The House Always Wins
The gaming industry is turning every smartphone into a casino — and it’s destroying more lives than ever.
Blog
The Crypto State
The Trump White House has helped install the ticking time bomb that is cryptocurrency directly into our economy. When it blows up, the damage will be catastrophic.
We Have Always Lived in the Casino
John Maynard Keynes warned that when real investment becomes the by-product of speculation, the result is often disaster. But it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
The Rise and Fall of the Bob Ross NFT King
How one artist rode the NFT wave to fame — and then crashed with it.
Director Alex Gibney on Dark Money
The documentarian speaks to Jacobin about The Dark Money Game, his new HBO series on the corrosive effects of Citizens United.
Issue 58: Dossier
We have all the vocabulary you need to score big on your Robinhood app.
Blue Devils
More than half of the top 15 crypto-PAC-backed candidates during the 2024 campaign season were Democrats.
Wannabe Gordon Gekkos
Are you missing the point by idolizing them?
Minecraft Scorsese
A Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg satire of mainstream film’s IP problem — in which everything is an adaptation of something else — fails to excuse or address their own extensive IP crimes.
In Carbon We Trust
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a global currency backed by carbon removal turns speculation into salvation.
Five Books on Speculation
As history and literature are quick to remind us, many a get-rich-quick scheme has ended in sorrow.