Adam Victor Brandizzi

The two most popular articles that freelancers have written for Priceonomics are an investigation into whether rotisserie chicken is really a bargain and the story of how a Hollywood sitcom writer became homeless. 

In other words, we have pretty eclectic taste. Which is why we’d like you to pitch us an article you’d like to write for Priceonomics. 

In the past, Priceonomics staff writers have written close to 100% of our articles. But working with freelancers has allowed us to tell stories we wouldn’t have thought of ourselves, like how the Korean government incited the bibimbap and kimchi craze in America, and how the $200 billion infomercial industry is twice the size of the entire TV business. 

Here are the last five freelance articles we published:

Our next freelance articles are about how investment banks profit from the construction of American public schools and how the dot-com collapse led to the racial integration of a San Francisco public school.

If you’d like to pitch an article, you have two options. You can scroll below to learn how to pitch your idea. Or you can pitch us on taking on one of the story or topic ideas we’ve listed below. We know that it can be time-consuming to pitch articles, so we want to make your life easier by suggesting ideas we are already curious about. 

We will update this list of story ideas regularly. If you’d like us to email you when we release a new batch of topics, please enter your email here. 

Whichever way you contribute, you’ll work with our editor, Alex Mayyasi, and we’ll pay you from $250 to $1,000 depending on your experience and the depth of the article. For four of the last five freelancer articles we published, we paid $1,000. We also reserve the right to pay writers more for an incredible pitch and story. 

Option 1: Write one of these stories

Here are several topics we’re curious about. If you’re interested in covering them, the instructions for contacting us are below.

The Cult of the Volkswagen Westfalia

These camper vans, made by Volkswagen in the 1980s, have a cult following. They are 30 years old and costly to maintain, but people seem to love them. What’s the deal with the Volkswagen Westfalia?

Fires in San Francisco Apartment Buildings

Is there any data showing that apartment buildings in San Francisco tend to catch fire more often when rents are higher?

We suspect that when landlords want to get rid of rent-controlled tenants, they stop maintaining their buildings properly, which can lead to fire hazards. 

This is a morbid thought, and just a hypothesis. What does the data say—if it’s possible to assemble?

The Donald Trump Cost-Control Strategy

Donald Trump has famously stiffed contractors who worked on his Atlantic casinos. The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, among others, have reported that this practice is common in the real estate industry: a routine “cost-saving measure.” 

Why is this practice common in the real estate sector? Why and how does it work? And is it common in other industries? 

The Gigantic Romance Novel Industry

According to Nielsen, romance novels make up 29% of all fiction books sold in the United States. We’re not sure what the story is here, but this is an interesting data point. What story could you tell about this?

Why do Men Commit More Crimes?

Each time a mass shooting takes place, a minority of commentators point out that the shooters are invariably male. And, in general, men commit the majority of violent crimes. 

Why do men commit more crimes, and is this true of both violent and non-violent crime? Which crimes are committed at equal rates across genders, and does the size of the gender gap in crime vary in different areas or countries?

What’s the Deal with Polygraphs?

In the world of Harry Potter, it’s very easy to wrap up criminal mysteries. Once a suspect is in hand and forced to take a truth-telling potion, he or she confesses everything. 

Our world has a technological version of a truth-telling potion: a polygraph. So why don’t we use them all the time? And if they are unreliable, why do we use them at all?

Spam in the Age of Telegraphs

This is a complaint about spam sent by a dentist over telegraph in 1864. 

Was this a major problem or annoyance back then? How did individuals and the government try to deal with spam in the 19th century?

Option 2: Pitch us an original idea

Do you have an idea for a story? Great! We’d love to hear it.

Despite our name, we don’t exclusively focus on prices or economics. (It’s a long story.) We publish stories on any topic we find interesting or important as long as they are reported objectively and intelligently. 

Our articles tend to run from 1,500 to 3,000 words. We don’t publish think pieces or hot takes, and we don’t aim to report the news or follow the news cycle. Our approach is closer to magazine journalism, and one of our strengths is finding stories in unexpected places. 

You can get a sense for our style and the type of topics that succeed on Priceonomics by looking at this list of our most popular articles (as measured imperfectly by number of Facebook likes and shares). You can also see examples of common types of Priceonomics articles here.

You’ll see that we like stories about data. (Although we don’t force data analysis into stories.)  And if you read some of our articles, you’ll see that our writing gets pretty nerdy. Not nerdy in the sense of writing about SETI and Dungeons & Dragons—although those sound like interesting topics. But nerdy in the sense of getting into the weeds of the history/economics/psychology of a topic. 

Go ahead. Nerd out in your stories. Priceonomics is a safe place. 

How to apply

To apply, we need you to do four things. It shouldn’t take long—we are looking for people with a demonstrated background in publishing this kind of work. You could have published something on Medium or the New York Times. As long as it is good, it doesn’t matter. 

If you’d like to pitch us or cover one of the above topics, please apply with the following:

1. A single pitch—either one of yours or one of our suggested stories. You don’t need to have conducted interviews or written an outline. What we’d like to see is 1-3 short paragraphs that show you have thought about the topic, have a hunch for what may be interesting about it, and have an initial gameplan for how to investigate. 

2. A little blurb about you. Who are you? Feel free to add a link to your LinkedIn or website.

3. The link to the most popular thing you’ve ever published online. 

Using Facebook’s API, we’ll check how many times it was shared and liked. (It’s an imperfect measure of popularity, but the best that’s publicly available.) We’ll also check Twitter to see if people have shared it and what they said about it. We don’t care about popularity persay, but we want to see a demonstrated ability to write something that will make an impact on the Internet.

To find out how many times your articles have been liked and shared—and to find your most popular one—you can do the same thing using this tool. Having over 1,000 likes/shares on an article is pretty popular—although it depends somewhat on where the article was published.

4. The link to the best thing you’ve ever published online.

Here’s the application link.

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On Tuesday, the United States government kicked off the latest round in what might go down as the largest and most complex auction in human history. If you’ve never heard of this historic bidding war, that might be because the property that is now on the auction block, the national radio spectrum, is entirely invisible.

To be sure, we take the spectrum for granted. Every time we watch TV, listen to the radio, or use our smartphones, it is easy to forget that we are making use of a finite natural resource.

The right to use this resource is governed by the Federal Communications Commission, which holds complex, algorithmically assisted auctions and assigns right-of-way along the nation’s radio waves to the highest bidder. But this has not always been standard practice. For decades, the federal government parceled out subdivisions of the electromagnetic frontier by conducting hearings and holding lotteries.

When the government started selling spectrum in 1994, it was celebrated as a victory for the American taxpayer. The U.S. Treasury is over $100 billion richer thanks to the FCC’s auctions, and governments around the world have come to embrace this innovation with similarly lucrative results. 

But the advent of the spectrum auction was also an unlikely victory for an esoteric sub-discipline of economic theory—the study of auctions. The task of auctioning off radio waves was a unique economic and logistical challenge that no one had tackled before. Presented with a looming spectrum crisis in the early 1990s that threatened to delay the dawn of the digital age, the FCC did what few federal bureaucracies have done before or since. They turned to a handful of academics and let them put their untested theories into practice.

Now, as the possibility of yet another spectrum crisis looms, the FCC is once again counting on a handful of economists and computer scientists to bring order to the ether.

From Etheric Bedlam to Ernest Borgnine

The unregulated radio spectrum tends towards anarchy.

That seemed to be the view of George von Lengerke Meyer, William Howard Taft’s Secretary of the Navy. In a letter penned to the Senate Committee on Commerce in 1910, an irate Meyer complained that the Navy’s use of the “electric waves” was being obstructed by “amateurs” who were jamming up the frequencies used by ship operators and by “irresponsible parties” who had taken to issuing fake SOS calls. The result of these spectral-prank callers, he wrote, was that “calls of distress from vessels in peril on the sea go unheeded or are drowned out in the etheric bedlam.”

Meyer had good reason to be frustrated.

Just as two cars can’t travel along the same patch of road at the same time without crashing into one another, no two broadcasters can use the same frequency in the same area without causing interference. Even as technological progress has allowed for broader and more efficient use of the spectrum (think wider roads and narrower cars), there is still only so much space to go around. 

This crowded spectrum, Meyer argued, needed a traffic cop.

The public came around to the Navy Secretary’s view two years later. As Ars Technica explains, in the chaotic aftermath of the Titanic disaster in 1912, many blamed amateur radio operators for muddying up the rescue operation and spreading false rumors to the panicked relatives of deceased passengers. Valid or not, those criticisms spurred Congress to pass the Radio Act. The new law required all would-be broadcasters to obtain licenses from the Secretary of Commerce and to stick to their assigned frequencies. 

Despite the new rules, it took another decade of legal wrangling before it was finally affirmed that use of the radio waves was indeed the “the inalienable possession of the people of the United States and Their Government.” But by 1927, the spectrum, like federal land, was a publicly owned and managed resource. And just like federal land, the government now had to devise a fair system of choosing who would get to use it. 

For the next five and a half decades, the method of choice was “comparative hearings.” Any radio company (and before long, television broadcaster) who wanted to make use of the public’s airwaves had to go before a panel at the Federal Radio Commission (renamed the Federal Communications Commission in the 1930s). Aside from the negligible application costs, broadcast licenses were given out for free.

On paper, these hearings were meant to award applicants who best advanced the “public interest.” Just what was the public interest? Therein lay the rub. The FCC’s reasoning was often opaque and the losers frequently filed lawsuits in protest.

At the same time, demand for access to the ether only escalated with America’s television watching habits. With the invention of commercial cell telephones in the early 1980s, things came to a head. Drowning in license applications, the FCC pled with Congress for relief, and in 1983, legislation was passed to allow spectrum licenses to be awarded by lottery.

The logic of the lottery was appealing at first glance. Unlike lengthy and litigious hearings, drawing license winners from a proverbial hat was a quick and inexpensive way to work through the backlog of 1,400 cell phone service applications. Plus, given the inherently random nature of this licensing system, no one could claim the license awards were based on politics. 

In fact, no one could claim the license awards were based on anything, which proved to be a problem. As it turns out, selecting license winners at random sometimes meant that the people who ended up with large tracts of one of the nation’s most valuable natural resources were, well, a little random. 

People, for example, like the actor Ernest Borgnine.

Ernest Borgnine, character actor and one-time spectrum lottery winner.

Sometime between working on the CBS series Airwolf and taking a voice acting gig in All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, Borgnine tried his hand at spectrum speculation. As part of a syndicate of lottery participants, the actor was one of hundreds of thousands of citizens who played the cellular telephony lotto in the mid-1980s. According to an article in Forbes from 1990, Borgnine’s group were one of the lucky ones and took home the right to provide cell service to Yakima, Washington, which they then sold for a handsome profit. 

The active secondary market for lottery-won cell phone licenses that emerged publicized a fact that radio and television industry executives had long known. Since 1927, the government had been distributing billions of dollars worth of spectrum to some of the country's largest companies, absolutely free of charge.

Amid growing public concern about the national debt, and as stories of spectrum “application mills” began to pop up in the press, calls for a more remunerative and rational approach intensified. If the government auctions offshore oil drilling rights, coal seams, and seized property, why not spectrum rights too?

