Karoline Leavitt and the Great American Time Warp By our correspondent in the corner booth of a 24-hour diner that still serves hope with a side of fries If you squint hard enough at the White House briefing podium, you can almost see the curvature of history bending backwards. There stands Karoline Leavitt—press secretary, Gen-Z…
The Curious Case of Sébastien Lecornu: Europe’s Defense Wunderkind and the Art of Looking Busy While the World Burns By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the grand, slightly mildewed ballroom of European politics, where every minister arrives with a rehearsed sound bite and a half-eaten canapé, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu has managed the…
TV Guide, International Edition: The Remote-Controlled Decline of Civilization By the time you read this, 6.2 billion people—give or take the population of Luxembourg—will be clutching a remote control like it’s the One Ring. The humble TV guide, once a stapled pamphlet that doubled as a coaster and emergency fly-swatter, has metastasized into a global…
Edinburgh, Tuesday night, and a chill wind sweeps across Tynecastle Park carrying the faint smell of North Sea regret and deep-fried existential dread. On the pitch, Scotland’s Under-21s—an optimistic contradiction in terms—are doing their level best to convince 16,000 rain-soaked souls that the future is bright, or at least brighter than the present. Across the…
Serbia vs England: A Balkan-Westminster Cage Match for the Age of Digital Panic By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Belgrade–Heathrow Corridor Let us dispense with the polite fiction that a football match is merely twenty-two millionaires chasing bladder control issues across manicured grass. When Serbia and England collide—whether on a pitch in Gelsenkirchen or…
Hungary vs Portugal: The Quiet Balkanization of European Soft Power Bylines from the Danube to the Tagus, by someone who’s run out of passport pages and patience On the surface, the latest diplomatic joust between Budapest and Lisbon looks like a spat about EU recovery funds, some footnotes on judicial independence, and an energetic argument…
Somewhere between the Geneva motor show and a Lagos traffic jam, the Apple Watch completed its quiet conquest of the human wrist. Ten years ago it was a curiosity for Californian yoga instructors; today it is the de-facto visa stamp of the global middle class—more recognizable than most passports and twice as judgmental when you…
Trackhouse: The Racing Team That Took American Stock Cars on a World Tour and Won’t Apologize for It By “Globetrotting” Gregor Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a Miami nightclub and a Seoul karaoke bar, Trackhouse Racing decided that the best way to make NASCAR relevant again was to treat it like an indie…
Dan Orlovsky and the Mirage of American Exceptionalism By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau GENEVA—In a world where Belarusian sprinters defect during live Olympics and French pension reform is decided by tear-gas referendum, the name Dan Orlovsky might seem as globally urgent as the Liechtenstein water polo standings. Yet the former Detroit…
Apple’s share price—those three crisp capital letters that look so tidy on a Bloomberg terminal—has become the planet’s most polite form of geopolitical warfare. From the glass canyons of Shenzhen to the granite lobbies of Frankfurt, the daily flicker of AAPL is now less a measure of gadgets sold than a referendum on who still…
GENEVA—The Apple Watch Series 11 debuted this week, and humanity’s response was as choreographed as a North Korean military parade: half the planet gasped in rapture, the other half Googled how to pawn a kidney in Jakarta. From Berlin’s glass-walled co-working chapels to Lagos traffic jams where the watch costs more than the average annual…
AirPods Pro 3: The World’s Newest Passport to Oblivion By Miles Blackstone, International Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—In the shadow of the Jet d’Eau, where diplomats still argue about carbon ceilings they’ll never meet, Apple quietly slipped another sliver of white plastic into humanity’s collective ear canal. The AirPods Pro 3, unveiled yesterday in a…
