Drag Race as a Global TV Franchise
When RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered on the niche cable channel Logo on 2 February 2009, it looked like an affectionate, low-budget curiosity: nine queens,…
How the Preferential Ballot Decides Best Picture
Since the ceremony honouring the films of 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has chosen its top prize through a system…
A Brief History of the Christmas Number One Race
Every December, the United Kingdom stages a pop ritual with no real equivalent anywhere else: the race for the Christmas number one. The prize…
The Drag Residency Boom in Las Vegas
“RuPaul’s Drag Race Live!” opened at the Flamingo on January 30, 2020, six weeks before Nevada shut every showroom in the state. It was…
Gambling Scenes in Cinema: Accuracy Against Drama
Every gambling movie faces the same structural problem: real gambling is mostly waiting, folding and grinding out small edges, while cinema needs a decisive…
Formula 1 in Las Vegas: The Numbers Behind the Race
On the night of November 18, 2023, Formula 1 cars ran down Las Vegas Boulevard at over 200 miles per hour, past the Bellagio…
Why the Casino Buffet Died and What Replaced It
For half a century, the buffet was as central to the casino experience as the slot machine, and it died in essentially one weekend.…
A Short History of the Las Vegas Residency
In November 1944 a young pianist from Wisconsin took a booking at the Last Frontier hotel on a dusty highway outside Las Vegas. Liberace…
Slot Streamers and the Twitch Gambling Ban
For a stretch of 2021 and 2022, the most reliable spectacle on Twitch was not a video game at all. It was a spinning…
The Sphere: How a Venue Became a Media Format
On September 29, 2023, U2 opened a 40-show run of “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live” inside a 366-foot-tall globe just east of the Las Vegas…