Moscow, late spring. The lilacs are blooming along Tverskaya and the traffic cops are extorting drivers with the same languid grace their grandfathers practiced in the Brezhnev era. It’s comforting, in a perverse way: empires collapse, currencies crater, but the bribe rate for an illegal U-turn remains reassuringly stable—like a Central Bank for petty corruption….
Freeze Warning: A Global Icy Stare in a Heating World by Our Correspondent, somewhere between the last functioning tavern and the first broken thermostat Dateline: Geneva, 03:17 a.m. local time—because even the sun is rationing these days. The World Meteorological Organization has just issued a multinational “freeze warning,” a bureaucratic euphemism for “brace yourselves, Earth,…
Brea stock—two syllables that sound like an artisanal sourdough but in fact describe a substance that keeps the planet’s industrial ovens burning. In the grand bazaar of global commodities, crude oil’s lighter, cheerier cousin is suddenly the belle of the ball, and every suitor from Singapore to Stavanger is elbowing his way to the punch…
Germany vs Slovenia: A Quiet Collision of Alpine Pretensions and Baltic Hubris By Dave’s Locker International Desk, somewhere between Frankfurt’s finance bros and Ljubljana’s ironic cafés Europe, that antique chessboard where every pawn believes it’s a rook, is once again arranging its pieces. This time the matchup is Germany vs Slovenia—two countries that, on the…
Dubai, Thursday, 04:17 a.m. local—The phrase “UAE vs India” usually conjures a cricket scorecard, but the real match is being played in boardrooms, oil futures pits, and WhatsApp family groups scattered from Sharjah to Silicon Valley. One side fields sovereign wealth funds the size of small nations’ GDPs; the other dispatches humans in roughly the…
Texas: The World’s Favorite Cautionary Tale That Still Makes Money by Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, somewhere over the Atlantic with a lukewarm Bloody Mary If you watch the planet from 30,000 feet—preferably in business class, because who still flies coach voluntarily—Texas appears less like a U.S. state and more like a fever dream the rest of…
Dallas, Texas— The forecast here is so cartoonishly extreme that it feels like the city is auditioning for a spot in the United Nations Climate Hall of Infamy. One day the mercury tickles 110°F (43°C), the next a derecho rewinds the thermostat to 68°F and flips every patio umbrella into low-orbit lawn art. From a…
ConocoPhillips: The Friendly Neighborhood Oil Giant Quietly Reshaping the Planet Byline: From a press-room somewhere between Houston and Hades There’s a moment, somewhere between the third espresso and the fourth climate report, when you realize ConocoPhillips is less an energy company and more a planetary-scale bartender—mixing equal parts liquefied dinosaurs, shareholder dividends, and geopolitical hangover….
