PARIS — Somewhere between a Moldovan data-center and a Singaporean coffee shop that accepts Dogecoin for flat whites, the word “blockchain” has achieved the rare distinction of being simultaneously the most over-promised cure since snake oil and the most under-explained phenomenon since democracy. From Davos panels to Lagos fintech meet-ups, the distributed ledger has become…
Severn Trent and the Art of Selling Rain Back to the English By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, filing from a damp pub in Shropshire with Wi-Fi worse than a Siberian gulag. There’s something beautifully perverse about Severn Trent Water—Britain’s sixth-largest water company—declaring record profits last year while England simultaneously endured hosepipe bans so draconian that…
The Lioness Roars, Mostly into a Void A global dispatch on what happens when the world’s fiercest predator meets the planet’s most inventive PR department: humanity. There is, apparently, a global shortage of lionesses these days. Not the tawny, four-legged kind—those are still being shot, poisoned, or trafficked at the brisk clip of one every…
Another Day, Another Deck Chair: The Vanishing Passenger Who Reminds Us We’re All Just Tourists on a Sinking Planet Dave’s Locker, International Desk – 03:46 UTC Somewhere between Cozumel and the existential void, Carnival Cruise Line’s newest headliner slipped overboard. The passenger—identity withheld pending awkward family group-chat diplomacy—was last seen at the 24-hour soft-serve machine,…
The Bruin Diaspora: How Boston’s Bear Became the World’s Most Overworked Mascot By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Munich Beer Hall and a Jakarta Food Court If you think “bruin” is merely shorthand for a hockey team whose fans believe the 1970s never ended, you haven’t been paying attention to late-stage capitalism’s gift for exporting…
Aires in the Age of Over-Sharing: A Global Tour of Hot Air and Cold Hard Cash By the time you finish reading this sentence, roughly 847 new “aires” will have been minted—cryptic aires, green aires, luxury aires, even aires-for-people-who-hate-aires. The suffix, once the modest dominion of French real-estate agents (“trois pièces, deux aires ouvertes”), has…
The Ozone Layer Shows Signs of Recovery, Just in Time for Us to Finish Torching the Rest of the Planet By our correspondent in Geneva, still clutching a 1994 “Save the Ozone” tote bag like a talisman GENEVA—The United Nations announced this week that the ozone layer is on track to heal “within decades,” prompting…
Tigers, as it turns out, are the last aristocrats left on earth. While we bicker over crypto crashes and airline legroom, roughly 4,500 striped monarchs still insist on private estates—though the real estate keeps shrinking faster than a Russian oligarch’s yacht registry. From the mangrove slums of the Sundarbans to the snow-dusted oligarch playground of…
**The Global Serpent: How Diamondbacks Became Everyone’s Favorite Metaphor for Modern Misery** Somewhere between the Sonoran Desert and your local sports bar, the diamondback rattlesnake has transcended its humble origins as nature’s original home security system to become humanity’s preferred metaphor for everything from corporate mergers to geopolitical tension. The creature that once merely wanted…
Pumas, the World’s Sleekest Bureaucrats By Dave’s Foreign Desk, somewhere between a press buffet and a UN climate summit The puma—alias cougar, mountain lion, panther, or, if you’re feeling dramatic, “ghost cat”—has quietly upgraded from regional apex predator to unwitting geopolitical consultant. While humanity argues over carbon credits and TikTok bans, Puma concolor has been…
Gary Player, the Black Knight of the fairways, has spent nine decades swinging clubs and scolding the rest of us for not doing enough sit-ups. Born in 1935 on a South African cattle farm so remote it probably didn’t get the memo about apartheid until the late nineties, Player has become the planet’s most peripatetic…
**The Gentle Art of Global Domination: How Alan Titchmarsh Conquered the World One Petunia at a Time** While the planet burns and democracy crumbles like overbaked shortbread, there’s something almost subversive about a 74-year-old British gardener who has quietly become more influential than most world leaders. Alan Titchmarsh—yes, that affable chap with the perpetual tan…
