Society

John Semley on the Gamblification of America

John Semley on the Gamblification of America John Semley on the Gamblification of America

On this episode of The Nation Podcast, John Semley on the dangers of accessible sports betting.

May 26, 2025 / Podcast / D.D. Guttenplan and John Semley

NEW HAMPSHIRE Matt Hongoltz-Hetling New Hampshire clings to Mount Monadnock, the mountain in its southwestern corner that juts defiantly skyward, a lone rocky resister to the forces of erosion that wore everything else away. Rugged, individualistic, idealistic, the “Live Free or Die” state was a cradle of the American Revolution and has long been the grave of administrative ambition, featuring neither seat-belt laws for adults nor a general sales tax. It has a vibrant secessionist movement and the highest rate of machine-gun ownership in the nation. Individualism reigns—or so we are told—even as large swaths of the southern part of the state have been turned into charmless concrete strip malls. In Somersworth, a small cemetery is bombarded all day and night by the distorted voices emanating from a loudspeaker at a KFC/Taco Bell franchise, which casts a ghastly purple pall over the graves. Sure, there are nods, of a sort, to the past. Along the Seacoast, there have historically been few lobstermen (accounting for less than a third of a 10th of a percent of the economy) and roughly zero pirates, but tourists are bombarded with lobster-­festooned paraphernalia and fake pirates carrying fake parrots and shouting “Ahoy, matey!” over and over. “Nostalgia without history is a decorative fraud,” wrote the poet Donald Hall, who died in 2018 at the age of 89 in his Wilmot farmhouse. Until recently, New Hampshire burned with visions of a strange and wonderful future. The dreams were varied, often collective, and frequently whimsical, as when Keene held a 2013 pumpkin festival that set a world record for the most lit jack-o’-lanterns (30,581). Or when the millionaire businessman Roger Babson, the author of the essay “Gravity—Our Enemy Number One,” gave Keene State College a stone monument to encourage resistance to this immutable law of nature. (Babson’s Gravity Research Foundation, founded in New Hampshire in 1949, persists to this day.) But sometime around 2010 or so, New Hampshire saw a large influx of libertarians who purported to adhere to a pure Thoreauvian individualism but who behaved more like a gang of whiny crypto-geeks. Mischief abounded; misinformation flourished. Already ranked dead last in per capita support for higher education, the state cut spending in half. In the ensuing belt-tightening melee, the University of New Hampshire, the state’s premiere public education institution, accepted a $500,000 grant offered on the condition that its football team would have to run tackling drills with no helmets on. The Granite State (which, incidentally, is actually made up mostly of schist and gneiss) is now a national leader in distrust of government, distrust of media, distrust of church, and distrust of neighbors. The glue that bonded communities together has been washed away in an acrid tide of individual rights and crappy commercialization. The year after Keene set the jack-o’-lantern record, attendees at the annual festival began smashing pumpkins, then windows. They flipped cars, set fires on the street, and attacked cops. “USA!” they chanted. “USA!” Full of dreams of wilderness, and wildness, and violence, New Hampshire has already put one foot firmly back in the cave. Award-winning journalist Matt Hongoltz-Hetling’s third book, The Ghost Lab, is about a group of oddball paranormal enthusiasts in New Hampshire. New Jersey Nell Painter These disunited United States? Here in my securely blue state of , surrounded by states—or parts of states, in the case of Pennsylvania—also securely blue, my first thought is: “No disunity here!” My second thought is that New Jersey is so diverse, with the largest proportion of foreign-born residents except for California, that such a varied populace surely means disunion. But, no, demographic diversity does not disunite New Jerseyans. What does it is geography. A little over a decade ago, Rutgers graduate Joe Steinfeld labeled a map of my state, with plain-speaking cruelty, from north to south as follows: “Well-to-Do Conservatives”; “The Melting Pot” (where I live); “Poor Minorities”; “Russians, Polacks, and Toxic Fumes”; “Jews”; “Lawyers Driving Hybrids”; “Old People and Asians”; “Italian Guys in Wife Beaters”; “Pretty Much Alabama”; “Sad Black People