FC 26 Web App: The Quietest Global Border-Crossing Since the Black Death, Now With Pack Odds By the time the first wave of commuters in Lagos have finished bargaining with their bus conductors over 20-naira change, the FC 26 Web App has already logged 1.3 million log-ins from five continents. By the time the Tokyo…
Susie Ma, the London-born skincare tycoon whose surname translates to “horse” in Mandarin, has galloped so far ahead of the pack that even the global beauty industry—an arena not known for modesty—has started clearing its throat and pretending it always believed in her. From a one-woman stall at Greenwich Market hawking £6 sugar scrubs to…
A Needle in the Global Haystack: How One Weekly Jab Became the Planet’s Hottest Status Symbol GENEVA—The newest weapon in humanity’s eternal war against its own waistline isn’t a dusty treadmill or a kale smoothie, but a humble pen-shaped syringe filled with something called semaglutide. Marketed as Wegovy in the United States, Ozempic everywhere else,…
The last time a Romanian woman made global headlines for racket work, it involved a certain Dracula and a wooden stake. This week it’s Jaqueline Cristian—no fangs, just a forehand that slices through hope like an IMF austerity package. While most of the planet was doom-scrolling about submarine implosions and the price of eggs, Cristian…
**When the World’s Largest Economy Forgets to Pay the Electric Bill** *By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen This Movie Before* America, that shining city upon a hill, occasionally likes to switch off its own lights just to remind everyone it’s still the main character. While the rest of the planet scrambles to keep the fluorescent bulbs…
The International Republic of Dolly Parton: How a Rhinestone-Studded Appalachian Soprano Became the UN Secretary-General We Never Had By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Gstaad and Dollywood Somewhere on the autobahn between Berlin and Bratislava, a Syrian refugee-turned-taxi-driver keeps a photo of Dolly Parton taped to his sun visor, right next to the mandatory EU fire-extinguisher….
Alibaba’s ticker—BABA—has spent the last few years doing the financial equivalent of a trust-fall exercise on a glacier: everyone knows the drop is coming, yet the crowd still gasps when the ice finally cracks. From Wall Street to Wangfujing, from Zürich pension funds to Jakarta ride-hailing drivers who’ve turned their scooters into mini trading desks,…
Week 3 Quarterback Rankings: A Geopolitical Power Struggle Played Out in Pads and Play-Action By Henrietta “Hank” Mortensen, Senior Globe-Trotting Cynic, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk GENEVA — While the United Nations busies itself drafting strongly-worded letters about things no one will read, the planet’s real soft-power summit is already underway in NFL stadium parking lots…
**Love in the Time of Existential Dread: How The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Finale Became Humanity’s Collective Therapy Session** While the Northern Hemisphere collectively sweated through another record-breaking summer and the Southern Hemisphere braced for what climate scientists euphemistically call “interesting times,” millions of humans sought refuge in the ultimate first-world coping mechanism: watching attractive…
**The Neglected Middle Child of History: Gen X Waves from the Sidelines of Global Chaos** While the world obsesses over whether millennials can afford avocado toast or if Gen Z will cancel democracy itself, Generation X—the demographic equivalent of that mysterious bruise you can’t remember getting—continues its quiet march through middle age with the resigned…
Together for Palestine: A Global Chorus That Can’t Quite Hit the Same Note By Dave’s Locker International Desk The hashtag du jour, “Together for Palestine,” now pings across 195 sovereign Wi-Fi networks with the urgency of a pop-up ad for eternal salvation. It has trended in Lagos, trended in Lima, trended in Luxembourg—proof that nothing…
Snow Day or Slow Day? How a Two-Hour Delay in Ohio Echoes from Oslo to Ouagadougou By the time the robo-call hits American parents at 5:14 a.m.—“Due to inclement weather, all district schools will operate on a two-hour delay”—half the planet has already been up, down, and sideways. In Helsinki, the sun has been up…
