Real validation wouldn’t come until around 2:30 that morning, after the first day of the tournament had come to an end and Davies had made the 15-minute drive from the Rio to his home, outside Las Vegas. There, in an office just in from the garage, he opened a computer program called PioSOLVER, one of a handful of artificial-intelligence-based tools that have, over the last several years, radically remade the way poker is played, especially at the highest levels of the game. Davies input all the details of the hand and then set the program to run. In moments, the solver generated an optimal strategy. Mostly, the program said, Davies had gotten it right. His bet on the turn, when the deuce of diamonds was dealt, should have been 80 percent of the pot instead of 50 percent, but the 1.7 million chip bluff on the river was the right play.
“That feels really good,” Davies said. “Even more than winning a huge pot. The real satisfying part is when you nail one like that.” Davies went to sleep that night knowing for certain that he played the hand within a few degrees of perfection.
Red fish are in demand as the new year looms; they’re the color of luck. Local TV anchors report ahi prices as breaking news. Restaurants and hotels typically get first pick, so Uncle Glenn orders his onaga a month ahead through a friend who owns a sushi bar. (An unexpected blessing of the 2020 pandemic lockdown was that home cooks suddenly had access to the islands’ best fish, with boats offering drive-through specials at the pier.) This is how it goes in Hawaii, little favors and shares, a jar of guava jam left at the front door, a sack of mangoes hanging on the knob.
In the hall of mirrors that is literary culture, Andrew Lipstein has now published “Last Resort,” a novel about a bad art friend. No one is accusing Lipstein of plagiarizing Kolker’s article — his novel was finished long before the Times piece appeared — but “Last Resort” offers an uncanny dramatization of the issues Kolker explored. Clearly, we live in an age sweaty with anxiety about authenticity.
Cowardly, avaricious, annoying, territorial, deceitful, opportunistic: There aren’t enough shady adjectives in the dictionary to describe the narrator of Andrew Lipstein’s “Last Resort.” What fun! One great thing about the well-drawn weasels of fiction is that you can always locate a bit of yourself in them.
“Every time the question of language surfaces,” the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “in one way or another a series of other problems are coming to the fore,” like “the enlargement of the governing class,” the “relationships between the governing groups and the national–popular mass” and the fight over “cultural hegemony.” Vindicating Gramsci, Rosemary Salomone’s “The Rise of English” explores the language wars being fought all over the world, revealing the political, economic and cultural stakes behind these wars, and showing that so far English is winning. It is a panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening book, with an arresting fact on nearly every page.
I’m writing this so I can tell you that what you’re thinking
about me is exactly what I’m thinking
about you.