Dylan Sprouse has revealed that one of the rare celebrity encounters that left him genuinely starstruck also changed his relationship with cigarettes. The actor recently looked back on an unexpected interaction with David Lynch, explaining why the brief encounter stayed with him long after the two went their separate ways.
During an Aug. 4 appearance on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, Sprouse recalled having dinner at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles with Barbara Palvin and friends when he heard Lynch speaking at a nearby table.
Sprouse, a longtime Lynch fan, said he immediately recognized the filmmaker's voice. Palvin encouraged him to introduce himself, but Sprouse resisted because he did not want to interrupt Lynch while he was eating.
Instead, he stepped outside for a cigarette. A short time later, Lynch entered the smoking area and asked Sprouse for a cigarette and a light. Sprouse handed him both.
The Chateau Marmont encounter soon took an unexpected turn when Laura Dern joined Lynch. Sprouse recalled watching Lynch pull a fresh pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his own pocket for Dern, leaving him to wonder whether the director had actually needed to borrow anything from him.

#cigarettes

Tim Matheson says working alongside Henry Fonda early in his career turned into an education that extended far beyond acting.
During an appearance on the Still Here Hollywood podcast with Steve Kmetko on Monday, August 3, the actor, 78, reflected on filming the 1968 family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours, where he played one of Fonda's children alongside screen icon Lucille Ball.
While Ball often retreated to her trailer, Fonda stayed near the set between takes, he recalled.
"You had a chair, you stayed on the set, you know, and you just stayed until you were called," explained the Animal House star. "Henry was trying to quit smoking, so he was doing needlepoint."
Fonda's technique for quitting cigarettes had some logic to it. According to smokefree.gov, one way to manage cravings is to "keep your hands busy."

#henry #matheson #here #steve

Altria Group (NYSE:MO) sells cigarettes, oral nicotine pouches, and vapor products to adult tobacco users in the US. It's the parent of Marlboro, still the country's top-selling cigarette brand. The stock showed up in Donald Trump's disclosed portfolio, and it's easy to see the appeal: over 50 straight years of dividend increases and a business that doesn't move much with the economic cycle.
Altria stock is up around 25% year to date. Over the trailing 12 months, the stock is up about 24%, ahead of the market's 19% gain. Only Philip Morris, up 21% YTD, comes close among the major tobacco names. British American Tobacco and ***** an Tobacco are each up 10%.
Altria's Q1 2026 earnings beat expectations on both lines. Net revenue grew 3.2% year over year mostly from pricing, not volume. Adjusted diluted EPS grew 7.3%, up from 4.4% growth in 2025.
The volume story is also improving. Altria's smokeable segment declined just 4% in Q1 2026, down sharply from a 12% decline a year earlier. On the oral tobacco side, on! PLUS nicotine pouches rolled out nationwide in March and are now in roughly 100,000 stores, covering 85% of the nicotine pouch category by volume. On!'s own volume grew 17.6% year-over-year in Q1, after growing 11% for all of 2025. It's also the first product authorized under the FDA's streamlined pilot review program for oral nicotine pouches.
Valuation

#tobacco #oral #grew #group

A cold Diet ***** e—sometimes paired with a shot of espresso—has become one of social media's favorite afternoon rituals. Gen Z even gave it a nickname: the "fridge cigarette." That's why it was so strange when Coca-Cola introduced a new font that eerily resembled an iconic one straight out of the cigarette world.
"Coke and Marlboro had a baby—and it's a font!," one X user wrote after seeing the company's updated typography. Others echoed the comparison, saying Coca-Cola's refreshed typography looked strikingly similar to Marlboros, in a case of reality imitating memes. Still others wondered whether the company had unintentionally leaned into the internet's "fridge cigarette" joke.
"Is Coca Cola rebranding like that because we all started calling 'em fridge cigarettes???," another fan questioned.
Coca-Cola said the refresh was designed to create "one iconic look" across more than 200 markets by updating its packaging and typography.
"This refresh is about being clearer and more consistent in how we show up, wherever people experience our brand," Arnab Roy, president of Coca-Cola Global Category, said in a statement on Monday. "By building on the things people already know and love, we're creating a stronger foundation for growth while staying unmistakably Coca-Cola."

