Shoppers of the World, Unite: Retail Sales Data as Our New Global Blood Pressure Reading By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent If you want a quick, painless biopsy of planetary morale, skip the WHO mental-health surveys and just glance at the monthly retail-sales print. Released in a rolling 24-hour relay from Beijing to Berlin to Brasília,…
Brett Goldstein: The British Scowl That Conquered a Planet Already in Therapy by “Dave’s” Global Correspondent, currently hiding in a Copenhagen airport lounge that smells of herring and regret PARIS—At 2:14 a.m. on a Wednesday, when most of the world is doom-scrolling about melting ice caps or the latest crypto-casino implosion, a 43-year-old man from…
Dustin Hoffman: The Accidental Everyman Who Conquered a Planet That Barely Agreed on Anything By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching the World Burn in Subtitles PARIS—Try explaining Dustin Hoffman to a Gen-Z Berliner who thinks “The Graduate” is a crypto-scam and “Rain Man” a TikTok filter. You’ll discover, as I did over flat…
Paul Newman, the man who once smirked at us from a thousand movie posters, has been dead for sixteen years, yet his face still sells salad dressing on every continent where supermarkets have refrigeration. From Lagos to Ljubljana, shoppers reach for the same genial grin in a jar, proving that global capitalism can turn even…
SYDNEY McLAUGHLIN-LEVRONE: THE LAST HAPPY THING BEFORE THE FIREWORKS FACTORY BLOWS By the time most of the planet wakes up, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone has already done something that would make an Olympic demigod blush and a hedge-fund quant reach for new algorithms. On a humid Thursday in Paris—while half the world argued on social media about…
In a modest apartment in Nairobi, Kevin Mwangi pores over his accounting ledger, wondering how the $30,000 he borrowed from a London-based lender to study data science in Manchester has ballooned into something resembling the GDP of a micronation. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, Mariana Andrade contemplates whether her monthly Brazilian-real payment on a U.S. dollar-denominated…
Atlanta—Delta Air Lines, the self-declared “Keep Climbing” carrier, spent the weekend climbing only as far as the nearest gate agent’s apology podium. Roughly 6,000 flights—give or take a few hundred, because who’s counting when the app already crashed—were scrubbed after a routine software update turned into a transatlantic game of Jenga played with air-traffic control….
If you want a snapshot of late-stage capitalism in fluorescent Lycra, watch the women’s 400 metres. The distance is short enough that the runners still look vaguely human—no skeletal marathon ghosts, no shot-putters shaped like vending machines—yet long enough for national mythmaking to be squeezed into forty-eight breathless seconds. The world record currently stands at…
Neighbours, Nukes, and the Neoliberal Nostalgia of Stefan Dennis By Our Foreign Desk, somewhere over the Pacific Sometime around 1985, while Reagan and Gorbachev were trading pleasantries about mutually assured destruction, an Australian soap opera quietly exported suburban melodrama to 60-odd countries and accidentally turned a Melbourne cul-de-sac into a soft-power superweapon. At the centre…
Publishers Clearing House Files for Bankruptcy, Proving Even the House Can Lose the Sweepstakes By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Physical Mail NEW YORK—The envelope that once promised “You may already be a winner!” has finally delivered its punch line: Publishers Clearing House (PCH) filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware this…
Tropical Storm Gabrielle, the Atlantic’s latest damp squib turned headline darling, has spent the past week doing what every self-respecting weather system does in 2024: politely forming off Cabo Verde, taking a selfie for the National Hurricane Center, and then sauntering north-east like a bored tourist who’s just realized the duty-free shop is closed. While…
The Sundance Kid Rides Again—This Time on a Private Jet By the time the private-jet fumes had cleared over Park City last January, Robert Redford had already ghosted the Sundance Film Festival he founded. Not with a press release—too gauche—but with a quiet exit via side door, the way you leave a party you started…
