The Curious Case of Sébastien Lecornu: Europe’s Defense Wunderkind and the Art of Looking Busy While the World Burns By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the grand, slightly mildewed ballroom of European politics, where every minister arrives with a rehearsed sound bite and a half-eaten canapé, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu has managed the…
TV Guide, International Edition: The Remote-Controlled Decline of Civilization By the time you read this, 6.2 billion people—give or take the population of Luxembourg—will be clutching a remote control like it’s the One Ring. The humble TV guide, once a stapled pamphlet that doubled as a coaster and emergency fly-swatter, has metastasized into a global…
Edinburgh, Tuesday night, and a chill wind sweeps across Tynecastle Park carrying the faint smell of North Sea regret and deep-fried existential dread. On the pitch, Scotland’s Under-21s—an optimistic contradiction in terms—are doing their level best to convince 16,000 rain-soaked souls that the future is bright, or at least brighter than the present. Across the…
Hungary vs Portugal: The Quiet Balkanization of European Soft Power Bylines from the Danube to the Tagus, by someone who’s run out of passport pages and patience On the surface, the latest diplomatic joust between Budapest and Lisbon looks like a spat about EU recovery funds, some footnotes on judicial independence, and an energetic argument…
Somewhere between the Geneva motor show and a Lagos traffic jam, the Apple Watch completed its quiet conquest of the human wrist. Ten years ago it was a curiosity for Californian yoga instructors; today it is the de-facto visa stamp of the global middle class—more recognizable than most passports and twice as judgmental when you…
Dan Orlovsky and the Mirage of American Exceptionalism By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau GENEVA—In a world where Belarusian sprinters defect during live Olympics and French pension reform is decided by tear-gas referendum, the name Dan Orlovsky might seem as globally urgent as the Liechtenstein water polo standings. Yet the former Detroit…
Apple’s share price—those three crisp capital letters that look so tidy on a Bloomberg terminal—has become the planet’s most polite form of geopolitical warfare. From the glass canyons of Shenzhen to the granite lobbies of Frankfurt, the daily flicker of AAPL is now less a measure of gadgets sold than a referendum on who still…
GENEVA—The Apple Watch Series 11 debuted this week, and humanity’s response was as choreographed as a North Korean military parade: half the planet gasped in rapture, the other half Googled how to pawn a kidney in Jakarta. From Berlin’s glass-walled co-working chapels to Lagos traffic jams where the watch costs more than the average annual…
AirPods Pro 3: The World’s Newest Passport to Oblivion By Miles Blackstone, International Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—In the shadow of the Jet d’Eau, where diplomats still argue about carbon ceilings they’ll never meet, Apple quietly slipped another sliver of white plastic into humanity’s collective ear canal. The AirPods Pro 3, unveiled yesterday in a…
Tim Cook: The World’s Nicest Warden of a Very Expensive Panopticon By Our Correspondent in Geneva—where surveillance cameras outnumber fondue forks, yet no one seems to notice. It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one has ever asked, “What does Tim Cook think about the future of humanity?”—yet here we are, hanging on every…
Apple Stock: The World’s Most Expensive Fruit Salad Keeps Getting Pricier By Matteo “Still Uses a 2012 iPod Classic” Rossi PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, a new planetary constant has emerged: Apple’s share price. From Seoul’s neon canyons to São Paulo’s favelas, the Cupertino ticker has become the Esperanto of modern capitalism—a…
San Francisco 49ers Dispatch from the Edge of the World By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 49th roster cut Word out of Santa Clara is that the 49ers have decided what every global empire eventually decides: let’s get younger, cheaper, and hope nobody notices the drop-off in…