Given the infeasibility of hearings and the unseemliness of lotteries, lawmakers had no choice but to listen. In 1993, Congress passed a bill calling for the FCC to issue new spectrum licenses by auction. There was no auction mechanism for spectrum in place—not in the United States or anywhere. The Commission was given until the following year to design one.

It was time to bring in the economists.

The Easter Bunny Wins the Preakness

The notion of selling spectrum by auction goes back to at least 1951, when the legal scholar, Leo Herzel, floated the idea in the University of Chicago Law Review. The idea was popularized a few year later by the economist Ronald Coase, who lambasted the wastefulness of the FCC’s comparative hearing practice and wondered whether regulation of the “etheric bedlam” was necessary at all. 

Despite the jeering from the academy, resistance to the auction within the FCC came with a long pedigree. As pressures to process license applications mounted on the Commission through the late 1970s, two commissioners declared that the chances of the FCC holding an auction for spectrum mirrored “those on the Easter Bunny in the Preakness.”

The resistance was not solely bureaucratic intransigence. Unlike oil fields, Treasury securities, and other assets that the government has traditionally sells to the highest bidder, spectrum has some unique features that make it slightly more complicated to auction off.

Most significantly, the value of a given license for a bidder often depends on the value of other licenses.

Imagine a cell phone company is hoping to build a national network. The government is auctioning off cell phone licenses in an "English" auction—the likes of which you might see at an estate sale or a charity event. Licenses will be sold across the country, so the auctioneer begins with California.

A typical "English" auction in London.

How much should the company bid for the right to ride the Golden State's airwaves? It will depend on whether or not the company can acquire coverage in every other state. California, as part of a comprehensive national network, is worth more than California by itself. 

Likewise, the company will want to know how much it is going to spend on all of the other states, so it doesn’t bid over its budget. Plus, what if a competitor decides to take advantage of the company's national ambitions by putting all of its chips on, say, New York, and holding out for a stratospheric price?

Economists call the challenge of bidding in this type of auction “the exposure problem.” And it is a problem. Left unaddressed, the strategic uncertainty will lead many participants to under bid, while trapping others in deals that aren’t in their interest. Over time, it will discourage anyone from taking part in the auction.

This put the FCC in a very difficult position.

“With no prior auction experience and a tight deadline, the normal bureaucratic behavior would have been to adopt a ‘tried and true’ auction design,” writes Evan Kwerel, an economist at the FCC who helped lead the design effort. “In 1993, however, there was no tried and true method appropriate for the circumstances.”

Luckily for Kwerel, a couple economists from California had just been hired to think of a workaround.    

Simultaneous and Ascending

Paul Milgrom says he was skeptical when he got a call from Pacific Bell. 

The telephone company was hoping to have some say in the design of the FCC's much awaited spectrum auction, and they wanted to hire Milgrom and his colleague at Stanford, Robert Wilson, as consultants.

"They came to me and said, 'Well, what do you think of this?'" recalls Milgrom of his first conversation with Pac-Bell. "I said, 'I'm just an economic theorist! I don't know anything!'"

Milgrom had been researching auction theory since the late 1970s, but that didn't mean he had spent much time studying actual auctions. Borrowing many of the analytical tools from game theory, the study of auctions offers a mathematically rigorous, but not terribly representative depiction of the real world. Even in the stylized universe of academic economists, many still regarded auction theorists as a somewhat heterodox.

Nevertheless, Milgrom and Wilson got to work.

The challenge before them was to set up an auction in which multiple bidders could bid on multiple licenses in multiple markets without running into the exposure problem.

"So we came up with a method to set prices simultaneously, so that bidders would have some idea what the prices were in other areas," says Milgrom. "If I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to be able to afford Chicago and Los Angeles, I want to know what the overall prices everywhere else are first, and the auction would provide a lot of information on that." 

This was the conceptual core of Milgrom and Wilson's simultaneous ascending auction. In practice, the form was very similar to the "English" auctions you might see at Christie's. Only instead of taking place in a room full of well heeled collectors all bidding on the same painting, this auction would take place within a computer network full of multinational corporations bidding for every commercially available segment of the electromagnetic spectrum at once.

To see how this might work in practice, imagine a very simple example. Two companies are bidding on cell phone licenses in San Francisco and Chicago. Company A is interested in the Bay Area market, while Company B is only willing to pay a premium for Chicago if it can land the San Francisco license too.

In each round, the two companies will submit bids on the licenses that they are interested in acquiring. In the above example, Company A might place $500,000 on San Francisco, while Company B might submit $510,000 on both. When the round ends, both companies will be able to view the highest bid in each market and, now having some understanding of the preferences of their competitor and the likely trajectory of prices in each market, they can adjust their strategies accordingly before making their bids in the second round.

The auction finally ends when a round passes in which no bids are made on any of the licenses.

In 1994, the concept was well understood in theory. Even the FCC was aware of it. As far back as 1985, the Commission's Evan Kwerel and his colleague, Alex Felker, had suggested developing a system in which all of available licenses would be bid upon at the same time. This hypothetical auction would clear up much of the uncertainty about license prices across different markets. But clearly, there was quite a bit of devil in the details. It was left to Paul Milgrom to convince the FCC that they had rooted them out.

Together with a research assistant, Milgrom programmed a workable prototype of the auction design into an Excel spreadsheet. Then he loaded up the file onto the 1993 equivalent of Dropbox and headed to Washington D.C.

"I actually showed up to one of my visits to the FCC with a three-and-a-half inch [floppy] disk with two Excel spreadsheets on it—one to show how the FCC program would run and one to show what a bidder could do," he says. The message he was trying to convey was clear: "People will tell you it can't be done. Well, it could be done—I'm not recommending you do it with an Excel spreadsheet—but you could!"

This was cutting edge stuff at the time, says Milgrom. Had Pacific Bell approached Milgrom and Wilson any earlier, the simultaneous ascending auction would not have been possible. Milgrom and Wilson's work was as much about mathematics and computer science as it was economic innovation.

With some additional input from Preston McAfee, a University of Texas economist who had been hired by the cell phone company AirTouch (and who is now the chief economist at Microsoft), the FCC signed off on the untested design and held the world's first simultaneous ascending auction in July of 1994. Ten licenses were sold over the course of 47 rounds and the FCC brought in $617 million.

Not a bad haul for an agency that had been giving out spectrum for free since 1927.

Successes and Failures 

In the immediate aftermath, the auction was heralded as an outstanding success for market-oriented policymaking and sound fiscal stewardship. The following year, after the FCC held its fourth and largest spectrum auction yet, the conservative columnist William Safire declared it "the greatest auction in history" and a "taxpayers' bonanza."

Since then, writes auction theorist Peter Cramton, the simultaneous ascending auction has become the “workhorse of spectrum auctions” around the world, where it has generated revenue in excess of $200 billion. It has also been taken up, with some modifications, in other settings, such as in electricity and gas markets.

Data source: Federal Communications Commission; chart by Priceonomics.

The approach was even proposed by the English author and economist, Tim Harford, as a method for deciding who ought to get which room in a crowded house.

“In the first round, any student may choose to bid on any of the seven largest rooms, in increments of £5,” he writes in response to a letter from a university student. “In each subsequent round, students without rooms must submit a bid to exceed the current high bid by £5. Any incumbents thus dislodged can bid on any room in the following round.” 

Asked whether he was aware that the auction model he helped to design was being put to such prosaic use, Milgrom warned that, in fact, the rent application is “trickier than it seems.” Unlike the spectrum context, bids among housemates must sum to a specific value—namely, the rent. Instead, he says, he refers inquiring students to the website Spliddit.

Still, while the incontrovertible usefulness of the simultaneous ascending auction has earned Milgrom, Wilson, and McAfee plenty of accolades and awards, there have been bugs along the way.

In 1996, for example, it was discovered that a cellular carrier, Mercury PCS, had found a way to collude with competitors by including license area codes in the last three digits of its bids. For example, a bid of $1,615,264 in Amarillo, Texas was meant to tell a competitor to stay out of the nearby Lubbock market, known as license area 264.

Likewise, another flaw—this one potentially more fundamental—came to light in an auction ten years later. In 2006, a consortium of cable companies, including Comcast and Time Warner, were able to exploit a quirk in the auction design that made it more difficult for bidders to move from one type of license to the other. This allowed the consortium to walk away with national coverage at a multibillion-dollar discount. 

Over the years, these loopholes and glitches have led the FCC to tinker with the basic design. They have also encouraged other countries to modify the original 1994 model when constructing their own spectrum auctions. In much of Europe, for example, bids are not made on individual licenses, but on "packages," which represent a wish list of licenses across a region and across the spectrum. This makes for an auction process that would have been computationally out-of-reach in the era of floppy disks, but which more recent innovations have made possible.

Likewise, as the demand for spectrum in the United States once again seems ready to outstrip supply, the latest innovations in market design and computer science have been used to manufacture the largest and most complex auction yet.

The Coming Shortage

For years, the threat of a looming spectrum shortage has struck fear into the hearts of telecom executives and federal regulators alike. While the demand for new spectrum, in the form data hungry smartphone usage, shows no sign of abating, the supply of spectrum, as always, is fixed. 

Well, almost fixed. 

Beginning in 2012, the FCC initiated a plan to repurpose spectrum from local TV broadcasters and repackage those airwaves for the use of the mobile broadband industry. This massive transfer of invisible wealth is now underway. As Paul Milgrom told the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, “this is by far the most complicated resource reallocation ever attempted, anywhere in the world.” 

Milgrom is well positioned to know. Once again, he has played the role of market designer.

Though the FCC's decade-spanning spectrum reallocation scheme is called an "Incentive Auction," it is in fact two auctions.

The first, which began at the end of March, was in every way an inversion of the typical model. Rather than serve as the single seller of spectrum before a host of bidders, the FCC was the lone buyer in a "reverse" auction. And unlike a traditional ascending auction, in which prices begin low and end high, the FCC started high and sought out TV broadcasters willing to sell at the lowest prices.

Evidently, these broadcasters drive a hard bargain. When the reverse auction closed at the end of June, the FCC had acquired commitments from them to supply 126 MHz of spectrum at a price of $86.4 billion.

To be clear, these funds are not coming out of government coffers. The FCC is simply playing the role of middleman in a massive spectrum recycling program. Now, starting this Tuesday, the Commission is in the process of rounding up potential buyers with its "forward auction." 

This second phase of the process looks much more like traditional FCC fare, but with a few important changes. In the forward auction, bids are not tied to a specific frequency, but are made for generic spectrum in a particular region. Likewise, unlike a traditional English auction in which the auctioneer fields potential prices from bidders, the FCC will raise prices in fixed steps in each round and ask all bidders how much spectrum they are willing to purchase at that price. 

Both changes are intended to standardize the bidding process across markets, which are intended to help the FCC match the supply of the TV broadcasters with the demand of the wireless carriers. On that note, some are less optimistic than others.

"They're completely nuts," said industry analyst, Roger Entner, referring to the TV broadcaster's high price tag. "The wireless industry, even with private equity and cable, I don't see has a chance of raising that much."

