Global Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker – Somewhere between a Berlin co-working loft and a Jakarta food-court Wi-Fi hotspot If the Cold War was fought with missiles and manifestos, the TikTok War is being fought with lip-syncs and lo-fi filter presets. From the marble lobbies of Brussels to the humid back rooms of Manila’s influencer incubators,…
Quantum Computing, Imperial Ambitions, and the Curious Case of QBTS Stock By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Cash PARIS—On any given afternoon along the Boulevard Saint-Germain you can overhear hedge-fund tourists explaining quantum superposition to their mistresses between sips of €9 espresso. The object of their breathless pedagogy is usually QBTS, the…
Hypertension: The World’s Quietest Arms Race by R. J. Valente, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—While diplomats trade barbs over missile trajectories in Eastern Europe, a far stealthier escalation is taking place inside every third adult on the planet. Hypertension—blood pressure high enough to power a small espresso machine—now affects 1.28 billion people, according to the…
Jake Wightman and the Quiet Art of Ruining Everyone’s Afternoon in Oslo By our still-breathing correspondent in the cheap seats On an overcast evening in Oslo last July, while most of the planet was doom-scrolling about energy prices, food shortages, and the inexplicable resurgence of cargo shorts, a polite Scotsman called Jake Wightman stepped onto…
The Continent That Refuses to Be a Soundbite By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Doubt Nairobi–Africa, that sprawling ellipsis of 54 nations and 1.4 billion plot twists, is once again the world’s favorite Rorschach test. Peer at it from Davos and you see the green future—lithium brine and cobalt seams humming beneath solar farms…
**The Persian Gulf’s Quiet Rivalry: UAE and Oman’s Polite Cold War** While the world obsesses over flashier conflicts—nuclear saber-rattling, Twitter coups, and whatever Elon Musk did this week—two neighbors on the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula are waging a war so subtle it could be mistaken for a mutual-admiration society. The United Arab Emirates…
**The Atyr Stock Phenomenon: When Kazakh Oil Money Meets Global Capitalism’s Fever Dream** In the grand casino of global finance, where fortunes rise and fall faster than a dictator’s approval ratings, Atyr stock has emerged as the latest contestant in humanity’s ongoing game of “Who Wants to Be a Petroleum Millionaire?” The Kazakh oil company,…
**The Global Spark: How a Four-Letter Word Keeps Humanity’s Lights On (Barely)** In the grand theater of human civilization, where we’re all just extras pretending we know the plot, “spark” remains our most versatile prop. From the first caveman who discovered fire could both cook mammoth and terrify his mother-in-law to the latest tech bro…
PARIS—While most of humanity was busy arguing over which streaming service best numbs the pain of existence, a quiet consortium of physicists, hedge-fund magicians, and geopolitical chess players spent the spring chasing a ticker symbol that sounds like a forgotten Scandinavian cereal: OKLO. The company, which promises to mass-produce “mini” nuclear reactors small enough to…
Nvidia: The Green Giant Making the World’s Dictators and Democracies Equally Dependent by Our Correspondent in a Café Where the Wi-Fi Is Faster Than the Justice System If Silicon Valley had a Godfather, it would wear a leather jacket, speak with a mild Taiwanese-American accent, and answer to “Jensen.” Nvidia, the company that started life…
Breakfast: The World’s Most Important Meal and Most Elaborate Act of Self-Deception By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the frostbitten fjords of Norway to the smog-choked megacities of China, humanity greets the dawn with a ritual so universal it feels divinely ordained: pretending that a slice of toast and a thimble of caffeine can compensate…
Ella Seidel, the Tennis Prodigy Who Makes Global Panic Look Like a Gentle Warm-Up By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the city that perfected existential dread in cafés and surrender in 1940, twenty-year-old German qualifier Ella Seidel spent last week politely reminding the planet that panic is best outsourced to the adults. First came world…
