Sam Thompson and the Curious Case of the Planet-Sized Personality Dave’s Locker International Desk – Monday, 09:14 GMT Somewhere between a Tokyo bullet-train bar car and a Lagos rooftop speakeasy, the name “Sam Thompson” is being whispered with the same nervy reverence usually reserved for crypto moguls who haven’t yet been indicted. Who, exactly, is…
Louise Minchin: How One Woman’s 3:40 a.m. Wake-Up Call Echoes from Kyiv to Caracas By our correspondent, still jet-lagged in Terminal 2 In the grand geopolitical casino, where chips are measured in oil pipelines and rare-earth minerals, Louise Minchin’s decision to step off the BBC Breakfast sofa last autumn might look like spare change sliding…
INEOS: How a Quiet Chemical Empire Became the World’s Loudest Sponsor of Everything ZURICH — Somewhere between the Rhine and the Clyde, INEOS has managed to turn industrial solvents into soft-power superglue. The conglomerate—founded in 1998 by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a man who reportedly keeps a Gulfstream G650 for weekdays and another for weekends—now sponsors…
Qatar Airways: The World’s Nicest Way to Ignore Geopolitics at 35,000 Feet Doha—Somewhere above the Persian Gulf, the cabin lights dim to a shade called “midnight indigo” and a flight attendant glides down the aisle offering warm almonds as if they were tiny, salted apologies for the last half-century of regional turbulence. Qatar Airways, the…
Omaha, Nebraska—population 486,051, or roughly the same number of people who will claim today to have “always loved” whatever K-pop band just broke Spotify—woke up yesterday to discover its weather behaving like a geopolitical superpower with abandonment issues. One moment, the city was basking in an unseasonable 21 °C (70 °F) springtime flirtation; the next,…
RAW in the Streets: How Monday Night’s Spandex Diplomacy Travels the Globe By the time the first guitar riff hits in São Paulo, the toast is already burning in Lagos, and a bleary-eyed accountant in Mumbai is wondering why his VPN just died. WWE Raw, that weekly three-hour carnival of suplexes and soap opera, has…
Juwan Johnson and the Cheerful Apocalypse of the Global Touchdown By Our Man in the End-Zone, filing from a bar with suspiciously sticky floors in Paris It is 3:17 a.m. Central European Time when Juwan Johnson, 6’4″ and technically a New Orleans Saint, hauls in his seventh touchdown catch of the season somewhere above the…
IKEA’s Gustaf Westman: How a Swedish Flat-Packer Became the Unlikely Geopolitical Punch-Line By our correspondent, still recovering from a 17-hour layover in a terminal that smelled of meatballs and regret Stockholm—While the rest of us were busy panic-buying tinned beans and wondering which hemisphere would catch fire next, IKEA quietly appointed Gustaf Westman—yes, that Westman,…
The Curious Afterlife of Robert Howard on a Planet That Keeps Reinventing Barbarism By Our Special Correspondent in the Global Cynics’ Lounge Let us begin with a confession: typing “Robert Howard” into any search engine is like tossing a flaming skull into a barrel of cultural gasoline. Half the planet thinks you mean the Texan…
Drive, the noun, not the verb, has become the planet’s most over-caffeinated export. Every continent now manufactures its own boutique strain—Silicon Valley’s jittery hustle, Shenzhen’s 996 martyr complex, Lagos’ “hustle culture” with matching Spotify playlist, Berlin’s ironic start-up sloganeering delivered over oat-milk flat whites. We are, all seven point nine billion of us, trapped in…
The London Film Festival kicked off last week under the usual autumn drizzle, which felt almost too on-the-nose: a grey sky weeping politely over a city that has perfected the art of pretending everything is fine. Inside the red-carpet bubble, however, the planet’s creative class was busy congratulating itself for surviving another year of algorithmic…
London, that damp and overpriced island capital, is once again pretending the planet orbits Leicester Square. The 67th BFI London Film Festival (or LFF to the acronym-obsessed) has rolled out its red carpet—this year woven from equal parts recycled polyester and Brexit anxiety—inviting the world to queue politely and pretend the weather is “atmospheric.” From…
