Weather Forecast: A Global Séance Where Everyone Pretends the Future Still Obeys Us By Lila Moreau, International Desk PARIS—At 05:47 CET, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) supercomputer in Reading, England, coughed up its daily oracle: scattered showers over the Ruhr, a Saharan dust plume aimed at Marseille, and the obligatory “unseasonable warmth”…
Good Morning America’s “Deals & Steals” segment ran again this morning, parachuting another crate of discounted ephemera onto the breakfast tables of an anxious republic. While the hosts chirped about 40 % off a cordless neck-fan, the rest of the planet—some of it literally on fire—was left to wonder how a country so allergic to…
Lululemon’s Yoga Pants Are Now a Geopolitical Flashpoint *How a Canadian athleisure label became a proxy in the great U.S.–China decoupling—and why your downward dog might soon require a customs form.* PARIS—There are, broadly speaking, two ways to interpret Lululemon’s ticker (LULU) touching a fresh all-time high last week. The optimistic take is that a…
The Chair Company That’s Sitting on the World By “Correspondent-at-Large with Chronic Back Pain” GENEVA—Somewhere between the fifteenth espresso of the week and the forty-seventh UN resolution on sustainable furniture, it became clear that the world’s most powerful seat of power is, quite literally, a seat. The Chair Company—officially known as Sedis Universalis S.A., though…
Randolph County, USA: Where Globalization Goes to Die of Sheer Boredom By Our Man in the Provinces, still jet-lagged from passport stamps that read like a suicide note Randolph County—pick your state, they’re franchising the name like a depressed Starbucks—sits at the precise longitude where the 21st-century supply chain forgets to deliver meaning. Fly in…
Somewhere above the Indian Ocean, a Boeing 777 freighter hums with the refrigerated sighs of Chilean cherries headed for Chinese New Year, while—in the cargo hold of a separate flight—a single replacement phone charger rattles around in a box the size of a microwave, bound for a London flat whose occupant forgot to tick “eco-friendly…
Mariners vs Royals: When a Wednesday Night in Kansas City Becomes a Geopolitical Chess Piece By A Correspondent Who’s Covered Actual Revolutions but Still Gets Assigned Baseball KANSAS CITY—Imagine, if you will, the serene absurdity: 30,000 mildly sunburned Midwesterners arguing about a sacrifice bunt while, 7,000 miles east, grain ships tiptoe through Black Sea minefields…
Hatton: The One-Word Riddle Currently Ruining Every Foreign Correspondent’s Sleep Cycle By Our Man in a State of Perpetual Jet Lag Every so often the planet coughs up a proper noun that seems to have been devised by a committee of prankish linguists and bored algorithm engineers. “Hatton” is the latest entry in that noble…
Red Sox Schedule: How 162 Games of American Pastime Quietly Dictate the Planet’s Supply Chains, Diplomatic Timetables, and Your Cousin’s Wedding By the time Fenway Park’s ancient PA system crackles to life on Opening Day, the reverberations are felt well beyond Boston’s clam-chowder belt. In Singapore, a container-load of David Ortiz-branded oven mitts is rerouted…
Hong Kong vs Bangladesh: When a Glittering Finance Hub Discovers Gravity By Our Correspondent Who Has Watched Too Many “Emerging Market” PowerPoints Burst into Flames HONG KONG—If you squint past the harbor-front Chanel billboards, you can almost see the moment Hong Kong’s self-image slipped on a banana peel labeled “GDP per capita.” On the same…
The Name That Quietly Rules the World By Our Correspondent in Transit Between Time Zones Somewhere above the North Atlantic, seat 14B is occupied by a mid-level trade attaché who still believes his job matters. Somewhere below, a container ship named *MSC Crawford* glides past Gibraltar carrying 19,000 units of everything from Ukrainian sunflower oil…
Open Stock: The World’s Panic Pantry, or How We All Became Amateur Preppers By the time you finish this sentence, someone in São Paulo will have panic-bought their fifteenth roll of industrial-grade aluminum foil, convinced the grid is about to collapse. That, dear reader, is the sound of “open stock” going global—an innocuous retail term…
