Why Airlines Are Always Going Bankrupt

How aviation companies (fail to) make a profit

It might not be the most important story in the world right now, as our species takes its first halting steps into a brave new world of technological power whose contours are still to us mysterious and weighted with fearful portent, but lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time reading about the death of Spirit Airlines. Spirit, for those lucky enough to have never flown on one of its planes—I have a few memories of terrible Spirit flights from New York to Miami in my teenage years—is, or rather was, one of the ten or so largest airlines in the United States, and, after its more popular rival Southwest, the most prominent of the budget airlines. (JetBlue is somewhat larger, but can’t be considered a “true” budget airline.) And, for the last few years, Spirit had been hurtling toward insolvency.

Spirit had last turned a profit in 2019; things turned disastrously bad with the COVID pandemic in 2020—as was the case for every other airline—but whereas larger flyers generally recovered, things went from bad to worse for Spirit. Corporate leadership pursued a merger with JetBlue, but this was blocked by a federal judge. And so in November 2024, Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; then it filed again, less than a year later, in August 2025. But these filings did little to save Spirit. There was talk of liquidating the company. The Trump administration raised the prospect of a capital injection that would leave the federal government with a 90 percent stake in the airline (the first time in American history that the federal government has owned a passenger airline outright), but the talks collapsed, and so in early May 2026 Spirit announced that it was shutting down for good.

The collapse of Spirit was unique in that in its death throes it managed to solicit a bailout offer from the U.S. government; but it was not unique among its fellow airlines in going broke. Airlines are a bad business: a really, really bad business. The International Air Transport Association, the trade body of the global airline industry, has documented for years that airlines as a sector destroy investor value in the aggregate. The IATA’s 2026 outlook, looking forward to a quite strong year—this was before the Iran war broke out and oil prices surged—projected an average return on invested capital of 6.8 percent, against a weighted average cost of capital of 8.2 percent. As the IATA’s report said, “the airline industry collectively does not generate earnings that cover its cost of capital.” This has been the case for a long time. From its deregulation in 1978 to the end of 2025, the airline industry has cumulatively lost money: its net profit over those 47 years sits at negative $37 billion.

Given these grim economics, you won’t be surprised to hear that airlines have a bad habit of going insolvent. This includes many of the most famous names in the history of aviation. Pan Am, long the unofficial flag carrier of the United States, ceased operations in 1991; Eastern Air Lines liquidated the same year; TWA, the carrier of Howard Hughes, was absorbed into American Airlines after a third bankruptcy filing in 2001; Braniff died in 1982. And those are only the most famous names; countless aviation startups have come and gone. (Have you ever heard of Trump Shuttle?) Even airlines with the backing of a national government go bankrupt all the time: Alitalia, Italy’s flag carrier, reported only a single year of profit since its founding in 1946 and was saved countless times by the Italian government before ultimately ceasing operations in 2021. Even those airlines that survive for long periods of time are perpetually in financial distress. Between 1978 and 2005, more than 160 airlines filed for bankruptcy; virtually every major U.S. carrier other than Southwest has been to bankruptcy court at least once. In September 2005, every one of the four largest American airlines—United, Delta, Northwest, and US Airways—was operating simultaneously under Chapter 11 protection.

This is very strange. There’s not really a conventional economic explanation for an industry whose long-term equilibrium is losing money: an industry that, on a purely economic level, should not exist. Warren Buffett once called the airline industry a “bottomless pit” for investor capital. “Indeed,” he wrote, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”

So why is the airline business so remarkably bad?

One answer is that airlines are particularly vulnerable to shocks. There are so many potential risks with air travel that practically anything going wrong will have some effect. The September 11th attacks, for example, had a huge effect on air travel; so did the surging oil prices of the 2000s, the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting recession, the 2020 pandemic, and now the volatility in oil prices surrounding the Iran war. Whenever a major shock occurs you tend to see a huge wave of airline bankruptcies.

But airlines obviously aren’t the only type of business in the world that’s vulnerable to shocks. Hotels, for instance, are heavily exposed to recessions, terrorism, and pandemics; their costs are heavily front-loaded into the property, just as an airline’s costs are loaded into the plane; and yet the hotel industry doesn’t go through synchronized waves of bankruptcy each time a shock hits. Shocks might explain why airlines tip over the edge into restructuring or liquidation; but they don’t really explain why they’re so vulnerable in the first place, or why the airline sector—uniquely among all major industries—is unable to generate profit in the aggregate.

And we don’t see the same structural unprofitability in any of the other companies of the aviation ecosystem: engine and avionics manufacturers, for example, do totally fine; so do the service suppliers that sell into airlines.

Maybe, then, the answer is that airlines specifically are just poorly managed. This was the dominant view in the 2000s and 2010s: legacy full-service carriers were chronic money-losers; budget airlines, like Southwest and Ryanair, were much more profitable; and so in the future air travel would bifurcate into budget aviation for the masses and Emirates-style luxury travel for the few. But the budget airlines don’t look so good anymore. Spirit was a flagship budget airline and has now been liquidated; JetBlue and Frontier, two budget or semi-budget competitors, are also at risk of bankruptcy; even Southwest, the most durable and iconic of the low-cost carriers, has been unable to make a profit since the pandemic and is now fending off an activist challenge from the hedge fund Elliott Management. So the budget strategy clearly wasn’t a solution to the airline industry’s problems.

So explanations that cite shocks or bad management either explain too much or too little. If it’s just vulnerability to shocks, why don’t other industries have such huge bankruptcy waves? And if it’s bad management, why has no airline in the long history of aviation figured out a replicable solution to running the business profitably?

I’d like to suggest that the problem with the airline industry is much deeper than people seem to think. Losing money in the aggregate is a feature, not a bug, of a competitive airline industry. The airline sector, for reasons that go into the essential nature of the industry, cannot reach a profitable competitive equilibrium. This is not because airlines are vulnerable to shocks or because they’re poorly managed. The airline industry itself can either be profitable, or it can be competitive: but it can’t really be both.

To understand why, we have to learn a little bit about game theory.

by David Oks, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Mike Kelley from “Life Cycles” series
[ed. Interesting thesis. I'd never have imagined the industry as being systemically unprofitable given ticket prices and all the add-on charges. Or, at least wildly profitable during certain periods to compensate for the occasional downdrafts.]

LIV R.I.P.