#cola #fridge

The smell of rain, cheap beer, and hot pies floods through the concourse at the Etihad Stadium after a 2-0 UEFA Champions League victory over Galatasaray, just as it did nearly 60 years ago.
Oasis are playing, probably the record-breaking guitar solo on Live Forever or perhaps something heavier like Cigarettes and Alcohol, and fans are walking out of the stadium pleased after a brilliant first 30 minutes saw Erling Haaland break his five-game goal drought and Rayan Cherki add a second.
All senses convey the synchronicity of City's second-ever English ****** le win in 1968, when Neil Young scored a brace alongside goals from Mike Summerbee and Francis Lee to earn a close-knit win over Newcastle United, and ****** the ****** le from rivals Manchester United.
Back then, a backdrop of dense, soot-stained slums swallowed the beauty of Manchester, but it was still alive in spirit, and life in the 60s was about the internal rather than the external.
The Beatles, only 35 miles down the M62, released one of the most popular songs in history: "Hey Jude", changing music forever; there would often be "mums" of the street, where everyone cared for one another, and children would be all over the place, swinging from lampposts or kicking footballs in alleyways.

More than 300 people have been arrested across the UK, including 57 migrants who had crossed the Channel by boat, as part of a police crackdown on illegal trade and organised immigration crime.
The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) said more than £1m cash was seized during the five-day operation between June 15 and June 20.
Illegal tobacco, vapes and cigarettes with a street value of more than £700,000 were also seized as well as cars, drugs and e-bikes.
The operation centred on tackling crime at premises that included barber shops, vape shops, car washes, food production and nail salons - with the NPCC saying such businesses are often targeted by criminal gangs as they "provide opportunities to conceal illegal working, to exploit vulnerable migrants, and to launder proceeds of crime".
The operation involved most UK police forces working alongside agencies including the Home Office, Immigration Enforcement and Trading Standards. A total of 362 arrests were made.

A man was tortured, doused in petrol and set on fire to be "taught a lesson" after he lost 10 million cigarettes that were worth £1m, a murder trial has heard.
Tomasz Samel was kidnapped in 2019 in Birmingham by three men claiming to be from Interpol, before being driven to the Liverpool area and attacked, prosecutors have alleged.
On Wednesday, Birmingham Crown Court was told the 45-year-old father of two, who was the subject of an international arrest warrant, had then been dumped in a remote location and died in hospital about three months later.
Neil Jones, Kevin Wooden, Kye Arthur and Tobiasz Kozlowski have been accused of Samel's murder, which they deny.
Wooden, 46, of Alma Road, Banbury, Oxfordshire, Arthur, 35, of Copley Gardens, Bristol, Jones, 48, of no fixed address, and Kozlowski, 38, of Crosland Road, Kirkby, Merseyside, also deny conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.

Changes to the law giving councils more powers to tackle businesses selling illegal goods would be "welcome", a senior official has said.
Dan Swaine, executive director for place at Doncaster Council, made the comments after the recent rape convictions of Hexthorpe Mini Market worker Bawan Hawre, who lured underage girls to his flat with the promise of free vapes and cash.
Swaine said Trading Standards had previously seized counterfeit goods from the shop and that the wider trade in illicit tobacco, cigarettes and vapes was a nationwide issue linked to organised crime.
Reform UK councillors in Doncaster said residents had "repeatedly" raised concerns about Hexthorpe Mini Market.
Sheffield Crown Court heard Harwe, an Iraqi national, targeted girls aged 12 to 16, plied them with drink and drugs, and raped or abused them.

The Australian government has spent the last decade introducing steep tax hikes to curb smoking, and, as a result, the country has the most expensive cigarettes in the world. The average price of mainstream cigarettes is 54.99 Australian dollars per pack (about $40). But the eyewatering prices have driven people to the black market.
In 2025, an estimated 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in Australia was illegal, up from 12 percent in 2017, according to new ***** ysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The study, which is the first attempt by the Australian government to estimate the size of the black market, found that "prices for legal tobacco products have almost tripled since December 2016 driven by annual tobacco excise increases, while estimated prices of illicit tobacco products have remained relatively constant." Since 2020, household spending on legal cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved, but between 2017 and 2025, the amount of nicotine consumed in Australia has risen by almost 40 percent.
Meanwhile, between 2016 and 2025, the price of legal cigarettes nearly tripled while tobacco duty revenue more than halved. As a result, the Australian Treasury has downgraded tobacco excise revenue by $8 billion over the next five years in the latest federal budget.
Lower tax revenue is hardly something to mourn, but Australia's collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia's illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to "more than 200 firebombings," "at least 3 homicides," and "multiple other non-fatal violent attacks," according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.
"It's hard to see how it could get any worse," Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police detective and Border Force member, tells Reason. Pike, who created and led Australia's Illicit Tobacco Strike Team, says the violence is now an "old-fashioned turf war" and that criminal gangs, attracted by the profits, are fighting to control distribution.