It all started at the television. At this World Cup I watched Norway handle Iraq, and what struck me wasn’t the tactics but the physical mismatch. The Norwegians looked bigger, taller, heavier. And a thought appeared. See, Latvian hockey figured out long ago that player size is an essential ingredient of winning. Exactly the same with Latvian basketball. […]
links: 03.07.2026
The Athletic: There are 99 French-born players at this World Cup. Welcome to the beating heart of global football The Athletic reports that 99 players at this year’s World Cup were born in France — more than in any other country (the Netherlands is a distant second with 67) — and many of them represent other national teams: […]
links: 30.06.2026
Wired: How Hunter Biden Won the Internet Wired spent months talking to Hunter Biden — the son of a former US president — about his return to public life. For three years he stayed silent and painted in a Malibu garage, but in May, after nearly a decade away, he began posting on X again and gained more […]
links: 27.06.2026
Le Monde: In the age of AI, Chinese universities overhaul their curricula Le Monde describes how Chinese universities are overhauling their degree programmes to align with artificial intelligence, which has been made the top priority of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) — the government wants to embed the technology in as many sectors of the real economy as […]
links: 22.06.2026
The New York Times: The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week Researchers at the Wharton School spent six years finding that the only personality trait that consistently predicts a leader’s objection to remote and hybrid work isn’t distrust of employees or a love of being around people — it’s narcissism. […]
links: 19.06.2026
Wired: How the Peter Thiel-Linked Dialog Club Secretly Ranks Its Members WIRED has obtained internal data from Dialog, the private club co-founded by Peter Thiel — dossiers on nearly 200 prominent people, complete with home addresses, private phone numbers, dates of birth and even food allergies. It turns out the club secretly grades its members by wealth and […]
links: 14.06.2026
LSM: President Čakste’s daughter who feigned insanity in Siberia for her children’s sake. The story of Maiga Šīrone’s self-sacrifice Pianist Maiga Šīrone, a daughter of Latvia’s first president Jānis Čakste, was deported to Siberia with her two children in 1941. Realising that her children could only be sent home if she herself were declared legally incapacitated, she deliberately […]
links: 12.06.2026
WIRED: You Probably Won’t Get Rich Off the SpaceX IPO As part of SpaceX’s IPO the company set aside an unusually large share of stock for retail investors, but experts warn the big gains stay with existing shareholders — employees, institutional funds and Elon Musk. Even if you manage to buy a few shares at $135, the average […]