Tim Cook: The World’s Nicest Warden of a Very Expensive Panopticon By Our Correspondent in Geneva—where surveillance cameras outnumber fondue forks, yet no one seems to notice. It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one has ever asked, “What does Tim Cook think about the future of humanity?”—yet here we are, hanging on every…
Apple Stock: The World’s Most Expensive Fruit Salad Keeps Getting Pricier By Matteo “Still Uses a 2012 iPod Classic” Rossi PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, a new planetary constant has emerged: Apple’s share price. From Seoul’s neon canyons to São Paulo’s favelas, the Cupertino ticker has become the Esperanto of modern capitalism—a…
San Francisco 49ers Dispatch from the Edge of the World By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 49th roster cut Word out of Santa Clara is that the 49ers have decided what every global empire eventually decides: let’s get younger, cheaper, and hope nobody notices the drop-off in…
Valencia’s Newest Import Isn’t a Siesta—It’s Eder Smic, and the Whole World Just Woke Up By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you’ve spent the past decade assuming Valencia’s chief exports were paella, slow-motion fallas, and the occasional disgruntled footballer, congratulations—you’ve missed the quiet arrival of Eder Smic, the 27-year-old Kosovar-Albanian technologist who landed at Manises…
Liam King, the 29-year-old software engineer from Manchester who spent three consecutive nights on the roof of a burning data centre in Jakarta, has unwittingly become the poster child for what happens when late-stage capitalism meets a heatwave and a looming recession. While CNN hailed him as “the last firewall standing between civilisation and a…
Bad moods have gone global, and the planet is now exporting irritability in 4K resolution. From the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila where operators practice smiling at 3 a.m. to the fog-shrouded cafés of Copenhagen where everyone is still somehow content, humanity has discovered that sulking scales. Moody is no longer a temperament; it is…
Burnham Yard: The Tiny Patch of Rust That Just Taught the World How Not to Die By the time the last Union Pacific freight rumbled out of Burnham Yard last Tuesday, the Denver rail hub had already become an international parable. Not because it was particularly large—at 70 acres it could fit comfortably inside a…
If you tilt the globe toward West Africa and squint past the usual headlines of pipeline fires and missing oil revenues, you can almost make out a green-and-white blur sprinting down the touchline. That blur is Nigeria FC—not a formal club, mind you, but the national football team rebranded by the internet into a sort…
The Global Kindergarten: How the World Outsources Its Toddlers and Calls It Progress From Reykjavík to Rio, a silent consensus has formed: the most valuable mineral of the 21st century is not lithium but a qualified grown-up willing to watch someone else’s offspring for less than the price of a Manhattan martini. Welcome to the…
Domenico Tedesco and the Beautiful, Broken Game: A Dispatch from the Edge of Europa We meet Mr. Tedesco in the only place that still makes sense—mid-table, mid-crisis, mid-pandemic hangover—where the Belgian national team has just handed him the keys to what optimists call a “golden generation” and pessimists call “eleven millionaires in matching deodorant adverts.”…
Dow Jones: The World’s Most Expensive Mood Ring By Dave’s Locker’s Chief Correspondent, somewhere between an airport lounge and existential dread The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened Tuesday like a hung-over aristocrat—wobbly, entitled, but still convinced the planet should curtsy. Thirty-odd American companies, stitched together into a single numerical shrug, managed to send tremors from…
In the grand theater of international relations, where every handshake is a potential dagger and every pipeline a geopolitical jugular, the sudden romance between Azerbaijan and Ukraine is less a love story than a mutually beneficial hostage situation. One country sits atop enough oil to make a Saudi prince blush, while the other has become…
