Wednesday’s lotto numbers are out again—an innocuous string of digits that somehow manages to be the most democratically shared hallucination on the planet. From Manila’s jeepney queues to Reykjavik’s geothermal-heated kiosks, humanity queued up to pay a voluntary tax on hope, and the planet’s eight official time zones obligingly staggered the disappointment so no one…
Friday evening in Milwaukee, and the only thing colder than the lake-effect wind is the existential dread creeping in past the seventh-inning stretch. The Brewers—an outfit whose name still sounds like a failed microbrewery IPO—are hosting the Padres, a team whose branding evokes Catholic guilt and surfer slang in equal measure. To the uninitiated, it’s…
Autopen: The Signature That Travels the World While Its Owner Stays Home By Our Correspondent Who Has Signed Too Many Expense Reports to Ever Trust Handwriting Again PARIS—Somewhere in the Élysée Palace sits a squat beige machine that can reproduce Emmanuel Macron’s looping “E” and Napoleonic “M” faster than you can say “Article 49.3.” Across…
Keegan Bradley and the Last Gasp of American Exceptionalism on a Scottish Fairway By Our Man in the Bunker St Andrews, Scotland – In the cradle of golf, where sheep once grazed and now Chinese conglomerates graze on real-estate brochures, Keegan Bradley did something mildly shocking: he won the Scottish Open. Cue polite applause from…
Como 1 – Sassuolo 0 Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia, Northern Italy, Saturday evening. The fog rolls off Lake Como like a hung-over diplomat slinking out of a five-star summit, and somewhere between the water and the floodlights a football match breaks out—apparently of interest to more than the 11,000 locals too polite to admit they’d rather…
Tonight, in a windowless studio somewhere between a tax haven and a tax headache, six plastic balls tumbled out of a glorified popcorn machine and rewrote destinies from Lagos to Ljubljana. The numbers—3, 17, 24, 33, 41, with a “bonus” 7 that looked suspiciously like an afterthought—have already been translated into 47 languages, meme-ified in…
Ligue 1: The French Farce That Keeps the Planet Spinning By A. Correspondent Who Has Slept in Too Many Airport Lounges PARIS—On any given weekend, while glaciers calve and trade ministers slap new tariffs on each other, twenty French football clubs perform the same ritual: they jog onto perfectly manicured pitches to chase a sphere…
Ryder Cup Opening Ceremony: A Pageant of Flags, Fortune, and Thinly-Veiled National Anxiety by our correspondent in Marco Simone, nursing a Campari in the media tent The Ryder Cup opening ceremony has always been golf’s answer to Eurovision: flags the size of small nations, anthems belted out by choirs that sound like they’ve been told…
The Washington Skyline Gets a New Hole and the World Winces in Recognition By the time the first shaky TikTok reached Buenos Aires, the Potomac had already swallowed whatever remained of American Airlines 5342. Somewhere between Reagan National and the river’s muddy applause, the mid-air pirouette with a Black Hawk helicopter turned the U.S. capital…
Real Sociedad vs Mallorca: A Microscopic War on the Edge of the Known Universe By Our Man in San Sebastián, Still Recovering from Last Night’s Pintxo Moral Hangover In the grand, indifferent sweep of the cosmos, two football clubs from Spain’s northern and Balearic peripheries will collide tonight on a patch of grass so exquisitely…
The view from the Radisson Blu Plaza’s 34th-floor bar is, to be polite, unnervingly tidy: a Lego diorama of fjords, forests and social democracy, all lit by the low-wattage glow of collective guilt about being too comfortable. Oslo—population smaller than a Shanghai rush-hour platform—has managed to turn itself into a global Rorschach test. The rest…
SÃO PAULO—Somewhere between the papaya-colored favela lights and the 24-hour sushi robots, I found myself asking an algorithm for “grocery near me.” The phone, ever the obedient courtier, spat back a map studded with red pins: a Carrefour the size of Liechtenstein, a Korean mom-and-pop that doubles as a cryptocurrency exchange, and, for the romantics,…
