalachian Soprano Became the UN Secretary-General We Never Had By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Gstaad and Dollywood Somewhere on the autobahn between Berlin and Bratislava, a Syrian refugee-turned-taxi-driver keeps a photo of Dolly Parton taped to his sun visor, right next to the mandatory EU fire-extinguisher….
Alibaba’s ticker—BABA—has spent the last few years doing the financial equivalent of a trust-fall exercise on a glacier: everyone knows the drop is coming, yet the crowd still gasps when the ice finally cracks. From Wall Street to Wangfujing, from Zürich pension funds to Jakarta ride-hailing drivers who’ve turned their scooters into mini trading desks,…
Week 3 Quarterback Rankings: A Geopolitical Power Struggle Played Out in Pads and Play-Action By Henrietta “Hank” Mortensen, Senior Globe-Trotting Cynic, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk GENEVA — While the United Nations busies itself drafting strongly-worded letters about things no one will read, the planet’s real soft-power summit is already underway in NFL stadium parking lots…
**Love in the Time of Existential Dread: How The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Finale Became Humanity’s Collective Therapy Session** While the Northern Hemisphere collectively sweated through another record-breaking summer and the Southern Hemisphere braced for what climate scientists euphemistically call “interesting times,” millions of humans sought refuge in the ultimate first-world coping mechanism: watching attractive…
