From the rickety rooftop bars of Havana to the fluorescent-lit sportsbooks of Macau, the Cubs standings—currently hovering in the polite purgatory of third place in the NL Central—have become a kind of universal Rorschach test for anyone who’s ever tried to explain American optimism to a customs officer abroad. Ask a Berliner why a city…
The Marco Rubio Traveling Circus: A Floridian in the Global Funhouse By Diego “Weathered Passport” Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Miami — The first thing you notice when you land at MIA is that even the palm trees seem faintly embarrassed. They know they’re props in a stage set that doubles as the seventh-largest economy…
Jeffrey Gundlach—super-investor, bond oracle, and the man whose permabear scowl has become a kind of global mood ring—has once again wrapped the planet’s financial mandarins around his little finger. From Tokyo’s Ministry of Finance to a Berlin pension fund that still thinks 2 % is a “decent yield,” traders refreshed their browsers at 3 a.m….
FDA COOKWARE LEAD: HOW AMERICA’S LATEST KITCHEN SCANDAL IS EXPORTING PANIC FROM PEORIA TO PESHAWAR By the time the U.S. Food & Drug Administration sheepishly admitted last week that “some cookware” may be leaching enough lead to make a Roman emperor nervous, the news had already raced across borders faster than a Michelin-starred chef fleeing…
Eric Swalwell, the Californian congressman who once ran for president on a platform of “ban the guns, baby,” has become something of an international Rorschach test. From Brussels to Beijing, observers peer at him and see whatever they most fear or covet: an avatar of American overreach, a walking data-breach cautionary tale, or simply the…
Latest Scores: Humanity 2 – 98, Gravity 1 – The Planet’s Weekly Tally By the time you finish this sentence, the global scoreboard will already be obsolete—such is the break-neck velocity of our modern misery index. Still, for the sake of tradition (and because editors still pretend readers enjoy tidy ledes), here are the freshest…
Flashscore: The Global Addiction Nobody Talked About At Davos By Dimitri Valenzuela, Senior Correspondent-at-Large There’s a quiet pandemic spreading faster than the last one (and arguably with fewer masks). It isn’t carried by bats, lab leaks, or rogue influencers. It’s called Flashscore, a pocket-sized dopamine IV drip that has turned every human with a smartphone…
Rahul Chopra, a name that sounds like a polite cough in a Mumbai elevator, has quietly become the poster child for a very 2024 kind of global panic: the fear that your résumé might one day read “CEO, My Own Life, until the algorithm noticed.” Last month the 31-year-old data scientist was escorted out of…
Liverpool’s Match Today: A Global Séance in Red and the Quiet Collapse of Time Zones By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Thursday Somewhere between the Indian Ocean and the Irish Sea, a Sri Lankan call-center worker named Ranjith is watching Mohamed Salah ghost past a defender on a cracked Samsung J5. The feed lags,…
Ajax vs Inter: the Champions League quarterfinal nobody asked for but everybody will watch anyway, because the modern attention economy demands we rubber-neck at every head-on collision between legacy brands that peaked when fax machines were cutting-edge. On paper it’s a clash of continental aristocracy: Amsterdam’s once-revolutionary nursery against Milan’s faded La Scala of calcio….
The planet’s fastest-growing welfare state doesn’t issue passports, levy taxes, or bother with elections. It’s called GoFundMe, a Silicon Valley startup that has quietly become the de-facto Ministry of Last Resort for the 21st-century human. From Manila to Manchester, when the chemotherapy invoice arrives, the volcano erupts, or the local warlord decides your village is…
The Curious Case of Robbie Savage: How One Peroxide Welshman Became a Global Metaphor for Our Times Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the rise of TikTok, humanity quietly agreed that Robbie Savage—yes, that Robbie Savage—would serve as the international barometer for how far we’ve collectively fallen. From the steppes of Mongolia to the…