and Misguided Tourists”; “Swamps and Toxic Waste”; “Canadians and Philly Trash.” What holds all this together, what unites the varied people of New Jersey, is this: roads. Asking a fellow New Jerseyan “What exit?” is a test, and the answer proves one’s Garden State bona fides. Public transportation also brings us together, especially in North Jersey. (South Jersey, sadly, isn’t so well-served.) I’m thinking of NJ Transit’s network of trains, light rail, and buses. Years ago, when I was commuting from Newark to New Brunswick for art school, I made a collage in homage to Newark Penn Station, from which you can take trains and buses pretty much everywhere. But public transportation has also exacerbated tensions between New Jersey and its metropolitan neighbor. The congestion pricing program that went into effect in New York City earlier this year charges automobiles $9 to enter Midtown Manhattan. The money raised will go toward improving public transportation in New York City, not in New Jersey. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a staunch Democrat, has begged President Trump to halt the program, which Trump has made clear he intends to do. The debate has deepened the divide between those who use public transportation and those who drive cars. That divide, of course, is bigger than just New Jersey: It’s fundamental to the health of the global environment. Nell Painter’s most recent book, I Just Keep Talking, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2024. NORTH CAROLINA John Jeremiah Sullivan People say North Carolina is one of the swingiest of swing states. Having lived here for 21 years, I see the truth in it. Republican Legislature, Democratic governor—that’s both the persistent reality and a serviceable metaphor. You often find yourself chockablock with your enemies. For us lefties, that means the most atavistic Dixie stereotypes, newly pumped on Trump juice, featuring both the wealthy-racist-snob and hostile-worm-farmer varietals. For those on the right, millions of whom are no doubt poring over this text with open minds, there are the liberals of the Research Triangle, plus small but entrenched bohemian communities everywhere you look (especially in the mountains). Socially speaking, there’s no avoiding each other. When we North Carolinians are at our best, we occasionally get along and establish weird pockets of middle ground. But we haven’t been at our best in a loooong time. And now everything’s darkening so fast. A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a younger friend, J.P., who lives in the county adjacent to mine, in a town that has always been a literal and figurative backwater but is now reportedly one of the fastest-growing places in America. Every time I drive out there, new housing developments and the attendant outdoor malls have reconfigured the landscape to the extent that I get physically lost. We were talking about his neighbors, a middle-aged couple, hard-core Trumpers, flags in the yard. (In town, only a handful of outliers—bona fide aspiring brownshirts—advertise it like that, and they tend to be given a wide berth even by other Republicans. But these folks were country, out and proud.) And the thing was, J.P. said, shaking his head, they were really nice. “Like, shirts off their backs,” he said. They’d been his neighbors for a couple of years, and you know how it is: Things happen, whether you want to get to know somebody or not. Your dog gets loose, and they help to catch it. You get sick, and they stop by with food. Before you’ve had a chance to strap on your armor, your humanity has intermingled with theirs, and now you can’t unknow it. Neither of us felt sure about what these nice neighbors are, as political animals. Are they still fellow sons and daughters of the republic? Or something else, something new? In the past, Americans have often sought to find out how far they could push their preferred value system while remaining democratic Americans. But these people follow a man who has made it clear that he will simply go as far as he can. Historians remind us that this kind of right-wing radicalism has always been with us, but now it sets the tone. And so the prevailing mood down here, among people I know, seems to be one of anxious questioning: How far will they go? Will they ever come back? And if they won’t come back, what’s left, and what the hell do we do? John Jeremiah Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina. His essay “Corona” appears in this year’s edition of The Best American Essays.

