Johnny Cash's newly released album, 'Out Among the Stars', recorded in 1984. (© 2014 Legacy Recordings.) OK, it ain't the Holy Grail, but if you are fan of Johnny Cash, this is really exciting: Out Among the Stars releases today.
An album of unheard songs by Johnny Cash that's big news! Paint program in cleveland ohio. (Full disclosure: I am a massive Johnny Cash fan. I have a picture of Johnny Cash on my wall at home and a Johnny Cash action figure in my work cubicle.) And this is an actual album, not your typical 'cobbled together from assorted studio outtakes, remixes, and rarities' release. This one was originally meant to be the follow-up to Cash's 1981 album The Baron, which sold poorly in the post-Urban Cowboy era.
At that point in his career, Johnny's record company had no idea how to market his music. Hard as it is to imagine, The Man in Black was on the verge of being dropped by his label. The '80s weren't very kind to many legendary artists. After a substance relapse and fresh from out of treatment, Johnny Cash recorded these songs in 1984 with famed country-politan producer Billy Sherrill; the songs were ultimately shelved and forgotten by Cash's record company. Eventually, Johnny's son, John Carter Cash, found the tapes, which had been missing and weren't quite complete, so he called in a few A-list musicians like Marty Stuart who was part of the original sessions and Buddy Miller to finish it up. From beyond the grave, Johnny Cash gets the last laugh. He is in strong voice on a strong batch of songs; ain't no grave gonna hold his body down!
Out Among the Stars almost fits right in with the American series that relaunched his career a decade later. The lead and title track, 'Out Among the Stars,' struck me from the get-go with Cash's 'voice of god' shining through on a track that features a full choir. The album then features 'Baby Ride Easy,' which might be the best Johnny-and-June duet since 'Jackson.' You'll be singing along, even on first listen!
All the duets on Out Among the Stars are priceless; a still-healthy Waylon Jennings wandered into the studio and joins Cash on the Hank Snow classic, 'I'm Movin' On' this one is pure gold! Cash sounds like had had a blast recording some of these tunes. 'If I Told You Who It Was' tells the story where Cash changes the flat tire of a female country star. When you learn who it is, you'll bust out in laughter.
(It's not who you'd think!) Later, Johnny sounds like he was having a devilish good time on the track, 'I Drove Her Out of My Mind'. Cash also contributes a couple of very personal songs he wrote, 'Call Your Mother' and 'I Came to Believe,' where he explains the religion that is so important to him. The hymn-like quality of the latter one will get you to church on time. Johnny Cash's Out Among the Stars might not make any converts, but for Cash fans like myself, this is a must-hear album! Related Stories. Fresh out of rehab and a rocky point in his marriage to June Carter, Cash recorded an album in the early 1980s that his fans never got to hear.
The Current's Bill DeVille recently visited Nashville, Tenn., to attend the Americana Music Conference very fitting for the host of United States of Americana! Read about and see photos of Bill's experiences in 'Music City.'
. Children of famous parents sometimes have a hard time adjusting to life in their parents' shadow.
Not so for Rosanne Cash, the daughter of the late Johnny Cash. Throughout her thirty-year career, Cash has been a vibrant and engaging force in the country music world.
O n the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her. Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.
He spent the next four hours burning through $13,000 from the account, plugging any winnings back into the machine, until he had only $4,000 left. Around noon, he gave up. From Our December 2016 Issue Try 2 FREE issues of The Atlantic Stevens, 52, left the casino and wrote a five-page letter to Stacy. A former chief operating officer at Louis Berkman Investment, he gave her careful financial instructions that would enable her to avoid responsibility for his losses and keep her credit intact: She was to deposit the enclosed check for $4,000; move her funds into a new checking account; decline to pay the money he owed the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas; disregard his credit-card debt (it was in his name alone); file her tax returns; and sign up for Social Security survivor benefits. He asked that she have him cremated. He wrote that he was “crying like a baby” as he thought about how much he loved her and their three daughters. “Our family only has a chance if I’m not around to bring us down any further,” he wrote.
“I’m so sorry that I’m putting you through this.”. He placed the letter and the check in an envelope, drove to the Steubenville post office, and mailed it.
Then he headed to the Jefferson Kiwanis Youth Soccer Club. He had raised funds for these green fields, tended them with his lawn mower, and watched his daughters play on them. Stevens parked his Jeep in the gravel lot and called Ricky Gurbst, a Cleveland attorney whose firm, Squire Patton Boggs, represented Berkman, where Stevens had worked for 14 years—until six and a half months earlier, when the firm discovered that he had been stealing company funds to feed his gambling habit and fired him. Stevens had a request: “Please ask the company to continue to pay my daughters’ college tuition.” He had received notification that the tuition benefit the company had provided would be discontinued for the fall semester. Failing his daughters had been the final blow.
