1. What happens when you give a faithful, practicing Mormon $10,000 and tell him to gamble it on the 2025 NFL season? McKay Coppins reports back with the answer after the Atlantic offered him the assignment. And folks, it’s not good. After securing permission from his church leaders to engage in this act of journalism, Coppins spent last fall putting the magazine’s money on the line while learning all about parlays, props, and ways to make a profit in sports betting. Titling the long read “Sucker,” you can guess how it goes for him:
It was almost midnight — the Christmas tree was glowing nearby, my father-in-law was dozing on the couch, and I had just lost $500. I noticed that I was grinding my teeth. […]
On tilt — this was one of the terms I hadn’t known before my foray into betting. It describes the emotional distress that causes a gambler to make unwise decisions. Over several frenzied days in December, I disregarded every rule Silver had taught me — throwing money at random prop bets and constructing multi-leg parlays like I was a mad scientist mixing volatile compounds in a lab.
Point spreads and moneylines ran constantly through my head, mingling with the omnipresent Christmas carols to create a strange backbeat to the holiday season. Every festive family outing became an opportunity for me to gamble. While my wife and kids ice-skated, I sat in the minivan, our toddler napping in his car seat, as I put together a six-game parlay (lost $80). While my daughter practiced for a Christmas choir performance, I stayed outside the church, chewing my fingernails as I watched a Chiefs-Chargers game on my phone (lost $400). […]
I had put a lot of money on the Seahawks to cover a two-touchdown spread. But while our guests filtered out in a blur of hugs and Merry Christmas es, I watched miserably as Seattle eked out a measly two-point win with a field goal in the dwindling moments, losing me $450.
When the house was empty, I collapsed onto the couch and started doing the math in my head. The flames were low in the fireplace; Bing Crosby was playing over the speakers. I had lost more than $2,500 in 13 days.
Ostensibly, leisure activities that are big enough to merit their own twelve-step program deserve all sorts of caution. The long read is well worth your time, a fraught tale that shows how easily a hobby can spiral into far more than you bargained for. It doesn’t take much to push even the most teetotaling of sinners into pathological addiction — especially when your bookie lives in your pocket. Coppins’ newfound gambling obsession impacted his marriage and kids and his own psyche. The phrase on tilt is one I’ll be putting in my back pocket for future pastoral care.
2. A whole host of new books and retrospectives have been about how ’90s and ’00s pop culture went off the rails when it came to sexualizing women. Sophie Gilbert has written extensively on the subject over the years and recently revisited the reality TV show America’s Next Top Model. A new retrospective on the Tyra Banks–helmed show, called Reality Check, dropped on Netflix, and it has to be said, ANTM itself does not hold up at all on this side of the #MeToo movement and the release of the Epstein files.
The very first episode of ANTM subjected the contestants to on-camera Brazilian bikini waxes and then sent them up to a Manhattan roof terrace to pose in swimwear in frigid weather. Right away, the show made clear that it wanted them to suffer: to squabble over who was the smallest — “She has a little more insulation than me,” one contestant, Elyse (114 pounds), griped of one of her peers after shivering up on the roof — and to wail while their pubic hair was ripped out. It wanted viewers to see beauty as something that could be earned. It was a product not of luck, but of labor.
“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” my mother told me as a child, a phrase you would have to torture me to make me repeat to my own daughter. “Sometimes you have to go through pain, you know, to be beautiful,” Joanie, a former Top Model contestant, explains in Reality Check. The point Banks makes, over and over, is that the 2000s were a different time — the implication is that no one then knew that criticizing people’s weight on national television might be bad, or that subjecting young women to sadistic photo shoots and arbitrary commands might damage them psychologically.
Which is bunk: Plenty of people were criticizing Top Model while it was on the air. But this things were different then line of defense does ward off a more crucial critique of the show — one that Reality Check doesn’t identify. Top Model and shows like it were intoxicating because they compelled each woman who watched to imagine herself as a virtual contestant, and to internalize the idea that beauty wasn’t a pleasurable pursuit but a necessary grind for self-optimization and profit. The world we live in now, with its casual parlance of Botox and blephs, glass skin and looks-maxxing, was built on the foundation that Top Model helped set — the idea that if you simply work hard enough on your physical form, blessings will surely follow. That if you do enough to yourself, whether with procedures or products, you can become a product yourself, no matter what you were born with.
3. The other side of the coin, of course, was the concurrent heyday of Evangelicalism’s purity subculture, which thrived in response to that ’90s and ’00s exploitation. Katelyn Beaty, writing in her Substack this week, isn’t interested in defending purity culture, but in retrospect, she recognizes that the impulse to guard against the kind of exploitation that ANTM represents was actually right. The problem was correctly diagnosed even if the solution wasn’t great.