 NORTH DAKOTA Taylor Brorby North Dakota has often been a testing ground for the country’s worst practices and ideas, from the radioactive river water caused by oil and chemical spills to the creation of a reservation system for controlling Native peoples. This should make it ground zero for writers—if only we could produce them. At cocktail parties, I’ll often ask well-read guests to name a North Dakota writer—just one, any one. An awkward silence will sweep the room as ice rattles against glass, or someone swirls their red wine before taking a swig. North Dakota? Who even thinks about North Dakota? And it’s true: For most of my life, even close out-of-state friends can’t remember where I’m from, saying “South Dakota”—or, worse, lumping the region into some vanilla-flavored mass and, hedging their bets, saying that I’m from the Dakotas. There should be no shortage of writing prompts in a state where Sitting Bull was forced to surrender his rifle, where we blow up the Badlands to drill for more oil. We even have a lake that doesn’t freeze in the winter—and anyone who has experienced a North Dakota winter (or seen Fargo) should immediately understand how alarming that is—because its water is used to cool the coal-fired turbine engines of a power plant. Like our topsoil, writers from North Dakota eventually get blown into other states: Louise Erdrich to Minnesota; Chuck Klosterman to Portland, Oregon; Louis L’Amour to Los Angeles. As with the extractive industries that define the state, exporting our writers is an act of self-sabotage: It allows other people to shape our stories, to sculpt the cultural narrative of North Dakota. North Dakota is also sandwiched between two much more literary states. Minnesota produced a Nobel Prize winner, Sinclair Lewis, as well as the author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, while Montana gave us A River Runs Through It and The Power of the Dog. North Dakota gave us Mr. Bubble and the wood chipper in Fargo. From our arsenal of nuclear warheads in the north to the clear-cutting along the Red River Valley in the east, whether we are strip-mining for coal in the south or fracking for oil in the west, North Dakota is defined—and hemmed in—by various forms of violence. It is nearly impossible to escape the crushing reality of the state: that it appears to be hell-bent on self-destruction. Maybe—maybe—if North Dakota finally found a way to invest in its artists, perhaps then it could finally shift the narrative it tells of itself about the glory of plundering the prairie. It’s the only narrative available, given the absence of writers willing to tell a different one, but it’s time for North Dakota to share in the pressing task of revising the myths we’ve been telling ourselves about our great country.n
 Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land; Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience; and Crude: Poems. He teaches at the University of Alabama.
 OKLAHOMA J.C. Hallman Oklahoma embodies American disunion as well as any state. It’s a geographically peculiar place, not traditionally associated with any of the country’s regions—certainly not the Northeast or Pacific Northwest, and ill-fitted to the West, the Midwest, and the South as well. It’s also a small state, at 4 million people, with two significant metropolises, Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The former is a Southern city, the latter a Western city—a drive of less than two hours separates them. The far southeast of the state is known as Little Dixie and butts up against the Ozark Mountains; the opposite end, a distinctive strip of land that no one particularly wanted, is about as close to the Wild West as you’re going to find in the 21st century. They call it the Panhandle, but that’s in Florida; Oklahoma looks more like a butcher knife. You know Oklahoma from the pop-culture signposts—Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—and based on literary metrics, the state was transformed from bountiful frontier to ecological apocalypse in the span of a decade. American disunion may begin there. But it’s older than that. A decade before the wind ripped down the plains, Oklahoma was torn asunder by one of the worst race massacres the country has ever known—wrongly called a “riot” for many years, and to be honest, not even “massacre” gets it right: It was a small, lopsided war, featuring the first use of aircraft to launch offensive attacks in the United States. Before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Black Wall Street in the city’s Greenwood District was a shining emblem of hope. Was it an expression of union? Perhaps not, but it offered evidence that the toxic history of slavery might one day be transcended. I live in Tulsa; I live in Greenwood; I live in a building once owned by the newspaper that printed the story that triggered the violence. To be honest, even