About

A small publication about big numbers.

TheGlobalWow is a small, independent publication about surprising numbers — the kind that make you stop scrolling and say, “wait, really?”

Each Wow is built around one figure: why every piano is tuned slightly wrong, how long a town in Pennsylvania has been burning underground, how much of beef's famous water footprint is actually rain. One big number, a clear explanation, and enough context to see why it matters.

Why this exists

The internet is full of astonishing facts. A surprising number of them aren't true.

They get repeated until nobody remembers where they came from — a statistic in a slide deck, a line in a speech, a number that sounds just about right. We love the jolt of learning something unexpected about the world, and we wanted a place where that jolt survives a closer look.

The surprising story, or the true one

We like a surprising story. We like a true one more.

When we follow a famous number back to its source, it doesn't always make it. The claim that you make 35,000 decisions a day leads back to a blog post citing “various internet sources”. The line that 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years has been repeated since 2011, even though today's growth figures don't come close.

When that happens, we don't bend the fact to fit the headline. We change the headline. If a fact needs an asterisk to stay true, the asterisk probably belongs in the story. More often than you'd think, the real version is the better Wow.

How we check a Wow

We won't always get it right first time. These are the habits we hold every Wow to:

  • Follow the number home. We trace the key figure back to where it was measured, not just to the last place it was repeated.
  • Prefer the primary source. Where we can, we cite the agency, dataset, paper or company filing itself.
  • Check the date and the definition. What year is the figure from, what exactly does it measure, and what does it leave out?
  • Redo the maths. If a Wow compares, divides or converts, we recalculate it rather than trust the version we found.
  • Show our working. Every Wow lists its sources, and shows when they were last checked.
  • Fix it when we're wrong. When better evidence turns up, we update the article. We'd rather correct a Wow than defend it.

AI tools sometimes assist with research, drafting and production. They don't decide what gets published: claims are checked against their sources, and editorial decisions and corrections remain ours.

Independent, and made in South Africa

TheGlobalWow is an independent project, made in South Africa. We write about the whole world — Africa very much included — because some of the most surprising numbers come from places that rarely make the headlines.

If a number here makes you say “wait, really?”, good. That's the whole idea.