Las Vegas

Sunday

Sean Thomas

Vegas’s seedy soul will save Sin City

I vividly remember the first time I saw Las Vegas. It was decades ago, and a friend and I did the classic LA-Vegas mini-road-trip, across the burning desert, arriving in Nevada around dusk. As we crested the final sandy hill, I saw this thing. This glittering neon jewel-box of a city, glowing in the twilight. I fell in love at once, a love that was only confirmed when we actually entered Vegas, and I realized I was motoring down Hugh Hefner Way.That love didn’t quite last, however. Not long ago I returned, and something felt very different. Sadder, somehow. Yes, I was shown a Damien Hirst-designed bedroom with a fridge full of diamonds, but I also saw too much druggy homelessness, and too many stickers that gave me a shock.

Vegas

Thursday

Jake Donoghue

Trumpworld’s embrace of crypto should raise suspicion

“It’s been quite a while since I’ve been to a conference with this level of energy… I promise I’m not just saying that to juice my own memecoins.” After dropping this clanger in his keynote speech at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, J.D. Vance paused awkwardly for an applause which never arrived. Bar a few perfunctory laughs, this was one buzzword the Vice President rolled out which failed to impress the thousands-strong crowd in Vegas yesterday afternoon. To understand the frosty reception, a cursory glance through Trump’s recent dealings in this chaotic corner of the crypto industry is required. On January 17 this year – a mere three days before his inauguration – the soon-to-be president of the United States launched his own memecoin: $TRUMP.

Vance crypto

Monday

Rich Cromwell

A far out weekend at the Vegas Sphere

We were somewhere around the Palazzo when the drugs began to take hold. Unlike Hunter S. Thompson, though, we were surrounded not by imaginary bats but an amiable crowd of agèd hippies. Our destination was the Las Vegas Sphere, to hear Dead & Company. The venue itself eschews the definite article, but it’s futile. No one says they’re going to Sphere. It’s too much of a destination. It needs the definite article. Security was rather lax, though the price of tickets plus the age of the average attendee greatly lessened the chances of anyone showing up with mayhem on his mind. After going through a metal detector, where we are instructed not to empty our pockets, we headed up the stairs to find our seats.

Sphere

Monday

Neal Pollack

My World Series of Poker debut

I played in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas this summer for the first time. The most common question I got on social media and in person, from dozens of people who’ve never suffered through a poker tournament before, was: “How do you qualify for this?” The answer is: you show up, pay your money, and then you’re in. Anyone could do the World Series of Poker tomorrow. I don’t recommend the WSOP as an activity if you’ve never played poker before, but as a human with a bank account or some other sort of cash reserve, you’re technically eligible. The other question, once I started posting my results, was: “Are you still in the tournament, or are you eliminated?” Don’t be a dope.

poker

Monday

The Spectator

Biden White House rocked by protests

The Biden White House had a difficult weekend as pro-Palestinian protesters continue to be a thorn in the side of the administration and the Democratic Party. Thousands arrived outside of the White House on Saturday to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and for Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel. Police erected additional fencing around the White House in anticipation of the protests and deployed pepper spray against at least one demonstrator, but no arrests were made. Instead, the pro-Palestinian activists left graffiti on statues in Lafayette Square and trash strewn around the perimeter of the White House complex.

protests

Wednesday

Ross Anderson

Loving Las Vegas

After ten hours of flying and too much bad airplane coffee, the beef carpaccio from 8 East at the Circa casino was ecstasy. Topped with potato chips, served with drops of citrus-infused wasabi crème, it would have been fabulous anytime. But nursing a cold Sapporo, stoned on exhaustion and discombobulation, I shivered in delight with every bite. Just a single piece would have been worth the flight. It was my first time in Las Vegas — my first time in the States — and I was hoping to write a meaningful story about a too-much written about place.

Vegas

Thursday

Cat Woods

Dita Von Teese, the once and forever burlesque star

She’s the Glamonatrix who looks equally as comfortable luxuriating in a Champagne glass, emerging from a giant shell, perched upon a cake or astride an oversized lipstick bullet. She’s the Rhinestone Cowgirl, the Bird of Paradise, the star of Strip, Strip, Hooray! and Dita’s Crazy Show. She’s a star. In contrast to OnlyFans influencers, Dita Von Teese comes from an older, spectacular style of tease, and at fifty-one, remains the world’s best-known burlesque dancer. She’s the most famous striptease showgirl since Gypsy Rose Lee and perhaps the world’s leading erotic celebrity. She’s come a long way since she was simply a Michigan-born girl named Heather Sweet.

