Author: Sam Allcock
Steve Clarke became the manager of Scotland’s national team in 2019. He had a good coaching background, but he didn’t have the kind of fame that usually comes with national team jobs. After that, they qualified for three tournaments in four tries, a generation of players found faith again, and fans who had almost given up hope for anything. This may have made him the best men’s manager Scotland has ever had. Even so, he was said to be making around £500,000 a year during most of it. It tells you something about how much money is made in international…
Attorneys for OpenAI and The New York Times are arguing over training data in a federal courtroom in New York. Not in the abstract—about particular articles, particular archival material, and particular works that the Times claims were included into sizable language models without authorization or compensation. The Times filed its complaint in late 2023, and since then, the discovery process has turned into a battlefield of its own. The Times is suing OpenAI for allegedly withholding internal tools that might search training data for content protected by copyright. The plaintiffs think there is proof of infringement, and they think the…
The assembly lines are operating in the industrial areas outside of Chennai. Employees are transporting iPhone parts through stations that, in general, resemble what you’d expect from a facility running in accordance with Apple’s specifications: spotless floors, regulated conditions, and employees wearing uniforms provided by the firm. Apple has made no secret of the fact that it is growing its presence in India. There is a headcount. The structures are present. The output is rising. Less obviously, there is also a cost structure that is far more than what the identical operations cost in Shenzhen. Analysts monitoring Apple’s supply chain…
On a Wednesday night in Manhattan, the Theater District appears to be a thriving business from the outside, with bright marquees and moving lines. The Broadway League has been releasing revenue data that have broken records. A comeback is described in the headlines. The investors, on the other hand, frequently provide a different picture, one in which they see a performance play to respectable houses for months without being able to recoup the initial investment. Since theaters reopened after the pandemic, less than 10% of new Broadway musicals have recovered their initial investment. That is a shocking figure that doesn’t…
One of the most remarkable cautionary tales in the history of the music industry is the case of Paul McCartney losing the publication rights to Beatles songs. In the early 1960s, he and John Lennon sold their collection to ATV Music, a move that was common at the time and that neither of them fully realized would have long-term effects. In 1985, Michael Jackson paid $47.5 million to acquire ATV Music, following advice he allegedly received from McCartney during their acquaintance. It would take McCartney decades to address the legal and financial issues that resulted from that acquisition, which gave…
A hurricane or a port attack garner more media attention than the Panama Canal. It is a tiny stretch of water between two oceans that prevents container ships from going around South America to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It hums along in the background of global trade, handling about three to five percent of international marine commerce on any given day. In Georgia or New Jersey, most people don’t give it any thought. Until prices begin to fluctuate. Water powers the canal. In particular, it operates on Gatún Lake, an artificial reservoir that supplies the lock system…
On June 27, 2026, Alan Jackson had his last performance. That statement carries some weight for anyone who grew up listening to country music in the 1990s and 2000s. It wasn’t because the songs ran out or the crowds stopped attending that he decided to retire. Charcot-Marie-Tooth illness, a genetic neurological disorder that impairs nerve communication to muscles, had advanced to the point that it made no sense for him to continue performing, so he retired. He was sixty-seven. He has been doing this for forty years. He leaves behind one of the most spectacular financial records in American popular…
For more than twenty years, Faizon Love was a well-known figure in American comedy. His portrayal as Wanda, the Gimbel’s manager in Elf, turned into a kind of holiday tradition—the kind of character that casual viewers quote without necessarily knowing the actor’s name. He starred with Chris Tucker and Ice Cube in Friday, one of the most popular comedies of the 1990s. For a while, the career was actually working, the job was real, and the visibility was real. The financial scenario in 2026 appears to be very different from what the filmography could imply. Love and his legal team…
By most standards, Qatar is a little nation—about the size of Connecticut—with a population that could easily fit inside one large American city. However, the family that has ruled it since the nineteenth century has amassed a wealth that has little to do with the actual size of the country. With resources that most nations of any size would find difficult to match, the Al Thani dynasty is one of the world’s most wealthy royal families. Depending on how you take into consideration the overlap between governmental assets and private family holdings, estimates of the family’s overall net worth vary…
Jill Smokler began writing about parenthood in 2008, focusing on how it felt rather than how parenting publications portrayed it. The tiredness, uncertainty, and times of true annoyance that most parents experienced but few discussed in public. The blog was dubbed Scary Mommy by her. Initially, it was merely a personal journal of a stay-at-home mom with kids, a laptop, and some thoughts. Millions of people had been waiting for that voice, something she was unaware of at the time. The website expanded rapidly. Then it grew more quickly. After then, it grew to become the biggest parenting destination in…