Deebo Samuel, or How a South Carolinian With a Villain’s Nickname Became Every Continent’s Favorite Glitch in the Matrix By the time you read this, Deebo Samuel has probably already been traded—again—inside the collective delirium we call the NFL offseason. One moment he’s a 49er, the next he’s rumored to be packing for Kansas City,…
Global Suds Scandal: Hand Soap Recall 2025 Makes the World Rinse and Repeat GENEVA—In a plot twist that would make even the most hardened epidemiologist wince, the World Health Organization announced this week that approximately 2.7 billion bottles of “Ultra-Germ-Blaster 3000” hand soap—marketed in 147 countries under 42 different patriotic labels—contain trace amounts of a…
Prime Video: A Global Streaming Empire Where Even Your Grandmother’s Telenovelas Are Now Data Points By Our Jaded Correspondent in the Cloud In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was “binge.” Then Amazon whispered, “Let there be Prime,” and lo, 200-odd countries discovered that their Friday nights could be reduced to a…
ARCA Menards Series: Today’s Oval Ballet in the Shadow of a Burning Planet By Our Man in the Paddock, filing from somewhere with spotty Wi-Fi and existential dread If you squint past the exhaust haze at Toledo Speedway this afternoon, you can almost pretend the ARCA Menards Series race is the most important thing happening…
Matthew Golden: The Quarterback Who Makes NATO Look Underfunded By Henrietta “Hank” Voss, Senior Foreign Correspondent ZURICH—Somewhere between the Alps and yet another Davos coffee bar that charges in Swiss francs what most nations spend on vaccines, Matthew Golden is busy redefining the word “projection.” Not the psychological kind—though anyone who’s watched game film of…
NFL Tonight: The Empire’s Colosseum Goes Global, Again By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Tonight, as another autumn Monday unfolds beneath floodlights and corporate banners, the National Football League will once again beam its three-hour melodrama into 180 countries. From a tin-roofed bar in Lagos where generators cough like dying camels, to a sleek Tokyo bachelor…
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale – A Requiem for Empire, Served with Tea and Schadenfreude By Our Man in the Cosmopolitan Wreckage So the bells have tolled at last for the Crawleys, and the final credits of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale have rolled over a lingering shot of Highclere Castle at sunset, looking every…
Romeo Doubs and the Global Art of Suspended Disbelief By Special Correspondent, Somewhere over the Pacific In the grand geopolitical telenovela we all pretend is “normal life,” the most consequential act of the past week was not the BRICS summit, the latest crypto-currency implosion, or even the surprise merger of two shipping cartels that will…
Veronika Kudermetova and the Beautiful, Pointless Resilience of the Tour By Dave’s Locker Global Sports Correspondent Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, halfway between a Dubai duty-free lounge and the next time zone she must pretend to inhabit, Veronika Kudermetova is probably trying to remember what month it is. Not that it matters; the WTA calendar…
The world’s attention, never especially reliable, has momentarily swivelled away from melting ice caps and crypto-billionaires launching themselves into low-orbit ego trips to focus on a more modest spectacle: NC State versus Wake Forest, a football game whose geopolitical reach is roughly equivalent to a well-aimed paper aeroplane landing in the neighbour’s koi pond. Still,…
Redmond’s Golden Goose Goes Global: Why the World Quietly Roots for MSFT to Keep Printing Money By Matteo “Machiavelli with Wi-Fi” Delacroix In a small, fluorescent-lit office somewhere in Nairobi, an IT intern named Amina is patching a hospital’s Windows fleet before the next ransomware wave arrives. In São Paulo, a fintech founder who just…
ZETEO: THE GLOBAL SEARCH FOR MEANING, OR HOW TO SELL THE VOID AT $9.99 A MONTH By Davide Locatelli, International Desk, from an airport lounge that still smells of 2019 The word “zeteo” drifted out of classical Greek like a half-remembered dream and has since been repurposed, trademarked, and monetized on every continent except Antarctica—where,…
