Jerome Powell took the podium this week like a man asked to defuse a bomb while everyone else in the room argues over the color of the wires. The Federal Reserve—America’s monetary Death Star—kept rates unchanged at 5.25–5.50%, thereby disappointing bulls, bears, prophets, doom-scrollers, and at least three hedge-fund managers who had already priced in…
From the Ruins of Empire to the Philips Fridge: How a Dutch-Belgian Kickabout Quietly Explains the 21st Century There are, by the latest United Nations head-count, 195 countries; only two of them, however, bothered to show up in Eindhoven last Thursday night wearing fluorescent boots and matching anxiety disorders. PSV versus Union Saint-Gilloise: on paper…
Ban vs Afg: The World Watches Two Letters Decide the Fate of Eleven Men and 38 Million Others By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge from Dubai to Doha When the International Cricket Council (ICC) scheduled “BAN vs AFG” for the T20 World Cup, the acronym looked like a typo for a Balkan trade dispute….
Gaza Strip: 140 Square Kilometres of Perpetual Headlines By the time you finish reading this sentence, some foreign minister somewhere will have issued a “deeply concerned” press release about Gaza. That is the Strip’s greatest export: statements of concern, delivered in impeccable officialese, then promptly filed next to the coffee-stained draft on climate change and…
Shoppers of the World, Unite: Retail Sales Data as Our New Global Blood Pressure Reading By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent If you want a quick, painless biopsy of planetary morale, skip the WHO mental-health surveys and just glance at the monthly retail-sales print. Released in a rolling 24-hour relay from Beijing to Berlin to Brasília,…
SYDNEY McLAUGHLIN-LEVRONE: THE LAST HAPPY THING BEFORE THE FIREWORKS FACTORY BLOWS By the time most of the planet wakes up, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone has already done something that would make an Olympic demigod blush and a hedge-fund quant reach for new algorithms. On a humid Thursday in Paris—while half the world argued on social media about…
Publishers Clearing House Files for Bankruptcy, Proving Even the House Can Lose the Sweepstakes By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Physical Mail NEW YORK—The envelope that once promised “You may already be a winner!” has finally delivered its punch line: Publishers Clearing House (PCH) filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware this…
Tropical Storm Gabrielle, the Atlantic’s latest damp squib turned headline darling, has spent the past week doing what every self-respecting weather system does in 2024: politely forming off Cabo Verde, taking a selfie for the National Hurricane Center, and then sauntering north-east like a bored tourist who’s just realized the duty-free shop is closed. While…
Flash Flood Warning: The Planet’s Latest Party Trick By our soaked correspondent, still wringing out the passport GENEVA—Somewhere between the 37th climate summit and the 847th “once-in-a-century” downpour of the decade, the World Meteorological Organization quietly upgraded its vocabulary. “Cloudburst” was deemed too quaint, “inundation” too bureaucratic. The new lingua franca is the blunt, all-caps…
Somewhere between the 24-hour news cycle and the bottomless mimosa brunch of internet outrage sits The Daily Beast, a publication that has spent the last fifteen years convincing the world it is simultaneously a fearless watchdog and the friend who brings the best gossip to the potluck. From an international vantage point—say, a cramped bureau…
Shia LaBeouf: The Accidental Global Citizen Nobody Asked For By Luka Varga, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a Hollywood red carpet and a Baltic film festival, Shia LaBeouf has become the human equivalent of a pop-up ad—ubiquitous, vaguely disorienting, and somehow still profitable. Once merely the kid from a Disney Channel sitcom, he has…
Vinny Dingle Goes Global: How a Yorkshire Lad’s Misery Became the Internet’s Only Universal Currency By Our Man in Doha, Still Recovering from Episode 5,742 There are only three things the entire planet can still agree on: the price of diesel is a scam, every national anthem sounds better in a minor key, and Emmerdale’s…
