Alphabet’s share price—ticker GOOGL—has been waltzing across trading screens like a tipsy diplomat at a UN reception: one moment bowing to regulators, the next pirouetting on AI headlines, never quite spilling the drink. To most retail investors from Jakarta to Johannesburg, the stock is simply “the Google thing,” a proxy bet on humanity’s incurable need…
Somewhere above the North Atlantic, a Boeing 787 is banking left in a holding pattern because the airline just realized it’s short one rivet certified for 0.0003 millimeters of tolerance. Down on the ground, the same missing rivet is making traders in London, Tokyo, and São Paulo twitch like overcaffeinated meerkats. Welcome to the global…
The Curious Case of Paul Ovenden: How One Man’s Mid-Life Crisis Became a Global Parable By Our Correspondent, still recovering from the last press-trip “per diem” LONDON—If you blinked last week you probably missed the latest entry in the catalogue of Anglo-Saxon males who confuse LinkedIn with a therapy couch. Meet Paul Ovenden, 47, former…
Dubai, 6 March – Somewhere between the opulent skyscrapers of the UAE and the 24-hour news cycle that still pretends to care about associate-nation cricket, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka played what the ICC politely calls an “official T20I.” The rest of the planet, busy doom-scrolling about inflation or the latest palace intrigue in Washington,…
Global Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker – Somewhere between a Berlin co-working loft and a Jakarta food-court Wi-Fi hotspot If the Cold War was fought with missiles and manifestos, the TikTok War is being fought with lip-syncs and lo-fi filter presets. From the marble lobbies of Brussels to the humid back rooms of Manila’s influencer incubators,…
Hurricanes Without Passports: A Forecast for the World’s Favorite Punchline By Santiago “Santi” Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker MIAMI—Every June, the Atlantic basin opens its annual box of chocolates and, true to form, half of them are filled with hot sauce and glass shards. This year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the bureaucratic oracle we…
Walmart Stock Surges, Planet Slightly Winces By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS—While European ministers argue over olive-oil subsidies and Chinese brokers refresh their screens for the next Evergrande shoe to drop, America’s favorite fluorescent temple to bulk mayonnaise has quietly ascended to new stock-price altitudes. Walmart (NYSE: WMT) closed Friday at an all-time…
**The Great GPU Gold Rush: How CoreWeave Became Wall Street’s Favorite Casino Chip** In a world where cryptocurrency exchanges implode faster than you can say “regulatory oversight” and AI startups promise to revolutionize everything from your morning coffee to your existential dread, CoreWeave has emerged as the latest contestant in humanity’s ongoing game of “Who…
Mushroom Kingdom Goes Multilateral: How a Plumber in Space Became the UN’s Accidental Mascot By our man in low-Earth orbit, still waiting for the Wi-Fi to catch up GENEVA—The lights dimmed, the orchestra struck up a Koji Kondo medley, and for 124 minutes last week the 78th International Film Festival surrendered its customary velvet melancholy…
Quantum Computing, Imperial Ambitions, and the Curious Case of QBTS Stock By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Cash PARIS—On any given afternoon along the Boulevard Saint-Germain you can overhear hedge-fund tourists explaining quantum superposition to their mistresses between sips of €9 espresso. The object of their breathless pedagogy is usually QBTS, the…
Roberto Clemente: The Caribbean Saint the World Keeps Mispronouncing By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk On the night of December 31, 1972, a DC-7 cargo plane sputtered over the Atlantic like a drunk tourist who’s just discovered rum is cheaper than water in Puerto Rico. Somewhere between San Juan and Managua, the aircraft—loaded with earthquake…
Hypertension: The World’s Quietest Arms Race by R. J. Valente, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—While diplomats trade barbs over missile trajectories in Eastern Europe, a far stealthier escalation is taking place inside every third adult on the planet. Hypertension—blood pressure high enough to power a small espresso machine—now affects 1.28 billion people, according to the…
