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…
Wisconsin Lottery: Where Dairyland Dreams Meet the Global Delusion of Getting Rich Without Actually Doing Anything By Our Man in Geneva, Still Recovering from the Last Davos After-Party MADISON—From the air, Wisconsin looks like a polite green doily laid over North America’s midriff, all silos, supper clubs, and the occasional cow wondering why the grass…
The Tennessee Lottery: A Very American Miracle, Exported and Deconstructed By Our Man in Somewhere With Better Odds NASHVILLE—Somewhere between the neon crucifix of a Broadway honky-tonk and the beeping heartbreak of a gas-station scratcher, the Tennessee Lottery is quietly staging its own version of Manifest Destiny. From the outside, it looks like yet another…
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…
Power, like cheap tequila, is most potent just before it makes you sick. From the marble corridors of Brussels to the fluorescent-lit war rooms of Beijing, the world’s sharpest minds are busy proving that axiom daily, usually while someone else foots the bar tab. Consider the United Nations Security Council on any given Tuesday: five…
The World’s Most Democratic Tax on Hope By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the 7-Eleven and the Edge of Reason It was 8:03 p.m. in Madrid when Carlos, a civil servant who hasn’t seen a raise since fax machines were chic, forked over his last two euros for “El Gordo” Christmas tickets. Twelve time zones away,…
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…
Elsbeth, the Legal Tourist: How One Prosecutor Became the World’s Favorite Foreign Correspondent By the time CBS shipped Elsbeth Tascioni—Chicago’s most flamboyantly unhinged defense lawyer—to New York under the guise of “monitoring police reform,” half the planet had already turned her into a meme. In Lagos, WhatsApp stickers show her tilting her head like a…
Jauan Jennings and the Weaponized Underdog: How a Third-Stringer Became a Geopolitical Mirror PARIS—On paper, Jauan Jennings is a 6’3″ wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers who was drafted in the seventh round, cut twice, and now moonlights as a special-teams gunner and occasional red-zone nuisance. In practice, he has become a walking, trash-talking…
The 2026 World Cup, or “Operation Three-Country Branding Exercise” as its accountants call it, is already warming up on the runway like a private jet full of undecleared cash. Spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico—a North American triumvirate that can’t agree on the spelling of “defence” yet somehow agreed to share a trophy—it…
Astros: The New Cosmic Cartel Running the World While You’re Busy Scrolling By Dave’s Foreign Desk, from an undisclosed bar with a view of three different time zones You’d be forgiven for assuming that “Astros” refers to that baseball team whose 2017 World Series trophy is now used primarily as a paperweight for MLB’s apology…
The Sinner and the Saint: How One Italian Tennis Prodigy Became a Global Parable of Moral Relativism Dave’s Locker International, 7 April 2024 ROME—At 4:37 a.m. CET, the ATP press release slid into inboxes like a confession whispered through a confessional grille: Jannik Sinner, the polite South Tyrolean who hits a tennis ball as if…