LIV Golf will soon be gone. Its collateral damage will linger.

LIV Golf is on life support. The circuit that promised to disrupt the sport by liberating players and democratizing power is losing support from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Its architect, PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, has stepped down. A recent event was postponed, the league citing heat and a soccer scheduling conflict. LIV insists the project continues, scaled down from its Golf But Louder origins, with a restructured board of directors hoping to find new investment to keep it running come 2027. The rest of the evidence is harder to soften. No funding, no captain, no fanbase to absorb the financial and reputational weight the league is now dragging, its marquee star Bryson DeChambeau openly entertaining a return to the tour he sued.

Should LIV's attempt at survival fail, it leaves behind a landscape permanently altered—Fissures that will take years to close, loyalties that calcified under pressure, and a generation of fans that watched the sport they love hold itself hostage. It is tempting to declare winners. This is understandable and mostly wrong. Let's be precise about what happened, because there is a specific kind of silence that follows a standoff that neither side truly won, with the participants left wondering what, exactly, they were fighting for.

LIV Golf was not, at its core, a golf league. It was a geopolitical instrument. Saudi Arabia spent an estimated $5 million to $8 billion on the venture because soft-power exercises work. PIF understood, correctly, that associating the kingdom's brand with the game was worth more than any conventional PR campaign could deliver. The players who signed were not naive about this. Some convinced themselves the cause was separable from the source. Others simply didn't care. Both positions were defensible in their own way, and both were, ultimately, wrong.

The LIV product was mediocre, although that was besides the point. What made LIV genuinely, existentially dangerous was its bottomlessness, and the greed that bottomlessness unleashed. There is no conventional competitive response to an opponent who has decided that losses are acceptable. The PGA Tour spent a century building a system of merit. LIV walked in and wrote checks that made that system feel like a prank. When Dustin Johnson signed, when Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm signed, each name felt like another stone pulled from a wall that had seemed permanent.

The tour suspended the defectors, asked its remaining membership to fight for the league, then reversed course and announced a framework deal before the deal existed. It was the behavior of an institution that had never gamed out the scenario it was now living through. Jay Monahan was right to fight. He was wrong to pretend, for as long as he did, that the fight was about the integrity of the sport rather than the preservation of the tour. The PGA Tour outlasted its opponent in part because a foreign government decided to redirect its attention elsewhere. That is not the same as winning. The tour had strategy and endurance. It also had luck, and the difference between strategy and luck is the kind of thing institutions are tempted to revise in their own favor afterward.

The professional golf landscape after LIV looks like a neighborhood after a flood—structurally intact in most places, yet waterlines on the walls everywhere you look. The players who stayed, who watched colleagues leave, who made the calculation that their careers and their principles required them to remain, who played through the uncertainty of a tour that was simultaneously suing a competitor and negotiating with it, were never celebrated for staying. Loyalty tends not to be. You are left with the satisfaction of having made a decision you can live with, and you get to watch the tour eventually extend an olive branch to the men who burned it. [...]

The most lasting damage may be the hardest to quantify, which is the goodwill of the audience. Golf as a participation sport was growing before LIV, lifted by a pandemic-era surge that had introduced millions of new players to the game and returned millions of lapsed ones to it. Rounds played hit a 40-year high. Equipment sales broke records. Junior participation climbed. The sport had momentum it had not felt in a generation, and the timing was rare, a confluence of cultural availability and demographic interest that the industry had spent decades trying to manufacture. It then spent the next five years asking that audience to care about a labor dispute between multi-millionaires and a sovereign wealth fund.

The casual fan, always the most important and most fragile constituency in any sport, is not an idealist. That fan understands athletics are not synonymous with saints. However, that fan requires the sport to be primarily about sport. LIV made that impossible. Every tournament existed inside a larger conversation about money and loyalty and the kingdom's human-rights record, a conversation most fans had neither the appetite nor the obligation to follow. The hardcore audience stayed. The hardcore audience always stays. But the viewer who had started watching after 2020, who was learning the rhythms of the season, who had not yet decided whether this was a sport that belonged in the rotation alongside the NFL and the NBA—that viewer was handed an exit ramp, week after week, for five years. Some took it. The industry will be measuring the cost of that for a long time.

The damage was particularly harmful because it was cumulative, a slow tax on attention paid in storylines nobody asked for. Golf exhausted its fans quietly. That is, in certain ways, harder to recover from. The current effort to frame Yasir's departure, PIF's pullout, and the postponement of the New Orleans event as "strategic decisions" is part of the same pattern. What this moment does offer is clarity. For five years, golf operated under an atmospheric pressure of uncertainty. Would the deal happen, would more players leave, would the framework collapse, would the Saudis walk away? That pressure is lifting. The air is cleaner. You can see farther. [...]

There is a version of this story that ends on the triumphalist note. Golf survived! The sport is resilient! That version is incomplete. What LIV revealed, underneath the politics and the money and the posturing, was a question the sport had long avoided asking itself directly: What is professional golf actually for? Is it a meritocracy or only in name? Is it a global sport, or a primarily American entity with global marketing? Are its players independent contractors or franchise assets? Does the history of the game belong to the tour that administers it, or to the game itself? These are not new questions. LIV pulled them into the light and refused to let anyone look away.

The soul of golf has never belonged to a tour or a sovereign wealth fund or a television contract. It belongs to the men and women who play the game, watch it, argue about it. Who make any of this matter in the first place. They were sidelined, asked to spectate a fight they did not start. The game has outlasted wars and scandals and its own periodic conviction that it was dying. Not gracefully, not cleanly, but through a stubborn refusal to be finished. For five years the sport lived that refusal out loud, without much dignity. Survival means little without an accounting of what it cost.

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Icon Sportwire

[ed. See also: LIV Golf members have reached out to PGA Tour about return, but terms and pathways will be more restrictive (GD).]

A Humble ‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Ends His Run

For the past month, “Jeopardy!” episodes have followed a pattern.

The theme music plays. The three contestants stand at their lecterns. Then two of them are clobbered by a mild-mannered bureaucrat from New Jersey named Jamie Ding.

But on Monday’s episode, the unthinkable happened: After 31 victories, Ding lost.

His streak is the fifth-longest in “Jeopardy!” history. He fell just one win short of matching James Holzhauer’s 2019 run, and he left the Alex Trebek Stage with more than $880,000 in winnings.

