The Prime Directive: How a Seattle Membership Card Quietly Became a Passport to Modern Life By Paulo “No-Rush Shipping” Mendes, roving correspondent and reluctant citizen of Planet Amazon Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok dances, humanity agreed—without a vote, plebiscite, or even a particularly lively group chat—to let…
Amazon’s $5.5 Million Mea Culpa: A Global Settlement in the Key of “Oops” By A. Correspondent, somewhere between Luxembourg and a warehouse in Shenzen The press release arrived on a Tuesday, which is when most corporate apologies are scheduled—late enough to miss the Monday news cycle, early enough to beat the Wednesday dump of quarterly…
Redmond’s Golden Goose Goes Global: Why the World Quietly Roots for MSFT to Keep Printing Money By Matteo “Machiavelli with Wi-Fi” Delacroix In a small, fluorescent-lit office somewhere in Nairobi, an IT intern named Amina is patching a hospital’s Windows fleet before the next ransomware wave arrives. In São Paulo, a fintech founder who just…
The Global Apple: A Fruit, a Brand, and a Metaphor for How We Keep Getting Bitten By the time you finish this sentence, 1.2 million actual apples will have been eaten somewhere on Earth—mostly by schoolchildren who didn’t want them and adults who convinced themselves the daily one keeps the oncologist away. Meanwhile, 7,000 digital…
GOOGLE STOCK: THE WORLD’S FAVORITE DIGITAL LOTTERY TICKET An international dispatch from the frontlines of capitalism, where a search bar has become sovereign. Global markets woke up this week to discover that Alphabet—parent to Google, the search engine that taught us to ask questions we never wanted our mothers to hear—had added another 4% to…
