Tokyo traders were still rubbing the sleep from their eyes when Frankfurt decided Tuesday was the perfect morning to panic-sell European banks, thereby gifting Wall Street a pre-dawn anxiety attack that ricocheted through Mumbai before Sydney had even finished its flat white. Welcome to the planetary pinball machine we politely call the global stock market:…
Dacara Thompson Found: The Global Circus Packs Up Its Tents Byline: Geneva, Switzerland – Dave’s Locker International Desk For three weeks the planet’s most renewable resource—idle curiosity—has been burning at full wattage. From Lagos to Lima, office printers coughed up pixelated flyers; WhatsApp groups from Manila to Manchester traded the same grainy CCTV still as…
Bethenny Frankel and the Geopolitics of a Skinny-Girl Empire By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine’s gently bobbing wine barges and the neon glare of a nearby McDonald’s, a French sommelier is quietly weeping into his gamay. The cause? A former Real Housewife of New York has managed to export “low-calorie margarita in…
David Lammy: The Man Quietly Re-Wiring Britain’s Place in a World That’s Already On Fire By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Across the marble corridors of Westminster and the slightly less hygienic corridors of Brussels, a single question echoes with the urgency of a smoke alarm whose batteries have just expired: “Who the hell is David…
Sharjah, UAE – In a desert stadium where the air-conditioning costs more than several national GDPs, Afghanistan’s cricket eleven politely reminded the United Arab Emirates that passport stamps, oil royalties and diplomatic clout still don’t buy you cover drives. The final scorecard—Afghanistan 255 for 6, UAE all out for 195—reads like a polite invoice from…
Afghanistan vs. UAE: A Friendly in Sharjah, or a Metaphor for the Modern World Order? Sharjah, UAE — The floodlights at the Sharjah Cricket Stadium hummed like overworked photocopiers in a fluorescent-lit purgatory on Tuesday night, illuminating a contest that—at first glance—looked like just another T20 fixture on the ICC’s interminable calendar. Afghanistan, freshly rebranded…
As the sun rose over five continents this morning, so did a familiar, slightly guilty thrill: Rockstar has finally deigned to show us Grand Theft Auto VI—or, as foreign-exchange desks immediately rebranded it, “the single most reliable dollar-drain since Taylor Swift’s travel itinerary.” From Lagos broadband cafés to Seoul’s PC-bangs, from São Paulo’s favela LAN…
Afghanistan vs UAE: Two Nations, One Desert, Infinite Irony By Our Cynical Correspondent in the Sand-Swept Cheap Seats Here we are again, watching two patches of sun-baked real estate pretend they’re playing the same sport. On one side, Afghanistan—freshly rebranded by its new management as “Talibanistan, Now With 30 % Less Music.” On the other,…
The Last Emperor of Cable: John Malone’s Quiet World Domination Tour By Our Man in Luxembourg, still wondering why his hotel TV has 900 channels and nothing on Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the favelas of Rio, your monthly broadband bill is being stage-managed by a 83-year-old Coloradan who looks less like Darth…
Transamerica: A Road-Trip Through the Twenty-First-Century Soul by “The Bureau Chief Who’s Had Too Much Airport Coffee” From the cracked sidewalks of San Francisco’s Tenderloin to the fluorescent glow of a São Paulo data-center, the word “Transamerica” no longer belongs exclusively to a 1970s insurance logo or a B-movie about gender transition. It has metastasized…
Issa Rae and the Global Business of Being Seen Dave’s Locker – International Desk Somewhere between the 405 and the A1, Issa Rae stopped being merely “that awkward Black girl from YouTube” and became a stealth export product—part cultural soft power, part quarterly-earnings call. The rest of the planet, always hungry for American dysfunction packaged…
Mortgage Rates Today: A Global Game of Financial Whac-A-Mole by Our Man in Geneva—where the interest is always compounded and the cynicism is tax-free ZURICH—Another sunrise, another spreadsheet. While half the planet doom-scrolls TikTok and the other half doom-scrolls Bloomberg, mortgage rates have crept up again—like that one cousin who always “forgets” his wallet at…