fixing the start of American disunion at the Tulsa Race Massacre overlooks the equally horrific massacres and equally fundamental fissures that formed when the Alabama Creeks were force-marched along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Perhaps a better question than “What now divides the United States?” is whether it was ever united in the first place. It’s chic to say that America is split down the middle on basic facts. Oklahoma may have that covered, too. Donald Trump began referring to Oklahoma-born Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed some Cherokee ancestry, as “Pocahontas” in 2016. One year later, Kevin Stitt, in announcing his candidacy for governor of Oklahoma—an office he still holds—made his first public assertion that he was a card-carrying member of the Cherokee Nation. Graham Lee Brewer, an assiduous Cherokee journalist, fact-checked the claim: Stitt’s line traced back to a figure whose Indigenous status had been vigorously challenged by the Cherokee Nation a century ago. Stitt is a “pretendian.” Which suggests a final answer we may be loath to confront: Rather than losing our country after 250 years, perhaps we have only been pretending to have one. J.C. Hallman is the author of seven books, most recently Say Anarcha. He lives in Tulsa. SOUTH CAROLINA Albert Scardino The low-lying coast of South Carolina—all 187 miles of it, the home to 1.4 million people—may be a sandcastle on the beach facing an incoming tide. Satellite imagery shows that the ocean is rising faster and the ground is sinking more rapidly there than almost anywhere else between Canada and Mexico, a combined change of roughly one inch a year that may be accelerating. Nancy Mace, the member of Congress who represents the region, is determined to keep balls out of the women’s stalls on Capitol Hill, as she put it during her campaign against transgender people earlier this year. Mace’s district had been competitive before 2020; then the Legislature packed much of Charleston into an adjacent Democratic district, giving her a 14-point partisan advantage. Representative Buddy Carter, from neighboring coastal Georgia, is pushing a bill to rename Greenland “Red, White and Blueland.” Carter’s district is sinking, too. His state’s Legislature, also dominated by Republicans, did him a similar favor. The Atlantic coastal crescent here is a movable line. At different moments in recent geological times, it has existed 30 miles farther out or 30 miles farther inland, always a string of sand beaches and dunes never more than 30 feet above the sea. When ocean levels dropped during ice ages, the offshore sandbars grew into barrier islands. When seas rose, the old barrier islands farther inland became new ones again. The Gulf Stream flows north much farther out along the shallow continental shelf here than it does off Florida or North Carolina, creating a reverse eddy in the shallow pool up against the coast. This eddy carries sand south from one island beach to the next for almost 300 miles, from Cape Hatteras to St. Augustine. There isn’t any rock on the surface to hold the sand, only a layer of porous limestone buried under 30 feet of old ocean sediment and another 30 feet of clay. That layer of porous limestone carries another stream of water, drained from the foothills of the Appalachians. By the time this freshwater arrives 60 feet beneath the coastline, the flow behind it is pushing it through clay and sand to form artesian ponds and freshwater swamps. These swamps, broad salt marshes, strong tides, and deep estuaries created a pristine wilderness. With abandoned rice and sea-island cotton plantations, the sparsely settled South Carolina–Georgia coast is about the same size on a map as the Grand Canyon, but its deepest points are rarely more than 30 feet below the water in the sounds along the coast, the highest 30 feet on the top of sand dunes above the beaches. Then came the paper industry. Then the bridges. Then the golf courses. Now the tourists—more than 40 million of them each year. So much water is being pumped from the limestone that the pressure that used to support the sand above it has dropped. The ground is sinking. In 1893, a hurricane drove up along the coast from Florida. The front edge of the storm pushed against the southward-­flowing coastal currents, creating a 16-foot swell ahead of it. More than 2,000 people drowned. The seas inundated much of Hilton Head, the largest of South Carolina’s islands. The population of Hilton Head in 1950 was just 300; today, it is 40,000. But in August—the month of the 1893 storm—there may be more than 125,000 visitors who have come for the hard-packed beaches and 26 championship golf courses. The island is accessible by one road over the Intracoastal Waterway. Albert Scardino comments in various media on public issues in the United States and Europe. He lives in Bluffton, South Carolina.
