Geneva—While delegates upstairs at the UN rehearse fresh platitudes about “re-shoring” and “strategic autonomy,” the real action is two floors below in the gift shop. There, a Chinese-made souvenir key-rings its way into existence courtesy of a humming little box the size of a hotel mini-bar: a desktop CNC mill, quietly proving that the apocalypse…
Cruising Altitude, Crashing Expectations: The Global Irony of the Humble “Plane” By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 1,200 commercial aircraft will be aloft, herding 1.5 million souls above weather systems, war zones, and the occasional rogue balloon. From Reykjavík to Riyadh, the aluminum tube—once a miracle, now a flying bus—has become the most…
Monaco, 6:07 p.m. local time. As the chequered flag fluttered like a surrendering white hanky, Max Verstappen crossed the line first and immediately apologised to his engineers for “only” breaking the track record by eight-tenths. Somewhere in the same second, a Nairobi boda-boda rider named Kiptoo beat a city bus by half a wheel, earning…
Micron’s Memory Chips: The Tiny Silicon Hostages Holding the World Economy Together By Our Man in the Global Supply-Chain Trenches If you’ve been watching “MU stock” lately—Micron Technology to its parents, $MU to its Reddit foster kids—you’ve seen the financial equivalent of a caffeine-withdrawn squirrel: up 7 % in Seoul trading, down 5 % in…
Racing Post: The Global Glue Holding Together a Planet That’s Already at Full Gallop By Santiago “Santi” Varga, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker LONDON—On a rain-lashed Tuesday that looks indistinguishable from every other Tuesday since 2019, the Racing Post lands in betting shops from Galway to Guangzhou with the soft thud of recycled promise. To the…
**The Crimson Empire: How Alabama Football Became America’s Most Successful Export Since Fast Food** While the rest of the world obsesses over actual football—the one played with, you know, feet—America has been quietly perfecting its own version of gladiatorial combat. Nowhere is this spectacle more refined than in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the Crimson Tide has…
America Ferrera: The Accidental Geopolitical Weapon Washington Never Budgeted For By Our Correspondent Still Recovering from the Barbie Press Tour If you squint at the 2024 global balance-of-power spreadsheet long enough, you’ll notice a new line item wedged between semiconductor export bans and Taylor Swift’s carbon footprint: America Ferrera. Yes, the same actress who once…
THE STUDIO—OR HOW LOS ANGELES LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE AIRSTRIKE By our man in the bunker, somewhere between Burbank and the Hague It was fitting that the first tweet about The Studio TV Show came from a 15-year-old in Lagos watching on a cracked Android: “Hollywood finally made a war-crime sitcom—10/10 would…
Bloomberg: The Terminal That Runs the World—Or at Least Thinks It Does By the time the sun has crept over the Sea of Marmara, a trader in Istanbul is already jabbing at a keyboard the color of old money, watching yields on 10-year Treasuries twitch like a cat in a thunderstorm. Half a world away,…
CPI Day: When a Bureaucratic Spreadsheet Becomes the Planet’s Pulse Geneva—Somewhere between the 06:30 espresso and the 06:31 coronary, traders in five continents discovered that eggs in Ljubljana are 0.3 % cheaper than last month, a revelation so thrilling it shaved 180 points off the Nikkei before Tokyo even finished its miso soup. Such is…
PARIS—Somewhere between the second encore of “Stonehenge” and the moment Nigel Tufnel tries to coax extra volume from an amp that already goes to eleven, it hits you: This Is Spinal Tap is not merely a 1984 mock-rockumentary about three pasty Brits in perilously tight trousers. It is the Rosetta Stone for every multinational boondoggle…
Manchester, England, has always prided itself on exporting gloom at scale—first via the Smiths’ back catalogue, now via low-pressure systems that circle the globe like grumpy tourists. The city’s latest forecast—steady drizzle, intermittent existential dread, maximum 12 °C—may read like a local shrug, but in a world where the jet stream is drunk-dialling the Arctic,…