Gurbst said he would pass along the request. Then Stevens told Gurbst that he was going to kill himself. Wait.” “That’s what I’m going to do,” Stevens said, and promptly hung up. He next called J.
Timothy Bender, a Cleveland tax attorney who had been advising him on the IRS’s investigation into his embezzlement. Up until that point, he had put on a brave face for Bender, saying he would accept responsibility and serve his time. Now he told Bender what he was about to do. Alarmed, Bender tried to talk him out of it. “Look, this is hard enough,” Stevens said. “I’m going to do it.” Click. At 4:01 p.m., Stevens texted Stacy.
“I love you.” He then texted the same message to each of his three daughters in succession. He took off his glasses, his glucose monitor, and his insulin pump—Stevens was a diabetic—and tucked them neatly into his blue thermal lunch bag with the sandwich and apple he hadn’t touched. He unpacked his Browning semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun, loaded it, and sat on one of the railroad ties that rimmed the parking lot. Then he dialed 911 and told the dispatcher his plan.
S cott Stevens hadn’t always been a gambler. A native of Rochester, New York, he earned a master’s degree in business and finance at the University of Rochester and built a successful career. He won the trust of the steel magnate Louis Berkman and worked his way up to the position of COO in Berkman’s company.
He was meticulous about finances, both professionally and personally. When he first met Stacy, in 1988, he insisted that she pay off her credit-card debt immediately. “Your credit is all you have,” he told her. They married the following year, had three daughters, and settled into a comfortable life in Steubenville thanks to his position with Berkman’s company: a six-figure salary, three cars, two country-club memberships, vacations to Mexico. Stevens doted on his girls and threw himself into causes that benefited them. In addition to the soccer fields, he raised money to renovate the middle school, to build a new science lab, and to support the French Club’s trip to France.
He spent time on weekends painting the high-school cafeteria and stripping the hallway floors. Stevens got his first taste of casino gambling while attending a 2006 trade show in Las Vegas. On a subsequent trip, he hit a jackpot on a slot machine and was hooked. Scott and Stacy soon began making several trips a year to Vegas. She liked shopping, sitting by the pool, even occasionally playing the slots with her husband. They brought the kids in the summer and made a family vacation of it by visiting the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam, and Disneyland.
Back home, Stevens became a regular at the Mountaineer Casino. Over the next six years, his gambling hobby became an addiction. Though he won occasional jackpots, some of them six figures, he lost far more—as much as $4.8 million in a single year. Did Scott Stevens die because he was unable to rein in his own addictive need to gamble? Or was he the victim of a system carefully calibrated to prey on his weakness?
Stevens methodically concealed his addiction from his wife. He handled all the couple’s finances.
He kept separate bank accounts. He used his work address for his gambling correspondence: W-2Gs (the IRS form used to report gambling winnings), wire transfers, casino mailings. Even his best friend and brother-in-law, Carl Nelson, who occasionally gambled alongside Stevens, had no inkling of his problem. “I was shocked when I found out afterwards,” he says. “There was a whole Scott I didn’t know.” When Stevens ran out of money at the casino, he would leave, write a company check on one of the Berkman accounts for which he had check-cashing privileges, and return to the casino with more cash.
He sometimes did this three or four times in a single day. His colleagues did not question his absences from the office, because his job involved overseeing various companies in different locations. By the time the firm detected irregularities and he admitted the extent of his embezzlement, Stevens—the likable, responsible, trustworthy company man—had stolen nearly $4 million.
Stacy had no idea. In Vegas, Stevens had always kept plans to join her and the girls for lunch. At home, he was always on time for dinner. Saturday mornings, when he told her he was headed into the office, she didn’t question him—she knew he had a lot of responsibilities.
So she was stunned when he called her with bad news on January 30, 2012. She was on the stairs with a load of laundry when the phone rang.
“Stace, I have something to tell you.” She heard the burden in his voice. “Who died?” “It’s something I have to tell you on the phone, because I can’t look in your eyes.” He paused.
“I might be coming home without a job today. I’ve taken some money.” “For what?” “That doesn’t matter.” “How much? Ten thousand dollars?” “No.” “More?
One hundred thousand?” “Stace, it’s enough.” Stevens never did come clean with her about how much he had stolen or about how often he had been gambling. Even after he was fired, Stevens kept gambling as often as five or six times a week. He gambled on his wedding anniversary and on his daughters’ birthdays. Stacy noticed that he was irritable more frequently than usual and that he sometimes snapped at the girls, but she figured that it was the fallout of his unemployment. When he headed to the casino, he told her he was going to see his therapist, that he was networking, that he had other appointments. When money appeared from his occasional wins, he claimed that he had been doing some online trading. While they lived off $50,000 that Stacy had in a separate savings account, he drained their 401(k) of $150,000, emptied $50,000 out of his wife’s and daughters’ ETrade accounts, maxed out his credit card, and lost all of a $110,000 personal loan he’d taken out from PNC Bank.
Stacy did not truly understand the extent of her husband’s addiction until the afternoon three police officers showed up at her front door with the news of his death. Afterward, Stacy studied gambling addiction and the ways slot machines entice customers to part with their money.
In 2014, she filed a lawsuit against both Mountaineer Casino and International Game Technology, the manufacturer of the slot machines her husband played. At issue was the fundamental question of who killed Scott Stevens.
Did he die because he was unable to rein in his own addictive need to gamble? Or was he the victim—as the suit alleged—of a system carefully calibrated to prey upon his weakness, one that robbed him of his money, his hope, and ultimately his life?
L ess than 40 years ago, casino gambling was illegal everywhere in the United States outside of Nevada and Atlantic City, New Jersey. But since Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, tribal and commercial casinos have rapidly proliferated across the country, with some 1,000 now operating in 40 states. Casino patrons bet more than $37 billion annually—more than Americans spend to attend sporting events ($17.8 billion), go to the movies ($10.7 billion), and buy music ($6.8 billion) combined. The preferred mode of gambling these days is electronic gaming machines, of which there are now almost 1 million nationwide, offering variations on slots and video poker.
Their prevalence has accelerated addiction and reaped huge profits for casino operators. A significant portion of casino revenue now comes from a small percentage of customers, most of them likely addicts, playing machines that are designed explicitly to lull them into a trancelike state that the industry refers to as “continuous gaming productivity.” (In a 2010 report, the American Gaming Association, an industry trade group, claimed that “the prevalence of pathological gambling is no higher today than it was in 1976, when Nevada was the only state with legal slot machines.
And, despite the popularity of slot machines and the decades of innovation surrounding them, when adjusted for inflation, there has not been a significant increase in the amount spent by customers on slot-machine gambling during an average casino visit.”). “The manufacturers know these machines are addictive and do their best to make them addictive so they can make more money,” says Terry Noffsinger, the lead attorney on the Stevens suit.
“This isn’t negligence. It’s intentional.” Noffsinger, 72, has been here before. A soft-spoken personal-injury attorney based in Indiana, he has filed two previous lawsuits against casinos.
In 2001, he sued Aztar Indiana Gaming, of Evansville, on behalf of David Williams, then 51 years old, who had been an auditor for the State of Indiana. Williams began gambling after he received a $20 voucher in the mail from Casino Aztar. He developed a gambling addiction that cost him everything, which in his case amounted to about $175,000. Noffsinger alleged that Aztar had violated the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act by engaging in a “pattern of racketeering activity”—using the mail to defraud Williams with continued enticements to return to the casino.
District Court for the Southern District of Indiana granted summary judgment in favor of Aztar, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit instructed the district court to dismiss the case, declaring, “Even if the statements in these communications could be considered ‘false’ or ‘misrepresentations,’ it is clear that they are nothing more than sales puffery on which no person of ordinary prudence and comprehension would rely.”.
Four years later, Noffsinger filed a suit on behalf of Jenny Kephart, then 52 years old, against Caesars Riverboat Casino, in Elizabeth, Indiana, alleging that the casino, aware that Kephart was a pathological gambler, knowingly enticed her into gambling in order to profit from her addiction. Kephart had filed for bankruptcy after going broke gambling in Iowa, and moved to Tennessee.
But after she inherited close to $1 million, Caesars began inviting her to the Indiana riverboat casino, where she gambled away that inheritance and more. When the casino sued her for damages on the money she owed, Kephart countersued. She denied the basis of the Caesars suit on numerous grounds, including that by giving her “excessive amounts of alcohol and then claiming that it was injured by her actions or inactions,” Caesars waived any claim it might have had for damages under Indiana law. Although Kephart ultimately lost her countersuit, the case went all the way to the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled in 2010 that the trial court had been mistaken in denying Caesars’s motion to dismiss her counterclaim.
“The existence of the voluntary exclusion program,” the judge wrote, referring to the option Indiana offers people to ban themselves from casinos in the state, “suggests the legislature intended pathological gamblers to take personal responsibility to prevent and protect themselves against compulsive gambling.” (Caesars did not respond to repeated requests for comment.). Noffsinger had been planning to retire before he received Stacy Stevens’s phone call. But after hearing the details of Scott Stevens’s situation—which had far more serious consequences than his previous two cases—he eventually changed his mind. Unlike in his earlier gambling cases, however, he decided to include a products-liability claim in this one, essentially arguing that slot machines are knowingly designed to deceive players so that when they are used as intended, they cause harm.
In focusing on the question of product liability, Noffsinger was borrowing from the rule book of early antitobacco litigation strategy, which, over the course of several decades and countless lawsuits, ultimately succeeded in getting courts to hold the industry liable for the damage it wrought on public health. Noffsinger’s hope was to do the same with the gambling industry. When Noffsinger filed the Stevens lawsuit, John W. Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, described it as a potential “blockbuster case.” E ven by the estimates of the National Center for Responsible Gaming, which was founded by industry members, 1.1 to 1.6 percent of the adult population in the United States—approximately 3 million to 4 million Americans—has a gambling disorder. That is more than the number of women living in the U.S. With a history of breast cancer.
The center estimates that another 2 to 3 percent of adults, or an additional 5 million to 8 million Americans, meets some of the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for addiction but have not yet progressed to the pathological, or disordered, stage. Others outside the industry estimate the number of gambling addicts in the country to be higher.
Such addicts simply cannot stop themselves, regardless of the consequences. “When you’re dealing with an addict active in their addiction, they’ve lost all judgment,” says Valerie Lorenz, the author of Compulsive Gambling: What’s It All About? “They can’t control their behavior.” Gambling is a drug-free addiction. Yet despite the fact that there is no external chemical at work on the brain, the neurological and physiological reactions to the stimulus are similar to those of drug or alcohol addicts. Some gambling addicts report that they experience a high resembling that produced by a powerful drug.
Like drug addicts, they develop a tolerance, and when they cannot gamble, they show signs of withdrawal such as panic attacks, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, and heart palpitations. Approximately 3 million to 4 million Americans are pathological gamblers—and one in five gambling addicts attempts suicide. Neuroscientists have discovered characteristics that appear to be unique to the brains of addicts, particularly in the dopaminergic system, which includes reward pathways, and in the prefrontal cortex, which exerts executive control over impulses.
“We’ve seen a disregulated reward system,” says Jon Grant, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago. “The frontal parts of the brain that tell us ‘Hey, stop!’ are less active, and parts that anticipate rewards tend to be stronger.”. Gambling addicts may have a genetic predisposition, though a specific marker has not yet been uncovered.
Environmental factors and personality traits—a big gambling win within the past year, companions who gamble regularly, impulsivity, depression—may also contribute to the development of a gambling problem. Whatever the causes, there’s widespread agreement that certain segments of the population are simply more vulnerable to addiction. “You can’t turn on and turn off certain activities of the brain,” says Reza Habib, a psychology professor at Southern Illinois University. “It’s an automatic physiological response.” Scott Stevens’s story is not anomalous. Given the guilt and shame involved, gambling addiction frequently progresses to a profound despair. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that one in five gambling addicts attempts suicide—the highest rate among addicts of any kind. There are no accurate figures for suicides related to gambling problems, but there are ample anecdotes: the police officer who shot himself in the head at a Detroit casino; the accountant who jumped to his death from a London skyscraper in despair over his online-gambling addiction; the 24-year-old student who killed himself in Las Vegas after losing his financial-aid money to gambling; and, of course, Stevens himself.
The Vorhees P roblem gamblers are worth a lot of money to casinos. According to some research, 20 percent of regular gamblers are problem or pathological gamblers. Moreover, when they gamble, they spend—which is to say, lose—more than other players. At least nine independent studies demonstrate that problem gamblers generate anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of total gambling revenues.
Several companies supply casinos with ATMs that allow patrons to withdraw funds through both debit and cash-advance functions, in some cases without ever leaving the machines they are playing. (Some of the companies also sell information on their ATM customers to the casinos.) “The whole premise of the casino is to get people to exceed their limits,” says Les Bernal, the national director of the advocacy organization Stop Predatory Gambling. “If you’re using the casino ATM, it’s like painting yourself orange.” All of these data have enabled casinos to specifically target their most reliable spenders, primarily problem gamblers and outright addicts. Despite those customers’ big losses—or rather, because of their losses—the casinos lure them to return with perks that include complimentary drinks and meals, limo service, freebies from the casino gift shop, golf excursions for their nongambling spouses, and in some cases even first-class airfare and suites in five-star hotels.
They also employ hosts who befriend large spenders and use special offers to encourage them to stay longer or return soon. Some hosts receive bonuses that are tied to the amount customers spend beyond their expected losses, which are calculated using the data gathered from previous visits.
As Richard Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University and the president of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, explained at the group’s forum on casino gambling in the fall of 2014, “The business plan for casinos is not based on the occasional gambler. The business plan for casinos is based on the addicted gambler.”. Casinos have developed formulas to calculate the “predicted lifetime value” of any given individual gambler.
Gamblers are assigned value rankings based on this amount; the biggest losers are referred to as “whales.” These gamblers become the casinos’ most sought-after repeat customers, the ones to whom they market most aggressively with customized perks and VIP treatment. Caroline Richardson, for example, became a whale for the Ameristar Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
In 2011 alone, she lost nearly $2 million, primarily on the casino’s slot machines. The casino allegedly allowed her to go behind the cashier’s “cage,” an area normally off-limits to patrons, to collect cash to gamble. It increased the limits on some slot machines so that she could spend more on single games. It also made a new machine off-limits to other customers so that Richardson could be the first to play it. Management assigned Richardson an executive host, who offered her free drinks, meals, hotel stays, and tickets to entertainment events.
So claimed a suit brought against the casino by Richardson’s employer, Colombo Candy & Tobacco Wholesale. Richardson, the company’s controller, embezzled $4.1 million over the course of two years to support her gambling addiction. (In 2014, Richardson, then 54, was sentenced to 14 to 20 years in prison for the crime.) The thefts ultimately put the company out of business. The suit claimed that the casino had ample reason to presume that Richardson, who earned about $62,000 a year, had come into the money she gambled by fraudulent means. (A representative for Ameristar Casino declined to comment on the lawsuit.).
District Court for Nebraska agreed that Colombo had sufficiently proved its initial claim of unjust enrichment, which the casino would have to defend itself against. The suit, however, stalled when Colombo’s president and CEO, Monte Brown, and his wife, Jenise, ran out of money to pay their attorneys and had to file for personal bankruptcy. “They found someone who had the addiction and the ability to steal, and they exploited it,” Monte Brown says. “The casino embezzled from us through an employee.” Jenise adds, “For people to do that to other people, it’s evil.” Clay Rodery W alk into the Mountaineer Casino in West Virginia, and the slot machines overwhelm you—more than 1,500 of them, lights blinking, animated screens flashing, the simulated sound of clinking coins blaring across the floor. The machines have names such as King Midas, Rich Devil, Cash Illusions, Titanic, and Wizard of Oz.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and here inside the windowless, clockless, cavernous space, a few patrons are clustered around a craps table, a roulette table, and a handful of card tables. But the vast majority sit at the slot machines. Slots and video poker have become the lifeblood of the American casino. They generate nearly 70 percent of casino revenues, according to a 2010 American Gaming Association report, up from 45 percent four decades ago. Three out of five casino visitors say their favorite activity is playing electronic gaming machines. Their popularity spells profits not only for casinos but for manufacturers as well. International Game Technology, which, as the world’s largest manufacturer of slot machines, has made many of the 900,000-plus slot machines in the U.S., earned $2.1 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2014.
(That year, Gtech, an Italian lottery company, acquired IGT and adopted its name in a $6.4 billion deal.). Yet another feature made possible by virtual reel mapping is the uneven distribution of winning symbols among virtual reels, known as “starving reels.” For instance, a 7 may come up four times on the first virtual reel and five times on the second but only once on the third. The first two reels are thus much more likely to hit a 7 than the last one, but you wouldn’t know this by looking at the physical reels. Just as the craps player expects the dice to be numbered 1 to 6 and the blackjack player expects the dealer to use conventional decks of 52 cards, it’s natural for the slot-machine player to expect equal odds on each of the reels, says Roger Horbay, a former gambling-addiction therapist and an expert on electronic gaming machines. “Unbalanced reel design enables EGMs to present to the player screens which are rich in symbols but which are designed to limit winning combinations in a manner incommensurate with the appearance of the screen,” Horbay writes in “Unbalanced Reel Gaming Machines,” a paper he co-authored with Tim Falkiner in 2006. Astonishingly, the patent application for virtual reel mapping, the technology that made all these deceptive practices possible, was straightforward about its intended use: “It is important,” the application stated, “to make a machine that is perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has within the legal limitations that games of chance must operate.” Countries such as Australia and New Zealand have outlawed virtual reel mapping because of the harm the inherent deception inflicts upon players.
In the United States, by contrast, the federal government granted the patent for virtual reel mapping in 1984. IGT purchased the rights to it in 1989 and later licensed the patent to other companies. “Imagine sitting around a boardroom table, thinking of what’s fair, and coming up with this,” says Kevin Harrigan, a co-director of a gambling-research lab at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. “It just seems wrong to me.” The Nevada State Gaming Control Board approved virtual-reel slot machines in 1983. “The brain somehow registers a win,” Kevin Harrigan says. “No matter what you think, physically you’re being affected by these things—the lights, the sounds, the graphics—as a win.
You can get 150 to 200 of these false wins, which we also call losses, an hour. That’s a lot of positive reinforcement.” Losses disguised as wins also create a “smoother ride,” as some within the industry call it, allowing a machine to slowly deplete a player’s cash reserves, rather than taking them in a few large swipes.
Because the machine is telling the player he or she is winning, the gradual siphoning is less noticeable. Related to the video slot machines are video-poker terminals, which IGT began popularizing in 1979. The standard five-card-draw game shows five cards, each offering players the option to hold or replace by drawing a card from the 47 remaining in the virtual deck. The games require more skill—or at least a basic understanding of probabilities—than the slot machines do.
As such, they appeal to people who want to have some sense of exerting control over the outcome. But over time, designers of video-poker machines discovered that they could influence gamblers’ behavior by manipulating game details. They saw, for instance, patrons going more often for four of a kind than the royal flush, a rarer but more lucrative hand, and they adjusted the machines accordingly. Video poker also offers its own version of losses disguised as wins. Today’s “multihand” video-poker machines—triple-play, 10-play, and even 100-play—allow patrons to play multiple hands simultaneously.
This creates an experience similar to multiline slots, in which players are likely to “win back” a portion of each bet by frequently hitting small pots even as they are steadily losing money overall. This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze.
She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen.
But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says.
“So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”. Every so often, a right-wing commentator who purports to abhor dishonesty among media elites admits that they’ve been guilty of dishonestly purveying propaganda. These figures are not marginal.
In the final years of the Bush administration it was Rush Limbaugh, easily the most popular talk-radio host on the right, who responded to GOP losses in Congress by admitting that he hadn’t been leveling with his listeners about their political party. He declared, “I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, ‘Well, why have you been doing it?’ Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat Party does.”. Much of 2017 was consumed with untangling the political mess that was 2016 and Russia’s role in it. Much of what we learned came from American journalists, who brought us revelation after revelation about how the Kremlin meddled in the presidential election.
Through these reporters’ domestic sources—in the White House, Congress, and the intelligence community—we learned how Russians aimed at sowing division; how Russian government agencies and; how Russians loosely affiliated with the Kremlin; and how the Kremlin the popular Kaspersky Labs anti-virus software into a spying tool. HEMET, California—Many cities across America are doing better today than they were before the recession. This is not one of them. A decade after the start of the Great Recession, it struggles with pervasive crime and poverty.
“We’re still recovering—we were really hit hard on all levels,” Linda Krupa, the mayor of Hemet, told me. A fifth of the population lives below the poverty line, up from 13 percent in 2005.
Hemet is not alone in its troubles. A released this year by the Economic Innovation Group, a research group started by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, found that one in six Americans lives in what the group calls “economically distressed communities” that are “increasingly alienated from the benefits of the modern economy.” Such communities have high shares of poverty, many housing vacancies, a large proportion of adults without a high-school diploma, high joblessness, and a lower median income than the rest of the state in which they are located. They also lost jobs and businesses between 2011 and 2015. In the first novel ever written about Sherlock Homes, we learn something peculiar about the London detective. Holmes, supposedly a modern man and a keen expert in the workings of the world, does not know how the solar system works.
Specifically he is unfamiliar with the heliocentric Copernican model, which, upon its slow acceptance in the 17th century, revolutionized Western thought about the place of our species in the universe. “What the deuce is it to me?” Holmes asks his sputtering soon-to-be sidekick, Dr. “You say that we go ’round the sun.
If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” Brains are a kind of “little empty attic,” says the detective, and they should be filled only with furniture that’s useful to one’s line of work. Holmes doesn’t doubt the Copernican model; he simply has no use for it in solving murder cases. “Now that I do know it,” he adds, “I shall do my best to forget it.”. When great powers fade, as they inevitably must, it’s normally for one of two reasons. Some powers exhaust themselves through overreach abroad, underinvestment at home, or a mixture of the two.
This was the case for the Soviet Union. Other powers lose their privileged position with the emergence of new, stronger powers. This describes what happened with France and Great Britain in the case of Germany’s emergence after World War I and, more benignly, with the European powers and the rise of the United States during and after World War II.
To some extent America is facing a version of this—amid what Fareed Zakaria has dubbed “the rise of the rest”—with China’s ascendance the most significant development. But the United States has now introduced a third means by which a major power forfeits international advantage. It is abdication, the voluntary relinquishing of power and responsibility.
Johnny Cash
It is brought about more by choice than by circumstances either at home or abroad. On Thursday morning, Adam Gill stepped outside in a heavy, bright-yellow coat, bulky gloves, and a ski mask to brace himself against the blistering wind. He brought with him a metal teakettle full of boiling water. As he tipped the kettle over, the piping-hot liquid turned instantly into snow and blew away in the wind.
That’s how cold it was at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire, the highest peak in the northeastern United States., a meteorologist at the observatory, conducting this little presentation received thousands of sympathetic likes on Facebook. The temperature that day at the observatory a bone-chilling low of -34 degrees Fahrenheit (-37 degrees Celsius)—and that was without accounting for wind chill. The day broke the previous record of -31 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 degrees Celsius), set in 1933.
This past year, reporters on The Atlantic’s science, technology, and health desks worked tirelessly, writing hundreds of stories. Each of those stories is packed with facts that surprised us, delighted us, and in some cases, unsettled us. Instead of picking our favorite stories, we decided to round up a small selection of the most astonishing things we learned in 2017. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did, and we hope you’ll be back for more in 2018:. The record for the longest top spin is over 51 minutes. Probably won’t make it past 60 seconds. Flamingos have, which makes them more stable on one leg than on two.
If your home furnace emits some methane pollution on the last day of 2017, it’ll almost certainly leave the atmosphere by 2030—but it could still be raising global sea levels. By analyzing enough Facebook likes, an algorithm can predict someone’s personality.
There are cliff-hanging nests in northern Greenland that. Researchers read the layers of bird poop in the nests like tree rings. Six-month-old babies basic words like mouth and nose. They even know that concepts like mouth and nose are more related than nose and bottle. Most common eastern North American tree species. In 2016, Waymo’s virtual cars logged in simulated versions of California, Texas, and Arizona. America’s emergency 9-1-1 calling infrastructure that there are some parts you can’t even replace anymore when they break.
The transmitters on the Voyager spacecraft have as much power as refrigerator light bulbs, but they from billions of miles away. By one estimate, one-third of Americans currently in their early 20s.
Donald Trump has a long and on the early web. Somewhere around 10,000 U.S.
Companies—including the majority of the Fortune 500— based on the Myers-Briggs test. Humans have inadvertently created, formed when radio communications from the ground interact with high-energy particles in space. This bubble is capable of shielding the planet from potentially dangerous space weather like solar flares.
Climate-change-linked heat waves. China from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century. A lay minister and math Ph.D. Was the best checkers player in the world for 40 years, spawning a to solve the entire game to prove the man could be beaten. There is, where the Nansen Ice Shelf meets the sea. Adobe fireworks cs6 serial number list. On Facebook, Russian trolls on May 21, 2016, bringing Muslim and anti-Muslim Americans into real-world conflict at an Islamic center in Houston.
Boxer crabs like boxing gloves, and if they lose one of these allies, they can make another by ripping the remaining one in half and cloning it. may be essentially useless to travelers, but to airlines they are valuable space for advertising. Scientists can figure out the storm tracks of 250-year-old winter squalls by reading a map. On islands, deer are occasionally licking small animals, like cats and foxes—possibly because the ocean breeze makes everything salty. People complained of an “” in 1896. Languages worldwide have for describing warm colors than cool colors. Turkeys are as they were in 1960, and most of that change is genetic.
Two Chinese organizations of the global Bitcoin-mining operations—and by now, they might control more. If they collaborate (or collude), the blockchain technology that supposedly secures Bitcoin could be compromised. Physicians prescribe of the necessary amount of opioids. Physicists discovered in the Great Pyramid of Giza using cosmic rays. Daily and seasonal temperature variations, even if the temperature is always above freezing, by expanding and contracting rocks until they crack. The eight counties with the largest since 1980 are all in the state of Kentucky. The has less to do with the rise of smartwatches and more to do with the rising cost of gold, the decline of the British pound, and a crackdown on Chinese corruption.
Spider silk is self-strengthening; it can from the insects it touches to make itself stronger. Intelligence doesn’t make someone more likely to change their mind. People with higher IQs are better at crafting arguments to support a position—but. Among the strangest and yet least-questioned design choices of internet services is that. Steven Gundry, who has contributed to Goop, believes Mercola.com, a prominent anti-vaccine site, is a site that gives “very useful health advice.”. At many pumpkin- and squash-growing competitions, entries are: Any specimen that’s at least 80 percent orange is a pumpkin, and everything else is a squash. Only of all U.S.
Google employees are black, and only 4 percent are Hispanic. In tech-oriented positions, the numbers fall to 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
The weight of the huge amount of water Hurricane Harvey dumped on Texas 2 centimeters. Russian scientists plan to re-wild the Arctic with. The NASA spacecraft orbiting Jupiter can never take the same picture of the gas planet because the clouds of its atmosphere are, swirling into new shapes and patterns. During sex, male cabbage white butterflies inject females with packets of nutrients. The females chew their way into these with a, and genitals that double as a souped-up stomach.
If all people want from apps is to see new stuff scroll onto the screen, if that content is real or fake. Cardiac stents are extremely expensive and popular, and yet they don’t appear to have outside of acute heart attacks. Animal-tracking technology is just showing off at this point: Researchers can glue tiny barcodes to the backs of carpenter ants in a lab and scan them repeatedly to. One recommendation from a happiness expert is to build a “,” which is a place in your house that you pass a lot where you put pictures that trigger pleasant memories, or diplomas or awards that remind you of accomplishments. Some ancient rulers, including Alexander the Great, after an eclipse, as a kind of sacrificial hedge. A colon-cancer gene found in Utah can be traced back to a single from the 1840s. In November and December 2016, the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line to ask for turkey-cooking advice.
That’s an average of over 1,500 calls per day. In the United States as a whole, of the land is hardscape. In cities, up to 40 percent is impervious. Half of murdered women by their romantic partners..
Among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines, more than hunting, fishing, or basically any other skill. The familiar metal tokens in the board game Monopoly didn’t originally come with the game, to save costs.
Popular were only added to the box later. Thanks to the internet, American parents are for their children, trying to keep them from fading into the noise of Google. The median boy’s name in 2015 (Luca) was given to one out of every 782 babies, whereas the median boy’s name in 1955 (Edward) was given to one out of every 100 babies. America’s five most valuable companies are between Northern California and Seattle.
President Kennedy secretly had Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder, which he with injections of amphetamines and steroids from Max Jacobson, a doctor whose nickname was “Dr. Feelgood.”. Some of the most distant stars in the Milky Way were actually “” from a nearby galaxy as the two passed near each other. Hummingbirds drink in an unexpected way: Their when they hit nectar, and close on the way out to grab some of the sweet liquid. New York City has genetically distinct.
The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 created one of the ever. People who can’t find opioids are taking an over-the-counter diarrhea drug.
Some are consuming as many as. It used to take to make one pound of insulin. (Insulin is now made by genetically engineered microbes.). Astronauts on the International Space Station the yummy aromas of hot meals like we can on Earth because heat dissipates in all different directions in microgravity. “Sex addiction” in any official capacity, and it’s actually a deeply problematic concept that risks absolving men of agency in sexual violence. The peculiar (and previously unidentified) laughter that was recorded for the Golden Record was—well, we won’t spoil it for you until you.
The oldest rocks on Earth, which are, have signs of life in them, which suggests that the planet was biological from its very infancy. Fire ants form during floods. But you can break up the rafts with dish soap. Until this year, no one knew about a whole elaborate system of. People are worse storytellers when their listeners by saying things like “uh-huh” and “mm-hmm.”. China’s new radio telescope is large enough to hold on the planet.
Scientists calculated that if everyone in the United States, we could still get around halfway to President Obama’s 2020 climate goals. The reason that dentistry is a separate discipline from medicine can be traced back to —when two self-trained dentists asked the University of Maryland at Baltimore if they could add dental training to the curriculum at the college of medicine. The physicians said no. Naked mole rats can survive for at all. A well-regarded Hollywood insider recently suggested that sequels can represent “a sort of creative bankruptcy.” He was discussing Pixar, the legendary animation studio, and its avowed distaste for cheap spin-offs.
More pointedly, he argued that if Pixar were only to make sequels, it would “wither and die.” Now, all kinds of industry experts say all kinds of things. But it is surely relevant that these observations were made by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, in his best-selling 2014 business-leadership book. Yet here comes Cars 3, rolling into a theater near you this month. You may recall that the original Cars, released back in 2006, was widely judged to be the studio’s worst film to date. Cars 2, which followed five years later, was panned as even worse. And if Cars 3 isn’t disheartening enough, two of the three Pixar films in line after it are also sequels: The Incredibles 2 and (say it isn’t so!) Toy Story 4.
Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage. I couldn’t agree more about “Crocodile,” David. I’m such a devoted Andrea Riseborough fan that I’d pay money to watch her read the phone book, so the episode felt like a colossal disappointment. Her character’s throughline was nonsensical, as you noted—how can someone so horrified by accidentally hitting a cyclist in the opening scene murder four people (including a toddler) a decade later? The spurring factor was clearly supposed to be the psychological destabilization of having your memories be accessible, but it was a dismal (and mostly dreary) end to an extremely missable installment.