While Japan’s more than 50,000 convenience stores – konbini – are an indispensable part of daily life, they’ve tended to stay away from the realm of fashion, beyond offering clean underwear or perhaps an emergency shirt and tie. That all changed in 2021 when FamilyMart – operator of nearly 16,300 convenience stores in Japan –…
What can poker teach us about risk management? Maria Konnikova explains what competing in high-stakes games has taught her about making decisions, getting caught bluffing and playing the hand she’s dealt. The way that poker is played today is light years from how it was done in the days of the Wild West and gambling…
The Netherlands and Denmark have much in common: both are rich, flat, windswept, laboriously democratic and industriously agricultural. Plus: bicycles. But there is one aspect where they have diverged in the past 20 years. Denmark became an improbable global culinary mecca. The local, seasonal New Nordic movement began with René Redzepi’s Noma and ended up inspiring a…
A beloved hillside wine walk in Hesse once offered quiet trails and crisp rieslings. Some 12 years later it’s a very different vintage – and a reminder that not all memories are meant to… We all have memories of a wonderful trip taken, an event attended or a travel highlight that we have held on…
If you’re on the metro in Stockholm these days, you can’t escape the message splashed across almost every billboard: Sweden is spending huge sums on rearmament in a bid to reverse years of limp military investment. The ads proclaim that a newly refurbished, now top-class submarine recently went back into service; that 503 specialist officers…
A pharaoh eagle-owl named Shamsa flicked her amber eyes upwards towards the rafters of the Sheikh Saeed Hall 3 in the Dubai Convention Centre. Had she spotted a rogue dove or a gate-crashing white-eared bulbul hiding from the oppressive heat outside? Whatever she had seen, the bird from Al Ain Zoo was, for the briefest…
The US president’s reshaping of foreign alliances is a geopolitical victory for North Korea and China Donald Trump’s disdain for the US’s traditional partners is emerging as a central feature of his administration’s foreign policy. Washington’s Indo-Pacific allies have so far avoided such ire but Trump will eventually turn toward them – and likely pick…
