In a modest apartment in Nairobi, Kevin Mwangi pores over his accounting ledger, wondering how the $30,000 he borrowed from a London-based lender to study data science in Manchester has ballooned into something resembling the GDP of a micronation. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, Mariana Andrade contemplates whether her monthly Brazilian-real payment on a U.S. dollar-denominated…
Atlanta—Delta Air Lines, the self-declared “Keep Climbing” carrier, spent the weekend climbing only as far as the nearest gate agent’s apology podium. Roughly 6,000 flights—give or take a few hundred, because who’s counting when the app already crashed—were scrubbed after a routine software update turned into a transatlantic game of Jenga played with air-traffic control….
If you want a snapshot of late-stage capitalism in fluorescent Lycra, watch the women’s 400 metres. The distance is short enough that the runners still look vaguely human—no skeletal marathon ghosts, no shot-putters shaped like vending machines—yet long enough for national mythmaking to be squeezed into forty-eight breathless seconds. The world record currently stands at…
Neighbours, Nukes, and the Neoliberal Nostalgia of Stefan Dennis By Our Foreign Desk, somewhere over the Pacific Sometime around 1985, while Reagan and Gorbachev were trading pleasantries about mutually assured destruction, an Australian soap opera quietly exported suburban melodrama to 60-odd countries and accidentally turned a Melbourne cul-de-sac into a soft-power superweapon. At the centre…
Publishers Clearing House Files for Bankruptcy, Proving Even the House Can Lose the Sweepstakes By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Physical Mail NEW YORK—The envelope that once promised “You may already be a winner!” has finally delivered its punch line: Publishers Clearing House (PCH) filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware this…
Tropical Storm Gabrielle, the Atlantic’s latest damp squib turned headline darling, has spent the past week doing what every self-respecting weather system does in 2024: politely forming off Cabo Verde, taking a selfie for the National Hurricane Center, and then sauntering north-east like a bored tourist who’s just realized the duty-free shop is closed. While…
The Sundance Kid Rides Again—This Time on a Private Jet By the time the private-jet fumes had cleared over Park City last January, Robert Redford had already ghosted the Sundance Film Festival he founded. Not with a press release—too gauche—but with a quiet exit via side door, the way you leave a party you started…
Windhoek, Tuesday—If you scan the world map for geopolitical fault lines these days, you’ll usually land on places where the tectonic plates of ideology, oil, or unfiltered narcissism rub together. Yet here we are, fixated on a squabble between two nations whose combined GDP is slightly smaller than the annual budget of a mid-tier Swiss…
Publishers Clearing House, that quintessentially American fever dream of mailbox miracles, has quietly metastasized into a global phenomenon. From Lagos to Lahore, the same oversized check—printed in Comic Sans for maximum sincerity—now arrives in WhatsApp forwards, Instagram ads, and those browser tabs you swear you didn’t open. The prize patrol may still wear navy blazers…
**The Swedish Death Metal Diplomat: How Tomas Lindberg Became an Accidental Ambassador for Global Chaos** In a world where traditional diplomacy has devolved into Twitter spats and trade wars, leave it to a Swedish death metal vocalist to accidentally unite continents through the universal language of incomprehensible screaming. Tomas Lindberg—frontman of At the Gates, collector…
Flash Flood Warning: The Planet’s Latest Party Trick By our soaked correspondent, still wringing out the passport GENEVA—Somewhere between the 37th climate summit and the 847th “once-in-a-century” downpour of the decade, the World Meteorological Organization quietly upgraded its vocabulary. “Cloudburst” was deemed too quaint, “inundation” too bureaucratic. The new lingua franca is the blunt, all-caps…
ZURICH—While the rest of us were binge-watching geopolitical reruns (inflation, war, more inflation), the world’s central bankers quietly pushed the global cost of shelter to levels that would make a Zurich landlord blush. Current mortgage rates, once the financial equivalent of elevator music, have become the loudest soundtrack on earth—throbbing from Auckland’s leaky apartments to…
