The Red Card That Rules the World by A. Corvus, roving correspondent, somewhere between the locker room and the Hague On a damp Thursday in Dortmund, the referee reached into his breast pocket and produced what looked like a laminated square of doom. One crimson rectangle later, Jude Bellingham was trudging off the pitch, 80,000…
Kansas Football and the Art of Cosmic Insignificance by Special Correspondent Luka Petrovic, filing from a hotel bar that still thinks Prohibition is negotiable Somewhere on the vast, wheat-swept oblong Americans call “the Heartland,” 53 scholarship athletes in crimson and blue keep losing football games with the dependable rhythm of a Swiss cuckoo clock that’s…
Igor Thiago: The Brazilian Striker Who’s Quietly Making the Whole World Care About Club Brugge By Dave’s Locker International Desk For most mortals, Belgium is a polite smudge between France and the Netherlands where diplomats go to feel relevant and chocolate enjoys better healthcare than humans. Yet in this accidental nation, a 22-year-old named Igor…
PlayStation Secret Lairs MTG: When Corporate Cross-Over Fever Reaches Pandemic Levels by our man in the departure lounge, Geneva The news that Sony’s PlayStation division has brewed yet another “Secret Lair” drop for Magic: The Gathering landed in my inbox while I was watching a Zurich financier try to expense a €42 bottle of water…
A Heron Flies the Coop: How the Death of a Discount Grocer Signals the End of Civilisation (Probably) The shuttering of Heron Foods’ last corporate-owned stores this month is, on paper, a tidy little British footnote: 14 shops across post-industrial Yorkshire and Humberside, a few hundred jobs, and a brand that most people outside Grimsby…
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…
Binance, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crypto Bomb By Our Man in 200 Jurisdictions (and Counting) If you stare long enough at the Binance logo—two diagonal rectangles forever sliding past each other—you start to see the entire twenty-first-century condition: frictionless, borderless, lawless, and just one fat-fingered trade away from total…
PlayStation 5 Pro: A Console So Advanced It Can Render the Collapse of Civilization in 8K By the time the PS5 Pro rolls off its Shenzhen assembly line next month, four continents are already on fire—some literally, some only on social media. Sony’s marketing department, ever the optimists, calls the machine “the future of play.”…
China: The World’s Favorite Villain, Banker, and Life Coach BEIJING—When historians finally tally the scorecard of the 21st century, they may conclude that the planet spent four decades simultaneously fearing, financing, and imitating the same country—often in the same news cycle. Welcome to the China Show, the longest-running geopolitical dramedy of our time, now streaming…
The Almighty Greenback’s Mood Swing: Watching the World Hold Its Breath Over “قیمت دلار” By the time Tehran’s currency hawkers finish their second espresso, the dollar-rial rate has already sprinted past yesterday’s closing like a caffeinated greyhound. Across the planet—whether you call it “قیمت دلار,” “dólar hoy,” or simply “why is my rent in pesos…
Martine McCutcheon and the Quiet Collapse of the Global Dream By Our London Bureau Chief, still hung-over from the last royal wedding LONDON — While COP summits wheeze out one final communique and Silicon Valley re-brands mass layoffs as “right-sizing,” a former East-End soap star has apparently been declared solvent again. Martine McCutcheon, once the…
Nigeria is the world’s favorite cautionary tale wearing a couture agbada. Two hundred million people, Africa’s largest economy, and a daily masterclass in how to sprint while shackled—yet somehow the sprinters keep breaking world records in hope. From Berlin boardrooms to Beijing construction sites, policy nerds whisper the same question: if Nigeria ever truly gets…
