Johnny Depp: The Last Pirate of Global Celebrity By the time the sun rose over the French Riviera last May, Johnny Depp had already been applauded by European cineastes for seven minutes straight—an ovation longer than most of his recent films’ combined running times in Chinese multiplexes. Cannes was signaling something the rest of the…
**Thunderball Lotto Results: The Global Echo of a Modest British Boom** LONDON—While the world’s gaze is fixed on missile trajectories, crypto collapses, and the slow-motion demolition of various rainforests, Britain’s National Lottery quietly coughed up Tuesday’s Thunderball numbers: 06, 09, 14, 23, 39, and the Thunderball itself, 03. A £500,000 jackpot—pocket change next to America’s…
Kevin Hart, the 5-foot-4 human espresso shot, has become the planet’s unofficial ambassador of mild panic. From Lagos traffic jams to Tokyo bullet-train etiquette videos, his face—frozen mid-shriek—now greets roughly 2.3 billion monthly viewers who apparently find existential dread hilarious. UNESCO could declare him a living meme, but that would imply the organization still believes…
Pick 3: A Global Lottery in Miniature Where Hope Is Sold by the Thimbleful By Matteo “Numbers Never Lie” Bianchi, Dave’s Locker International Desk SINGAPORE—Somewhere between the 24-hour currency desks and the hawker stalls that never sleep, a tiny rectangle of paper changes hands for the price of a kopi-o. Three digits, one Singapore dollar,…
Jonah Coleman and the Global Ripple of One Man’s Very Public Mid-Life Crisis by “Lazlo Marquez, roving correspondent for the terminally bemused” ISTANBUL — In the grand bazaar of modern notoriety, every hour now coughs up a new Jonah Coleman. Ours happens to be the 34-year-old former logistics manager from Portland, Oregon who, on the…
The UNLV Football Coach and the Theater of American Dreams By our Las Vegas bureau chief, still recovering from the all-you-can-eat buffet of hope LAS VEGAS—Somewhere between the wedding chapels offering “Marry a Stranger, Get a Free Margarita” coupons and the slot machines that cough out cryptocurrency instead of coins, the University of Nevada, Las…
If you stand on any international film-festival red carpet long enough, you’ll spot Benny Safdie orbiting the chaos like a benign black hole: quietly warping space-time while the rest of us scramble for canapés. The curly-haired half of the Safdie brothers has spent the past decade dragging American indie cinema—kicking, screaming, and probably high on…
Kevin Bacon: The Global Village’s Favorite Piece of String By the time the sun rises over the Sea of Japan, a salaryman in Osaka has already discovered he is four steps from Kevin Bacon via a K-drama star who once studied at UCLA. At the same instant, a bleary-eyed student in Lagos updates her thesis…
**Whiskey, Heartbreak, and the Global Village: Chris Stapleton as Accidental Diplomat** *By Our Correspondent Who’s Watched Empires Fall but Never Missed a Good Guitar Solo* NASHVILLE—While the world busies itself weaponizing trade routes and TikTok trends, a bearded Kentucky export named Chris Stapleton has been quietly achieving what the State Department gave up on sometime…
The Virginia Lottery’s latest “$1.3-billion-prize-that-nobody-claimed” kerfuffle has been greeted abroad with the same polite horror reserved for American cheese-in-a-can: fascinating, slightly nauseating, and impossible to look away from. From Lagos to Ljubljana, headlines asked the same question: how do you misplace a life-altering fortune when inflation is devouring paychecks faster than a TikTok trend? The…
Jameson Williams: How One Speedster’s Hamstring Became a Geopolitical Flashpoint By Dave’s Locker, World Affairs Desk PARIS—On Tuesday, while the European Central Bank was busy attempting to convince 450 million citizens that negative interest rates are somehow a personality trait, another drama with far graver implications was unfolding across the Atlantic: Detroit Lions wide receiver…
From the Deck of a Slowly Sinking Cruise Ship Somewhere Between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mariana Trench by Our Correspondent-at-Large, still waiting for the Wi-Fi to load The phrase “Sam Houston vs Hawaii” sounds like the kind of fever dream you’d get after eating too much poke washed down with lukewarm Lone Star…
