On Gambling

"The World for Wager" in Current Affairs (and Internazionale)

Hello friends,

I hope that your 2025 is off to an okay start, all things considered. For the November-December 2024 Issue of Current Affairs, I wrote a piece called “The World for Wager” on the normalization of gambling and how it is tied to masculinity. The piece is now online under the title “How Gambling Took over America”: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-world-for-wager. Many thanks to Nathan Robinson for his thoughtful edits, as well as to Nick Sirotich for his incredible art!

In a fun twist, the piece has also been picked up by a couple outlets. The longform aggregator site The Syllabus named it a Curators' Pick for Best in Journalism. And this past week, the Italian magazine Internazionale translated the article and reprinted it as the cover story of their 18/24 aprile 2025, Numero 1610 issue. You can read the Italian translation (“La febbre delle scommesse”, or “betting fever”) here: https://www.internazionale.it/magazine/benjamin-charles-germain-lee/2025/04/17/la-febbre-delle-scommesse. Here’s the cover of the issue, which is very fun:

I have a couple essays in the works with other outlets, and I’ll share them once they go online. In the meantime, I hope you’re able to enjoy the spring weather, as I will be doing in Seattle.

— BCGL