von Teese

Friday

Adrian Brune

What Really Happens in Vegas doesn’t tell you what really happens in Vegas

Many magicians have passed through Las Vegas since its inception somewhere around the early 1940s: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Criss Angel. But possibly its most renowned, yet least acclaimed, trickster was a woman named Gloria Dea.   Dea performed traditional magic — the sleight of hand stuff — but she had a specialty in billiard ball manipulation, tossing the balls so that they seem to multiply and then disappear. A prodigy, you could say — and one of the first magicians, let alone a female one, to set foot on the Strip. In 1941, Dea, who was born Gloria Metzner in Oakland, California, appeared at the Round-Up Room at the El Rancho Vegas. She was not yet twenty years old. Dea lasted a year before Hollywood recruited her into D-movies.

seal patterson vegas

Monday

Cockburn

Cardi B is dangerous with a mic — literally

2023 has the summer of unruly concertgoers. So far, bras, phones and a woman’s ashes have been thrown, pelted, and flung at the likes of Bebe Rexha, Drake, Kelsea Ballerini, Kid Cudi, Pink and Harry Styles. Now that Cardi B has become the latest victim, the celebrities are finally fighting back.   On Saturday, Cardi B was performing her 2018 hit “Bodak Yellow” at Drai’s Beach Club in Las Vegas when a concertgoer threw her drink at the rapper. Cardi B immediately hurled her microphone into the audience before unleashing a string of expletives. Cockburn commends Cardi for her excellent aim — she hit the culprit squarely in the chest.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlYU3Lpx9b0&ab_channel=CNN Cardi had warmed up her throwing arm the night before.

cardi b

Sunday

Jim Buckley

Las Vegas’s Mob Museum revels in the city’s gritty past

A generation or two is usually enough time for a family whose fortune may have been built upon a crime to bury its heritage. Not Las Vegas. It’s proud of its inglorious past. Housed in a four-story former federal courthouse and US post office in downtown Las Vegas, the Mob Museum revels in Sin City’s storied, unconventional and very criminal past. The building’s basement, for example, has been converted into an immersive exhibit redolent of the Prohibition era, complete with a fully operational speakeasy featuring a menu of 1920s-style cocktails. Gin-based Bee’s Knees and other drinks are served, and a traditional whiskey Old-Fashioned will be delivered hidden in a book. You’ll be invited to tour an onsite distillery where 100-proof corn moonshine is made.

mob

Monday

Cockburn

The Trump scions are inviting e-girls to Vegas penthouse parties

Trump parties are usually littered with famous, Botox-ed faces. It's far rarer to find yourself rubbing shoulders with TikTok stars. Hailey Lujan, who has over 350,000 followers on her TikTok @lunchbaglujan, is a twenty-one-year-old soldier who is apparently in the US Army's 101st Airborne Division. Cockburn's nieces tell him that Lujan is also an "e-girl," which Vox describes as "hip young people whose defining qualities are that they are hot and online." In her latest TikTok, the influencer was recently seen chilling in Las Vegas with Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Rick Harrison from the reality show Pawn Stars. Lujan introduces her video by saying “OK I'm with my friend from IllPro, we’re about to go to Donald Trump Jr.’s party and if I meet Donald Trump Jr.

hailey lujan

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

The Lone Star State’s new poker boom

Late on a Sunday night in May of 2022, I found myself playing heads-up poker with a hoodie-wearing small-town Texas high-school basketball coach for $70,000, plus a trophy. Well, technically, we were playing for $10,000, since the final five players in the tournament had agreed to a chopped pot an hour earlier, guaranteeing us each $45,000. Regardless, it was a lot of money, and somehow, I was in the mix. This was the “Monthly Monster” at the Lodge, a club in Round Rock, just northwest of Austin. The spot is the epicenter of the Texas poker boom and I’d staggered into this situation more or less by accident. The $600 buy-in was a lot more than I usually spent; I’d never paid more than $200 for a tournament before.

poker

Wednesday

Cockburn

AP conveniently forgets to mention that politician accused of murder is a Democrat

Cockburn is partial to a murder mystery, but in some cases it seems that the mainstream media are going out of their way to hide relevant facts. The Associated Press, for example, serves the important function of scribbling up neutral versions of smaller local stories and syndicating them nation- and worldwide. It's intriguing, therefore, that when the wire service reported on the trial of the Clark County public administrator Robert Telles allegedly killing a Las Vegas investigative journalist, they conveniently forgot to mention that he’s a Democrat. While Cockburn is sure that the AP made an honest mistake, like every yuppie he has found himself on his fair share of crime scenes. Getting a sense of things is generally pretty easy: Colonel Mustard with the dagger in the library.

robert telles nevada ap

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Fifty years of Fear and Loathing