Early in the game broadcast Monday, Ding found himself lagging behind Greg Shahade, an International Master in chess who was lightning-fast on the buzzer. During Final Jeopardy, Ding jotted down the correct response to a clue about South African languages — but it wasn’t enough to make up the deficit.

“It was over, just like that,” Ding, 33, said in an interview.

Contestants who went up against him included a statistician, a librarian and a professor. Ding produced so many correct answers (always in the form of a question) that it seemed he might never run out.

“Who was Trotsky?”

“What are non-Newtonian fluids?”

“What are waffle fries?”

Throughout his reign, he was matter-of-fact as he came up with arcana in a split second (“What is cuneiform?”). He endeared himself to viewers through his comically humdrum banter with the show’s host, Ken Jennings, about such topics as his favorite color (orange), his favorite letter (F) and his favorite number (6).

As the streak continued, the drama-free anecdotes and humble bits of personal information shared by Ding seemed to amuse Jennings, a former “Jeopardy!” champ who holds the record for consecutive wins, with 74.

The depth of Ding’s knowledge went along with a lack of bluster. He proudly identified himself as a “faceless bureaucrat.” When he won a game, he looked pleasantly surprised, as if he had been given an unusually good free sample at Trader Joe’s.

“Put Jamie Ding on the $20 bill,” one fan demanded in a tribute on the newsletter platform Substack.

After his “Jeopardy!” loss had been taped but before it was broadcast, Ding gave a video interview from his two-bedroom apartment in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

There he was, in front of an orange couch and a stuffed orange clown fish. He said he had remained calm throughout his final game, even as he realized that he was on his way to a loss. He went backstage and stared at the mostly orange clothes he had brought along in the hope that his streak would continue.
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“During it, I was trying to stay grounded,” he said. “Planning to win a whole bunch of games of ‘Jeopardy!’ just feels like asking to lose.”

Ding filmed the show in five-episode chunks in Los Angeles during vacation days from his job as a program administrator for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency. His work involves administering tax credits to build affordable housing in the state.

In an early appearance, he praised New Jersey’s efforts on the issue compared with those of New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. “If you’re from one of those states, then shame on you,” he said. “Build more housing.”

He spends his time away from his job studying law at Seton Hall University. He said he did not expect his “Jeopardy!” windfall to change his life all that much. He planned to donate some money and put the rest in a high-yield savings account.

In a way, Ding said, he had been preparing for the show since childhood. The son of a neuroscience professor and a high school math teacher, he grew up in Grosse Pointe Shores, a suburb of Detroit. He competed in geography bees and on his high school quiz bowl team. He recalled losing a sixth-grade spelling bee when he misspelled the word “bolero.”

“B-a-l-l-e-r-o,” he said. “Terrible.” [...]

Ding was a relatively conservative player, avoiding the all-in wagers on Daily Doubles that were a go-to stratagem for Holzhauer. But he was unusually fast on the buzzer and seemed to have few weak categories.

“The key to Jamie’s run really has been his incredibly wide base of knowledge in just about any category you can think of,” Saunders said.

Ding used a tactic he called “knight moves” — traversing the board in an L-shaped pattern, like a knight in chess. Maybe it threw his opponents off-balance, or maybe it was just nice to have a simple rule to follow, he said. “It’s basically a guaranteed way to pick something of a different difficulty, and in a different category,” he added.

He watched his first “Jeopardy!” appearance at Pint, a bar in Jersey City, with friends from so many different groups that it felt like a wedding. He is still getting used to the attention that comes with being a TV star.

“Watching my episodes, I can be pretty self-critical — like, ‘Why did you do that?’ Or, ‘What’s wrong with your face?’” he said. The outpouring of support has been worth the discomfort. “I’m trying to keep a list of people who did nice things for me because it’s so many,” he said.

Now that his streak has ended, he can return to his hobbies, like constructing cryptic crosswords and running an Instagram account rating General Tso’s chicken with his sister. He is also part of a group of intervenors seeking to block the U.S. Department of Justice from obtaining New Jersey’s voter registration records.

It won’t be long, though, before he starts studying for the “Jeopardy!” Tournament of Champions. He might even need some more orange clothes.

“I have a reputation to uphold,” he said.

by Callie Holterman, NY Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Katy Kildee/The Detroit News/TNS

[ed. Feels refreshing to read about a normal, well-adjusted person who's main goal in life isn't self-promotion in some way.]

We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.

From Laundromats to Airplanes

What’s remarkable is not just the fact that online sports books have taken over sports, or that betting markets have metastasized in politics and culture, but the speed with which both have taken place.

For most of the last century, the major sports leagues were vehemently against gambling, as the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explained in his recent feature. [...]

Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy vs. NCAA, sports gambling was unleashed into the world, and the leagues haven’t looked back. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games, and the league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals.

Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:

Why not let people gamble on who’s going to win the Oscar, when Taylor Swift’s wedding will be, how many people will be deported from the United States next year, when the Iranian regime will fall, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026, or whether there will be a famine in Gaza? These are not things that I’m making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.

“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.

Four Ways to Lose (Or, What's a 'Rigged Pitch' in a War?)

There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

[ed. See also: Exclusive: Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets (CNN).]

Journalism in the Age of Prediction Markets

On Tuesday, March 10, a massive explosion shook the city of Beit Shemesh, just outside Jerusalem, in yet another Iranian ballistic missile attack during the ongoing war.

Rescue services scrambled to the scene in search of possible casualties, though as it turned out, the projectile had struck a forested area just outside the city, around 500 meters from homes.

On The Times of Israel’s liveblog that day, I reported that the missile had hit an open area and no injuries were caused, citing the rescue services, as well as footage that emerged showing the massive explosion caused by the missile’s warhead.

But what I thought was a seemingly minor incident during the war has turned into days of harassment and death threats against me.

The saga begins

Later Tuesday, I received an unusual email, in Hebrew, from someone named Aviv.

“Regarding your Times of Israel report that described today’s launch as an ‘impact’ — Beit Shemesh Municipality and MDA (Magen David Adom) later corrected their reports to clarify that what fell was an interceptor fragment, not a full missile,” he claimed.

“I’d appreciate it if you could update your article, as in its current form it does not reflect reality. Alternatively, if you have information that it was indeed a full missile that was not intercepted, I would be glad to be corrected.”

I told Aviv that, from what I know from the Israeli military, the impact outside Beit Shemesh was indeed a missile warhead and not just fragments.