And if that's the case, the FCC will have to start the entire process over again. The fate of the unobstructed flow of digital information will have to wait.

That will keep Paul Milgrom and his team busy. Though Milgrom says he cannot get into the details of the incentive auction design until the process is complete, the repackaging of unwanted frequency to meet the demands of wireless carriers is evidently a mammoth logistical and economic challenge.

"The computations that the FCC has to do in real time now are unprecedented," he says. "I think this is the most exciting thing I've ever done."

No doubt, the last time Milgrom said that, he reshaped an entire industry and gave governments around the world a tool to collect hundreds of billions of dollars in extra revenue.

Let’s hope this experiment goes just as well.

Our next article explores why Americans are no longer among the world's tallest people. To get notified when we post it  →  join our email list.

Note: Priceonomics can help your company get better at creating content marketing that actually performs. Software, training and content creation services from Priceonomics. Starting at just $49 / month.

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It is easy to find ugliness in this election cycle, but I thought I would take a moment to point out two remarkable happenings that you might have missed.

Clinton and Trump are the most disliked candidates for president that this country has ever seen. And yet, see what they have accomplished without even getting elected…

Hillary Clinton has already broken the ultimate glass ceiling. I see no discussion – in private or in public – about the role of her gender. Clinton did that for you and your daughters. She took gender off the table for the most important job in the land. It doesn’t matter who gets elected now. Clinton already made the gender sale. In 2016, nearly all American citizens believe a woman can, and will, be president. Because of Hillary Clinton. That’s a big deal.

I know that some of you think Clinton “cheated” because she used the advantage of her husband’s presidency to seek her own destiny. But keep in mind that ALL successful people exploit their unique advantages. Clinton just did it better. She isn’t here by accident.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump turned the GOP into a pro-LGBTQ organization. No one saw that coming. And I think it is sticking. That’s a big deal.

So, while we were watching the two most odious personalities on the planet hurl lies and insults at each other, those two odious personalities were bringing civilization toward the light. And succeeding.

Don’t lose that.

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You might love my book because I wrote it like a book.

Vincent Gigante, head of the Genovese crime family from 1981 to 2005, feigned mental illness for 30 years in order to throw law enforcement authorities off his trail. Beginning in the 1960s he could regularly be seen shuffling around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers, mumbling to himself, and quietly playing pinochle at a local club. His lawyers and relatives insisted he had become mentally disabled, with an IQ of 69 to 72.

But informants told the FBI that during this time he was really leading the wealthiest and most powerful crime family in the nation and a dominant force in the New York mob.

At arraignments he appeared in pajamas, and psychiatrists testified that he had been confined 28 times for hallucinations and “dementia rooted in organic brain damage.” “He was probably the most clever organized-crime figure I have ever seen,” former FBI supervisor John S. Pritchard told the New York Times. Mob rival John Gotti called him “crazy like a fox.”

It wasn’t until April 2003, in exchange for a plea deal, that he acknowledged that the whole thing had been a con to delay his racketeering trial. His lawyer said, “I think you get to a point in life — I think everyone does — where you become too old and too sick and too tired to fight.” He died in prison in 2005.

My week of Silicon Valley comics continues. So does my visit to Silicon Valley! Heading back to Vancouver tonight

“I would have praised you more if you had praised me less.” — Louis XIV, to poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, after a fulsomely flattering verse

Odila é a diferentona da foto. Ela é a única que teve o nome anotado, e a única que posou separada das colegas, ao lado de seu garboso professor.

As razões de tanto privilégio se perderam junto com os envolvidos: a foto tem 97 anos, e não sobrou ninguém que possa explicá-las.

A única que restou é a escada que emoldura a pose, que evidentemente não pode contar a história. Mas só o fato de ela ter sobrevivido já é notável em São Paulo, onde o normal é que as construções (sobretudo as belas) desapareçam antes das pessoas.

Pensando bem, a escada é outra diferentona na foto.

A foto antiga, com um 1919 anotado no verso, estava em um sebo em Santos. A foto atual fui eu mesmo que tirei hoje de manhã, na Escola Estadual Conselheiro Antonio Prado, na Barra Funda.

[Not meant as a claim that science doesn’t know something. More of an admission that I don’t know some things, and a hope to be informed about them by someone who does.]

Everyone knows about tolerance. The first time you take heroin, you get really high. The second time you take heroin, you get slightly less high. The nth time you take heroin, you barely feel good at all – but if you stop taking heroin, then you feel miserable. Your body adjusts, the receptors desensitize, whatever.

This is so simple that it took me forever to ask the obvious next question – how come this doesn’t happen for everything else? Supposedly if you have ADHD you can just stay on Adderall forever. Nobody says “The first time you take Adderall you can concentrate really well, the second time you take it you’ll concentrate less well, and the nth time you take it you can barely concentrate better at all.”

The psychiatry textbooks contain a sentence or two saying that “some” patients “may” develop Adderall tolerance, but it’s not something that we’re trained to expect. There are a lot of anecdotal reports online, but there are also anecdotal reports of people who don’t develop any tolerance at all after years and years. Hmm.

Also, people who abuse Adderall develop tolerance all the time, and keep having to up the doses just like heroin abusers do. This is a little weird – my pet theory is that people only develop tolerance to drug effects that aren’t FDA-approved uses – though how your receptors know what the FDA says I haven’t quite figured out. More seriously, it may be an effect of method of use – taking a small amount daily versus snorting a large amount of crushed tablet whenever you feel like it. Or it may be that tolerance to euphoric effects is worse than tolerance to stimulant effects.

(This seems true in general – I get euphoric effects from caffeine when I drink it very rarely; if I drink it more often, the euphoria goes away and I just feel a little more awake. This is important since it suggests tolerance isn’t just your body metabolizing the drug better, but actually a matter of receptor-level action – something I think everyone agrees is true, but which it’s always nice to have independent confirmation for.)

Sometimes tolerance gets weird. Antipsychotics are supposed to block dopamine receptors. Too much dopamine can contribute to psychosis, but it can also screw up the basal ganglia’s modulation of movement and cause you to make repetitive jerking motions all the time. People who have been on antipsychotics for too long may remain protected from psychosis, but start making repetitive jerking movements in a way consistent with too much dopamine. The theory goes that the receptors involved in psychosis haven’t developed tolerance (for some reason), but the receptors involved in movement modulation have developed so much tolerance that they’ve overshot their baseline and become supersensitive to dopamine. So by taking a drug that lowers dopamine, you get higher dopaminergic effects. In the worst case scenario, you end up with a condition called tardive dyskinesia, which is permanent. The receptors stay supersensitive forever and you will always make repetitive jerking movements. If you stop the antipsychotic, that will just make it (temporarily) worse – now you have supersensitive dopamine receptors and you’re not blocking them, so that means lots of repetitive jerking movements.

In this case, giving someone a drug has caused them to develop not just tolerance but supertolerance, where they are permanently worse than before. It’s as if taking heroin for long enough made you permanently miserable.

…which actually isn’t totally hypothetical. Some percent of people who abuse opiates like heroin get what’s called a post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS), meaning that they feel depressed for months or years after they stop using the opiates. I treated a patient like for a while. I tried pretty much every antidepressant on him without success. He was just miserable. He’d been clean for about six months and I told him that he might just have to wait it out – it usually goes away after a few months to a year or so.

There is a poorly-studied but anecdotally very helpful treatment for PAWS: low-dose naltrexone. Naively, this sounds like the stupidest possible thing to try. It’s an opiate antagonist, meaning that you’re taking somebody who is undersensitive to opiates and blocking the tiny number of functioning opiate receptors they already have. It should be the only thing capable of making this already bad condition worse. Yet people swear by it. The theory is supposed to be the tolerance reaction again. Your body reacts to this opiate-blocking agent by releasing more opiates. So we’re treating a condition in which drugs that increase opiates cause you to have fewer opiates, by giving you a drug that decreases opiates which will cause you to have more opiates. How annoying is that?!

(some people recommend that if you’re giving someone opiate painkillers, you can give them low-dose naltrexone at the same time to prevent development of tolerance. Giving someone an opiate and an opiate-blocker simultaneously seems kind of like the medical equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in again, but apparently it does something useful)

This means we have examples of all three of the following:

1. A drug that’s supposed to have effect X, and after a while it still has effect X (Adderall)
2. A drug that’s supposed to have effect X, but after a while it has no effect (heroin)
3. A drug that’s supposed to have effect X, but after a while it overshoots and has effect anti-X (Antipsychotics? Heroin? Naltrexone?)

You may notice that these are all three of the logical possibilities. So for example, if we gave someone a drug that was supposed to decrease anxiety, it might decrease anxiety, have no effect, or increase anxiety. If scientific hypotheses are about closing off parts of possibility-space, then the receptor sensitivity hypothesis isn’t doing a very good job.

But it’s actually worse than this, because I get the impression that different people will end up in different branches of this trilemma. Benzodiazepines are a special offender here. Some people can take Xanax once a day for anxiety, and it’s a perfect solution – it suppresses their anxiety, it never stops working, and they never become addicted – if twenty years later they get a good therapist who helps them treat their anxiety without drugs, they can stop the Xanax with just a couple of days of mild discomfort. Other people will lose all effect after a couple of weeks, up the dose, up the dose some more, and end up as total wrecks. I think this is much less common than most people say – my attending’s rule of thumb is “benzo tolerance develops for sleep but not anxiety” – but it certainly happens. And for that matter, I’ve met a few people who never seem to develop tolerance for benzodiazepine sleeping pills. You see this same pattern for opiates used as painkillers. I spent so many years confused about whether people develop tolerance to these or not, and my final conclusion is that some people do and some people don’t and if you try to find a coherent universal pattern here you will go insane.

And it’s actually worse than this. Drugs don’t just work differently in different people, sometimes the same person will cycle through totally different mechanisms of drug response. SSRIs have something called tachyphylaxis, where they’ll work really well for months and then suddenly stop working (the word means “fast protection”, ie you develop protection against the drug effects quickly). This is even more annoying than the other patterns – at least with heroin, it makes sense that the receptors will gradually lose their sensitivity. But here? In random people at random times, the drug just stops working suddenly. It might be after a month, it might be after a year, it might be after ten years. And then every so often you’ll try the drug again a decade later, and then it’ll work just fine. Why? Nobody knows.

Some skeptics have pointed out that this is exactly what you would expect if the drug had no real effect and it was just luck that people didn’t have depressive episodes while they were taking them, but we know SSRIs have some effect. And anyway, placebo tachyphylaxis isn’t any less weird than real tachyphylaxis.

One more weird thing: LSD users report very strong tolerance lasting about three days after a dose, to the point where a second dose the day after will do almost nothing. Rat experiments have shown this is definitely because of receptor downregulation and not just enzyme induction. Okay. But LSD is a pretty strong drug. If receptors are so down-regulated that you are essentially on negative one tabs of LSD, how are you remotely normal while the tolerance is in effect? Are people during their periods of LSD tolerance less crazy and creative than normal? What the heck is the 5-HT2A receptor even doing if decreased amounts of it sufficient to render LSD ineffective don’t have noticeable effects on consciousness?

