A Global Dispatch from the Church of Low-Probability Miracles By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Despair and the Duty-Free The numbers—6, 12, 19, 27, 33, and the bonus 42—dropped into the digital slipstream last night like six drunks tumbling down embassy stairs. Within minutes, the same sequence was being translated into 47 languages, 23 alphabets, and…
The Wheel Keeps Spinning—Whether You’re Watching or Not By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg The studio lights in Culver City, California, still blind the next contestant who can’t pronounce “quesadilla,” but the real wheel of fortune hasn’t stopped on any soundstage since 1975. It keeps rolling, gathering passport stamps, sanctions, and the occasional…
South Park: The Little Colorado Town That Weaponized Global Schadenfreude By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk In a world where diplomats still pretend that “deep concern” is a policy and billion-dollar summits produce press releases nobody reads, four construction-paper children in a fictional backwater have become the de-facto United Nations of satire. South Park, Colorado—population: whatever…
South Africa vs England: A Very Polite Colonial Reunion, Sponsored by Nostalgia and Nervous Investors When the Proteas and the Three Lions next square off—be it on a cricket pitch, a rugby field, or, if the planet melts sufficiently, a floating barge in the Thames—rest assured the rest of the world will be watching with…
PARIS — If you had told the average café philosopher here last year that a 44-year-old Indian-American prosecutor from Long Island would soon be whispering in the ear of the next U.S. president, they would have snorted their espresso into the Seine. Yet Kash Patel—pronounced “cash” by people who enjoy cheap puns and “kaash” by…
If you squint past the glare of the Zamboni’s headlights and the polite Scandinavian hush of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy Center, you’ll spot the same phenomenon that’s unfolding in Singaporean data centers, Congolese cobalt pits, and every Swiss banker’s encrypted inbox: raw, uncut Russian talent being vacuumed westward before the motherland figures out how to bolt…
Tuvalu is the geopolitical equivalent of a canary in a coal mine, except the canary is nine coral atolls, the coal mine is the Pacific Ocean, and the miners are too busy arguing over the thermostat to notice the bird has already started packing its bags. On most world maps the country is cropped out…
Synopsys Stock: How a Californian Code-Scraper Became the World’s Quietest Geopolitical Chess Piece By Dave’s International Affairs & Existential Despair Desk If you stare long enough at a Synopsys earnings chart, you can almost hear the planet groan. The Silicon Valley firm—best known for selling software that designs other software, a neat Russian-doll trick that…
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…
Synopsys (SNPS) is not, alas, a Greek tragedy about synthetic preservatives; it’s the Nasdaq ticker for the EDA overlord whose software quietly decides whether your next smartphone will overheat in Dubai, imitate a hand-grenade in Detroit, or merely bankrupt you in Berlin. While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through 2023’s buffet of wars, wildfires,…
Tunis—population 2.7 million, median age 32, SPF factor “wishful thinking”—sits on the Mediterranean like a cynical postcard: azure sea on one side, sub-Saharan migration routes on the other, and a constitution that’s been rewritten so often it qualifies as performance art. To the wider world, Tunisia’s capital is either the place where the Arab Spring…
Jordan Moray, the man who accidentally became a geopolitical Rorschach test, has spent the last decade reminding the planet that even the most resolutely local scandals can go viral if you just add passports and a slow news week. Moray—once a mid-tier logistics planner for a shipping firm whose name sounds like a sneeze—was thrust…
