Solana: The Blockchain That Promised to Cure Everything Except Human Greed By Our Correspondent Who Has Watched Empires Burn Faster Than a Stablecoin Peg ZURICH—While the rest of us were busy panic-buying toilet paper and existential dread in 2020, a small band of San Diego coders quietly christened a new blockchain they claimed could process…
Facebook to Pay $725 Million to Settle a Privacy Suit, Proving Once Again That a Deal with the Devil Is Cheaper Than Therapy By Hugo van der Loon, International Correspondent When news broke that Meta—the artist formerly known as Facebook—will fork over $725 million to settle the long-running Cambridge Analytica privacy debacle, global reaction ranged…
The Great Satellite Bazaar: How Starlink Became the World’s Most Expensive Escape Route While the rest of us were busy arguing about whether 5G causes cancer or Bill Gates puts microchips in vaccines, Elon Musk quietly built a celestial internet provider that’s rapidly becoming the digital equivalent of a Swiss bank account—expensive, exclusive, and incredibly…
The “Crypto Arena” Isn’t a Building—It’s the Planet, and We’re All in the Cheap Seats By our jaded correspondent, still nursing a $4 bottle of stadium water LOS ANGELES, DUBAI, DAKAR—Pick your time zone, the opening whistle already blew. Staples Center may have rebranded itself Crypto.com Arena for a tidy $700 million, but the real…
DONALD TRUMP, DEEPFAKED AND DEEP-FRIED: HOW ONE AI VIDEO UNMASKED PLANET EARTH’S COLLECTIVE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN by Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic The 45-second clip dropped at 3:07 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, which is of course the universal witching hour for questionable life choices. There was the former U.S. president, improbably svelte, wearing a sash…
The iPhone 13 Pro Max: A 240-Gramme Passport to the End of History Bylines from Lagos, Shenzhen, Cupertino, and the back of a tuk-tuk in Phnom Penh Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, seat 42B is scrolling through macro-economic charts on a screen the size of a small paperback. The passenger—French-Malian venture capitalist, dual citizenships, three vaccine…
Warsaw, 03:14 a.m. local—While most of the planet was doom-scrolling inflation graphs or arguing about whether the ocean is actually on fire this week, one modest Polish web portal quietly chalked up its one-billionth click since January. The culprit? “onet pl,” a two-decade-old digital veteran that looks, at first glance, like the internet equivalent of…
Sam Altman: The Accidental Emperor of the Algorithmic Age By our jaded foreign correspondent, still recovering from a blockchain conference hangover GENEVA—If you had asked the world’s diplomats a decade ago which American twentysomething would end up holding a veto over their national sovereignty, they might have muttered “Zuckerberg” between gritted teeth. Yet here we…
Perseverance’s Red-Planet Road Trip: A Global Vanity Mirror in 4K The latest postcard from NASA’s Mars rover—complete with sweeping drone footage and a selfie that would humble any influencer—arrived this week with the usual fanfare: breathless headlines from Houston, congratulatory tweets from Jakarta, and, somewhere in the Kremlin, a stony silence thick enough to slice…
A Pocket-Sized Empire: How the Smartphone Conquered the Planet and Everyone’s Attention Span Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of avocado toast, humanity quietly decided to hand its collective consciousness to a 6-inch slab of Gorilla Glass. The smartphone—once a charming novelty for Finnish executives and Californian geeks—now outnumbers toothbrushes…
Kyoto’s House of Mario Files Blueprints for the Next Global Addiction By Our Man in the Airport Lounge, still sober enough to type TOKYO—While half the planet argues about whose turn it is to save democracy and the other half wonders whether the air will still be breathable by Christmas, Nintendo Co. has been quietly…
Football Manager 2026: The Last Refuge of the Powerless, Now With 17% More Existential Dread By the time you read this, another actual manager has been sacked for the crime of losing two games in a row, and somewhere in a basement flat in Jakarta a 14-year-old has just led Accrington Stanley to the Champions…