I added: “The footage also shows a massive explosion of hundreds of kilograms of explosives from the warhead. Normally, a fragment does not produce such an explosion.”

A day later, on Wednesday, I received another email, also in Hebrew, regarding the impact just outside Beit Shemesh, from someone identifying themselves as Daniel.

“Sorry for reaching out without a prior introduction, but I assume we will get to know each other well,” he wrote, in a somewhat threatening manner.

“I have an urgent request regarding the accuracy of your report on the missile attack on March 10. I would really appreciate a response if possible. There is an inaccurate report from you about the missile attack on March 10, and it’s causing a chain of errors,” Daniel’s email continued.

“If you could reply to me tonight… you would be helping me, many others, and, of course, the State of Israel. And along the way, you would gain a good source.”

It was indeed a little strange to receive the same question, about something relatively inconsequential, from two different people within a day.

But I responded, naively: “Hi Daniel, can you elaborate on what the problem is?”

He replied: “In the article and in your tweet you wrote, ‘One missile struck an open area just outside Beit Shemesh.’”

“However, it appears that this was a missile that was intercepted, and its debris and interceptor fragments fell at the scene. No security authority so far has confirmed that it was a missile that was not intercepted and fell in an open area,” he claimed.

“If you could correct this tonight, you would be doing me and many others a great favor,” Daniel added.

Why does such an inconsequential detail matter to these people, I wondered.

Half an hour later, Daniel sent me another email: “If one of you could change everything to interceptor debris, or missile fragments even tonight, it would help a lot,” he persisted.

I went to sleep without answering.

By Thursday morning, Daniel had sent me another email.

“I would appreciate an update from you as soon as possible, because in the meantime you are already being quoted in The Economist, saying that the IDF confirmed that most of the missiles on Tuesday were intercepted except for one that fell in the Beit Shemesh area,” he said, attaching a screenshot from The Economic Times, an Indian English-language business-focused news site, and not The Economist.

“I ask again, if you could handle this as soon as possible, it would help us a lot. It’s really important, if possible, still this morning,” Daniel demanded.

As I read through Daniel’s veiled threats, I received another email from an anonymous user: “Is the article about March 10 interception gonna get updated?”

Moments later, I received a message on the Discord online platform: “In regards to March 10th. Some sources are saying all the missiles were intercepted on March 10th per IDF. Is that true?”

The Polymarket connection

Meanwhile, on X, I saw a user reply to a recent tweet of mine: “There are people saying that they have received word from you that the missile strike in Beit Shemesh on March 10th was in fact intercepted, is this true or did no such interaction occur?”

Another X user responded to my post with the video showing the Iranian ballistic missile impact in Beit Shemesh with: “was there any video of the actual impact.” (Clearly, he didn’t watch the video.)

Checking those X accounts, both appeared to be involved in gambling on the Polymarket betting site.

As far as I now understand, the emails I received were intended to confirm whether or not a missile had hit Israel on March 10 in order to resolve a prediction on Polymarket.

Polymarket is one of the largest prediction markets in the world, where users can wager their money on the likelihood of future events, using cryptocurrency, debit or credit cards, and bank transfers. However, there are accusations that the site has been plagued by manipulation and insider trading.

The event that these people had bet on was “Iran strikes Israel on…?” More than 14 million dollars had been wagered on March 10.

The rules of the bet state: “This market will resolve to ‘Yes’ if Iran initiates a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel’s soil on the listed date in Israel Time (GMT+2). Otherwise, this market will resolve to ‘No’.”

However, there is a clause: “Missiles or drones that are intercepted… will not be sufficient for a ‘Yes’ resolution, regardless of whether they land on Israeli territory or cause damage.”

My minor report on a missile striking an open area was now in the middle of a betting war, with those who had bet “No” on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 demanding I change my article to ensure they would win big.

More emails arrived in my inbox.

“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.

Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.

“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)

I then received a WhatsApp message from someone named Shaked: “Can I ask one question about the impact in Beit Shemesh on the 10th?”

Meanwhile, I saw a reply on X to a recent post of mine, with the same fake screenshot of my email exchange with Daniel: “There’s someone quoting that you replied to their email about making corrections to the below news article about all missile attacks being intercepted by Israel on March 10th. Is this actually true? Are we going to make this correction?”

By this point, it was clear to me why these people were asking about the missile impact, and I took to X and told the gamblers to get a better hobby.

This did not stop them.

A colleague makes contact

A few hours later, a colleague from another media outlet messaged me. He said that someone he knew asked him to ask me to change the report on the missile impact in Beit Shemesh, and that it would be “negligible” for me if I did make the change.

The journalist had no idea why his acquaintance was demanding the change to the article until I told him what I understood was going on. He then confronted the acquaintance, who admitted to placing bets on Polymarket and confirmed my theory.

Going further, the acquaintance even offered the journalist compensation, from his winnings, if he managed to convince me to change my report.
The threats escalate

After a quiet weekend, things escalated further.

by Emanuel Fabian, Times of Israel |  Read more:

Image: the author

[ed. Everyone is gambling these days. Why do these markets allow anonymity?]

The Sucker

On a Thursday evening in September, I excused myself from the family dinner table and slipped into my bedroom. I didn’t want my kids to see what I was about to do.

With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app. I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Fifteen minutes before kickoff, I scrolled through the available wagers on DraftKings in wide-eyed bewilderment. Struggling to make sense of the terminology—Profit boosts? Alternative spreads?—I punched in bets almost at random. I bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by at least nine points, based on the sophisticated premise that the Eagles had won the previous Super Bowl and the Cowboys had not. I placed a bet that Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts would throw for more than 200 yards, and wagered on something called a “same-game parlay” that would pay out if both Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley scored touchdowns.

Then, after tucking in my kids for the night, I turned on the TV in our bedroom and settled in next to my wife, Annie.

Watching the game was unexpectedly stressful. Toggling among my five different bets—monitoring their progress, weighing live “cash out” options—left me feeling harried and sweaty. Four seconds into the game, I got a taste of the capriciousness of the enterprise when the Eagles’ best defender inexplicably spit on the Cowboys’ quarterback and got himself ejected. Had the Eagles’ chances of beating the spread, and my chances at winning $75, just been expectorated away?

Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them.

But the experience was also strangely mesmerizing. For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets. Most of my bets ended up losing, but the long-shot Hurts-Barkley parlay hit, and when the game ended, I calculated that I was up $20.

