Quantum Computing, Imperial Ambitions, and the Curious Case of QBTS Stock By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Cash PARIS—On any given afternoon along the Boulevard Saint-Germain you can overhear hedge-fund tourists explaining quantum superposition to their mistresses between sips of €9 espresso. The object of their breathless pedagogy is usually QBTS, the…
Roberto Clemente: The Caribbean Saint the World Keeps Mispronouncing By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk On the night of December 31, 1972, a DC-7 cargo plane sputtered over the Atlantic like a drunk tourist who’s just discovered rum is cheaper than water in Puerto Rico. Somewhere between San Juan and Managua, the aircraft—loaded with earthquake…
Hypertension: The World’s Quietest Arms Race by R. J. Valente, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—While diplomats trade barbs over missile trajectories in Eastern Europe, a far stealthier escalation is taking place inside every third adult on the planet. Hypertension—blood pressure high enough to power a small espresso machine—now affects 1.28 billion people, according to the…
Geneva’s Palexpo Arena, 5:47 p.m. local time: the 60-metre hurdles have just ended and the stadium screen flashes “Mujinga Kambundji – 7.02” in retina-scorching LED. Half the crowd erupts in the polite Swiss roar that sounds like suppressed yodeling; the other half Googles “kambundji” between sips of overpriced Aperol. In that moment, a sprinter from…
Tinley Park, Illinois—Population 55,971, median age 39.4, median household income $86,000, and, according to the village’s own tourism bureau, the proud owner of “the largest outdoor concert venue in Chicagoland.” To the average Dane scrolling through Reddit at 2 a.m. in Aarhus, that bio reads like a haiku of late-stage capitalism: small town, big shed,…
Jake Wightman and the Quiet Art of Ruining Everyone’s Afternoon in Oslo By our still-breathing correspondent in the cheap seats On an overcast evening in Oslo last July, while most of the planet was doom-scrolling about energy prices, food shortages, and the inexplicable resurgence of cargo shorts, a polite Scotsman called Jake Wightman stepped onto…
Auckland, New Zealand – Somewhere between the lycra-clad chaos of a global athletics circuit and the slow-motion apocalypse we politely call “the news cycle,” a 27-year-old Kiwi with the improbable name Geordie Beamish just reminded the planet that footraces can still deliver plot twists more satisfying than any streaming-service finale. Last month in Glasgow, Beamish—who…
The Continent That Refuses to Be a Soundbite By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Doubt Nairobi–Africa, that sprawling ellipsis of 54 nations and 1.4 billion plot twists, is once again the world’s favorite Rorschach test. Peer at it from Davos and you see the green future—lithium brine and cobalt seams humming beneath solar farms…
In the grand tradition of Scandinavian exports—flat-pack anxiety, existential detective series, and the smug certainty that 18 °C is “room temperature”—the name Ingebrigtsen has lately sprinted onto the world stage with all the subtlety of a Viking raid reenacted at a climate summit. To the average sports fan, it’s shorthand for Jakob, the 23-year-old Norwegian…
Pole Vault World Record Shattered—Humanity Still Unable to Clear the Bar of Basic Decency By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently somewhere between a war zone and a duty-free lounge So, 6.27 metres. That’s the new altitude at which a man with a carbon-fiber stick briefly outran gravity last weekend in a repurposed bullring in the outskirts…
**The Bourne Identity Crisis: How a British Pop-Punk Relic Became an Accidental Geopolitical Rorschach Test** LONDON—In the grand carnival of global celebrity, where K-pop bands moonlight as Korean trade envoys and footballers double as Qatari soft-power billboards, James Bourne has achieved the rare feat of becoming internationally significant by not trying at all. The 40-year-old…
**The World Holds Its Breath While Washington Plays Interest Rate Roulette** As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell emerges from the marble temple of American monetary policy this week, global markets will be watching with the same nervous anticipation usually reserved for North Korean missile launches or Elon Musk’s Twitter feed. The September Fed meeting—essentially the…
