College Gameday Picks Today: A Global Ritual of Hope, Hubris, and 18-Year-Old Knees By Our Correspondent in a Dublin Airport Lounge, Pretending to Care About the Spread DUBLIN—Somewhere above the Atlantic, a cargo Boeing 777 hums eastward with 40 tons of refrigerated Wagyu destined for a Qatari prince’s Super-Saturday viewing soirée. On board the same…
If you want a crash course in global inequality, skip the World Bank white papers and simply tailgate an eighteen-wheeler. The moment the bumper kisses asphalt from Marrakesh to Manila, a small army of truck accident attorneys materializes—some in bespoke Milanese suits, others in flip-flops—each ready to translate carnage into compensation with the efficiency of…
Shutdown: The World’s Favorite New Pastime By Our Correspondent, presently not shut down (give it time) PARIS—Another week, another capital city flicking the off-switch like a toddler who’s discovered the light button. From Washington’s debt-ceiling death spiral to Berlin’s overnight techno-curfew, “shutdown” has become the global lingua franca, a polite euphemism for “we’ve stopped pretending…
Nancy Leonard, the woman who accidentally became the world’s most influential energy broker, is currently sipping a flat Diet Coke in a fluorescent-lit diner on the outskirts of Gary, Indiana, blissfully unaware that her name is being murmured in boardrooms from Riyadh to Reykjavík. Eight months ago she was an assistant comptroller at a regional…
Oklahoma Schedule: A Provincial Time-Table Reverberates Through the World’s Nervous System By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—While the rest of humanity frets over drone-dropped missiles, crypto crashes, and the inexplicable return of low-rise jeans, a modest PDF labeled “Oklahoma Schedule” has quietly detonated across global supply chains, TikTok algorithms, and at least three European parliaments….
The Hack: A Global Rehearsal for the Next Apocalypse By “Spengler in a Suit,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a ransomware note written in Comic Sans and the sight of a Belgian chocolate factory grinding to a halt because its servers now speak only Russian, humanity received another gentle reminder that we are one…
Weather, the last neutral topic left at dinner parties, has lately become the planet’s loudest passive-aggressive roommate. From the Sahara to Siberia, the sky is delivering PowerPoint presentations on our collective misbehavior: slide one, a heat dome parked over Delhi like a clingy ex; slide two, floodwater waltzing through the streets of Dubai, where residents…
Rob Lowe Has Finally Gone Global, and No, We’re Not Talking About the Actor By the time the sun rose over the Strait of Malacca last Tuesday, three separate governments had already issued “Rob Lowe” advisories. Singapore’s port authority warned of “anomalous drone signatures.” Jakarta’s air-traffic control logged an object “the size of an Airbus…
Peter Navarro, the Man Who Weaponized the Spreadsheet From Beijing to Brussels, the world still feels the paper cuts. By the time most Europeans had learned how to pronounce his surname—Na-VAH-roh, rhyming with “guano”—Peter Navarro had already rewritten the operating system of global trade. A Harvard-trained economist who once wrote love letters to the invisible…
Blown Britannia: How a Small Island’s Breeze Becomes a Global Mood Ring By Our Man in the Jet Stream, filing from an airport lounge whose roof is currently somewhere over the North Sea LONDON—The United Kingdom has issued yet another “yellow warning” for strong winds, which is meteorologist-speak for “batten down the ornamental gnomes.” Gusts…
Tyler Smith, a 29-year-old supply-chain analyst from Des Moines, woke up last Tuesday convinced he was, in fact, the epicenter of the global economy. The rest of the planet, still rubbing sleep from its eyes, did not immediately concur. Yet within 48 hours Tyler’s spreadsheet—an unassuming .xlsx file titled “FinalFinal_V6(Really).xlsx”—had ricocheted from a Midwestern laptop…
Backyard Brawl, International Edition: When Two Neighbors Go Full Gladiator and the World Watches with Popcorn By the time the first folding-chair met its structural demise somewhere over the fence in suburban São Paulo last Tuesday, seventeen distinct time-zones already knew the combatants’ blood types, Spotify playlists, and preferred brand of ibuprofen. That is the…