The next morning, I proudly shared the news with Annie, who high-fived me and immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season. Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry? Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.

I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm—but I was starting to get ideas myself. I had made $20 on my very first night of gambling. Scale up the wager sizes, multiply across all 272 games in the NFL season, throw in some NBA and college football, and I stood to make—what, $10,000? $20,000? More?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t win every bet. But I didn’t see the harm in dreaming. As Annie and I traded home-improvement fantasies, I tried my best not to dwell on the last thing the bishop had said to me: “Be careful.” 

Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong? [...]

Week Two

Total gambled: $376.00
Down $58.15

If I was going to do this, I decided, I would need a gambling guru—someone to talk me through the basics of sound sports betting (if such a thing existed) and teach me best practices.

The obvious choice was Nate Silver, America’s most famous statistics nerd. Silver first made a name for himself as the founder of 538, an election-forecasting website that accurately predicted the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential campaign. A few years ago, Silver, citing a midlife crisis and political fatigue, discarded the pundit suits, threw on a baseball cap, and started writing more about gambling. He launched a newsletter full of sophisticated sports-betting models and wrote a book about the psychology of successful gamblers. He estimates that he has netted in the “mid–six figures” over the course of his gambling life. If anyone could turn me into a respectable bettor, I figured, it was him.

Before our first call, I sheepishly sent Silver my week-one bet slips. After that first triumphant game, things had gone downhill. Scrolling through DraftKings’ offerings, I had turned into a little kid at a carnival, emptying my parents’ wallet into any ring toss or high striker that caught my eye. I’d taken fliers on games without doing any research, and placed live bets on whatever ESPN happened to be showing when I turned on the TV. On Saturday afternoon, while casually watching a random college-football game with my brother, I bet $10 that the point total wouldn’t go over 52.5, lost, tried to make my money back with a new bet that it wouldn’t go over 61.5, and lost that one too. Of the 14 wagers I’d placed in my first week, I’d won three.

Silver pulled up my slips when we got on the phone, and began to audibly react as he scrolled:

“Okay …”

“Oh.”

“Oh no.” He started laughing.

Is it possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver? Apparently, yes.

Perhaps sensing my humiliation, he tried to soften his assessment. “Look, the nice way to put it is that you’re betting like a recreational bettor.” I took this as a withering insult.

Silver laid out some basic realities of the sports-betting economy. The books effectively charge you about 4.5 percent for every bet you place, he explained, which means it isn’t enough to win 50.1 percent of the time; you have to win 52.5 percent of your bets just to break even, and that’s before taxes. My most obvious mistake, he said, was that I was using only DraftKings. To find edges, I would need to shop for lines across at least three or four books every week.

He gave me other tips, too: Avoid “prop bets” on individual players (Josh Allen to rush for more than 50 yards) and multi-leg parlays, which pay out only if every outcome hits (the Chiefs cover the spread, the Ravens win, and the Chargers score more than 24 points). Props and parlays are how sportsbooks generate most of their profits. “They’re suckers’ bets,” Silver said, which made sense, given that I had already placed several of them.

Live betting—placing wagers in the middle of games—was also a bad idea, he told me, because it leads to gambling based on emotion more than logic. Also, televised games are broadcast on a delay, which means the sportsbooks can adjust lines before you even see what has happened on the field. You are, in effect, betting against people who live 20 seconds in the future.

To guard against emotional betting, Silver suggested a Tuesday-morning ritual: I should sit in a quiet place, study the lines for that week’s games, gather information on injury reports and weather forecasts, and then place $100 bets on the six or seven games I liked best.

Before we hung up, I asked Silver what kind of profit would make it a successful season for me.

He seemed confused by the question. “If you make one penny, that would be better than 98 percent of people over an entire season,” Silver answered, as if this were obvious.

I was taken aback. Hadn’t Silver himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling? Yes, he said, but that was mostly from poker tournaments. Sports betting was a game of razor-thin margins and microscopic edges. NFL football was among the hardest sports to win money on—the lines were too sharp, the teams too evenly matched. Silver told me that, even with his quantish models and prognosticatory brilliance, he would consider it cause to celebrate if he broke even on the season.

by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Tyler Comrie/Getty

[ed. See also: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed (DS).]

The Monkey’s Paw Curls

[ed. More than anyone probably wants to know (or can understand) about prediction markets.]

Isn’t “may you get exactly what you asked for” one of those ancient Chinese curses?

Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume.

For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire (now it’s some AI people). Kalshi is so accurate that it’s getting called a national security threat.

The catch is, of course, that it’s mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is 81% sports by monthly volume. Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like this $686,000 market on how often Elon Musk will tweet this week - currently dominated by the “140 - 164 times” category.

(ironically, this seems to be a regulatory difference - US regulators don’t mind sports betting, but look unfavorably on potentially “insensitive” markets like bets about wars. Polymarket has historically been offshore, and so able to concentrate on geopolitics; Kalshi has been in the US, and so stuck mostly to sports. But Polymarket is in the process of moving onshore; I don’t know if this will affect their ability to offer geopolitical markets)

Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn’t really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome!

Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data. There are now strong, minimally-regulated, high-volume prediction markets on important global events. In this column, I previously claimed this would revolutionize society. Has it?

I don’t feel revolutionized. Why not?

The problem isn’t that the prediction markets are bad. There’s been a lot of noise about insider trading and disputed resolutions. But insider trading should only increase accuracy - it’s bad for traders, but good for information-seekers - and my impression is that the disputed resolutions were handled as well as possible. When I say I don’t feel revolutionized, it’s not because I don’t believe it when it says there’s a 20% chance Khameini will be out before the end of the month. The several thousand people who have invested $6 million in that question have probably converged upon the most accurate probability possible with existing knowledge, just the way prediction markets should.

I actually like this. Everyone is talking about the protests in Iran, and it’s hard to gauge their importance, and knowing that there’s a 20% chance Khameini is removed by February really does help to place them in context. The missing link seems to be between “it’s now possible to place global events in probabilistic context → society revolutionized”.

Here are some possibilities:

Maybe people just haven’t caught on yet? Most news sources still don’t cite prediction markets, even when many people would care about their outcome. For example, the Khameini market hasn’t gotten mentioned in articles about the Iran protests, even though “will these protests succeed in toppling the regime?” is the obvious first question any reader would ask.

