Good morning. Today, a writer for this newsletter explains how he became a grudging participant in the world of online gambling.
You can bet on it
An app on your phone lets you gamble on the timing of U.S. military strikes, on the existence of aliens and on the return of Jesus Christ. (Will he make his second coming before midnight on Jan. 1, 2027? Online speculators think there’s a 4 percent chance.) Gambling is old — even older than Jesus. Scholars believe that thousands of years ago, the Egyptians bet on senet, a religious board game representing the soul’s path to the afterlife. A couple of millennia later, the Romans bet on life-or-death gladiator fights and chariot races. When Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon, he described his move like a steely-eyed crapshooter: Alea iacta est, “The die is cast.” But the bets now consuming the world, transacted instantaneously via online prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, are different from those weightier wagers of the past. These sites empower hobbyist prognosticators to bet on virtually anything. No bet is too trivial. The world is a gamblers’ playground, and we’re all part of the game. I recently became a grudging participant. I didn’t even get the chance to try my luck or lose any money. I simply existed, and thus became a vehicle for someone else’s speculation. Becoming a betIt began when I posted on X earlier this month. I wanted to share an article I’d written, about the official behind a stream of Labor Department social media posts that parroted messages used by white nationalists. I’m not a huge social media guy, so I let myself get a little excited when my post picked up steam. 50,000 views. Now 100,000. Is this thing going viral? Then, I saw this image in the comments section:
Was this guy … betting on my tweet? Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised. As you read this sentence, real people are betting on whether President Trump will utter the words “six seven” this week. Others are gambling on whether the price of a Bitcoin will rise in the next five minutes. All of which is to say: Why wouldn’t someone also bet on my post? Sure. Fine. But why did he? That’s a harder question. So I asked him. His real name is Franklin Caldwell II, and he’s an aerospace engineer. During Covid, he started down a yearslong rabbit hole of NFTs and cryptocurrencies. He became a multimillionaire in a hurry — then, in a single transaction, lost $3 million in the form of cartoon crypto tokens. His latest obsession is Tweem, the platform that let him gamble on my post. “If I’m going to spend time viewing a tweet, I want to leave with something,” said Caldwell, 35, who added that he had “a passion for predictions.” Since creating his account around seven months ago, Caldwell has placed more than 25,000 bets — over 100 bets per day, on average. What gives?Online gambling now feels unstoppable, and it’s crossing over into places that once seemed unthinkable. Polymarket this year became “the exclusive prediction market partner” of the Golden Globes, which flashed “probabilities” (read: betting odds) on the screen before revealing award winners. A side effect: Gambling is getting more abstracted, and more gamified. When betting feels effortless — when it doesn’t feel like betting — it’s easier to get addicted. Since 2018, internet searches seeking help for gambling addiction have increased more than 20 percent. The stakes of a given wager now feel “more like a concept than a reality,” Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers, told me. “From the time you’re 5 years old, you’re being primed to gamble,” Nower said. “It’s part of our culture now.” Caldwell didn’t bet real money — for now, Tweem deals only in digital “points” — but he hopes that once the platform hits it big, it will shower him with crypto coins for having been an early adopter. In essence, he’s taking another gamble. As for my post? Caldwell bet that it would reach nearly 378,000 views. It ran out of juice at 274,000. Better luck next time.
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The head of the baseball players’ union resigned last week after an internal investigation found that he had an “inappropriate relationship” with his sister-in-law, who was also an employee. At first, it wasn’t clear whether the affair was with his wife’s sister or his brother’s wife, and social media — as well as our little newsletter team — broke into an intense debate over which was worse. To help parse this moral minefield, we consulted Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor who for more than a decade has written the Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine. If you sleep with your sibling’s spouse, Anthony pointed out, you’ve not only set off a bomb in your marriage, but also in what he called “your natal family, the people you’re connected to by blood.” Other siblings, parents, nieces and nephews could be collateral damage. You’ve betrayed the two people you’re supposed to be most loyal to. “It’s not just adultery,” he noted, “it’s violating the family relationship you’ve had since birth.” If you cheat with your spouse’s sibling, it might be easier on your family. But you’re doing all that extra harm to her and her family. As Anthony put it, “You’re denying her the person it would be most natural for her to go to to seek solace.” And if it’s worse for your betrayed spouse, he said, it’s worse overall. “In thinking about morality, we often make a sharp distinction between harming yourself and harming other people,” he continued. “Since you shouldn’t be doing it at all, what you should be focused on is the harm you’re doing to the other person.” Sign up to get The Ethicist newsletter delivered to your inbox.
As the war in Ukraine reaches its fourth anniversary, it has reoriented values and social relations that will define future generations of Ukrainians, M. Gessen writes. These Winter Olympics have shown us the difference between patriotism and nationalism, David Litt writes. Here is a column by Nicholas Kristof on what survivors of sex trafficking think about Jeffrey Epstein and his friends. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
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Aerial skiing: The Americans Connor Curran, Kaila Kuhn and Christopher Lillis won gold in the mixed team aerials. Cross-country skiing: With his victory in the 50-kilometer race, Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo of Norway won his sixth gold medal in these Games. Men’s curling: The Canadian squad beat Britain in a tense, strategic match to win the gold.
“A Hymn to Life,” by Gisèle Pelicot; translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver: In 2024, Pelicot sat in a courtroom in Avignon, France, while her husband and dozens of strangers were tried and convicted of raping her while she was drugged into oblivion over a period of nine years. (The lorazepam cocktail came courtesy of the man she loved for five decades, who slipped it into her food and drink.) In her memoir, which our critic described as a “rousing feminist manifesto,” Pelicot charts her progression from unwitting victim to global icon. “I don’t know where I am anymore,” she told the police when she learned of her husband’s crimes. It’s clear from her account that she has her bearings now. |
