Bristol Weather: How a Drizzly Tuesday in the West Country Quietly Rules the World By the time the first commuter in Taipei checks the 7-day forecast on her phone, the algorithm has already chewed through 2.3 million data points from a small corrugated shed on the roof of Bristol’s Lloyds Amphitheatre. What the app politely…
Horror Nights, Global Franchise of Dread, Celebrate Humanity’s Unpaid Therapy Bill by Matteo “Graveyard” Moreau, International Correspondent, somewhere between the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca and a fog-shrouded U.K. theme park If you’ve ever wondered what a billion-dollar coping mechanism looks like, buy a ticket to any Horror Night on the planet this season….
Indianapolis Weather: A Midwestern Microdrama Staged for the World Stage By Correspondent R. Valdez, filing from somewhere colder than your conscience While COP delegates in Dubai haggle over half-degree increments, Indianapolis has decided to audition for all four seasons in a single Tuesday. This morning the city awoke to 14 °F (-10 °C), a temperature…
Severe Thunderstorm Warning: The Planet’s Mood Ring Flashes Amber Again By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—Somewhere in the bureaucratic hush of the World Meteorological Organization, a color-coded map the size of Monaco just turned a queasy shade of puce. That, dear reader, is the international signal for “severe thunderstorm warning,” a phrase now so routinely…
Lotto Texas: A Lone-Star Fever Dream in an Age of Global Discontent By Our Senior Correspondent, Somewhere between Houston and Helsinki AUSTIN—Every Wednesday and Saturday night, while most of the planet is doom-scrolling through war-crime footage or calculating how many euros are left before civilization’s next rolling blackout, the good people of Texas gather around…
Dust Storm Warning: A Global Brown-Out By the time the meteorologists in Beijing, Baghdad, and Bakersfield finish their morning Zoom, the sky has already turned the color of an overcooked latte. A dust-storm warning is now less a regional inconvenience and more an international group chat nobody asked to join. From the Sahel to suburban…
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…