This is my concern about naltrexone as well. Sometimes doctors give naltrexone to help with alcohol addiction, which usually works okay. The theory is that since naltrexone blocks opiates, and opiates power the endogenous reward system, alcohol will seem less rewarding. Fine. But shouldn’t everything seem less rewarding? I always worry that I’m just blocking my alcoholic patients’ ability to enjoy anything at all (of which enjoying alcohol is a subset), but that doesn’t seem to be how it works. This is about when I default to my theory of “receptors read the FDA labels for medications and make sure to only do what they’re supposed to”.

All of this annoys me for a few reasons.

First, psychiatry really doesn’t think about this enough (or sometimes at all). The pharmacology textbooks will tell you how effective a drug is, how long it lasts, how many side effects it has, et cetera, but not whether it’s going to produce tolerance or not. It’s mostly just assumed that it won’t.

Second, groups skeptical of psychiatry are always talking about tolerance and it’s hard to tell whether they’re right or wrong. For example, some people claim antidepressants cause tardive dysphoria – that like the antipsychotics that eventually give permanent repetitive jerking movements, antidepressants can make serotonin receptors permanently undersensitive (or something) and so make depression worse. Other people say that antipsychotics themselves can eventually screw up dopamine receptors in ways that make psychosis worse (though see here). My guess is that these problems don’t arise for most people, but I can’t explain why these things wouldn’t happen.

Third, I think something like this is involved in addiction. Addiction is highly genetic; some people can drink alcohol socially their entire lives and never become alcoholic; other people quickly get hooked. This seems related to the thing where some people are stable forever at their low dose of opiate painkiller, and other people quickly develop tolerance and need to keep increasing it. I’m sure there are other things involved in addiction, but this is probably one of them.

Fourth, how many interesting things are we missing because they’re stupid and make no sense? I don’t know who first discovered that low-dose naltrexone could help potentiate the effect of opiates, but there have got to be other things like that. Forcing your body to become more sensitive to its own chemistry seems like a good alternative to forcing more and more foreign chemicals into it.

Finally, the best drugs seem to be the ones we hesitate to use because they produce too much tolerance. Xanax, opiates, you name it. A version of Xanax that that didn’t produce any tolerance would be a holy grail of anxiety disorder pharmacology. Some way to switch off Xanax tolerance would be just as good.

And a tolerance-free version of heroin would be pretty interesting too – from a purely pharmacological perspective, of course.

"Something was very wrong. Here was this guy from nowhere, and he kept going around the board and hitting the bonus boxes every time. It was bedlam, I can tell you. And we couldn't stop this guy."

~ Michael Brockman, head of the CBS daytime programming department, 1984

On May 19, 1984, before a live studio audience for the game show Press Your Luck, a squirrely-looking, gray-bearded 35-year-old named Michael Larson leapt from behind his podium and squealed with joy.

For the contestant, the show’s catchphrase, “Big bucks, big bucks, no Whammies!”, had just come to fruition: in an era where no single contestant ever won more than $40,000 — not even those competing on the ever-popular The Price In Right, or Wheel of Fortune — Larson had earned $110,237 ($253,000 in 2015 dollars).

And in achieving this, he’d overcome insurmountable odds...or had he?

While CBS executives in the control looked on in horror and disbelief, Larson harbored a secret: he’d cracked the code of Press Your Luck. For months, he’d studied the show’s game board, which lit up squares in a supposedly “random” sequence, and found that, in actuality, it was repeating the same 5 patterns over and over again.

What ensued was one of daytime television’s strangest moments — one that exposed the follies of both man and technology.

Press Your Luck: The Titanic of Game Shows

In September of 1983, a flashy new game show called Press Your Luck hit the daytime broadcast on CBS.

The brainchild of two veteran television producers, it was billed as the most “technologically advanced” program of its kind; utilizing cutting-edge audio-visual equipment, it tempted viewers and contestants with enticingly large payouts.

As far as rules and structure go, Press Your Luck was pretty straightforward. Each episode began with the show’s host, Peter Tomarken, asking the three contestants a series of multiple choice questions. Whoever buzzed first and answered correctly earned three “spins” on the “Big Board,” the prized centerpiece of the game show:

This Big Board was made up of 18 backlit squares, each containing a constant rotation of various cash and item prizes, as well as a selection called a “Whammy.” When a player’s spin began, a selector light rapidly bounced around the squares, lighting them up in a seemingly random sequence; the player would then choose when to slam down a big red button, stopping the board. Whichever square was lit up dictated the player’s fate for that spin. At the end of each spin, the player either had the option to “press his/her luck” (spin again) or pass any remaining spins to the next player.

The board contained a wide array of outcomes: cash amounts ranging from $500-$,5000, vacation packages, material prizes (boats, appliances, etc.), “Pick a Corner” (in which the contestant would select any corner square on the board), various instructions (“Go Back 2,” “Move 1”), and finally, the Whammy. If a player landed on this dreaded tile, an annoying animated gremlin in a red suit would come out and reap the player of every cent he/she had amassed. 

Many of the cash prize squares on the board also contained an extra spin (+S). Hypothetically, this made it possible for a player to continue on indefinitely, assuming he/she consistently landed on the cash+spin squares — though the show had made certain that the odds of this occurring were nearly impossible.

Of the Big Board’s 54 outcomes (18 squares with 3 rotating options each), 9 were a “Whammy.” That meant that, on any given spin, a player had 1 in 6 odds of losing everything. What’s more, the team that had programmed the board was confident that both the speed and “random” nature of its sequences would prevent contestants from winning more than $25,000. Over the first few episodes, the average winnings hovered around $14,000.

In the words of former CBS executive Ron Schwab, Press Your Luck was “like the Titanic — it was the technological marvel of its time.” Unfortunately for CBS, and iceberg loomed, and its name was Michael Larson.

The Game Show Hustler

Michael Larson was never interested in following the rules.

The youngest of four boys, he was born in 1949, somewhere between Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio. By middle school, he’d established a lucrative enterprise smuggling candy bars into his gym class and selling them at a considerable mark-up. While tenacious and intelligent, he was always looking for a quick, easy way to get rich. 

“He didn’t understand the value of good, hard, honest work,” his older brother, James, later bemoaned. “He thought those people were fools.”

Instead, Larson invested great amounts of time seeking out loopholes and taking advantage of them, often illegally. In one instance, he found a bank that gave out $500 for starting a new checking fund; using fake names, he opened dozens of accounts, waited the minimum necessary duration, then withdrew the money. On another occasion, he registered a business under a family member’s name, hired himself as an employee, then fired himself to collect unemployment benefits.

Throughout his 20s and 30s, Larson only intermittently found real work — first as an air conditioner mechanic, and later, an ice cream truck driver — all the while graduating to more intensive ploys. He began to spend every waking minute in front of a television, watching infomercials and game shows, in hopes of identifying some kind of opportunity to get rich quick.

“He had an entire wall of 25-inch televisions stacked one on top of the other,” recalled his then-girlfriend, Teresa Dinwitty. “He watched them all at once, and it got so hot, the paint peeled off the wall.”

After determining that more popular daytime game shows like The Price Is Right and Wheel of Fortune were un-hackable, Larson began to focus on a relative newcomer: Press Your Luck.

Using his VCR, he recorded episodes; for 18 hours a day, he sat perched in front of the screens, analyzing every spin of the Big Board frame-by-frame, looking for patterns. 

Then, incredibly, he found one.

After six months of scrupulous examination, Larson realized that the “random” sequences on Press Your Luck’s Big Board weren’t random at all, but rather five looping patterns that would always jump between the same squares. He wrote down these patterns, memorized them, then honed his timing by watching re-runs and hitting “pause” on his VCR remote when he suspected the board would land on a given square.

Most crucially, Larson determined that two squares on the game board, #4 and #8, always contained a combination of cash and an extra spin. Since he’d memorized the patterns, he knew exactly when the board would land on each square:

Larson analyzed the board and found that each of its 18 squares contained three rotating options (54 total); then, he found that squares 4 and 8 always offered a cash prize with an extra spin (and never contained a dreaded Whammy):

Larson was ecstatic. He’d uncovered a flaw in the game, perfected his technique, and, in his opinion, possessed the ability to amass a fortune. There was just one thing left to do: he had to finagle his way onto the show.

Armed with little more than the address of CBS Television City, Larson spend the last of his ailing funds on a bus ticket from Ohio to Los Angeles, with the intention of auditioning for Press Your Luck.

Bobby Edwards, the show’s contestant supervisor, remembers feeling uneasy when Larson strutted into the audition room:

“We held daily auditions: one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, maybe 50 people in each session. [Larson] walked up right off the street, and told us he was an ice cream man from Ohio...There was something about him that I just didn’t believe. I didn’t trust him.”

Despite Edwards’ doubts, Larson, an ever-enterprising schmoozer, managed to convince Bill Carruthers, the show’s executive producer, that he was a small-town plebeian desperately in need of a chance to win some money. Always in search of a good sob story, the network agreed: Larson was slotted to appear on the fifth taping of the day, May 19, 1984.

Michael Larson Presses His Luck

On the day of filming, Larson arrived early. Dressed in a cheap suit jacket and a shirt he’d bought for 65 cents at a thrift store, he exuded the intense confidence of a man preparing to go into battle. His competitors, Ed Long (a Baptist minister) and Janie Litras (a dental assistant), were completely oblivious to their impending doom.

When the show’s host, Peter Tomarken, asked Larson what he did for a living, his response was self-assured: “I drive an ice cream truck in the summer and I hope to win enough money today not to have to do that.”

Larson got off to a rocky start. On the very first question ("You've probably got President Franklin D. Roosevelt in your pocket or purse right now, because his likeness is on the head side"), he buzzed prematurely and yelled, “$50 bill!” (the correct answer was, of course “a dime”). For the remainder of the question round, he sat silently, with a perplexed look on his face. Eventually, he finished with 3 spins, putting him in last place behind Long’s 4 and Litras’ 10.

Since he’d come in last, the rules dictated that Larson spin first. This did not go well: on his very first spin of the board, he hit a Whammy. However, he quickly recovered: hovering his hands just above the buzzer, he intently watched the light travel around the board, and, recognizing the patterns, hit square #4 ($1,250) on his second and third spins.

Still, at the end of round one, Larson sat in last place, with $2,500:

In round two, Larson came to life.

During the second question round, he managed to correctly answer three questions, bumping his total spins up to 7; since he sat in last place, he again spun first. 

With his first two spins, he landed on square #4, earning him $4,000, and $5,000. Then, over 10 ensuing spins, he proceeded to rack up $29,351 in winnings without hitting a Whammy. The audience roared with excitement, yet Larson seemed unsure of himself. While he was aiming to hit squares #4 and #8, he missed his mark four times during this period of play, unintentionally landing on #7 (a trip to Kauai), #17 ($700 + a spin), #6 ($2,250), and #7 again (this time, a sailboat).

