Eritrea and (a Tigrayan-led) Ethiopia fought one of Africa’s deadliest wars against each other. Then Eritrea helped Ethiopia crush Tigray. Now Eritrea and Tigray are fighting Ethiopia together. Confusing? Super. Nicholas Norbrook of The Africa Report maps the forces pulling at a country that was, until recently, one of the fastest-growing economies on earth –...
Mark Walter bought the Lakers for $10 billion and sold them fourteen months later for $12.5. That’s a 20% return – which sounds enormous until you consider that nobody sells the Lakers after a year unless something has gone badly wrong. Chris Branch, author of The Athletic’s The Pulse, joins to pull on the thread:...
Two hundred years ago, Simón Bolívar dreamed of a united Latin America – precisely so it could resist becoming America’s backyard. South America may finally be integrating… Just not the way he had in mind. Elohim Monard joins from Pucallpa, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, to trace what Marco Rubio’s recent swing through the region...
People are being killed over sand. Not diamonds, not lithium, not rare earths – sand, the second-most consumed resource on earth after water, and the one nobody thinks about twice. Mette Bendixen, a geoscientist at McGill, studies where it comes from and who pays the price for it. Dubai imports its sand from Australia. Greenland’s...
Inside you are two wolves. One (Michael Every) looks at Washington and sees a plan. The other (Jacob) looks at the same info and sees chaos. Somewhere north of both is the sovereign nation of Canada – a country discovering what it actually costs to step away from Washington and forge out on its own....
The world has never been wealthier… but a warm patch of ocean in the Pacific is about to reorganize the weather across four continents and all that wealth still might not be enough to cover the damages. Climate scientist Justin Mankin studies how much these events actually cost – and his estimates run to $10...
Scott Bessent knows something that we don’t. Luke Gromen has spent his whole career reading the fine print of America’s balance sheet, and his conclusion is stark: the quiet interventions coming out of Washington – doubled bond buybacks, a yen rescue, a sudden fondness for stablecoins – aren’t policy. They’re symptoms. The arithmetic of debt,...
AI companies are buying up used books, scanning them, and destroying the originals. At least, that’s the headline… the real story is weirder. Charlie Becker, a seventh-generation bookseller in Houston, went viral for tracing one of these mysterious bulk orders – following overlooked books into Amazon warehouses filled with entire categories of obscure human knowledge....
Jacob Shapiro welcomes back Peter Harrell, visiting scholar at Georgetown’s Institute of International Economic Law and former White House senior director for international economics. Trump keeps finding new legal tools – including a forgotten 1930 law now aimed at Canada – and companies have stopped investing because they can’t guess what comes next :/ Also,...
Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of the China Global South Project, joins the pod to discuss the developments on the other side of the globe. From Ho Chi Minh City, Eric explains how the Global South actually sees the US-Iran war, why nobody expects China to ride to anyone’s rescue, and how Vietnam’s tariff and energy shocks...