Lots of folks will say purity culture was never about protecting teen girls, that it was always about controlling them and sexualizing them in its own, bizarre and damaging way. Absolutely, purity culture offered a shallow solution to the sexualization of teens, basically telling girls to “cover up more.” We all know that my wearing short shorts or long shorts or low-rise jeans or full-body jean jumpers wasn’t going to change the fact that many men out there (and in the church!) are predators, and that a lot of other men and women treat that as normal or excusable or just the way men are. That is the awful reality we’re daily confronting, whether in the news cycle or in our own lives. The purity culture movement failed to hold predatory men accountable, instead placing the onus on individual girls and women to “manage” their sexuality.
And also, some of these Christian parents and church leaders, however shortsighted their solution was, were right about this: Mass media and its images and stories profoundly warp our sense of self, especially when we are introduced to them at a young age. As Gilbert writes, “The things we watch, listen to, read, wear, write, and share dictate in large part how we internalize and project what we’re worth …”
It almost sounds like something Focus on the Family would have said 25 years ago.
I look back on my parents’ strong opinions about my clothing choices as a teenager and understand why I hated it at the time. I wanted the freedom to look cool and trendy, to follow what was on offer for teen girls at the time. I just didn’t realize that so much of what was defined as “cool” for teen girls was designed to be sexy to appeal to adult men. Maybe they were being controlling Christian parents. Or maybe they knew something about the world that I didn’t.
The exploitative world of ANTM might be boiled down to “thou shalt suffer to satisfy the male gaze.” And it’s disheartening that the church of the day responded to this law with the same, telling women to suffer to avoid the male gaze, whatever the costs it might have long term. (It may be worth mentioning that, at least in my evangelical youth group, the young men were made all too aware of the male gaze and commanded to cut it out, to limited success.) Given that social technologies have turned up the visual element of life to the maximum, an alternative law and gospel approach to the topic seems as urgent now as it was twenty-five years ago.
4. C. Thi Nguyen uses the language of games to explain to Derek Thompson on his Plain English podcast how metrics make us miserable. The whole hour-long interview is great, with Nguyen sharing a number of anti-metric anecdotes worth your consideration. A sample:
Thompson: I wonder whether you accept this framing that there are games that we elect to play and there are games that we find ourselves playing by accident. There’s a line about being a lawyer that it’s like a pie eating contest where the reward for the winner is more pie. You work, and work, and then you become partner. And guess what? We’re here to reward you … with 10X more work. I wonder how you frame this distinction between the games that we set out to play and the games where we fall into.
Nguyen: There’s a sense in which there’s a really easy thing to say here, which is that games are great when you choose them and games are terrible when they’re forced on you, or snuck up on you. But I’m not quite sure that’s right. And the reason I’m not quite sure it’s right is because a lot of dangerous gamifications to me look like cases that are voluntary where someone picks up something fully … People who get on social media often are fully aware that it’s a game-like system that will change their motivations, and they do it anyway.
The game language here is helpful: If you feel overburdened by a life defined by metrics (likes, clicks, bank account balances, publications, etc.), it’s probably because you’re playing a game that isn’t fun, lacks purpose, or offers a junk prize in return. Moreover, there are plenty of games where the prize isn’t worth the effort, especially if the award of success is an even higher metric goal. There’s a reason why so many top YouTubers, influencers, and internet writers tap out after achieving success. It’s not only lawyers discovering that the prize is just more pie to stomach.
5. Speaking of games, big news from the Beaverton this week: “Scientists pinpoint exact age when doing your best no longer good enough:”
After decades of analyzing report card data, Little League statistics, university drop out rates, and recordings of just fucking terrible violin etudes provided by the Royal Conservatory of Music, an international team of social scientists have finally pinpointed the age when doing your best is no longer good enough at 13.8 years.
“It varies, though. In academics, you can get up to 16.1 years on studying really really hard before your grades start to count for university. Whereas in music and sports, the average is much lower. Team sports are 8.3 years, and for music, it’s 10.5,” explained lead researcher Ingrid Miller, who studies child development at the University of Calgary.
“Some countries are also outliers. China and South Korea have the lowest ages, 0.2 and 0.1 years, respectively. Iceland had the highest, at 24.4. We’re operating on the theory that that’s due to a strong social safety net plus no Icelander having done anything notable anyway since Leif Eriksen in the 11th century.”