After the sailboat, with 4 spins remaining, he locked into what industry execs have since deemed to be one of the "most absurd grooves" in game show history. Over the course of 31 consecutive spins, he persistently nailed squares #4 and #8; astonishingly, 20 of them were $1,000 or higher:

Priceonomics; compiled from archived footage

During Larson’s rally, Tomarken, the show’s host, grew increasingly nervous. His quips graduated from shock (“We’ve never seen this happen! You’re on a roll!”) to disbelief (“This is unreal”), to utter disgust (“You’ve got to be kidding me”) — and once Larson hit the $30,000 mark, he started pressuring the contestant to bow out.

“Michael, you really are PRESSING YOUR LUCK,” he warned at one point, wagging a finger in the air. “After this show, you’re going to get a special call from the president of CBS…”

Finally, 40 successful spins and $102,851 later, Larson passed his final 3 spins to Ed Long, fearing that he was beginning to lose focus. On his very first spin, Long hit a Whammy and lost all of his cash. When the spins were passed to Litras, she too hit a Whammy on her first try. In the hopes that Larson would screw up and lose his cash, she then passed the spins back to him, but Larson did not falter. Instead, he landed $4,750 and a trip to the Bahamas.

When the game ended, Larson raised his arms in triumph and emitted a primal scream: he had secured $104,950 in cash, a sailboat ($1,015), and two all-inclusive trips, which brought his total winnings to $110,237. Ed Long distantly trailed in second place with $11,516 (which he'd earned in a prior episode as a returning champion), and Janie Litras left with $0.

Larson had made a fool of CBS: He'd spun the show's board 47 times. He’d won more than any other daytime game show contestant in history. And he’d done so by finding an inherent flaw in television’s most “technologically impressive” game board.

***

While Larson celebrated on stage, the powers that be at CBS sat dumbfounded and deflated.

“I wasn’t there that day, but boy did I hear about it,” Bob Boden, a former executive at CBS Daytime Programming, later told TVLand. “It went through the hallways of CBS like a rocket.”

Darlene Lieblich Tipton was in the Press Your Luck control room that day. As a CBS employee, it was her job to ensure that contestants were playing by the rules. In an interview with This American Life, she recalled the mounting tension backstage:

“It wasn’t unusual for contestants to go on streaks. It was kind of the way the game was designed. But after about 10 spins of the board, it started to become obvious that he was hitting same prize in same square every time. And that’s skill — it’s not random, and it’s not luck. He could aim and hit, which we didn’t think was possible. First, the booth got very quiet, then there was an, ‘OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, what do we do?!’ People were turning to me saying, ‘Can we stop this?’”

Statistically, it was extremely unlikely that Larson had simply gotten lucky. Given the 1 in 6 odds of hitting a “Whammy,” the probability of going 45 spins in a row without hitting one was (5/6)^45, or .027%. Larson had beat odds of roughly 3 out of 10,000. 

Despite this, Tipton saw nothing illegal in Larson’s play: he wasn’t visibly breaking any rules, and she could do nothing but helplessly stand by and watch him dominate the show.

The following day, CBS launched a full out investigation. Nearly every department head at the network gathered in a musty room and reviewed the tape frame-by-frame — just as Larson had done on his VCR with Press Your Luck episodes. However, even after this review, they could find no faults in his method. “He fit every criteria,” one executive told GSN. “He had not broken any rules of the game, he had played fairly, and he was an eligible contestant. We paid him his money...he was simply smarter than CBS.”

After Larson’s win, the “Big Board” was re-programmed: its 5 “random” patterns were expanded to 32, and the control panel was replaced by a PC running a far superior randomizer. Larson's streak had gone on so long that CBS had to split the airing into two half-hour segments; the network was so thoroughly embarrassed by the board's flaw that they only aired the episodes once.

In September of 1986, just two years after Larson's Press Your Luck appearance, the show was cancelled.

The Champion’s Downfall

Newly minted with around $90,000 in post-tax earnings, Larson initially indicated that he was ready to turn his life around and be more responsible. “I tried to get him to look at some reasonable investments,” his brother, James, told a reporter. “He put it in the bank...and for some time, was doing the right thing.”

But a few months later, while listening to the radio, Larson heard about a contest he just couldn’t resist: the show read a serial number on air every day, and if a listener could match that number to a $1 bill, he would win $30,000.

Larson visited five different banks, withdrawing nearly $50,000 in $1 bills. Then, over the course of two weeks, he analyzed every bill in hopes of winning. A match never came, and Larson, who’d grown lazy by then, resolved to just leave the bills in his home. This didn’t work out too well: one night, he left to Christmas party and came home to a kicked-in back door. All the money was gone.

This was the beginning of Larson’s downward spiral. Teresa Dinwitty, then Larson’s common-law wife, recalls then that aggression mounted to such a level that she feared for her life. She fled with her children and demanded Larson leave her house.

Eventually, Larson moved to Dayton, Ohio, where he assumed a role as an assistant manager at Walmart, but this didn’t last long. He grew disillusioned with his minimal pay and, after meeting another woman, launched his next venture: a massive Ponzi scheme. Under the name “Pleasure Time Incorporated,” Larson sold shares in a non-existent American-Indian Lottery, and, by the mid-1990s, he’d managed to cheat 20,000 investors out of $3 million. With the SEC, IRS, and FBI hot on his tail, he fled Ohio and disappeared into the void.

When investigators finally tracked Larson to Apopka, Florida in 1999, he’d succumbed to throat cancer.

***

“Winning that game show was the start of [Michael’s] downfall,” Larson’s brother, James, would later say. “It made him think he could trick anybody, and do just about anything he pleased.”

But it was also a feat that brought out the best in a man who was otherwise a delinquent: Recognizing the board’s flaws required keen observation skills. Mastering the timing of the generator took a unique combination of patience, dedication, and can-do mentality. And performing under pressure in front of a live studio audience demanded a special breed of composure.

In many ways, “gaming” Press Your Luck was the most honest endeavor Michael Larson ever undertook.

For our next post, we explore the probability of marrying a co-worker. To get notified when we post it →  join our email list.  An earlier version of this post first appeared September 14, 2015.

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pieterh wrote on 18 Aug 2016 10:08

There are no easy conversations when it comes to dying. Especially when it comes to a disease like cancer, which eats us up from the inside, a betrayal by our own cells. "Fight it," people still tell me. "Don't give up! We need you!" This notion that cancer is a fight… it's one I want to break down, and then rebuild, in this article. I've come to believe that death can be a positive social experience. Let me explain…

Let me start with this: one does not choose to fight, or give in to, a disease like cancer. Perhaps to any disease. In my body right now there is a holy war going on, and has been raging for years. My immune system has been doing its damned best to kill these rogue cells. And the rogue cells, unaware that they're destroying their own host, have been fighting back. It's no small fight. I've lost 15 kilograms in the last few months.

The odds are on the cancer, of course, which is why this family of diseases is a major killer. Our bodies have to keep winning, year after year. Any given cancer has to win only once, and it's Game Over. The only way to beat cancer, really, is to die from something else first.

So this is my first point. Everyone fights cancer, all our lives long. From birth, our immune systems are hunting down and killing rogue cells. I grew up in the African sun, pale skin burned dark. Do I have skin cancer? No, thank you very much, immune system! Much of my adult life I drank a bit too much, ate too much red meat, too few vegetables. Do I have bowel cancer? No, thank you again, you over-active beast of an immune system, you! Hugs.

And most of us can say the same thing, most of the time. We are all cancer survivors, until we're not.

Secondly I want to attack that notion that we can and should "fight", as a conscious effort. Then third, I'll try to explain some of the real fights that we the terminally sick do have.

So take this easy statement: "you must fight, Pieter. Don't let the cancer win!" It wraps up so many difficult emotions in a neat package. It fits into the "disease is mostly in the mind" 1970's era fantasy that still imagines meditation and positive thinking as the cure for rampaging gene mutations. And presumably cholera, malaria, and broken legs as well.

Worse is the implication of blame. When we die, did we not fight hard enough? If it takes me six months to die, am I doing a better job of "fighting my cancer" than someone who dies in six weeks? It goes beyond senseless into the cruel. We don't "lose the fight" against our cancers, any more than a cell phone loses its "fight" against battery exhaustion. The mutations will always win unless something beats them to it. It is a matter of when, not if.

That fist-pumping "you can beat it!" motif has more insidious effects. It drops responsibility like a ripening melon into the lap of the ill. It leaves the pep talker buoyed with their display of positivity and helpfulness. As a conversation with the dying, it is cheap and unintentionally nasty.

My neighbor, nice guy, every time we met over the last months, did the cheerleader thing. Finally I put on proper cancer face (shaved my head) and met him with my oxygen container, on the street outside our house. "I'm dying now, Hussein," I told him. "The treatment stopped working." He finally nodded, accepting it. Now finally we can talk about real things, like what will happen to my kids when I'm dead, and so on.

Clearing the table of the elephant poop of positivism, we see other creatures skulking about too. Worth mentioning:

• Diet positivism, from ketogenic to fresh fruit. Obviously, when you can, you should eat moderately and avoid junk foods, especially sugar. Yet a cancer patient is struggling with much more basic problems. When I have chemotherapy, I literally lose my appetite for days. Even getting a sweet pastry down my gullet can be a major victory. Thank heaven for drugs like Medrol (a glucocorticoid) that give me hunger again. From then, my body decides what it can stomach. Maybe it's buttermilk. Maybe it's chicken jalfrezi and chana masala. But heaven help you if you come to my bedside and propose that I should be eating more fruit.

• Alternative medicines and treatments, including marijuana, gene therapies, and so on. Apart from putting the responsibility for "trying hard enough to get better" onto the patient, it's poor advice. I assume you live, like me, in a city with a functioning medical system. With experienced oncologists who see hundreds, thousands of cases in their career. Who have access to databases of studies and data. With almost unlimited access to the necessary medicines. If you don't have these, then you are fairly doomed in any case. Can a single individual patient second-guess the medical machine? Is that really their duty?

Now I'll come to the real struggles of the dying. This isn't a full list, I've not done much field research. More of a sampler to show the point.

• Finishing the paperwork. By this, I mean cleaning up enough so that the survivors aren't punished. I've been lucky to have had time to do most of this. It's a huge job. I had hundreds of open projects and accounts. Each needs to be handed over to someone I can trust, shut down, or abandoned.

• Fighting off the wolves. You'd be shocked, yet I'm involved in arguments over money, and my humble yet non-zero estate. There are people who treat the dying as easy prey. I don't take it personally, instead I get my lawyers and notaries busy. I am grateful for portable oxygen and Uber, which has kept me mobile for the last weeks.

• Managing the symptoms. Cancer hurts. The right side of my chest aches, up to my shoulder and neck. I take opiates, two 12-hour Oxycodones, and then instant Oxonorm for moments when it's worse. With good timing I can get a night's sleep. If I mistime it I wake at 3am, from the pain. Yet I want to feel some pain, it's vital data.

• Finding food to eat. All my life I've been the one who shopped, cooked, served others. It makes me sad that I can't do this for my kids anymore. Yet it's pushed them to take over. My daughter does the shopping, and helps make food for me. I don't need to explain much, we know each other. I order an Indian takeaway. She prepares a thali-style plate, adds hot sauce, nukes it, brings it with a large glass of buttermilk.

