Doha, Qatar – In the marble-veined lobby of the Sheraton Grand, a life-size cardboard cut-out of Donald J. Trump still guards the concierge desk, a relic from the 2016 U.S. election night party where Qatari elites drank €300 bottles of champagne while cheering a man who had, only months earlier, suggested the tiny Gulf monarchy…
Joby Aviation—ticker JOBY, for those who still think stock symbols are secret handshakes rather than lottery scratchers—has spent the past week flapping around global markets like a drunken albatross on Red Bull. The California-based maker of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is, depending on whom you ask, either the Uber of the stratosphere…
Somewhere in a fluorescent-lit room that smells faintly of instant noodles and existential dread, a 23-year-old in Lagos is scalping the euro-yen while a dentist in São Paulo quietly hedges his daughter’s braces against a surprise NFP print. Their shared altar: Forex Factory, the digital coliseum where 1.7 million monthly pilgrims gather to watch the…
Melinda French Gates and the Polite Execution of a Philanthropic Empire By Our Correspondent, somewhere between Seattle and the Swiss tax-haven of your choosing GENEVA—If you happened to be sipping an overpriced espresso at the UN Palais last week, you could almost hear the global-development sector exhale in relief: Melinda French Gates finally filed the…
Nintendo Direct: The Planet Holds Its Breath While a Japanese Toymaker Reboots Our Collective Delusion By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Kyoto, 6 a.m. local time: salarymen stumble off night trains clutching convenience-store coffee, commuters queue for bullet-train platforms, and a small island nation quietly steers the attention span of eight billion people. Elsewhere, the…
Spotify Lossless: Because Your Existential Dread Now Deserves 24-Bit Clarity By Dave’s Locker International Desk COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between a NATO summit and a climate-crisis brunch, the world’s most influential music streamer finally admitted what every audiophile from Lagos to Lisbon has muttered since 2015: yes, compressed audio is the sonic equivalent of drinking boxed wine at…
When Xavier Gipson, a 22-year-old undrafted receiver from Stephen F. Austin, took the opening kickoff of overtime 65 yards to the house against the Buffalo Bills last September, the planet did not wobble on its axis. The Amazon rainforest did not burst into spontaneous applause, and no Swiss banker adjusted his ledger. Yet in that…
Stephen Curry, the 6-foot-2 human highlight reel from Akron-by-way-of-Davidson, has spent the last decade turning the world’s most American pastime into a kind of transnational cult—and he did it by weaponizing geometry like a bored teenager with a protractor and a grudge. While other superstars sold sneakers, Curry sold parabolas: rainbow arcs that travel farther…
Lossless Spotify: When the Planet Burns, but at Least the Cymbals Sparkle By Dave’s International Bureau of First-World Problems ZURICH—In a world where the Arctic is auditioning for a slush-puppy commercial and democracy comes with optional subtitles, Spotify has finally rolled out lossless audio to 180 countries. The feature—marketed as “HiFi” because “We Found Another…
The planet has, at long last, received the cosmic equivalent of a “save the date” card: Avengers: Doomsday is officially penciled in for May 2026. Naturally, the announcement did not arrive via diplomatic cable or UN press release, but via a carefully choreographed livestream from the Sanctum Sanctorum of Brand Synergy—Disney’s Investor Day—where Robert Downey…
The Summer I Turned Pretty, Episode 10: A Dispatch from the End of the Empire’s Beach Towel By Dave’s Locker’s Senior Correspondent for Soft Power and Coastal Melodrama Geneva, 03:14 a.m. local time—while COP delegates in Bonn argue over half-degree Celsius increments and the Indian monsoon politely drowns another election cycle, the true geopolitical fault…
Tunis—population 2.7 million, median age 32, SPF factor “wishful thinking”—sits on the Mediterranean like a cynical postcard: azure sea on one side, sub-Saharan migration routes on the other, and a constitution that’s been rewritten so often it qualifies as performance art. To the wider world, Tunisia’s capital is either the place where the Arab Spring…
