12 5.1.
The experience
is less
communal, more
customized.Illustration by R. O. Blechmanmore resemblance to CNBC’s coverage
of the stock market than to the typical
sports show, whose belligerent repartee is
familiar to anyone who has ever watched
a game with friends. The FanDuel experi-
ence is less communal, more customized.
I’ve enjoyed watching my roommate earn
the spoils of his wagers, but they more
often refl ect the failures of my own.
In the fi lm ‘‘Uncut Gems,’’ set in the
gray-market days of 2012, the gam-
bling-addicted jeweler Howard Ratner
charters his mistress a helicopter from
New York City to the Mohegan Sun casi-
no in Connecticut, carrying a duff el bag
of $155,000 to place a three-way parlay
on Game 7 of the Celtics-Sixers playoff
series. More recently, I had to lift exactly
one fi nger, my thumb, in order to lose
$10 on a fi ve-way parlay. Sports gambling
once evoked casinos and currency count-
ers and smoky back rooms with college
football playing on cathode-ray TVs. Now
the experience is brought to us direct-
ly, casually and conveniently, as with so
many other things we once had to seek
out or wait for: phone calls, pornography,
political arguments.
When I was young, my father would
sometimes ask if I thought the Baltimore
Ravens would win their next game. I
never wanted to answer: The very act of
predicting seemed to me to have karmic
consequences, as if I might rankle the
football gods. Like organized religion
or dieting, this kind of passive but sus-
tained commitment to the franchise of
your choice can feel ennobling, and we
expect to reap its rewards accordingly —
to win a championship, or gain entry to
heaven, or look somewhat like a catalog
model before summer. This, to me, was
the point of the whole covenant, of faith
and fandom itself.
But it turns out that with a few clicks
and a bit of cash, we can render that
whole bargain meaningless. Why stake
your mental health on your team’s win-
ning or losing when we can contrive for
ourselves a cluster of smaller games within
the larger one? Games in which we con-
trol the terms of engagement, adjusting
our loyalties from night to night? Never
in human history have there been more
ways to win, FanDuel tells us — so many, in
fact, that you might forget the cardinal one
altogether. And what a strange relief that
is, when you’re stuck with the Knicks.
e older we get, the more life and death tangle. In this poem, the speaker occupies the
liminal space of transition, where the child and the parents begin to switch roles. is
poem to les among birth, life and death seamlessly — it starts with objects remaining
after a recent death, and eventually turns to the speaker running errands with his aging
parents. is fi nal unannounced shift is what gives this poem gravity — changes are
always happening, and time’s movement is constant, but our awareness of these changes
arrives at the most mundane moments: buying cupcakes at a bakery, or picking up cold
medicine at the pharmacy.Of Errands
By Rick BarotOn a table in the living room
there is a gray ceramic bowl that catches
the light each afternoon, contains it.
This is the room we turned into
the room of her dying, the hospital bed
in the center, the medical equipment
against the walls like personnel.
In Maine, once, I rented a house hundreds
of years old. One room had been
the birthing room, I was told, and I sat
in that room writing towards the bright
new world I am always trying
to write into. And while I could stop
there, with those two recognitions
of endings and beginnings, I’m thinking
of yesterday’s afternoon of errands.
My father and mother were in the backseat,
my sister in the passenger seat,
and I driving. It was like decades ago
but everyone in the wrong places,
as though time was simply about
diff erent arrangements of proximity.
Sometimes someone is in front of you.
Or they are beside. At other times
they are behind you, or just elsewhere,
inconsolably, as though time was
about how well or badly you attended
to the bodies around you. First, we went
to the bakery. Then the hardware.
The pharmacy, the grocery. Then the bank.Screenland
Poem Selected by Victoria ChangVictoria Chang has written fi ve books of poems, most recently ‘‘Obit’’ (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), which
was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her book of nonfi ction, ‘‘Dear Memory: Letters on Writing,
Silence and Grief,’’ was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in Antioch
University’s M.F.A. program. Rick Barot is an American poet whose latest book is ‘‘ e Galleons’’ (Milkweed
Editions, 2020). He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency M.F.A. program.