Strictly Speaking: How the Planet Learned to Love the Cage It Built for Itself By our man in the departure lounge, passport ink still wet Strictly speaking, the word “strictly” has always had a passport problem. It shows up at customs with its shirt tucked in, visa pre-approved, declaring nothing but certainty. Yet everywhere it…
The Daily Record: Humanity’s Obsessive Love Affair with Counting Itself PARIS—In the predawn hush outside the Hôtel de Ville, a municipal clerk named Odette prints the daily record of Parisian births, deaths, marriages, parking tickets, and—since last month—TikTok views. She stamps each sheet with the same bronze seal Napoleon commissioned for his own birthday announcements,…
**The M4: Humanity’s Monument to Perpetual Motion (and the Art of Going Nowhere)** The M4 traffic jam stretches from London to the Welsh border like a modern-day Great Wall, except this one’s built from brake lights, shattered dreams, and the collective realization that perhaps driving 3,000 pounds of metal to sit perfectly still wasn’t humanity’s…
**The Global Lottery: Where Hope Meets Mathematical Reality** While millions of Brits anxiously refreshed their phones for Wednesday’s National Lottery results—another cascade of dreams crashing against the immutable wall of probability—the rest of the world was busy conducting its own elaborate rituals of optimistic delusion. From Manila’s congested lotto outlets to São Paulo’s jogo do…
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…
**The Global Hunger Games: How America’s Mega Millions Became the World’s Favorite Fantasy** While inflation ravages purchasing power from Lagos to Lisbon, there’s one American export that remains blissfully immune to currency fluctuations: the dream of instant, unearned wealth. The Mega Millions lottery—America’s weekly exercise in mathematical masochism—has transcended its humble origins to become a…
The Mega Millions jackpot—now swollen to a cartoonish $1.35 billion—has once again achieved what UNESCO summits and Davos panels can only fantasize about: uniting the planet in a single, perfectly synchronized daydream. From Lagos to Lisbon, from Manila to Manitoba, office printers wheeze out identical spreadsheets of “lucky” numbers, and grandmothers who have never set…
Bookers of the World, Unite: How a Four-Letter Word Became the Planet’s Quiet Puppet-Master From the neon back-alleys of Lagos to the sterile lobbies of Davos, the word “booker” has mutated into a shape-shifting verb, noun, and, lately, existential threat. In its earliest, most innocent form, it meant the poor soul who wrestled with opera…
**The Great Cosmic Tease: When the Moon Gives Earth a Half-Hearted Wink** Across the globe yesterday, millions of humans emerged from their digital caves to witness a celestial phenomenon that has captivated our species since we first figured out that staring directly at the sun is a terrible idea. The partial solar eclipse—a cosmic event…
**The OG Trailer: Humanity’s 90-Second Attention Span Goes Global** In a world where nuclear powers can’t agree on basic facts and climate change is apparently negotiable, humanity has finally found something we can all share: the compulsive need to watch grainy footage of movies that don’t exist yet. The “OG trailer”—that first tantalizing glimpse of…
The world, it seems, has overdosed on espresso and is now sprinting in twelve directions at once, each one convinced it’s late for a meeting that was cancelled last quarter. From the bullet-train commuters of Tokyo who can nap with their eyes open at 320 km/h, to the Lagos okada riders threading traffic like caffeinated…
The planet woke up yesterday to the latest Set for Life draws, a phrase that scans like a particularly bitter punch-line in an era when most of us are simply set for Tuesday. From Sydney to Sheffield, five fresh millionaires discovered they will receive a drip-feed of wealth—roughly $20,000 a month for twenty years—while the…