 SOUTH DAKOTA Rebecca Clarren As a teenager, my great-grandmother Ruth Sinykin rode bareback across the South Dakota prairie. Each day, a new adventure: hail the size of baseballs, prairie fires, rattlesnakes. Once, a surprise blizzard, and she was lost for hours, surviving by drafting off the cows’ heat. These anecdotes traffic in pluck and grit, like every story I heard about my homesteading ancestors when I was growing up. Veracity was less important than the overarching theme that we had survived, even thrived, on the stark, dust-blown plains. Here is what I know as fact: In the late 19th century, my family was living in Russia, where as Jews they weren’t allowed to own land. Ruth’s father had been beaten and nearly killed in a pogrom. Fleeing for their lives, they came to South Dakota, where the United States was awarding 160-acre plots for free under the Homestead Act; ultimately, the government would grant nearly 100,000 such parcels to settlers in South Dakota. To keep the land, they had to “prove up,” which meant building a house and plowing the sod. By the 1950s, Ruth and her family owned 5,500 acres. Land ownership, Ruth told her daughters, made her feel free, like a real American. My family, like many other South Dakotans, mortgaged their acreage to start businesses, to chase opportunity, to better their children’s odds. What I didn’t know growing up was that our homestead was available only because America broke a treaty that had reserved huge swaths of western South Dakota for the Lakota. By the time my family planted their first crop in 1908, the Lakota had been relegated to an estimated 2 percent of the land they were promised less than 60 years earlier; during that period, the United States had encouraged soldiers and settlers to slaughter millions of buffalo, the animal on which traditional Lakota life depended. While my ancestors proved up, the United States, in an effort to further eradicate Indigenous people’s connection to the land, took Lakota children away from their communities, converted them to Christianity, attempted to erase their culture. While my family was speaking Yiddish and praying with the Torah, America made it illegal for Native Americans to speak their languages, practice their rituals, and pass their religion down to new generations. This land dispossession and attempted cultural genocide have left a deep legacy: Four of the poorest counties in America contain Lakota reservations. Those of us who descend from homesteaders—an estimated 25 percent of American adults—benefit from the intergenerational wealth that we accrued through mortgaging, leasing, and selling our free land. One legal scholar calls the Homestead Act “a huge form of affirmative action for white people.” The foundation of America was never equality, never freedom for all. But by acknowledging our government’s theft of Native land, we free ourselves of pernicious myths and acknowledge the responsibility to repair past harms. Despite America’s best efforts, the Lakota Nation survives. When I drive over the land where Ruth once rode horses, I tune in to the local radio station and hear the Lakota language. And the buffalo, partly as a result of the efforts of Lakota people, are recovering. When I look out the window, I see the animals’ dark, hulking bodies bent to the prairie. Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than 25 years. TEXAS Gus Bova Twenty-two years ago, in the thick of the W. Bush years, Molly Ivins warned in these pages: “The whole damn country is about to be turned into Texas (a singularly horrible fate).” At the same time, Ivins defended her home state: its enigmatic vastness and dizzying diversity, its strangeness and beauty. “It is the place least likely to become a replica of everyplace else,” she wrote. Eighty years earlier, another Nation contributor took a crack at defining Texas. George Clifton Edwards, a Socialist attorney from Dallas, heaped scorn on the state’s anti-intellectualism, its violent disposition, and the hotbed of KKK activity that was his hometown. Then, like Ivins, Edwards defended his native state. But he inverted the case. “There are few better places to go,” he wrote, because Texas is America writ small. “After all, is it not really just the big Southwestern specimen of American capitalism?” I was not born in Texas (such disclaimers remain important here). I’ve lived here for one decade, in liberal Austin, so I don’t pretend to represent all 30 million Texans. But what I see here is something like a malign synthesis of the Ivins and Edwards arguments. Texas remains a “National Laboratory for Bad Government,” as Ivins put it, spreading reactionary policies to other states. In 2021, for instance, Texas invented bounty-style anti-abortion laws that weaponize civil litigation against pregnant people. The next year, our governor shifted the whole nation’s politics rightward by busing asylum seekers at random to Democratic cities. Yet simultaneously, national right-wing politics are draining Texas of some of its stubborn uniqueness. Earlier this year, our state Legislature finally passed a private-school voucher law, after 30 years of rural Republicans’ refusing to back such a spendthrift program that wouldn’t benefit their districts. Texas did not lead the school vouchers charge but followed on the heels of other red states. A majority non-white state expected to become a majority Latino state, Texas also used to resist extreme anti-immigrant politics. In 2001, we were the first state to pass a law ensuring that undocumented college students were eligible to pay in-state tuition rates. We avoided for years measures like Arizona’s 2010 “Show Me Your Papers” law. And Governor Rick Perry famously found his presidential ambitions stymied partly because he was not anti-immigrant enough. But Trump’s influence began to break this dam in 2017 with the passage of a “sanctuary cities” ban, followed by an unprecedented militarization of the border and the passage of Constitution-testing anti-immigrant legislation in 2023. Time will tell how many more legislative sessions the in-state tuition law can survive. With a recent rightward shift in the Latino electorate, the project of turning Texas blue has no clear timeline for success, so the GOP will likely have many years left to demolish any remaining decency on our lawbooks. It is true that America is in a period of sharp disunion, but what I see emerging is an unholy sort of unity: As America becomes Texas, Texas becomes America, to the detriment of each. Gus Bova is the editor in chief of the Texas Observer. 


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