Maybe the problem is that probabilities don’t matter? Maybe there’s some State Department official who would change plans slightly over a 20% vs. 40% chance of Khameini departure, or an Iranian official for whom that would mean the difference between loyalty and defection, and these people are benefiting slightly, but not enough that society feels revolutionized.

Maybe society has been low-key revolutionized and we haven’t noticed? Very optimistically, maybe there aren’t as many “obviously the protests will work, only a defeatist doomer traitor would say they have any chance of failing!” “no, obviously the protests will fail, you’re a neoliberal shill if you think they could work” takes as there used to be. Maybe everyone has converged to a unified assessment of probabilistic knowledge, and we’re all better off as a result.

Maybe Polymarket and Kalshi don’t have the right questions. Ask yourself: what are the big future-prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around? When I try this exercise, I get things like:

• Will the AI bubble pop? Will scaling get us all the way to AGI? Will AI be misaligned?

• Will Trump turn America into a dictatorship? Make it great again? Somewhere in between?

• Will YIMBY policies lower rents? How much?

• Will selling US chips to China help them win the AI race?

• Will kidnapping Venezuela’s president weaken international law in some meaningful way that will cause trouble in the future?

• If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire?

Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets?

Annals of The Rulescucks

The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria.

Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if:

…he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting.

You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases.

Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria.

Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations.

Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026:

Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.”

[more examples...]

With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules.

Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand.

The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though.

…And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells

I include this section under protest.

The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong.

Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories:

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:
Images: uncredited

Numb At Burning Man

Numb at Burning Man (long..)

Every year, seventy thousand hippies, libertarians, tech entrepreneurs, utopians, hula-hoop artists, psychonauts, Israelis, perverts, polyamorists, EDM listeners, spiritual healers, Israelis, coders, venture capitalists, fire spinners, elderly nudists, white girls with cornrows, Geoff Dyers, and Israelis come together to build a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. The Black Rock Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The ground there isn’t even sand, but a fine alkaline powder that causes chemical burns on contact with your skin, and it’s constantly whipped up into towering dust storms. Nothing grows there. There’s no water, no roads, and no phone signal. In the daytime the heat is deadly and it’s freezing cold at night. The main virtue of the place is that it’s extremely flat; it’s been the site of two land speed records. But for one week, it becomes a lurid wonderland entirely devoted to human pleasure. Then, once the week is up, it’s completely dismantled again. They rake over the desert and remove every last scrap of plastic or fuzzball of human hair. Afterwards the wind moves over the lifeless alkaline flats as if no one was ever there.

They’ve been doing this there since 1990, as long as I’ve been alive, and for the most part I’ve been happy to leave them to it. Burning Man might be where the world’s new ruling class are free to express their desires without inhibitions, which makes it a model of what they want to do to the rest of the world; if you want to know what horrors are heading our way, you have to go. But I don’t do drugs, I don’t like camping, and I can’t stand EDM. It’s just not really my scene.

What happened is that in February this year I received a strange email from two strangers who said they wanted to commission me to write an essay. They weren’t editors, they didn’t have a magazine, and they didn’t care where I published the essay once I wrote it; all they wanted was for me to go to Burning Man and say something about the experience. (...)

Up before dawn. Seventy thousand people would be attempting to get into Burning Man that day; to avoid queues your best bet is to go early. Three hours driving through some of the most gorgeous landscapes anywhere in the world, green meadows between sheer slabs of rock, glittering black crystal lakes, until finally the mountains fall away and you’re left on an endless flat grey plain. Nine thousand years ago, this was a lakebed. Now it’s nothing at all. Drive along a rutted track into this emptiness until, suddenly, you reach the end of the line. Ahead of us were tens of thousands of vehicles, cars and trucks and RVs, jammed along a single track far into the horizon. Like a migrant caravan, like a people in flight. If we’re lucky, Alan said, we should get in and have our tents set up before sunset. Wait, I said, does that mean that if we’re unlucky, we might not? Alan shrugged. He explained that once he’d been stuck in this line for nearly twelve hours. He’d staved off boredom by playing Go against himself on the surface of an imaginary Klein bottle... Every half an hour the great mass of vehicles would crawl ahead thirty, forty, fifty metres and then stop. (...)

I don’t know exactly what I’d expected the place to look like. For the best possible experience, I’d studiously avoided doing any research whatsoever. A hazy mental image of some vast cuddle puddle, beautiful glowing naked freaks. What it actually looked like was a refugee camp. Tract after tract of mud-splattered tents, rows of RVs, general detritus scattered everywhere. Our camp, when we finally arrived, was a disaster zone. A few people had already arrived and set up, but the previous night’s storm had uprooted practically everything. Tents crumpled under a collapsed shade structure; tarps sagging with muddy water, pegs and poles and other bits of important metal all strewn about like a dyspraxic toddler’s toys. The ground moved underfoot. When it rains over the alkaline flats you don’t get normal, wholesome, Glastonbury-style mud. Not the dirt that makes flowers plants grow. An alien, sterile, non-Newtonian substance, sucking at my shoes. (...)

My camp for the duration of Burning Man was named BrainFish. We were a theme camp. Most camps are just a small group of friends pitching their tents together, but some are big. Dozens or hundreds of people who have come to offer something. All free, all in the gift economy. A bar, or food, or yoga classes, or orgies. One camp runs a library, which contains a lot of books about astrology and drug legalisation, plus two copies of Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Mostly, though, theme camps are the ones with geodesic domes. (...)

What I learned, digging and hauling all day and talking to BrainFish at night, is that Burning Man is not really a festival. Festivals have a very long history. A thousand years ago, the villagers could spend the feast day drinking and feasting, while the bishop had to ride through town backwards on a donkey being pelted with turds. A brief moment of communal plenty. Leftists like me like the festival; what we want is essentially for life to be one big festival all the time. But as conservative critics point out, you can’t really consider the festival in isolation, and there’s no feast without a fast. There are also days of abstention and self-denial, when people are forbidden from laughing or talking, solemn mortification of the flesh. Burning Man is something new: a festival and an antifestival at the same time. Everything that’s scarce in the outside world is abundant. There are boutiques where you can just wander in and take a handful of clothes for free; there’s a basically infinite supply of drugs, and a similarly infinite supply of random casual sex. It is the highest-trust society to have ever existed anywhere in the world. At the same time, some extremely rich and powerful people come to Burning Man to experience deprivation and suffering. All the ordinary ties and comforts of a complex society are gone. No public authority that owes you anything, no public services, no concept of the public at all, just whatever other individuals choose to gift you. This is the only city in the world without any kind of water supply, or system for managing waste, or reliable protection from the elements. You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.

