Mega Millions: How a $1.6 Billion Mirage Seduces the Planet By Our Man in the Cheap Seats At 11 p.m. Eastern last night, a single American lottery draw produced more overnight billionaires than most African stock exchanges manage in a decade. The Mega Millions jackpot—$1.6 billion and change—had swollen to the kind of figure normally…
Mile-High Mirage: How a Rocky Mountain Scratch Card Became a Global Parable By the time the Colorado Lottery’s latest Powerball billboard flickered to life above Denver International—a smiling elk promising life-changing jackpots to anyone who can read English and ignore basic statistics—three continents were already taking notes. From Singapore’s Marina Bay to Lagos’s Balogun Market,…
Powerball en Vivo Hoy: The World Holds Its Breath for a Billion-Dollar Fever Dream By Dave’s Locker Correspondent, somewhere between a bar in Lisbon and a rooftop in Manila Tonight, at precisely 22:59 Eastern Standard Time, the multicolored balls of destiny will tumble inside a plastic drum in Tallahassee, Florida—population 200,000, humidity 400%. Somewhere between…
The Powerball Drawing: A Global Lottery Where Everyone Loses, Yet Still Buys Tickets By the time the white balls tumbled out of the acrylic drum in Tallahassee last night, Tokyo’s morning commuters were already checking the results on their phones between sardine-can train stops and Lagos’s night-shift nurses were placing proxy bets on WhatsApp before…
Judkins: The Last Name the World Needed, but Definitely Deserves By our man in the field, slightly jet-lagged and morally flexible If you’ve spent any time doom-scrolling through the global village lately, you’ve probably bumped into “Judkins.” It isn’t a new cryptocurrency, a rogue strain of avian flu, or the next Netflix docu-series about competitive…
The Astros Game Today: A Tragicomedy in Nine Innings, Brought to You by Planetary Melodrama Houston, Texas—population 2.3 million, humidity 100%, probability of existential dread steadily rising. While the locals shuffle into Minute Maid Park to watch grown millionaires in pajamas swat cowhide spheres, the rest of the planet quietly wonders whether this is the…
Kaitlan Collins and the Global Gladiator Pit A dispatch from the front row of the world’s most expensive reality show By the time the sun rises in Kyiv, Kaitlan Collins has already made three governments flinch. By dusk in Jakarta, she’s on every diplomatic WhatsApp group, her questions clipped, translated, and weaponised. The 32-year-old CNN…
CenterPoint Energy: Houston, We Have a Grid Problem (and It’s Contagious) By the time the lights flickered out in Texas last February, the rest of the planet had already stopped pretending to be surprised. After all, we’ve spent the last decade watching power grids from South Africa to Siberia audition for the same tragicomedy: one…
Dodgers vs. Pirates: A Tragicomic Opera Staged on the High Seas of Global Capital By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between a Tax Haven and a Rum-Soaked Dock The eternal pas de deux between dodgers and pirates has always been less a binary clash of good and evil than a recurring dinner party where the appetizers are…
The Curious Diplomacy of Erin Andrews: How a Sideline Reporter Accidentally Became a Global Rorschach Test By Dave’s International Desk Paris—In a world where heads of state can’t reliably keep their Zoom cameras off, Erin Andrews has improbably become a one-woman foreign-exchange program. The American sportscaster—once best known for asking sweaty linebackers how they feel—now…
CBS Fantasy Football: How an American Pastime Became the Planet’s Most Efficient Sleeper Cell By the time most of Europe is debating whether to raise the retirement age to 75 or simply replace pensions with TikTok dances, a quiet army of 12 million global managers—yes, that is the officially sanctioned euphemism—has already spent the pre-dawn…
Karolína Muchová: The Czech Enigma Who Makes Tennis Cosmopolitan Again By Dave’s Locker International Desk | June 2024 Prague, a city that still smells faintly of Kafka, Pilsner, and the 1989 velvet that refused to get bloody, has coughed up another absurdist protagonist for the global stage: Karolína Muchová. She is currently the only Czech…
