Leopards vs Saints: A Global Game of Spots and Halos By Our Correspondent, filing from whichever airport lounge still has free olives The phrase “leopards don’t change their spots” is enjoying a vigorous second act on the world stage, now re-cast as a dark comedy in which the leopards wear bespoke suits and the saints…
Lucky for Life: A Global Lottery Where the House Always Wins—But So, Occasionally, Do We By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the neon-soaked kiosks of Manila to the hushed kiosks of Reykjavik, the same phrase is whispered like a secular prayer: “Lucky for Life.” It’s the brand name of an American lottery whose annuities now…
The Rumor That Leapt Time Zones By Dave’s Locker International Desk It began, as all modern plagues do, with a half-charged phone battery in a Lagos airport lounge. A WhatsApp voice note—breathless, 19 seconds, accompanied by the obligatory “Fwd many times” disclaimer—claimed that an unnamed “high official” had defected, carrying a flash drive fatter than…
# The Quiet American: How Scottie Scheffler Became Golf’s Reluctant Messiah in a World Gone Mad While the planet grapples with the minor inconveniences of climate collapse, democratic backsliding, and the occasional nuclear saber-rattling, a soft-spoken Texan in pleated khakis has emerged as humanity’s most unlikely source of comfort—a walking, talking antidote to our collective…
The Weeknd Presale: A Global Ritual of FOMO, Firewalls, and Fractured Dreams By Dave’s Locker International Desk The sun never sets on a Weeknd presale. From Manila’s 3 a.m. queues to São Paulo’s lunch-break cyber stampedes, millions synchronize their suffering in the name of Abel Tesfaye’s falsetto. It is less a ticket drop than a…
**The North London Derby’s Ugly Cousin: How Tottenham-West Ham Became the World’s Most Watched Family Feud** While diplomats in Geneva debate nuclear non-proliferation and central bankers fret over inflation rates, a more ancient form of human conflict unfolds in North London this weekend—one that proves our species hasn’t evolved nearly as much as we’d like…
Mega Millions Winning Numbers: The Global Lottery Where Everyone Loses Except One Guy in Ohio By the time the white balls tumbled out of the gravity chamber in Atlanta, the planet had already placed its bets. In Manila, a call-center agent on his smoke break refreshed the app six times, convinced that 07-15-24-41-43 + 22…
The EuroMillions lottery—Europe’s weekly exercise in collective delusion—draws punters from nine countries who hand over small change in exchange for the statistically negligible possibility that their lives will suddenly resemble a private-jet commercial. Every Tuesday and Friday night the continent pauses, breath baited, to discover which accidental plutocrat will be granted the GDP of a…
Twins vs Royals: The Eternal Cage Match Between Genetics and Genealogy By Our Correspondent in the Republic of Slightly Unhinged Democracies If you’ve spent any time on social media this week, you’ve seen the memes: a pair of identical toddlers in matching rompers squaring off against a pair of middle-aged heirs in identical navy suits,…
An International Field Guide to Personal Injury Attorneys, or How to Monetize Gravity By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least four people on four different continents will have slipped, tripped, or otherwise obeyed Newton’s least-favorite law and discovered that the ground is not, in fact, optional. Enter the personal injury attorney—part litigator,…
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…
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…
