Veteran gamblers know you can’t beat the horses. There are too many variables and too many possible outcomes. Front-runners break a leg. Jockeys fall. Champion thoroughbreds decide, for no apparent reason, that they’re simply not in the mood. The American sportswriter Roger Kahn once called the sport “animated roulette.” Play for long enough, and failure isn’t just likely but inevitable—so the wisdom goes. “If you bet on horses, you will lose,” says Warwick Bartlett, who runs Global Betting & Gaming Consultants and has spent years studying the industry.
What if that wasn’t true? What if there was one person who masterminded a system that guaranteed a profit? One person who’d made almost a billion dollars, and who’d never told his story—until now?
In 2009, Cormac McCarthy sold his Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter at Christie’s for $254,500. With it, he wrote close to five million words over the course of five decades, including his highly regarded novels The Road and the Border Trilogy, which brought him commercial success. Rather than graduate to a computer after the sale, McCarthy replaced his Olivetti with the exact same model—though one in a newer condition. He valued it because it was lightweight, reliable, and portable. For these same reasons, this classic Olivetti model was popular with traveling journalists in the ‘60s.
The dirty secret of puns is that people like them when they’re terrible as much as they do when they’re great. They just don’t like them anywhere in between. When puns are truly great, though, it’s undeniably impressive. There’s a kind of math undergirding most jokes, but puns are especially equational. Making one out of unlikely elements floating around in the air is like solving a verbal speed-puzzle. The best ones make you wonder how on Earth a person came up with something so perfect so quickly.
Today’s great question is whether those achievements can be repeated. The backlash against capitalism is mounting—if more often in the form of populist anger than of proletarian solidarity. So far liberal reformers are proving sadly inferior to their predecessors in terms of both their grasp of the crisis and their ability to generate solutions. They should use the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth to reacquaint themselves with the great man—not only to understand the serious faults that he brilliantly identified in the system, but to remind themselves of the disaster that awaits if they fail to confront them.
Sixty-nine years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote a phrase that has gradually become one of her most quoted and often interpreted: “the right to have rights.” The phrase summed up her skepticism of the concept of human rights—those rights that, in theory, belong to every person by virtue of existence. But how are these rights guaranteed? For that, Arendt suggested, one had to be not only a person but also a citizen. In other words, while the rights in the light-blue book might indeed “belong” to me, I can claim them because I also have the dark-blue passport.
There are many worlds to explore within this deceptively short book, which gallops towards its conclusion with a mythic inevitability. You won’t be able to turn back.