The Super Mario Galaxy Movie: A Cosmic Distraction From a Planet in Free-Fall By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still dazed from economy-class turbulence and the existential variety Hollywood—If you squint past the mushroom-shaped confetti drifting over the Dolby Theatre, you can almost pretend the screaming outside is just another marketing stunt. Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy…
The United Kingdom’s state pension—an institution so venerable it predates sliced bread, penicillin, and the concept of human dignity at airport security—has become the latest exhibit in humanity’s ongoing museum of “How Did We Not See This Coming?” From a safe distance (say, a beach bar in Bali or a Tokyo co-working pod), the saga…
By the time the rest of the planet had finished arguing about whether babies should be delivered by TikTok-influenced doulas or by drones with midwifery certificates, the United Kingdom quietly reminded everyone that it still runs the grandest, crankiest, and most overstretched maternity apparatus in the Western world: the NHS maternity hospital network. Imagine a…
The Fed Waves a Red Flag and Calls It a Victory Parade By Helena de la Cruz, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Washington, D.C. – If you listen very carefully at 2 a.m. in Singapore, you can almost hear the champagne corks popping inside the Eccles Building. The Federal Reserve has, at long last, delivered the…
London, England – Somewhere between a rain-soaked betting shop in Manchester and a diplomatic cable marked “Urgent” in Abu Dhabi, ninety-two numbered balls tumbled around a perspex drum like anxious hamsters auditioning for Shakespeare. The occasion was the FA Cup Fourth-Round draw, an event the English still call “quaint tradition” and the rest of the…
Margot Robbie’s Dress: A Silk-Soaked Barometer of Global Collapse By our roving correspondent, who once filed from a war zone in flip-flops and now covers couture with the same grim resolve. GENEVA—When Margot Robbie stepped out in a candy-pink, 1990s Chanel homage at the London premiere of Barbie, the world’s collective gasp registered on seismographs…
**The Persian Gulf’s Quiet Rivalry: UAE and Oman’s Polite Cold War** While the world obsesses over flashier conflicts—nuclear saber-rattling, Twitter coups, and whatever Elon Musk did this week—two neighbors on the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula are waging a war so subtle it could be mistaken for a mutual-admiration society. The United Arab Emirates…
Hims & Hers Health, ticker HIMS, is having the sort of month most CEOs would sell a kidney for—though in this case the company would probably ship you a discreet packet of finasteride, a branded band-aid, and a pep-talk push notification for good measure. Shares have quadrupled since October, a rally so vertical that even…
**The Atyr Stock Phenomenon: When Kazakh Oil Money Meets Global Capitalism’s Fever Dream** In the grand casino of global finance, where fortunes rise and fall faster than a dictator’s approval ratings, Atyr stock has emerged as the latest contestant in humanity’s ongoing game of “Who Wants to Be a Petroleum Millionaire?” The Kazakh oil company,…
Lois Boisson: The Global Thirst Nobody Asked For PARIS—Every morning, somewhere between the Place de la République and the Boulevard Périphérique, a refrigerated tanker the color of a bruised sky rumbles past the homeless encampments and the €9 flat-white brigade. Inside is the newest French export that absolutely no one requested: Lois Boisson, a sparkling,…
London—A city that once convinced half the planet that fog was romantic and rationing was patriotic—has now managed to export a new marvel: the idea that water itself can be a speculative asset class. Thames Water, the private monopoly sloshing through 15 million British bathtubs, is circling the drain so elegantly that financiers from Sydney…
M62 Traffic: The World’s Longest, Most Expensive Parking Lot and What It Says About Civilisation By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, filing from somewhere between Leeds and irrelevance Tonight, somewhere in West Yorkshire, a Latvian lorry driver named Igors is eating cold pierogi out of a thermos while stationary on the M62. His artic is carrying…
