9/11/01: The Day the World Got a New Calendar By the time the second plane hit, foreign newsrooms had already stopped pretending it was an accident. In London, editors watched the feed with the grim satisfaction of people who’d warned the Americans for decades that their skyscrapers were basically vertical bullseyes. In Moscow, vodka glasses…
When a San-Francisco start-up best known for turning human silhouettes into JPEGs decides it’s time to go public, the planet takes notice—whether it wants to or not. Figure AI, the company that’s been teaching robots to fold laundry and smile stiffly like overworked flight attendants, filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO this week, valuing the…
Flight 93: The World’s Most Expensive Civics Lesson, Taught at 30,000 Feet By the time United Airlines Flight 93 nosed into a Pennsylvania field on 11 September 2001, the planet’s collective cortisol level had already red-lined. In London, traders were dumping airline stocks faster than you can say “actuarial nightmare”; Tokyo’s Nikkei was tripping circuit…
**THE CARDINAL SIN OF GLOBALIZATION: HOW A MIDWESTERN BASEBALL TEAM BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST EXPENSIVE EXPORT** *From our international desk, where we’ve learned that America’s pastime is now everyone’s headache* ST. LOUIS—In a world where democracy teeters on the brink and climate change promises to turn your grandchildren into expensive aquarium exhibits, the St. Louis…
**The Global Sweat Chronicles: How Mitchum Became the UN of Underarm Diplomacy** In the grand theater of human civilization, where nuclear treaties crumble like stale croissants and climate accords dissolve faster than a politician’s campaign promises, one unlikely ambassador has emerged from the shadows of our collective anxiety: Mitchum deodorant. Yes, dear readers, while the…
The first thing to understand about baseball standings is that nobody outside the contiguous 48 really cares—except, of course, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Dominicans, the Venezuelans, the Cubans who defected, the Canadians who politely pretend, and the Dutch who somehow snuck into the last World Baseball Classic with a roster of Caribbean passport-holders named…
Wild Card Fever: How a Statistical Footnote Became the Planet’s Favorite Morality Play By Luka Valentić, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you’ve spent the last month doom-scrolling through election tallies, bond yields, and whatever fresh ecological horror is trending on TikTok, you may have missed the quiet rise of the Wild Card Standings—those half-tabulated grids…
Hortman, Minnesota: How a Blink-and-Miss Hamlet Became the Canary in Globalization’s Coal Mine By Our Correspondent, freshly jet-lagged and morally hung-over Dateline: Somewhere between Amsterdam Schiphol and MSP, nursing lukewarm coffee and a creeping sense of futility. The first thing you notice about Hortman—population 212 on a generous census day—is that it doesn’t want to…
TBS News Dig: How a Japanese Cable Channel Accidentally Became the World’s Most Honest Intelligence Service By the time the coffee in Brussels is cold enough to taste the regret, TBS News Dig has already published the internal Kremlin memo, leaked the World Bank’s unpublished inflation forecasts, and live-streamed a closed-door IMF Zoom that still…
Big E: The Letter That Decides Whether Your Pension Buys Noodles or Nothing by Our Man in Geneva, nursing his third espresso and existential dread If you’ve glanced at any financial screen this week, you’ve seen it lurking in the corner like a bouncer who’s already decided you’re not on the list: the Big E….
**Star-Crossed Continents: How Today’s Horoscope Unites a World on the Brink** While NATO ministers debate troop deployments and central banks juggle inflation rates like flaming torches, 1.2 billion people opened their phones this morning to discover Mercury is apparently retrograding through their financial sector. Welcome to the 21st century’s most delicious paradox: we’ve split the…
WARSAW—Somewhere over the Bug River on Tuesday night, an unidentified flying object performed the drone-world equivalent of drunk-dialing an ex: it blundered into Polish airspace, ignored frantic radio calls, and finally face-planted into a forest outside the village of Zamość. Within minutes the Polish military—already jumpier than a cat at a dog show—scrambled F-16s, put…