God bless Hunter S. Thompson’s editors. Imagine paying someone a handsome amount of money to cover an off-road race and getting thousands of words of rambling prose that have a great deal more to do with drugs than with cars. It was a good time to be a writer, I suppose. The manuscript that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas appeared in two installments in Rolling Stone in November 1971. (Sports Illustrated passed.) Somehow, this rabid work of “gonzo journalism” spawned a book, a film, a graphic novel and a host of imitators, catapulting Thompson to the higher realms of fame. He never recovered from his own success. Fear and Loathing is easily summarized. Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his friend Dr.

thompson
michael bloomberg
Dominic Green

Bloomberg isn’t beaten

The sub-tweeters and thumb-twitchers are writing Michael Bloomberg’s political obituary after his admittedly less than thrilling turn in Las Vegas, but the pundits were always coming not to praise him, but to bury him. Who does this rich amateur think he is? What year does this out-of-touch oligarch think we’re in, 2016?The elites of the Democratic party and their baggage train in the media have, like an earlier elite in search of a restoration, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They remember only the humiliation of Trump’s victory in 2016. They refuse to consider the reasons for their repudiation by the voters, or the arrogance that led Hillary Clinton and her team to assume that the Blue Wall was theirs by hereditary right.

Friday

Riva-Melissa Tez

Viva Las Vegas?

The West is dying and we are killing her. We’re proud to destroy our own freedoms and repackage failure as democratic progress. We champion our rolling-out of red tape, the bureaucratic creep that strangles a nation’s liberty. The American Dream has been replaced by mass-packaged mediocrity porn, encouraging us to revel like happy pigs in our own meekness.No place demonstrates this demise better than the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite the area’s claims to diversity, it suffocates with homogeneity. Everyone wants to start a company, everyone wants to be a contrarian investor, everyone thinks about everything in exactly the same way. Expensively indifferent, my Palo Alto house had the same architect and unique style as every other house on the street.

Las Vegas

Sunday

Daniel McCarthy

What if Bernie actually wins the nomination?

Bernie Sanders has a long way to go yet before he locks up the Democratic nomination. He fell short of expectations in both Iowa and New Hampshire, winning both by the thinnest of margins. (And Pete Buttigieg may yet emerge with more delegates from those first two contests.) His victory in Nevada was a knockout, but the South Carolina and Super Tuesday contests could still revive Joe Biden’s fortunes or show that Elizabeth Warren didn’t really abort Bloomberg’s campaign by humiliating him in last week’s debate. Squint and you can still just about see a way for somebody else to win the nomination and take on Trump in November, maybe after a contested convention where enough moderates pool their delegates to deny Bernie the prize.

bernie

Wednesday

Matt McDonald

Ocean’s Five: the Vegas heist to bleed Bloomberg dry

Five chancers are rolling into Las Vegas tonight with one objective: to rob the ninth richest man in the world blind. Despite (we think) winning the first two primaries, Bernie Sanders is not the biggest target ahead of the ninth Democratic debate in the theater of the Paris casino. No, that honor falls to former New York mayor and current shortest candidate Michael Bloomberg, who takes the stage for the first time tonight after buying his way into contention. His quintet of opponents will each deploy a different approach in trying to sweep his little legs from under him. Let's call them Ocean's Five. There's Bernie, the old hand, who's been railing against billionaires for yonks and now has the perfect foil.

vegas

Saturday

Karol Markowicz

Please don’t take your kids to Vegas

Every year, my husband and I take a trip alone, without our three children, often heading to that paradise in the desert: Las Vegas. Vegas fits our needs for many reasons. The weather is always perfect, so we spend our day having drinks and lounging by the pool. We spa. We enjoy dining out and Vegas has terrific restaurants. We’re both poker players and Vegas has an abundance of poker rooms. I dress way up, in outfits I might not wear back home (I have some high, white leather boots that only get worn in Vegas) but that don’t cause a stir in Vegas at all. Most importantly, the atmosphere of the city is very grown up. For parents on a break from their kids, it’s exactly what we need. But in the last few years, we’ve noticed a troubling trend.

las vegas

Monday

Freddy Gray

How will Trump react to the Las Vegas attack?

President Donald J Trump, the man who never sleeps, hasn't woken up to the awful news from Las Vegas. Or at least he hasn't yet gone on to Twitter to rave at the world, as he normally does after any terrorist attack or incident of mass violence. No doubt he will any moment. Until he does, the media will have to content itself with publishing distressing images and videos of the shooting and reporting what few facts we know. There isn't anything else to say. It is worth noting, however, that Trump supporters have taken to pointing out that, while there have been around 40 terrorist attacks in Europe in 2017, in America there have been none -- not one terrorist atrocity since the 45th president was inaugurated.