Not everyone experiences the same level of discomfort. There are plug-and-play camps, where they hire a team of paid staff to set up all the amenities, and you can just arrive, stay in a luxury caravan, and have fun. They get private showers. Everyone else despises these people, supposedly because it’s not in keeping with the ethos of the place. I’m not sure it’s just that. There’s something more at stake.

Tech people tend to have a very particular view of their role in the universe. They are the creators, the people who build the world, who bless the rest of us with useful and entertaining apps. But they’re never allowed to simply get on with their job of engineering reality; they’re constantly held back from doing whatever they want by petty political forces that try to hold back progress in the name of dusty eighteenth-century principles like democracy. As if the public’s revealed preferences weren’t already expressed through the market. Every so often an imbecile politician will demand that tech companies turn off the algorithm. They don’t know what an algorithm is, they just know it’s bad. The British government thinks you can save water by deleting old emails. These people straightforwardly don’t understand anything about the industry they’re trying to regulate, but if you suggest getting rid of the whole useless political layer people get upset. You can’t win. But Burning Man is a showcase for the totally unlimited power of the builders. Here they get to be Stalinist technocrats, summoning utopia out of the Plan. The difference is that unlike the Soviet model, their utopia really works. Look what we can do. From literally nothing, from a barren desert, we can build a paradise of pleasure in a week and then dismantle it again. And all of this could be yours, every day, if you give over the world to me.

But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

North Pole Economics

Or, how the Grinch stole Christmas. Again.

Earlier this year, toy makers said tariffs would put Christmas "at risk." NPR's A Martinez gets an update on the price of toys from Jay Foreman, CEO of Basic Fun.

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

We have a follow-up conversation about the price of toys. During the summer, a toy industry group warned that the president's Liberation Day tariffs would put Christmas at risk. Well, the holidays are now upon us, so we've called back Jay Foreman, the CEO of Basic Fun! That's the home of Care Bears, Tonka trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite. Jay, so it might sound like we are completely obsessed with the price of a classic steel Tonka truck, but I got to ask again - what is it going to cost this year?

JAY FOREMAN: Well, this year, it's going to cost about 40 bucks, given the tariffs and general inflation. Last year, it was 30 bucks, and the year before, it was 25. So things are really accelerating in the toy space.

MARTÍNEZ: And these price hikes - what does that do to your sales? Are Tonka trucks so classic that people are just going to buy them anyway, or are you seeing a slowdown?

FOREMAN: Well, we're seeing sort of two different effects. The first effect was that we lost about eight weeks of shipping in the middle of the season, as well as this sort of uncertainty about what the tariff level would be sort of stunted the traditional pattern of buying from the retailers. So we got a lot less orders this year than last year. So whether the consumer shows up or not, there are going to be less Tonka trucks in the market. The other aspect, of course, is the consumer sentiment. We are really now starting to feel the consumer is noticing that prices are up and affordability is becoming an issue.

MARTÍNEZ: So I was looking at a report from the market research group Circana, and they say U.S. toy sales have been up by 7% this year. How do we square what they say and what you're reporting?

FOREMAN: So there's really two factors there. One is if you increase the price of toys anywhere from 10% to 30% because you've got a 30% tariff, then your gross sales are going to go up regardless. But the other thing that's skewing the sales data is there's a huge trend right now in the toy business, which is collectible trading cards, which aren't really toys. They're as much as a publishing item as they are toys, but they're sort of tracked by Circana in toys. And things like Pokemon cards, NBA cards, Major League Baseball cards, Magic: The Gathering trading cards - they're on fire right now. And the toy industry might be seeing some increase in sales, but it's in a very narrow band of categories and with a small group of companies. The smaller or medium-sized companies are really hurting pretty bad this year over the tariffs.

MARTÍNEZ: The last time we spoke, too, we talked about maybe considering where you manufacture things. Has enough time passed for you to make some kind of call, or maybe at least be leaning in a certain direction when it comes to where you manufacture your toys?

FOREMAN: Yeah. I mean, we held fast here at Basic Fun! and we kept our production primarily in China. It's just the most reliable supply chain. When you start to move the supply chain and set up new manufacturing, there's a big learning curve, not to mention a huge cost. We also kind of bet on the fact that there will be a recognition by the administration at some point that China is a very important trading partner. Almost, we have a symbiotic relationship with them, and while they can joust with each other, at the end of the day, they've got to play ball. And while we'd love to bring toy manufacturing back to the U.S., it's not really practical. We don't have the type of labor here. We don't have factories set up. We don't have the ability to finance the development of factories. So we're an industry that's generally not really going to be coming back to the United States, like some other industries might have a better opportunity to. So we've stuck it out in China, and so far it's paid off for us.

MARTÍNEZ: We mentioned back in the summer, too, that toymakers were saying that Christmas was at risk. Was that hyperbole, or is that maybe more of a reality now than ever before?

FOREMAN: Well, I mean, it was not hyperbole when, you know, tariffs were 145% and it was a de facto embargo on importations, not just from China but from other markets. You know, remember, India's tariffs are 50% right now. You know, I always say that consumers can always find products to buy. Stores will never be empty. It's all about the stuff you really want, and is that available when you want it, or are you going to get the next best item? So Christmas will come. It always comes. It will be full of a few less of the more desirable types of products, and consumers will have to, you know, be satisfied with sometimes the next or the third best thing on their list.

by A Martínez, NPR | Read more:
Image: Tonka truck/Walmart

[ed. See also: Mark Zandi, Chief Economist/Moody's Analytical (X):]

***

We’ve just updated our spending by income group data for the second quarter of 2025, based on the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts and Survey of Consumer Finance. Looking at the data, it’s not a mystery why most Americans feel like the economy isn’t working for them. For those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, those making less than approximately $175,000 a year – their spending has simply kept pace with inflation since the pandemic. The 20% of households that make more have done much better, and those in the top 3.3% of the distribution have done much, much, much better. The data also show that the U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do. As long as they keep spending, the economy should avoid recession, but if they turn more cautious, for whatever reason, the economy has a big problem.

