MADRID—Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a bean-bag chair the size of Liechtenstein has just exhaled in relief. Facebook—sorry, Meta—has agreed to pay a modest €1.2 billion (roughly what Mark Zuckerberg spends annually on SPF 50) to settle a European privacy case that began when a law student in Vienna asked, in 2018, “Hey, what exactly do…
Sophie Willan’s Sewing Bee and the End of Empires By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent PARIS—In a dimly lit arrondissement café where the espresso is priced like a Tokyo studio apartment, the television above the bar flickers to life with the unmistakable trill of BBC One. A baker from Bury is trying to sew a corset…
CD Projekt Red quietly slipped patch 2.31 onto the world stage last week, an update so modest it could be mistaken for a minor tax-code revision. Yet from Lagos LAN cafés to Seoul e-sports arenas, the patch has become a Rorschach test for how humanity now copes with disappointment: we keep installing hope, 2.2 GB…
PARIS, 06:07 a.m. CEST—While polite Europeans were still arguing over whose turn it was to buy the croissants, shares of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) were already sliding in New York like a tourist who’s just discovered the metro ticket machines don’t take cash. The stock, which once promised to fuse Hollywood glamour with Discovery’s unembarrassed…
Jason Collins, the 7-foot center who once specialized in setting bruising picks and committing professional fouls, unwittingly became the planet’s most unlikely diplomat on 29 April 2013. When he told Sports Illustrated “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay,” the news ping-ponged across time zones faster than an American drone contract. Overnight,…
Stockton University: A Quaint American Campus Where the World’s Problems Go for a Gap Year By Our Correspondent Who Still Owes the Bursar GALLOWAY, New Jersey—Somewhere between the Pine Barrens and the existential dread of late-stage capitalism sits Stockton University, a 2,000-acre arboretum of contradictions. To the average European it looks like a polite Scandinavian…
A Knife on the Rails: How One Ukrainian Girl’s Murder Became the World’s Latest Morality Play KYIV–PRAGUE–NEW DELHI, 24 May — If you want a snapshot of our collective attention span in 2024, picture this: somewhere between compartment 7 and the dining car, a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl named Darya Kovalenko was fatally stabbed on the…
Dow Futures: The World’s Most Expensive Horoscope, Now in Real Time By A. L. “Lex” Morose, International Correspondent, Somewhere with Terrible Wi-Fi They say the sun never sets on the British Empire; these days it merely rotates through time zones of sleepless traders watching the Dow Jones futures flicker like a cardiac monitor for late-stage…
Facebook’s Billion-Dollar “Oops” Reaches Every Corner of the Globe—Except, Predictably, Your Wallet By the time the sun rose over Silicon Valley, the legal settlement had already been translated into 43 languages, forwarded by 12 million WhatsApp aunts, and memed by teenagers from Lagos to Lahore who will never see a cent. Meta’s $725 million privacy-violation…
It is a truth universally acknowledged—by hedge-fund analysts in Singapore, crypto bros in Miami, and the guy who sells knock-off scarves outside the Waldstadion—that when Eintracht Frankfurt hosts Real Madrid, the planet tilts two degrees toward Europe’s financial black hole. On the surface it’s merely the second leg of a Champions League quarter-final, but down…
Migrant Visa Bonfire: The World Learns to Do Without Its Invisible Workforce By Our Man in the Departure Lounge LONDON—Governments from Ottawa to Canberra have spent the past fortnight cancelling migrant-worker licences with the gusto of teenagers deleting browser history. The stated reason? “Protecting domestic jobs.” The subtext? “Please forget we ever clapped for these…
Fairview High School, USA – Population 1,400, hormones 2.8 million – is, on paper, a perfectly ordinary American public school squatting at the edge of a mid-size Colorado suburb. Zoom out, however, and it becomes the unwitting laboratory for every planetary experiment currently keeping Davos delegates awake at night. Climate anxiety? Check. Algorithmic surveillance? Double…