Also good for a laugh: “What’s Going On Here? This Man Wrote Happy Birthday On His Wife’s Facebook Wall” from Clickhole; “I Brought Your Child an Oversized Lollipop Because I Hate You” from McSweeney’s; and “Report: America’s Primary Source of Education Fun Facts on the Sides of U-Haul Trucks” from Hard Times. And for people who like SNL, this week’s episode with Ryan Gosling broke its rule about breaking, and yours truly is here for it.
6. It’s always fun to hear from Ryan Burge, whose helpful graphs and stats on American religion cut through plenty of bad narratives floating around the webs. (Sorry folks: there is no statistically significant migration of evangelicals to Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, or Episcopal/Anglicanism.) His recent reflection, “Do People Think About Meaning and Purpose All the Time?” is excellent, linking higher contemplation with weekly church attendance.
Come to find out, lots of people seem to be ruminating on meaning and purpose on a regular basis. Nearly half the sample (47%) said that this was a thought they had at least once a week. (As an aside, I think the response options should be expanded to include an option for “every day,” but that’s neither here nor there.) But the distribution of responses to this question certainly tilted in the direction of higher frequency — two-thirds of respondents said that they thought about meaning and purpose at least on a monthly basis.
That means that very few people are at the bottom end of the distribution. Only 3% said that they never thought about the meaning and purpose of life, and another 12% said it was a seldom occurrence. In other words, almost all American adults are thinking about these “big picture” philosophical questions on a pretty regular basis. […]
The more often folks attend church, the more likely they are to be thinking about meaning and purpose on a weekly basis. You can often see a clean break in the data when looking at weekly or weekly+ attendance. Looking at evangelicals makes that really plain. For those who attend monthly, 51% are thinking about meaning and purpose with high frequency. Among weekly attenders, it’s 63%, and then it rises to 74% among those who attend multiple times per week.
For mainline Protestants, the divide is between weekly (57%) and more than once per week (73%). You can also see a jump among Black Protestants who are attending more than once a week, as well. For Catholics, there’s a clear connection between Mass attendance and thinking about meaning and purpose — it rises nine percentage points when going from monthly to weekly attendance, and then it goes up a whopping 18 percentage points for those who go to Mass multiple times per week.
Do people who meditate frequently on purpose and meaning end up going to church, or do people who go to church end up reflecting on purpose and meaning more frequently? Correlation, causation, etc. Either way, there’s something to be said about a Sunday morning space dedicated to contemplating bigger questions, especially given Burge’s reporting about how much less frequently atheists, agnostics, and the unchurched ask these questions themselves.
7. Between 2000 and 2007, a collection of 3,500 pages of personal correspondence from C. S. Lewis were collated and published. These were a balm to David Downing, water in the wilderness after he had read the entirety of Lewis’ published catalogue. In a newly published volume, titled Letters on Living the Faith, Downing sorts that collection into a selection of the most poignant letters for modern readers. He explains:
Lewis’s letters are especially rich because he considered it a part of his ministry as a Christian author to answer questions submitted by his readers, often complete strangers who had read one of Lewis’s books or listened to his radio talks. Sometimes the questions were a bit frivolous. One woman wrote to ask Lewis, “Are you handsome?” to which he replied, “Not that I know of.” At other times the questions were querulous. “Why did God make most people stupid?” asked another correspondent. Lewis replied tactfully that he would need to see more evidence of that, adding that many people’s stupidity was often caused by their defective education or their own willfulness, not by God.
Other questions were much more weighty. People wanted to know how to pray, if they could trust the Bible, or why a good God would allow so much evil and suffering in the world. Lewis answered such questions patiently, lucidly, and faithfully, often engaging in enough follow-up correspondence to fill a slender volume of its own.
Lewis acted as a mentor by mail, corresponding with his readers from the early stages of their spiritual quest to their eventual conversion and their ongoing journey as Christ-followers.
Christianity Today published a few of the book’s letters this week to promote the book’s release. We’ll give Lewis the last word this week as he reflects upon his own morality. The Oxford don would die roughly five months after sending this letter:
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE, JUNE 17, 1963
Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair-shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.Remember, tho’ we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round — we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you “Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?”
Of course this may not be the end. Then make it a good rehearsal.
Yours (and like you a tired traveler, near the journey’s end)
Strays:
- For those of you with the #MbirdNYC26 itch: here’s speaker James Kimmel on The Pulse podcast talking about revenge and forgiveness.
- Meghan O’Gieblyn reviews David Greig’s new novel The Book of I, a reflection on faith and not-faith told in the Middle Ages as Vikings raided the Isle of Iona. Sounds like a blast!
- “Why we need the idea of Sin to explain the Epstein story” via Seen and Unseen.
- “Atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him.” More from Christopher Beha and his book Why I Am Not an Atheist.