[ed. Solution - just lower your expectations.]

“You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils...Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need you always need steel,” Trump said.

“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls,” he added.

What Happens When an NFL Ball Goes Into the Stands?

It was Dec. 11, 2022, and Philadelphia Eagles third-year quarterback Jalen Hurts was building a campaign that would earn him MVP runner-up and his first Super Bowl nod.

In a Week 14 win against the New York Giants at MetLife Stadium, Hurts found a coverage gap and darted for a 10-yard touchdown run in the third quarter. It made him the first quarterback to post back-to-back seasons with at least 10 rushing touchdowns. The Pro Football Hall of Fame later announced that Hurts’ jersey and pants worn in that game would be put on display.

The broadcast showed Hurts running through the end zone and handing the ball to an Eagles fan in the first row. Paul Hamilton, the fan at the receiving end of that celebration, won’t forget that moment. But it’s not because he shook hands with the star player of his favorite team. Instead, it marked the beginning of the end of his Eagles and NFL fandom.

One year later, Hamilton filed a lawsuit against the NFL, MetLife Stadium, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and New Jersey State Police, claiming false arrest, false imprisonment, assault and battery, abuse of process and negligence. The NFL and Eagles were dismissed as defendants earlier this year, but the lawsuit remains unresolved against the other parties and is expected to extend into 2026.

Hamilton’s lawsuit says he was approached by stadium employees after Hurts handed him the ball, and “they misrepresented and lied to Mr. Hamilton claiming the football was not his property, and that he was violating law if he kept it and demanded that the football be returned.”

The lawsuit claims that an alternative gift was offered, but Hamilton did not want to give up the game ball. When he tried to leave, the lawsuit says Hamilton “was then thrown into a gate and forcibly held against it.” The lawsuit also claims that approximately 10 New Jersey State Police officers swarmed Hamilton and threatened arrest if he didn’t turn the ball over. Hamilton eventually exited with the ball and still has it in his possession...

Hamilton, now 34, hasn’t been back to an NFL game since the incident, nor does he plan to. He says he is “absolutely not” an Eagles fan anymore, nor a fan of the NFL.

“It’s any sports fan’s all-time high, followed by an all-time low. It’s emotionally very hard to comprehend how that feeling started and how that feeling ended,” Hamilton said. “I still struggle with it every day; it’s not like it’s gone away. It’s 2025, and it still feels like it was yesterday that they destroyed something for me.

by Jayna Bardahl, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; Photo: G Fiume/Getty Images

Every Major League Baseball Pitch, Explained

[ed. Enjoy the game.]

College Football: Big Money, Big Troubles

College football programs could spend $200 million in buyouts. Spare us the money moaning.

If you watched college football on Saturday, you saw yet another set of misleading political ads urging you to call your local congressman and tell them to SAVE COLLEGE SPORTS! The latest ones give the impression that women’s and Olympic sports are in trouble because having to pay athletes a salary is going to bankrupt their schools.

On Sunday, Penn State announced it has fired 12th-year coach James Franklin, for whom they now owe a roughly $45 million buyout.

These schools aren’t broke. They’re just wildly irresponsible spenders.

And if they find a private equity firm to come rushing to their rescue, as the Big Ten is actively seeking, they’ll just find a way to light that money on fire, too.

We’re only halfway through the 2025 regular season, and it’s clear we’re headed to a full-on coaching carousel bloodletting. Stanford (Troy Taylor), UCLA (DeShaun Foster), Virginia Tech (Brent Pry), Oklahoma State (Mike Gundy), Arkansas (Sam Pittman), Oregon State (Trent Bray) and now Penn State have already sent their guys packing, and the likes of Florida (Billy Napier), Wisconsin (Luke Fickell) and several more will likely come.

By year’s end, the combined cost of those buyouts could well exceed $200 million. Let that sink in for a second. Supposed institutions of “higher learning” have managed to negotiate themselves into paying $200 million to people who will no longer be working for them.

Just how much is $200 million? Well, for one thing, it’s enough to pay for the scholarships of roughly 5,000 women’s and Olympic sports athletes.

You may be asking yourself: How do schools keep entering into these ridiculous, one-sided coaching contracts that cost more than the House settlement salary cap ($20.5 million) to extricate themselves from?

Well, consider the dynamics at play in those negotiations.

On one side of the table, we have an athletics director who spends 95 percent of their time on things like fundraising, marketing, facilities, answering fan emails about the long lines of concession stands, and so on. Once every four or five years, if that, they have to hire or renew a highly paid football coach, often in the span of 24 to 48 hours.

And on the other side, we have Jimmy Sexton. Or Trace Armstrong. Or another super-agent whose sole job is to negotiate lucrative coaching contracts. It’s a bigger mismatch than Penn State-UCLA … uh, Penn State-Northwestern … uh … you know what I mean.

Franklin’s extremely one-sided contract is a perfect example. (...)

Coaching salaries have been going up and up for decades, of course, but that 2021-22 cycle reached new heights in absurdity. In addition to Franklin’s windfall, USC gave Oklahoma’s Riley a 10-year, $110 million contract, and LSU gave Brian Kelly a 10-year, $95 million deal; and the most insane of all, Michigan State’s 10-year, $75 million deal for the since-fired Mel Tucker.

As of today, none of the four schools has gotten the return they were seeking. (...)

Now, according to USA Today’s coaching salary database published last week, none of the 30 highest-paid coaches in the country have a buyout of less than $20 million.

In the past, we might have just rolled our eyes, proclaimed, “You idiots!” and moved on. But the current college sports climate all but demands that there needs to be more accountability of the people making these deals.

by Stewart Mandel, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Alex Slitz/Getty

[ed. I don't follow college football much, but from what I do pick up it seems like the transfer portal, NIL, legitimized sports gambling, conference reorganizations, big media money, and who knows what else have really had an overall negative effect on the sport, resulting in an ugly mercenary ethic that's now common. See also: College football is absolutely unhinged right now. It’s exactly why we love it; and, Bill Belichick pledged an NFL approach at North Carolina. Program insiders call it dysfunctional (The Athletic). 

Then there's this: College football’s ‘shirtless dudes’ trend is all the rage. And could be curing male loneliness? Can't see the connection but imagine women sure as hell won't be sitting anywhere near these guys. Don't think that's going to help with the loneliness problem.]