The Global Hustle of Renting a Set of Wheels By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently hiding the fuel receipt from accounting In the beginning there was the wheel, and it was good. Then someone invented the surcharge, and the wheel required collision coverage, a credit-card imprint, and a 45-minute queue at Antalya Airport. Welcome, weary traveler,…
**The Breezy Bowl Revolution: How Humanity’s Latest Bathroom Innovation Became a Geopolitical Powder Keg** In the grand theater of human progress, where we’ve split atoms, sequenced genomes, and convinced ourselves that cryptocurrency is a good idea, we now arrive at our crowning achievement: the Breezy Bowl. This $399 “intelligent air-drying toilet seat” promises to liberate…
Global Kraft-Up: When the World’s Favourite Emergency Meal Tries to Kill Us All Geneva—While diplomats at the Palais des Nations argue over carbon ceilings and the precise shade of beige that constitutes a war crime, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a worldwide recall of certain boxed macaroni and cheese products after discovering…
The Golden Arches’ Trojan Horse: How a Cardboard Box Became the Most Effective Soft-Power Tool Since the Marshall Plan By the time the Tokyo McDonald’s in Harajuku handed out its first Pikachu Happy Meal in 1998, the Pokémon toy was already worth more on the secondary market than the yen itself. That, dear reader, is…
Victoria Beckham: Globalization’s Loudest Whisper in a Pair of £900 Flats By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere Over the Duty-Free Abyss It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a Spice-Girl past and a footballer husband must be in want of a fashion empire. Enter Victoria Beckham, the woman who…
iPhone 17 Pre-Orders: Earth Holds Breath While Wallets Tremble By our global correspondent, still recovering from the last keynote-induced hangover The planet’s tectonic plates may grind along at a stately eight centimeters a year, but the real seismic shift this week comes from Cupertino, where the iPhone 17 pre-order window opened with all the subtlety…
Paris, 07:33 CEST — Somewhere between the Seine and the seventh arrondissement’s last surviving boulangerie, a queue of bleary-eyed exchange students has formed. Their phones glow with the same three words in seventeen languages: “free croissant pizza Papa Johns.” It sounds like an avant-garde haiku dreamed up by an algorithm on a sugar crash, yet…
McDonald’s Near Me: A Dispatch from the United Caliphate of the Golden Arches By Our Man in Anywhere, Earth Type “McDonald’s near me” from a rooftop in Cairo, a rain-soaked tram in Glasgow, or the back of a tuk-tuk weaving through Jakarta’s diesel dusk and the same cartographic genie appears—pin-dropping a promise of identical salt,…
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…
**The Wagyu Whopper: How Burger King Turned Japan’s Sacred Cow into Global Fast Food Fodder** TOKYO—In the land where cattle once lived better than most humans, the news landed like a sake bomb in a hostess bar: Burger King Japan has unveiled the “Wagyu Whopper,” a ¥1,980 (US$13) slab of allegedly premium beef wedged between…
The Burger: A Global Love Affair Held Together by Cheese and Existential Dread By the time you finish reading this sentence, humanity will have consumed roughly 2,500 hamburgers—enough to pave a greasy, slightly tragic path from Reykjavík to Jakarta. The burger, once a humble minced-beef puck served to German sailors in nineteenth-century New York, has…
The Curious Case of Sunday Trading Laws: When God, GDP, and Grocery Lists Collide By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from a Black-Market Avocado Bought on the Sabbath Somewhere between the pearly gates and the self-checkout aisle, humanity continues its millennia-old debate: should the seventh day be reserved for rest, retail, or restocking the fridge with…
