Cruising Altitude, Crashing Expectations: The Global Irony of the Humble “Plane” By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 1,200 commercial aircraft will be aloft, herding 1.5 million souls above weather systems, war zones, and the occasional rogue balloon. From Reykjavík to Riyadh, the aluminum tube—once a miracle, now a flying bus—has become the most…
Micron’s Memory Chips: The Tiny Silicon Hostages Holding the World Economy Together By Our Man in the Global Supply-Chain Trenches If you’ve been watching “MU stock” lately—Micron Technology to its parents, $MU to its Reddit foster kids—you’ve seen the financial equivalent of a caffeine-withdrawn squirrel: up 7 % in Seoul trading, down 5 % in…
When a San-Francisco start-up best known for turning human silhouettes into JPEGs decides it’s time to go public, the planet takes notice—whether it wants to or not. Figure AI, the company that’s been teaching robots to fold laundry and smile stiffly like overworked flight attendants, filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO this week, valuing the…
The Atlantic: Where Water, War, and Wi-Fi Collide For centuries the Atlantic was the world’s original superhighway, a liquid autobahn for conquistadors, rum-runners, and cruise-ship retirees who dress formally for dinner and casually for colonialism. Today the ocean that once ferried smallpox and Shakespeare continues to ferry data, debt, and disinformation—only now the ships have…
**The Great Satellite Bazaar: How Starlink Became the World’s Most Expensive Escape Route** While the rest of us were busy arguing about whether 5G causes cancer or Bill Gates puts microchips in vaccines, Elon Musk quietly built a celestial internet provider that’s rapidly becoming the digital equivalent of a Swiss bank account—expensive, exclusive, and incredibly…
Bali’s Latest Wet Look: How a Flooded Paradise Became the Planet’s Cautionary TikTok By our correspondent, still drying her passport in the hotel hair-dryer DENPASAR—When the Gods finally decided to rinse the island of incense, Bintang singlets, and crypto-burnout expats, they apparently chose the deluxe cycle. Over three sodden February days, Bali collected a month’s…
The Day the World Hit Refresh Geneva, 05:47 UTC – The sun rose, as it is contractually obligated to do, over a planet that had spent the previous twenty-four hours pretending that one axial rotation could meaningfully divide cause from effect. Traders in Singapore already priced in the hangover before Tokyo had finished pouring the…
The Day the Sky Fell: How September 11 Gifted the World a New Brand of Chaos By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Everyone remembers where they were, or so the cliché insists. I was in a Nairobi newsroom watching a fuzzy CRT feed as the second plane performed its murderous…
The “Crypto Arena” Isn’t a Building—It’s the Planet, and We’re All in the Cheap Seats By our jaded correspondent, still nursing a $4 bottle of stadium water LOS ANGELES, DUBAI, DAKAR—Pick your time zone, the opening whistle already blew. Staples Center may have rebranded itself Crypto.com Arena for a tidy $700 million, but the real…
Dodger Game, n.: A planetary pastime in which the world’s most powerful governments, corporations, and individuals compete to see who can avoid responsibility for the greatest number of catastrophes before the final buzzer—also known, on certain days, as a baseball match in Chavez Ravine. Same rules, different stakes. From the grandstands of geopolitics, the Dodgers…
The Curious Case of Victoria Jiménez Kasintseva, or How a 17-Year-Old Andorran Became the Canary in Tennis’ Global Coal Mine *By a Correspondent Who Has Seen Too Many Post-Match Pressers and Drunk Too Much Weak Espresso* Let the record show that the Principality of Andorra—population 79,000, most of whom are either duty-free perfume bottles or…
Perseverance’s Red-Planet Road Trip: A Global Vanity Mirror in 4K The latest postcard from NASA’s Mars rover—complete with sweeping drone footage and a selfie that would humble any influencer—arrived this week with the usual fanfare: breathless headlines from Houston, congratulatory tweets from Jakarta, and, somewhere in the Kremlin, a stony silence thick enough to slice…