• Staying happy. And, helping those around me to stay happy. It's far easier to be in a bad mood, tired, grumpy. People will excuse that. The chemo changes our personality, right? Well, perhaps, yet this is definitely within my control. I wrote in the Psychopath Code about emotional control. It takes effort, yet it repays itself many times.

• Staying fit and clean. If you've ever been bedridden, you'll know how hard it is to get up, and do things like wash your face. It's especially tough when you're getting chemo drugs that debilitate you. Yet you are only as strong as the work you do. I force myself to sit up, walk around, even to go outside if I can.

What's interesting to me is that in these struggles, other people are key. These aren't solitary conflicts. I've found that they bring my friends and family close to me. We're all involved in this slow process of dying. It may seem horrible, from some points of view. And yet, it is deeply satisfying in other ways. It has become an enriching thing, a collective work.

I'd much rather not die, yet if I'm going to (and it does seem inevitable now), this is how I'd want it to happen. Not fighting the cancer, with hope and positive thinking, rather by fighting the negativity of death, with small positive steps, and together, rather than alone.

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Honestly, you could've just mumbled something about arduino and I would've done it.

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Today's News:

Adolph Spreckels had decided to kill the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle. 

The year was 1884, and the 27-year-old Spreckels wanted revenge over an article the Chronicle had published about his family’s company, the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company. Spreckels’ father was known as the Sugar King because he’d grown rich by monopolizing the sugar trade between Hawaii and the West Coast. The Chronicle regularly denounced the Spreckels monopoly, and a recent article charged that the company was insolvent and that Spreckels and his father had misled and defrauded shareholders. 

“Don’t make a fool of yourself,” a friend counseled as Spreckels followed Mike de Young, the editor-in-chief of the Chronicle. But Spreckels ignored him. He walked into the Chronicle office, called out de Young’s name, and shot him with a large, Navy pistol. 

The first bullet landed in de Young’s shoulder. He fell to the ground, and Spreckels advanced and fired. By then, de Young had raised a package of books he was holding like a shield, which deflected the shot from his chest to his arm. 

At that point, a clerk in the office pulled a pistol from his drawer and shot Adolph Spreckels in the arm, and a Chronicle cashier vaulted over his desk, tackled Spreckels, and restrained him until the police arrived. 

Mike de Young survived the attack, and the resulting trial for attempted murder gripped the city. The Spreckels family, in addition to its sugar monopoly, owned railroads, shipping companies, and real estate. They were a household name; the trial resembled the O.J. Simpson trial.

Today, this history is largely forgotten. Instead, San Francisco remembers Adolph Spreckels for his philanthropy, which created landmarks like the Legion of Honor art museum, and for his status as the nation’s first “sugar daddy.” With the riches earned from the sugar monopoly that the Chronicle criticized, Adolph Spreckels married Alma de Bretteville, a working class girl turned nude model who never hid her ambition to marry a wealthy, older man. According to local lore, Alma called Adolph her “sugar daddy.” 

A common perception of the richest residents of today’s San Francisco is of entitled, lawbreaking men: technology entrepreneurs ignoring regulations or suing each other for equity, major landlords evicting tenants on questionable grounds, and male-dominated workplaces driving out women. 

But if you think entitlement and wealth define San Francisco today, you should hear what the city was like for the heirs of San Francisco Gold Rush fortunes. Because Adolph Spreckels got away with it. Despite shooting an unarmed man from point blank range, a jury declared Spreckels not guilty.

Reporting on the verdict, the Times said of San Franciscans’ reaction in 1884, “Well, money can do anything in this city.'"

The Trial

Spreckels’s attempt to assassinate Mike de Young attracted national attention and condemnation. The New York Times called it a “cowardly assault”, and the L.A. Times called it a “dastardly deed.”  

Explaining away the attempted murder charge would not be easy for Spreckels. Multiple witnesses confirmed that de Young was unarmed and had not even turned to face Spreckels before the first bullet hit his shoulder. When the police arrived, they found Spreckels and his loaded pistol. 

Of course, the wealth of Spreckels’ father did seem to help. After Spreckels’ arrest, San Franciscans were surprised to hear that he’d been released on bail. 

The lawyers for Spreckels argued that Spreckels had acted in self-defense—and that Spreckels had acted during a moment of temporary insanity. As the prosecutor in the case told the jury, the two explanations contradicted each other; it was a defense that lawyers would only make when they had no plausible alternative. 

Both arguments also went poorly. Spreckels’ claim that he reached for his gun only after seeing de Young reach for his pocket rang hollow given that he had stalked de Young to the Chronicle office and fired before de Young turned around. And while several friends and co-workers offered tentative support for Spreckels’ insanity defense by testifying that he had seemed moody and unfocused the week of the shooting, another friend of Adolph Spreckels recalled that they gaily shared a drink just hours before the attack. 

On the day of the verdict, onlookers packed the courtroom. During the five hours the jury—composed of grocers, merchants,  an auctioneer, a foreman, and an undertaker—deliberated, crowds outside the courthouse placed bets on the result, which the New York Times referred to as a “genuine surprise.” 

The judge called for order, yelling that the rowdy crowd was “scandalous,” the foreman of the jury read the words “not guilty,” and Spreckels and his friends left the courthouse whooping and celebrating. 

What went wrong?

According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s (not at all impartial) reporting, the jury was likely manipulated. Just before the verdict, the jurors, who were visible from the street, seemed to be relaxing rather than debating, and two jury members standing near the window dropped a “paper pellet” that was retrieved by a friend of Adolph Spreckels. Soon after, the same friend made a hand gesture to the two jury members, and a court clerk and another man inexplicably locked themselves in with the jury for almost an hour.

No investigative reporters of the era looked into the trial. The country’s newspapers simply reported the result in bafflement. It’s unclear if the Spreckels family used its fortune to corrupt the jury. 

But the story of Adolph Spreckels isn’t exactly a story of the rich trampling the poor without consequences. While Spreckels was heir to one of the country’s largest fortunes, his victim, Mike de Young, was no middle class journalist. De Young owned the Chronicle, the most successful newspaper on the West Coast. This meant he was worth at least several hundred thousand dollars (a fortune at the time), and that politicians regularly sought his advice.

Mike de Young also could not have been that surprised at the verdict. After all, one of the last people to escape justice after shooting a rival at point blank range was his brother, Charles de Young. 

A Wild West

When Adolph Spreckels shot Mike de Young in 1884, San Francisco was not far removed from its days of lawlessness and vigilante justice.

In 1848, before the discovery of gold in California, San Francisco was home to only several hundred people. California was a frontier, with few roads or bridges. So when 200,000 people arrived in California in 1849-1850, it took time for San Francisco to civilize from a rough-and-tumble mining town into a well-ordered city. As late as 1856, San Franciscans reacted to the lack of a strong police force by organizing vigilante committees that hanged suspected criminals. 

The city’s proclivity for violence was made worse by the fact that the whole country still embraced casual shootings: Alexander Hamilton is America’s most famous duel victim, but through the mid to late 1800s, the duel was an American institution and status symbol. As Barbara Holland writes in Smithsonian Magazine, nearly every American politician, including Abraham Lincoln, participated in duels. They were so common that a famous reverend described the United States as “a nation of murderers.” 

This was especially true for journalists, who often wrote for nakedly partisan institutions and received dueling challenges from political opponents. The early history of San Francisco journalism is a bloodbath; one editor reportedly hung a sign at his office that read, “Subscriptions received from 9 to 4; [duel] challenges from 11 to 12 only.”

No one embodied this combative journalist ethos more than Charles de Young, the co-founder of the San Francisco Chronicle. As the New York Times wrote in his obituary when he died at age 35, "He was ever on the alert to avoid his enemies. He never stepped into the street without a loaded revolver in his coat pocket, and he usually walked with his right hand grasping the stock." 

When de Young criticized a politician, business executive, or rival journalist in the Chronicle, the spat often spilled into the streets. In one episode, he exchanged fire with a rival editor, then chased him to a police station on another day with a gun in hand, and later even went for his pistol inside a police station when he saw the man in police custody. The courts dropped all the charges against de Young; the sentiment seemed to be “them Duke boys are at it again!”

Another time, Charles de Young demanded that a San Francisco mayoral candidate drop out of the race. When he refused, de Young published an article about the man’s embarrassing past, and the mayoral candidate threatened to do the same. So de Young showed up at a campaign event in his car and shot the candidate twice, nearly killing him. De Young was out on bail the next day, and seems to have never seen a jail cell for shooting the man who became mayor. 

A year later, the mayor’s son arrived at the Chronicle office and killed Charles de Young.

To the men of the jury who declined to pass judgment on Adolph Spreckels for killing Mike de Young, the shooting probably looked more like the squabbles of the rich and powerful than a murder—more like the Peter Thiel and Nick Denton feud than a crime. 

Why would you anger San Francisco’s most powerful family over something that happened all the time?

The Sugar Daddy

After Adolph Spreckels evaded criminal charges for shooting Mike de Young, their feud transformed from a gun-fuelled conflict between a journalist and a monopolist to a battle for prestige between the social elite and a brash newcomer. 

That brash newcomer was Alma de Bretteville, who scandalized the city when she married Adolph Spreckels. Alma de Bretteville had been born poor, but she was determined to marry up. She told people that she had “a great destiny to fulfill,” and she liked to repeat the proverb, “I'd rather be an old man's darling than a young man's slave.” 

Alma de Bretteville was six feet tall and beautiful, and she achieved local fame after posing nude for artists and taking a gold miner to court for refusing to marry her. (He claimed the two diamond rings he bought her were just pretty gifts.)

When de Bretteville met Spreckels, she was 22 and modelling for a statue, and he was 46 and helping to fund the statue. According to biographer Bernice Scharlach, their first date likely took place on the third floor of The Poodle Dog, a restaurant with a hidden, back elevator and a passageway to a hotel. 

The Goddess of Victory monument modelled after Alma de Bretteville in San Francisco. Photo credit: Carnaval.com Studios

Adolph kept many secrets from Alma, the chief example being his chronic syphilis, a condition that Alma did not learn about until her doctor left her side—while she delivered her third child—in order to treat Adolph’s syphilis-induced seizures. (She was lucky he did not infect her and the children.) 

But the fact that Adolph had shot Mike de Young was common knowledge. According to Scharlach, de Bretteville was family-focused and, viewing the shooting as a defense of family honor, lionized him for it. After a five-year, secret relationship, Adolph Spreckels married de Bretteville. 

This may have made Spreckels the country’s first sugar daddy. Today, tour guides in San Francisco explain to visitors that Alma used the term to describe Adolph, who inherited his father’s sugar business.

The origins of idioms and pop culture terms are rarely clear, and “sugar daddy” is no exception. Alma’s biographer says that Adolph called Alma “pet,” but does not mention Alma calling her husband sugar daddy. Most accounts of the term’s origins also look to early 20th century New York, where the term appeared in a number of play scripts and music lyrics. 

