Somewhere between the Geneva motor show and a Lagos traffic jam, the Apple Watch completed its quiet conquest of the human wrist. Ten years ago it was a curiosity for Californian yoga instructors; today it is the de-facto visa stamp of the global middle class—more recognizable than most passports and twice as judgmental when you…
Dan Orlovsky and the Mirage of American Exceptionalism By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau GENEVA—In a world where Belarusian sprinters defect during live Olympics and French pension reform is decided by tear-gas referendum, the name Dan Orlovsky might seem as globally urgent as the Liechtenstein water polo standings. Yet the former Detroit…
Apple’s share price—those three crisp capital letters that look so tidy on a Bloomberg terminal—has become the planet’s most polite form of geopolitical warfare. From the glass canyons of Shenzhen to the granite lobbies of Frankfurt, the daily flicker of AAPL is now less a measure of gadgets sold than a referendum on who still…
GENEVA—The Apple Watch Series 11 debuted this week, and humanity’s response was as choreographed as a North Korean military parade: half the planet gasped in rapture, the other half Googled how to pawn a kidney in Jakarta. From Berlin’s glass-walled co-working chapels to Lagos traffic jams where the watch costs more than the average annual…
AirPods Pro 3: The World’s Newest Passport to Oblivion By Miles Blackstone, International Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—In the shadow of the Jet d’Eau, where diplomats still argue about carbon ceilings they’ll never meet, Apple quietly slipped another sliver of white plastic into humanity’s collective ear canal. The AirPods Pro 3, unveiled yesterday in a…
Tim Cook: The World’s Nicest Warden of a Very Expensive Panopticon By Our Correspondent in Geneva—where surveillance cameras outnumber fondue forks, yet no one seems to notice. It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one has ever asked, “What does Tim Cook think about the future of humanity?”—yet here we are, hanging on every…
Apple Stock: The World’s Most Expensive Fruit Salad Keeps Getting Pricier By Matteo “Still Uses a 2012 iPod Classic” Rossi PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, a new planetary constant has emerged: Apple’s share price. From Seoul’s neon canyons to São Paulo’s favelas, the Cupertino ticker has become the Esperanto of modern capitalism—a…
San Francisco 49ers Dispatch from the Edge of the World By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 49th roster cut Word out of Santa Clara is that the 49ers have decided what every global empire eventually decides: let’s get younger, cheaper, and hope nobody notices the drop-off in…
Valencia’s Newest Import Isn’t a Siesta—It’s Eder Smic, and the Whole World Just Woke Up By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you’ve spent the past decade assuming Valencia’s chief exports were paella, slow-motion fallas, and the occasional disgruntled footballer, congratulations—you’ve missed the quiet arrival of Eder Smic, the 27-year-old Kosovar-Albanian technologist who landed at Manises…
Liam King, the 29-year-old software engineer from Manchester who spent three consecutive nights on the roof of a burning data centre in Jakarta, has unwittingly become the poster child for what happens when late-stage capitalism meets a heatwave and a looming recession. While CNN hailed him as “the last firewall standing between civilisation and a…
Bad moods have gone global, and the planet is now exporting irritability in 4K resolution. From the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila where operators practice smiling at 3 a.m. to the fog-shrouded cafés of Copenhagen where everyone is still somehow content, humanity has discovered that sulking scales. Moody is no longer a temperament; it is…
Burnham Yard: The Tiny Patch of Rust That Just Taught the World How Not to Die By the time the last Union Pacific freight rumbled out of Burnham Yard last Tuesday, the Denver rail hub had already become an international parable. Not because it was particularly large—at 70 acres it could fit comfortably inside a…
