Crypto: The Global Casino Where Everyone’s a High Roller Until They’re Not By Our Man in the Wreckage, filed from somewhere with spotty Wi-Fi and excellent whiskey In the beginning, there was the blockchain, and the blockchain was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of fiat. Then someone said, “Let there…
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI – Somewhere between the Missouri River’s lazy meander and the distant hum of NATO air-traffic control, the Kansas City Chiefs politely disembowelled the New York Giants 27-17 on Sunday. To a planet juggling heat domes, sovereign-debt brinkmanship, and the slow-motion collapse of social media civility, the box score looked almost quaint: Patrick…
The Eternal Oval: NASCAR’s Global Relevance in an Age of Electric Regret By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged in Charlotte CHARLOTTE—Somewhere between the smell of burnt ethanol and the distant hum of a C-130 practicing touch-and-go at the nearby Air National Guard base, it dawned on me that NASCAR is either the last honest religion…
TAMPA BAY—While artillery duels resumed near Kharkiv and the yen flirted with thirty-four-year lows, roughly 65,000 sunburned pilgrims filed into Raymond James Stadium this afternoon to discover whether the Tampa Bay Buccaneers could protect a 2-1 record against the undefeated Detroit Lions. Somewhere in the South Pacific a Kiribati fisherman mended his nets, blissfully unaware…
Charlie Morton, the American baseball pitcher whose right leg shattered like a fortune cookie under the weight of a World Series dreams, has become an improbable global metaphor: a man who kept throwing strikes on a broken fibula while the rest of the planet can’t even stand on its moral compass without collapsing. From Kiev…
While the rest of the planet worried about collapsing ice shelves, drone attacks on grain silos, and the curious habit of central banks to print money the way college freshmen print term papers at 3 a.m., the United States devoted yesterday’s dwindling daylight hours to a far more urgent matter: determining the precise sequence of…
Navratri 2025: Nine Nights of Global Nausea, Neon, and Negotiable Piety By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Mumbai T2 The ninth day of Navratri 2025 has just wrapped—at least in the parts of the planet where the Wi-Fi is still on. Elsewhere, from the neon-blasted garba grounds of Gandhinagar to the LED-lit living rooms…
Cost-of-Living Payments: A Global Panic Button That Keeps Getting Pressed By Our Man in Several Overpriced Airports COPENHAGEN — The memo must have gone out in 23 languages: when the price of eggs starts resembling the price of cocaine, governments reach for the emergency envelope marked “Cost-of-Living Payment.” From Seoul to São Paulo, officials are…
Tyler Glasnow, 6’8″ of angular American anxiety, just cashed in on a five-year, $136.5 million ticket to Los Angeles, a city that already treats apocalypse as seasonal décor. The transaction ricocheted from the Dodgers’ front office to betting apps in Seoul, from sabermetric Slack channels in London to taverns in Caracas where fans track U.S….
In the spring of 2025, governments from Reykjavík to Rabat will once again reach into the same threadbare pocket and pull out a fistful of freshly minted cost-of-living payments—those discreet fiscal love-taps meant to convince citizens that inflation is just a passing mood swing. The sums vary: Berlin dishes out €300 per adult, Jakarta opts…
Gamer After: How the World’s Thumb-Warriors Are Re-Engineering Reality Once the Console Clicks Off By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret In the beginning was the joystick, and the joystick was with the teenager, and the joystick was the teenager. Then the pandemic arrived like an overdue DLC nobody asked…
Gaza, that slender strip of Mediterranean real estate no wider than a diplomat’s promise, has once again become the world’s favorite open-air morality play. While the bombs fall like confetti at a particularly grim wedding, the rest of us watch from our algorithmic balconies, thumb-scrolling through tragedy like it’s a new Netflix true-crime docuseries. The…
