Tuesday, March 10, 2026

How Gambling Ate the World: In less than a decade, betting apps swallowed sports. And now they’re doing the same to the news.

https://newrepublic.com/article/207374/gambling-sports-news-united-states

"There is something fundamentally anti-human about the transformation of every victory and every misfortune, every event, incident, outcome, opinion, intention, or accident into an occasion for a wager. How can we govern ourselves—and I mean this in both the political and the old-fashioned, personal sense—if we replace conscience and consciousness with nothing more than a guess? Whether a person or a society, those that take as a guiding attitude that they have nothing to lose will soon discover that it’s become literally true."

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Playing ‘War’ at Sarah Lawrence


"Thanks in part to the propaganda bubble created by social media, many of today’s erstwhile revolutionaries don’t understand this. For them, violent rhetoric and even violent actions are a game in which their side, at least, is not supposed to get hurt. When ICE agents protect themselves with force, these naïve radicals are shocked, as if the other team has somehow violated the rules. This may be the first generation of utopians who want to wage a revolution without spilling their lattes."