Category: Semafor

The globalization of professional soccer has turned players into polyglots, even as global entertainment is increasingly siloed. As soccer professionalized, clubs realized that verbal communication was an “essential working tool,” the Financial Times wrote: “Some multinational businesses could learn from the linguistic sophistication of football teams.” De facto polyglots, Belgians ...

Private credit giant Blue Owl Capital is opening a regional headquarters — somewhat of a loaded term in the Gulf — in Abu Dhabi, an indicator that Wall Street firms are still betting on the UAE capital despite uncertainty over the Iran war. The firm, which manages $315 billion in ...

The News Jeff Bezos is ready to open up about Prometheus, the secretive AI startup he’s leading with former Google X executive Vik Bajaj. In his first CEO role since handing over the reins of Amazon in 2021, the tech billionaire said in an interview that he had raised $12 ...

China’s main way of serving overseas markets is, by a wide margin, exports, but rising trade barriers may leave the country with little choice but to expand its investments in foreign countries’ clean tech manufacturing capacity. Since 2014, China has announced $173 billion of FDI in clean technology sectors, but ...

This year’s World Cup is already historic for being the biggest in the competition’s history, stretching across Mexico, the US, and Canada — but it could also become the hottest and most polluting tournament ever. Heat is a central concern, measured not just by air temperature but by the wet-bulb ...

, by Nick Greene. Tracing the sport’s growth from the “folk football” of medieval England — in which players kicked around sheeps’ bladders and human heads — to the 19th-century private schools that popularized the modern game, Greene writes that soccer is “less an invention than some side effect of ...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for worker protection against AI-driven job losses and a new US regulatory body to oversee frontier AI research. Amodei said AI could soon threaten public safety, such as by producing biological or autonomous weapons that “in extreme cases could even threaten humanity itself,” and could ...

US President Donald Trump said he was “not looking to renew” his country’s free trade deal with Canada and Mexico, a decision that could have huge economic consequences across North America. Trump has repeatedly criticized those countries over a range of issues, while adding on Wednesday that the US didn’t ...

The men’s soccer World Cup, which opens today, is the largest sporting event in the world, but the average host nation gets no economic boost from it, analysis suggested. Goldman Sachs looked at every tournament since 1982 and found negligible long-term impact, in part because most fans watch at home. ...

Judah’s view More than 600 years ago, the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun observed a pattern that has repeated itself throughout history. He argued that groups rise through what he called — a powerful sense of social cohesion and shared purpose — but that within the success born of unity lie ...