Either way, Adolph certainly played a sugar daddy role for Alma, who could finally achieve her upper crust dreams. She moved with Adolph into the city’s most opulent residence and travelled to Paris to buy art and meet artists and creative types. 

But San Francisco high society snubbed her—excluding her from the country club attended by the city’s wealthiest wives and her children from the city’s best school. 

Alma’s isolation can partly be explained by her refusal to be anything other than herself. She liked to swim naked in her indoor swimming pool, and she had servants deliver entire pitchers of martinis in the afternoon. Her drive for recognition could be gratingly garish—like the disruptive and unending construction project to expand her mansion, or the self-promotion contained in her fundraising efforts for charity—and she enjoyed shocking people. Her nickname was “Big Alma.”

Alma’s snubbing at the hands of San Francisco’s elite also came from another source: her family’s rivalry with the de Youngs. When Alma saw the de Young daughters at social events, she would loudly tell friends, “We haven’t been friends since my husband shot their father.”

Left out of the high circles in which she felt she belonged, Alma decided to buy her way in or create her own. She convinced Adolph to purchase art for the city of San Francisco and donate money for war relief, which helped win her friends—like the Queen of Romania and Parisian artists—who attended her parties. 

In response to the de Young’s founding of the city’s first major museum, Alma decided to one up them. The result was the gorgeous Legion of Honor Museum, built on cliffs on the Pacific coast. 

When Alma learned that another museum had a larger collection of Rodin sculptures than the Legion of Honor, she responded, “I’d hoped to beat out that shitty Musée Rodin in Paris. I guess I just wasn’t in time.” But she was still pleased that her philanthropy had established her as a “blessing to all humanity” and elite patron of the city. 

More importantly, her elegant, European museum put the de Young to shame. As Alma’s biographer paraphrased her motivations as she assembled the Legion of Honor: “She’d show [the de Young’s] snooty daughters what a real museum should look like”

***

Thanks to Alma’s determination to live a big life, her and Adolph’s name can be found around San Francisco. And their rivalry with the de Young family produced the city’s two famed art museums.

Today, this is how these rich, squabbling folks are remembered. Not for their gunfights and monopolies and political schemes, but for the institutions they left behind: the Chronicle, the de Young Museum, Spreckels Lake in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion of Honor.

Rodin's "The Thinker" at the entrance to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Photo by Andreas Praefcke

Like John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and countless other wealthy individuals, they invested their fortune shrewdly: donating money to visible causes so that generations later, the halo of that philanthropy would outshine the misdeeds or complicated realities of their lives. 

If you keep an eye on the philanthropy sector, you can see which wealthy and controversial individuals are following the same playbook as America’s first sugar daddy and would-be assassin. 

It will be interesting to see which of today’s villains turn into tomorrow’s generous benefactors.

Our next article explains why the U.S. government is holding what may be the largest auction ever. To get notified when we post it  →  join our email list.

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Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news.

"For news about Russia, Radio Liberty," he said. "For news about America, Soviet newspapers." He smiled. "Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others."

American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.

Like the old adage about quarterbacks – if you think you have two good ones, you probably have none – this basically means we have no credible news media left. Apart from a few brave islands of resistance, virtually all the major news organizations are now fully in the tank for one side or the other.

The last month or so of Trump-Hillary coverage may have been the worst stretch of pure journo-shilling we've seen since the run-up to the Iraq war. In terms of political media, there’s basically nothing left on the air except Trump-bashing or Hillary-bashing.

Take last week's news cycle:

Red-state media obsessed over a series of emails about the Clinton Foundation obtained by Judicial Watch (a charter member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy") as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit. The emails hinted that Foundation donors might have had special access to Hillary Clinton's State Department.

Meanwhile, the cable-news channels consumed by Democrat-leaning audiences, MSNBC and CNN, spent most of last week hammering Donald Trump's latest outrages, especially the "the Second Amendment people" comments seeming to incite violence against Hillary Clinton or her judicial appointments.

Practically every story on non-conservative cable last week was a Democratic Party news flash: Reagan's daughter blasts Trump's comments! More Republicans defect to support Hillary! GOP, expecting Trump loss, shifts funds to down-ballot races! Khizr Khan challenges McCain to Dump Trump! Trump's worst offense was mocking disabled reporter, poll finds!

It's not that stations were wrong to denounce Trump's comments. He deserves it all. But he's not the only stupid, lying, corrupt politician in the world, which is the impression one could easily get watching certain stations these days.

These all-Trump, all-the-time story lineups are like Fox in reverse. The commercial media has devolved, finally, into two remarkably humorless messaging platforms.

What's crucial to understand is that a great many commercial media outlets now are not so much liberal-leaning as Democratic-Party leaning.

There's a huge difference between advocacy journalism and electoral advocacy. Not just occasionally but all the time now, private news organizations are doing the work that political parties used to have to pay for in the form of ads.

In the same way that Fox used to (and probably still does) save on reporting and research costs by simply regurgitating talking points from the RNC, blue-leaning cable channels are running segments and online reports that are increasingly indistinguishable from Democratic Party messaging.

Hillary Clinton speaks with reporters as she departs after meeting with Senate Democrats during their luncheon gathering at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on July 14th, 2016. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Trump really sent this problem into overdrive. He is considered so dangerous that many journalists are beginning to be concerned that admitting the truth of negative reports of any kind about the Democrats might make them complicit in the election of the American Hitler.

There's some logic in that, but it's flawed logic. When journalists start acting like politicians, we pretty much always end up botching things even more politically and crippling our businesses to boot.

Our job is to grope around promiscuously for stories on all sides, like dogs sniffing fire hydrants. Trying to fill any other role leads to trouble. It's the media version of the Bull Durham rule: "Don't think, it can only hurt the ball club."

Just look at the history of Fox and its satellite organizations.

Yes, the Murdoch empire has succeeded in accruing enormous power across the globe. In the United States, its impact on political affairs has been incalculable. It's led us into war, paralyzed Democratic presidencies, helped launch movements like the Tea Party and effectively spread so much disinformation that huge majorities of Republicans still doubt things like the birthplace of Barack Obama.

But Fox's coverage has been so overwhelmingly one-sided that it has lost forever the ability to convince non-conservatives of anything. Rupert Murdoch has turned into the Slime Who Cried Wolf. Even when Murdoch gets hold of a real story, he usually can't reach more than an inch outside his own dumbed-down audience.

Worse still, when you shill as constantly as his outlets have, even your most enthusiastic audience members very quickly learn to see through you.

This is a problem because if there ever comes a time when you want to convince your own audience of hard truths, you'll suddenly find them not nearly as trusting and loyal as you’d thought. Deep down, they'll have known all along you were full of it.

"Our job is to grope around promiscuously for stories on all sides, like dogs sniffing fire hydrants. Trying to fill any other role leads to trouble."

This happened to many Republican/conservative media figures in the past year.

The world may never have heard a yawn louder than the one evinced by flyover audiences in January, when the National Review gathered 20 prominent conservatives, headlined by Glenn Beck, to demand that Republican voters draw a line in the sand against Trump. It was an unprecedented show of media unity and determination.

Trump casually walked over the red-pundit-Maginot-line and raced straight to the nomination from there.

This was a powerful lesson. Media power comes from trust and respect, and both are eroded quickly if you only ever give people what they want to hear.

The formula for profits in the news business has grown stale. Commercial news shows now are subsisting on audiences of mostly older viewers who tend to enjoy programming that simply bashes whatever party it is they’ve grown to hate over the years, be they Republicans or Democrats. The median age of both Fox and MSNBC viewers is over 60.

But young audiences in particular tend to be incredibly turned off by the media-as-cheerleaders model of reporting. News audiences among the young have in recent years declined rapidly, mirroring a corresponding loss of trust in major-party politics.

"Garbage, lies, propaganda, repetitive and boring," is how a University of Texas researcher described the perceptions of young people vis a vis the news. Corporate news directors, much like the leaders of the Republican and Democratic Parties, seem blissfully unconcerned with the changing attitudes of their future customer base.

They'll be in for a huge shock five or 10 years from now when more people are getting their news from independent web content streamed to them through video games or online shopping platforms than they do from people like Wolf Blitzer.

Certainly that won't change if the "MSM" devolves completely into a McDonald's/Burger King situation where the major media splits into Trump Sucks or Hillary Sucks outlets. Forget about the fact that it's boring. From now on, how will we know if a real scandal hits?

The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption. This setup just doesn't work.

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is seen on a camera monitor as he speaks during a campaign event on July 28th, 2016 in Davenport, Iowa. Joshua Lott/Getty

For one thing, if most of your staff is busy all day working up negative stories about Republicans, that dramatically lowers the likelihood that they'll develop sources with info about Democratic corruption.

Moreover, even if you do make an effort to look at both sides, stories usually must be picked up by outlets across the spectrum to have an impact. That happens less and less in the partisan age.

Last year, the New York Times dipped a toe into the "Clinton Cash" material and did its potentially damaging "Uranium One" story about a series of suspicious donations to the Clinton Foundation. The story was soundly reported and forced the Clinton campaign to admit to "mistakes" in its disclosures.

But the response of other non-conservative outlets was mostly silence and/or damage control. That left it to mostly circulate in the Washington Times and Breitbart and the Daily Caller, rendering it automatically illegitimate with most blue-state audiences.

Some people will say that is because the Uranium One/Clinton Foundation matter simply isn't newsworthy. Maybe not. But if it isn't, are we sure we would know?

Right-wing audiences, almost irrespective of source, already discount most scoops about Republicans. That means even potentially devastating stories, like the troubling sexual misconduct lawsuit against Trump and the infamous Jeffrey Epstein involving a 13-year-old victim and an adult witness, will be dismissed out of hand as just more politicized coverage.

The public hates us reporters in the best of times, when we’re doing our jobs correctly, merely being conniving, prying little busybodies forever getting up into peoples’ business.

But the summer of Trump could easily turn into an Alamo moment for the press. There are reporters who are quietly promising themselves they'll go back to being independent and above the fray in November, after we're past the threat of a Trump presidency.

But just ask the National Review: Once you jump in the politicians’ side of the pool, it's not so easy to get out again. And what will they think of us then? Is there a word for "lower than scum?"

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Um post mais para guardar. Pra mim. Que vou realizar um sonho. De ver ao vivo os jogos olímpicos. Das coisas dos jogos que eu mais gosto: atletismo, ginástica e vôlei feminino. Planejei cuidadosamente o que ia assistir. Escolhi alguns esportes por curiosidade (tipo remo). O resto eu sabia tudo. Comprei na primeira leva. Aquela do sorteio e tal. Não consegui ginástica. O resto planejei assim:

– Atletismo salto com vara para mulheres. Isinbayeva é uma das grandes personalidades esportivas do meu tempo. Tenho um crush violento nela. Mito. De quebra tem a Fabiana Murer, chance de Brasil no pódio. Duplo fuén.

– Vôlei feminino bronze. Essa geração maravilhosa envelheceu. Algumas já se aposentaram. Outras estão se despedindo. Nenhuma novata é uau. Acho que não vai ter ouro. Uma prata ou um bronze. Apostei que vinha bronze. Nem preciso falar o que aconteceu.

