DL Open Thread Sunday Morning Magazine: March 15, 2026
‘My Year As A Degenerate Gambler’: State-sponsored thievery:
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.
Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them. Ancient Greeks wagered on the (occasionally rigged) early Olympic Games; Romans bet on chariot races and gladiatorial contests (also sometimes rigged). When 17th‑century settlers arrived in North America, they encountered Native tribes placing high‑stakes bets on “little brother of war,” a precursor to lacrosse.
Throughout most of America’s history, gambling was heavily regulated and generally discouraged. In 1631, Puritans banned games of chance in Plymouth Colony “under pain of punishment.” In 1794, a Pennsylvania law prohibited “cockfighting, cards, dice, billiards, bowling, shuffleboard, horse racing, or any other type of gambling.”
Laws varied by state and century, but the practice always came with a healthy social stigma, one rooted in millennia of accumulated wisdom. To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling.
Then, in 2012, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, hoping to boost Atlantic City’s flagging economy, signed a bill expanding sports betting to licensed locations in his state. The leagues sued New Jersey, and the case began winding its way through the federal courts.
By 2018, Christie’s case had landed before the Supreme Court, which overturned the federal ban on sports betting. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, made no effort to consider the public-policy rationale that had led Congress to make the law, or the cascading consequences of overturning it. He simply ruled that the Constitution empowers states, not the federal government, to regulate gambling, and scrapped the entire legal framework that had been in place for the past quarter century.
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?
Lots. Read and find out. Pretty sure that Charles Potter and John Viola led the charge to swell the ranks of degenerate gamblers in Delaware. A fitting legacy.
Guess Those ‘Learn To Code’ Programs Are A Thing Of The Past. Because you-know-what has taken over:
Lately, Manu Ebert has been trying to keep his A.I. from humiliating him.
I recently visited Ebert, a machine-learning engineer and former neuroscientist, at the spare apartment where he and Conor Brennan-Burke run their start-up, Hyperspell. Ebert, a tall and short-bearded 39-year-old with the air of a European academic, sat before a mammoth curved monitor. Onscreen, Claude Code — the A.I. tool from Anthropic — was busy at work. One of its agents was writing a new feature and another was testing it; a third supervised everything, like a virtual taskmaster. After a few minutes, Claude flashed: “Implementation complete!”
Ebert grew up in the ’90s, learning to code the old-fashioned way: He typed it out, line by painstaking line. After college, he held jobs as a software developer in Silicon Valley for companies like Airbnb before becoming a co-founder of four start-ups. Back then, developing software meant spending days hunched over his keyboard, pondering gnarly details, trying to avoid mistakes.
All that ended last fall. A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does the bulk of it. The agents are so fast — and generally so accurate — that when a customer recently needed Hyperspell to write some new code, it took only half an hour. In the before times? “That alone would have taken me a day,” he said.
He and Brennan-Burke, who is 32, are still software developers, but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Instead, they spend their days talking to the A.I., describing in plain English what they want from it and responding to the A.I.’s “plan” for what it will do. Then they turn the agents loose.
A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire. Sometimes when Claude misbehaves and fails to test the code, Ebert scolds the agent: Claude, you really do have to run all the tests.
Sounds like Claude has become one of those fake pets that provide you with fake love–minus the poop.
This vertiginous shift threatens to stir up some huge economic consequences. For decades, coding was considered such wizardry that if you were halfway competent you could expect to enjoy lifetime employment. If you were exceptional at it (and lucky), you got rich. Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code.”
Now coding itself is being automated. To outsiders, what programmers are facing can seem richly deserved, and even funny: American white-collar workers have long fretted that Silicon Valley might one day use A.I. to automate their jobs, but look who got hit first! Indeed, coding is perhaps the first form of very expensive industrialized human labor that A.I. can actually replace. A.I.-generated videos look janky, artificial photos surreal; law briefs can be riddled with career-ending howlers. But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose.
This lengthy article covers the entire waterfront, including ‘AI hallucinations’. Read. You’ve got the time now that you’ve lost your coding job.
The Secret To Kicking Tuna Salad Up A Notch? It’s–Mayo:
There’s only so much you can do with the tuna, but you can do quite a bit with that mayonnaise which makes tuna salad so creamy, so there’s no excuse for falling into the trap of sticking to plain mayo and nothing else.
Villa suggests some flavored or differently mixed alternatives, telling The Takeout exclusively that you can “reach for Duke’s, Winiary [a Polish mayonnaise known for tasting extra rich] or Japanese Kewpie mayo or Hellman’s mayo (so many varieties now for the novice chef) mixed with other easy to find and yummy condiments or spices.”
Vivian Villa says there are lots of ingredients you can add to mayonnaise before adding it to tuna salad, ranging from creamy options with specific flavors like “creamed cottage cheese, tzatziki, [and] whipped full fat ricotta,” to more umami options which take the place of salt. These include ingredients such as “nutritional yeast, mushroom seasoning (found in Asian stores), soy sauce, miso, sesame oil, [and] fish sauce,” the last of which only needs a smidgen to be effective.
Regardless of what you choose, assuming you’ve got some sort of emulsified mixture of creamy ingredients and oils, you also want to make sure that extra flavor is packed tightly into your tuna salad. Villa explains exclusively to The Takeout that you can do this by making sure the tuna is dry enough to absorb the new flavors you’re mixing in.
Calling your attention to articles like this is precisely why DL performs such a public service. Think of us the next time you luxuriate in your upgraded tuna sandwich.
Now, this article, on the other hand…:
Whether it happens on your postprandial fart walk, right in the middle of yoga class or while you’re sleeping, everyone — even the poshest among us — farts.
According to Dr. Satish Rao, professor of Medicine at Augusta University’s Medical College of Georgia, the average person farts seven to 24 times a day.
“It’s a normal physiological phenomenon,” he said, explaining flatulence as the byproduct of fermentation in the colon.
If you’re thinking that President Donald Trump is making you fart more, you might be right. (Fun fact: An old Australian slang word for a fart is a “trump.”) Stress or anxiety, about the current political climate or matters closer to home, can have an impact on how much someone farts, May said.
Bobby Darin sings us out:
