The System for Addressing Gambling Harm Is Broken

Sucker

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of McKay Coppins’s well-researched story on sports gambling is the combination of addictions cultivated by the app-based platforms he used. In the apps, the pathology of compulsive gambling partners with a ubiquitous pathology we all suffer from now: an addiction to our phones. One cannot help but wonder if, 50 years from now, we’ll look back on our current norms with the same disbelief we today express when discussing cigarette smoking during its heyday. Online gambling comes with its own set of life-altering problems, to be sure, but it exists in the context of a serious addiction—screen time—that now afflicts everyone, not just gamblers.

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Tom Langston, M.D.
Lookout Mountain, Ga.

McKay Coppins criticizes Justice Samuel Alito for ignoring the “public-policy rationale” behind the federal sports-betting ban. But that was exactly Alito’s job as a judge. The question in Murphy v. NCAA was whether Congress could constitutionally order state legislatures to maintain state laws prohibiting sports betting. Under the anti-commandeering doctrine, it cannot. This is the same constitutional safeguard that would prevent a future Congress from, say, requiring states to keep their abortion bans on the books.

As Coppins notes, experts estimate that only 2 to 5 percent of gamblers develop compulsive behaviors. That is a serious concern for those individuals. But when else do we ban an activity enjoyed responsibly by the majority because a small minority struggles? We tried that with alcohol and abandoned it. The consistent position on personal liberty must be that adults can make their own choices. Targeted regulation of predatory marketing and better self-exclusion tools are reasonable. Treating every adult sports bettor as a rube who needs saving is not.

Owen Voutsinas-Klose
Washington, D.C.

After reading McKay Coppins’s article, I keep thinking about how easy it would be for him to start gambling again. I wonder: Has he ever crossed from Virginia into any of the five bordering states that wouldn’t honor his self-exclusion in order to make a bet? Has he made a sports-related wager on one of the prediction markets available in all 50 states? Has he received offers for free bets in his inbox, even after opting out?

I know this cycle firsthand. I’m one of the millions of Americans in recovery for a gambling addiction. To borrow Coppins’s words, I am a fellow degenerate. I knew I had a problem as a teenager playing poker in friends’ basements, and it escalated through my 20s in casinos and on online sportsbooks.

I tried to stop myself more than 100 times. Therapy, Gamblers Anonymous, new cities, new social circles—nothing worked; the hook was set in my brain. I finally found recovery after more than a decade. I had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’d nearly lost my life. Today, six years bet-free, I manage it like a chronic disease. I have also founded Evive, a digital health company focused on supporting people with gambling problems.

Self-exclusion, which Coppins pursued at the end of his reporting, is a first step. I use it too. But it is a screen-door barrier, not a solution. What actually works is what you build on the other side of that door: accountability tools, a community of people who get what you’re going through, and a better understanding of what’s happening in your brain.

The system meant to address gambling harm is underfunded, underutilized, and built for an era before gambling was a 24/7 digital activity. There’s no shortage of infrastructure designed to bring you back into gambling, and almost none designed to help you stay out.

Coppins has shown what gambling harm looks like today: It can hit anyone. His article invites a reckoning with what support looks like. The groundwork is there: digital tools that reach people before they’ve hit rock bottom, peer support. We need casino operators, public-health agencies, regulators, and technological innovators to work together to create solutions as layered as the problem. We all deserve something more durable than a screen door.

Sam DeMello
Beverly, Mass.

The Women of Avenger Field

They bravely served as pilots during World War II, Ellen Cushing wrote in the April issue. Then America forgot them.

In 1943 my mother, 25 and single, left her job with IBM to join the war effort. She held a commercial pilot’s license, so she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots and reported for training. On orders from General Hap Arnold, she and 25 other WASPs were then transferred to Camp Davis, in North Carolina.

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My mom’s cohort was assigned to tow targets behind their aircraft so gunners could practice tracking and firing 90-mm and 40-mm shells. Many of the planes returned with holes; the pilots returned with shaken nerves.

The period was marked by several crashes and overt hostility from the base commander. Mom was proud of her service, but described it to my siblings and me as the most frightening time of her life. She was grounded with an ear infection in 1944 and left the WASPs, transferring to the Office of Strategic Services. Mom died in 2004, having finally been recognized for her service as a veteran. At her burial in Fremont, New Hampshire, she was attended by a military honor guard. A few years later, she received the Congressional Gold Medal. Her name was Frederica McAfee Richardson.

Steven M. Richardson
Winona, Minn.

My sister, Phyllis, was always more than a little irritated when someone expressed surprise that she, having surpassed 90, was still driving. “Of course I’m still driving,” she would reply. “I flew a B-17.”

Phyllis was a WASP. Ellen Cushing’s article on the Women Airforce Service Pilots reminded me of all the photographs my grown-up sister sent home from the base: of the “girls” gathered together in the bay, of her climbing into a plane with her leather jacket and parachute. I first viewed those photos when I was 5 years old; they constitute my chief memory of the war.

Phyllis married another pilot in 1945 and raised three children. She was politically conservative and eschewed a feminist label, but she enthusiastically joined other WASPs in a visit to their Russian counterparts in the early days of glasnost, and she was thrilled to attend the ceremony in 2010 in Washington, D.C., where the WASPs were officially, finally recognized and awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. She proudly displayed her medal in her home. But close to it sat her wings, the pin that symbolized what she personally had done for her country. I suspect that this was more important to her.

Phyllis died in 2018, just short of her 100th birthday; she is buried in a family cemetery on a small island off the coast of Maine. There, etched on her memorial stone, is Fifinella, the winged and goggle-wearing female gremlin depicted on the WASP insignia. Fifinella was designed by Walt Disney for a film based on Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins. (It was never produced.) As gremlins came to be associated with aviation culture—pilots would blame mechanical problems on the pesky creatures—the WASPs adopted Fifinella as their symbol. She was a powerful figure who could wreak havoc on those who did not take her seriously.

As the secretary of defense denies promotions to women in the military, as the Trump administration removes webpages telling the stories of the WASPs and other women who served their country, I think of Fifinella. Long may her spirit, and that of all the women who wore the insignia, live on.

Christina Marsden Gillis
Berkeley, Calif.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “The Age of Reading Is Over,” Rose Horowitch describes the new postliterate era. The problem is less a crisis of literacy—though many Americans do struggle with basic reading skills—and more a crisis of comprehension. Americans lack the desire to read and are losing the higher-order intellectual powers that come with reading extended texts. For the cover, we used transparent paper to make the headline appear as if it’s fading into obscurity.

— Colin Hunter, Art Director

Correction

“How to Tell the American Story” (July) described an August car race in Washington, D.C., as a Formula 1 race. In fact, it is an IndyCar race.

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

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