– Futebol feminino ouro. Chegou a vez, né? Coroação total de Marta e Cristiane. A seleção dos EUA deve estar meio envelhecida. Faremos uma final histórica. De quebra vejo a Hope Solo e aquela atacante incrível. Sou fã demais da seleção americana. Pelamor. Me sobraram as suecas retranqueiras. Vou passar o jogo todo de olho na técnica.

Enfim. Não faça planos. A gente põe e os deuses dispõem

During a visit to the Colt firearms factory in Connecticut in 1995, English sculptor Cornelia Parker was captivated by the recognizably gun-shaped casts of metal produced early in the manufacturing process. As blank casts they had none of the capacities of working weapons, but “in one further step, a hole drilled, a surface filed, they would technically become firearms.”

Fascinated by this transition, “I asked the foreman if I could possibly have a pair of guns at this early stage in the production, and if he could give them the same finish that they’d get at the end of the process,” she wrote later. “Amazingly, he agreed, and they became Embryo Firearms, conflating the idea of birth and death in the same object.”

Ironically, as she was leaving America, customs officials discovered the casts in her luggage and “an argument ensued that perfectly reflected the questions raised by Parker’s work,” writes Jessica Morgan in Cornelia Parker (2000). “The American Customs department insisted that Embryo Guns were weapons, while the police department, in Parker’s defense, argued that they were harmless metal forms and Parker was released from questioning.”

Tim Curry having a smoke on the set of It.

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Bonus Panel

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Will a change in the way America names its cheeses hurt sales?

If you were to ask a random American what he or she thinks about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), it’s safe to bet they wouldn’t have much to say. The European Union-United States trade deal, first floated in 2013, makes the news on a near-daily basis across the pond. However, whether because the US has been so opaque on the details of ongoing negotiations, or because many of the issues involved feel abstract from daily life, many Americans don’t even know what the TTIP is.

And yet, deep within the bowels of the treaty, there’s one clause that could have a profound effect on everyday American life — by making it illegal for US cheese makers to use common names rooted in regional European culinary traditions like feta, muenster, or parmesan. EU negotiators are serious enough about this that it’s had the US dairy world in a tizzy for two years, underscoring how attached our cheese culture is, both emotionally and financially, to its (often only name-deep) European heritage.

One clause [could make] it illegal for US cheese makers to use common names rooted in regional European culinary traditions like feta, muenster, or parmesan.

This provision is just the latest in a long crusade by traditional European cheese makers against the willy-nilly usage of their region’s dairy terms by foreigners. In the early 20th century, some European states blocked the importation of foreign products using their names, hoping to protect the integrity of their culinary heritage. Predictably, France was among the first to implement a cohesive system of cultural protections for their cheeses, limiting the use of the name Roquefort in 1925. But other nations like Greece, historically less litigiously finicky about their food, jumped on the boat as well. Starting in the 1930s, you couldn’t sell brined goat or sheep’s cheese under the name “feta” in Greece unless it was verifiably made in specific regions of that nation using exact ratios of sheep’s milk to goat’s milk.

In 1992, the EU picked up these precedents and codified a “Protected Designation of Origin” system to judge which names, tied to traditional regions and modes of production, ought to be protected throughout the Union. It was a move geared towards protecting the flavor integrity and economic viability of traditional products. To wit, after the EU embraced Greece’s claim that feta was a distinct regional product in 2005, other European feta makers weren’t just barred from selling their products in Greece. They also could no longer call their cheeses feta in total — to the chagrin of British, Danish, and German producers who’d long dominated the EU market with cow’s milk feta and to the benefit of poor cheese makers in the rural Greek mountains.

Since then, the EU has slapped these protections onto about 180 cheeses, including Asiagos, Bries, Camemberts, Gorgonzolas, Goudas, Gruyeres, Manchegos, and Provolones. EU officials have been so pleased with the benefits of these cultural protections, building the exclusivity and thus brand strength and profitability of cheeses on the continent, that they’ve sought to extend them across the world via trade treaties, including one finalized between the EU and Canada in the summer of 2014, which is currently just awaiting implementation.

In early 2014, American cheese makers realized Europe’s push to extend the frontiers of their cultural protection regime included the TTIP and freaked out. According to Massimo Vittori, managing director of the Geneva-based pro-cultural protection group oriGIn, at least 70 cheese names that most Americans consider generic conflict with European restrictions. American cheese makers, from industry powerhouses like Kraft-Heinz to Midwestern craft producers, say they’ve spent decades and gobs of cash developing brands built on these generic names — just think about every tube of grated white stuff in the refrigerated aisle of your grocery store you associate with parmesan or every deli slice you associate with muenster.

At least 70 cheese names that most Americans consider generic conflict with European restrictions.

Some claim American producers and marketers actually built the international reputation of and demand for European-heritage cheeses that EU producers now want to leverage through cultural protections. They fear that, if they’re forced to start calling their products brined cow’s milk cheese instead of feta or parmesan-style hard cheese instead of parmesan, they’ll lose global market recognition—they’ll seem cut-rate. No one I spoke to in the US cheese industry could put a figure on it, but they all suspect this would take a fair chunk out of the multi-billion dollar industry, jeopardizing the well-being of many dairy farmers and manufacturers at home for the benefit of small pockets of farmers and producers abroad.

Naturally, a bipartisan group of 55 senators attempted to protest the provision — because cheese is perhaps the one thing that can unite this nation, even today. And the US has officially pushed back, arguing that EU producers can just file trademark applications for protection in the US. Just like under the EU’s system, this would prevent people other than the trademark holders or licensed users from labeling their cheese with specific names in America. However we don’t issue trademarks for names we consider too generic, like parmesan, which Americans have long used as a general term for a hard white cheese.

Shawna Morris, who handles trade policy for the National Milk Producers Federation and US Dairy Export Council, points out that a number of European cheeses included on the list for protection, like Roquefort or Parmigiano-Reggiano already have trademarks. But for Europeans that’s not enough; the trademark for Parmigiano-Reggiano doesn’t extend to parmesan, which to them is a synonym, not a generic genus term.

“If the [European negotiators] spent as much time and effort helping [producers] simply register their names through the existing system as they have in trying to impose new restrictions in the US market,” Morris said, “their goal of greater protection for EU terms would have already been achieved. It’s a shame, really, because [they] continue to adamantly refuse to acknowledge that it is actually US producers who face genuine trade barriers in this context. It’s US companies that cannot sell asiago or feta to the EU and increasingly to a number of other global markets, directly as a result of inappropriately broad EU… policies.”

Despite staunch pushback and accusations that the EU’s bid goes beyond protecting its farmers and moves into an overreaching protectionist assault on American dairy, the EU has stood strong; 201 of Europe’s over 1,300 cultural food protections show up in papers from TTIP negotiations this spring, 78 of which are cheeses. Just last month, an event hosted by the EU included a session on the importance of global recognition of these protections for the security of regional agriculture within the bloc, which used cheese as a key example.

It’s a stubborn position born of a firm conviction that generic American cheeses, no matter how long they’ve used the terms or how many dollars they’ve sunk into branding, are clearly just piggybacking on the haute reputation of their classier European kin. That’s not always the case — as Morris points out, some American cheeses have won international awards going head to head with EU-made counterparts — like BelGioioso Parmesan, which took first in class in global competitions in 1986, 2010, and 2012. But Europeans do have a point that many American parmesans taste nothing like their continental equivalents, because they use ingredients Italians would consider unholy—like cellulose powder and potassium sorbate—and then market themselves using Italian imagery or oblique references to the quality and story of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

The same could be said of American fetas, which may be part of our heritage through southern European immigration, but which cannot truly mimic traditional tastes due to federal regulations on US cheese production and the usage of non-traditional materials like cow’s milk instead of sheep’s and goat’s milk in many offerings. Even if we popularized the terms and sometimes do credit to their heritage, that doesn’t mean we don’t also often irresponsibly capitalize on and detrimentally bastardize that heritage.

Many on the European side have tried to convince the US industry that the TTIP is an opportunity to build strong local brands, which could be more profitable in the end. OriGIn’s Vittori points out that a similar deal in Australia killed its dependence on “generic” wine names rooted in European heritage, like Chablis or Champagne, which folks in the know realize are tied to specific regions in France, but which many firms in Australia at the time (and in America now) used to up their class factor and sales. In the aftermath, Australian vintners created wildly successful narratives of local wine region-brands like Barossa Valley or Margaret River. Vittori thinks there are at least 500 products that the US could create culturally distinct and protected titles for, including many cheeses, giving a massive boost to local producers offsetting any damage the recognition of European protections might do.

“From the marketing perspective,” he told me, “more and more consumers are looking for authenticity…leveraging specific characteristics of place.” Already, producers of US cheeses like Grayson, Hooligan, and Humboldt Fog have drawn on their location or unique processes and ingredients to establish popular and profitable American brands.

Vittori hasn’t, he admitted, found much traction with this narrative. “We have a good dialogue,” he said, “but as far as I understand, the [US] position remains quite skeptical.” That’s mainly because local cheese makers can easily point to the pain their European counterparts say forced name changes caused them, or the trouble Kraft-Heinz faced when, in 2008, it was finally forced to rename its parmesan “pamesello” in the EU, as proof that these restrictions are just painful trade barriers designed as political tools to hurt viable and large-scale American producers.

“local cheese makers can easily point to the pain their European counterparts say forced name changes caused them”

US producers seem to be so convinced that this potential forced name change is a fundamental injustice, violating the values of free trade and fair usage, that no one I talked to was aware of any efforts to come up with contingency plans for rebranding or repositioning. Instead, explained Doug DiMento of the Northeast’s Cabot Creamery Cooperative, “we’re simply trying to fight.” The industry has formed an entire lobbying group, the Consortium for Common Food Names (whose media outreach Morris runs), to push back on European cultural protections in the TTIP.

Chances are the entire TTIP deal is not going to freeze over a debate on the rightful usage of the term parmesan. So, given how entrenched the US position is, it’s likely we’ll see some kind of compromise. Vittori has floated the idea of allowing the US to use names we consider generic under certain conditions, such as not associating our parmesan with Italian cultural symbols; maybe we could make hyphenated American-X cheeses, making it clear there are differences between traditional European cheeses and their fine American cousins. The details of those compromises would have to be hashed out by producers on both sides of the Atlantic, though.

In truth, it’d probably be good for US producers to move away from explicit callbacks to our European heritage, as a matter of pride in our local products, a move in the direction of US food trends that privilege a clear and local provenance, and a means of allowing consumers to better understand what they’re buying — something the US historically sucks at.

It’d probably be good for US producers to move away from explicit callbacks to our European heritage.

Renaming our cheeses, say, Oregon cow feta or something totally novel doesn’t seem so bad. But the fact that a multinational trade conflict has spun out of cheese name usage rights says something about the perceived value of an established brand — and the abject fear the prospect of a forced change can inspire. This obscure trade deal about which so few of us give a shit has the potential to make us more food-conscious consumers and benefit local brands and producers. It also has the potential to put a dent in the US dairy industry. Either way, it’s a conversation we’re going to have.

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