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REVIEW: The Hod King by Josiah Bancroft

• Book Reviews
• July 19, 2024
• By John Mauro

The Hod King is the third volume in Josiah Bancroft’s masterful Books of Babel tetralogy, combining the best features of the first two books of the series, Senlin Ascends  and Arm of the Sphinx , while bringing new emotional depth to this tragic story.

The Tower of Babel is an overwhelmingly massive structure, taller than any modern skyscraper. The building is divided into layers called “ringdoms,” each with its own peculiar culture and politics. In the first book, Senlin Ascends , our hero struggles to make his way upward through the ringdoms, believing that he will find his wife at the Tower’s famous baths. Senlin must overcome a series of Kafkaesque absurdities at each level to continue his ascent. By the second book, Arm of the Sphinx , the previously naïve Senlin is determined to take charge of his destiny, assembling a ragtag crew of makeshift pirates, traveling through this steampunk world on a stolen airship.

The Hod King strikes just the right balance between the Kafka-inspired absurdity of Senlin Ascends and the multi-point-of-view adventures of Arm of the Sphinx . More importantly, The Hod King deepens the emotional impact of the story as we finally encounter Marya. A year has passed since the newlyweds were first separated outside the Tower. Senlin’s bride may not be as he remembers, and the question arises of whether she actually wants to be “saved.”

Senlin’s personal struggles are set against the backdrop of the greater mysteries of the Tower, including those of the enigmatic Sphinx and the Hod King. As unlikely as it seems, Senlin’s journey may be inexorably linked with the fate of the Tower itself.

Among the many brilliant aspects of the Books of Babel, I am particularly impressed with Josiah Bancroft’s use of theatrical motifs to deepen the story. The author skillfully hones his theatre-related imagery in The Hod King , driving home the theme of finding our true selves behind the many literal and figurative masks that we wear throughout our lives.

The Hod King is arguably the best volume in Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel series. Grimdark readers will especially love the complexity of this dark world, as well as Bancroft’s consistently outstanding characterization. The tetralogy concludes with The Fall of Babel .

Read The Hod King by Josiah Bancroft

John Mauro lives in a world of glass amongst the hills of central Pennsylvania. When not indulging in his passion for literature or enjoying time with family, John is training the next generation of materials scientists at Penn State University, where he teaches glass science and materials kinetics. John also loves cooking international cuisine and kayaking the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

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• Entertainment
• Pedro Almodóvar’s <i>The Room Next Door</i> Finds Joy Even as It Stares Down Death 

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door Finds Joy Even as It Stares Down Death 

F or those who have been following his career from the start , the idea of Pedro Almodóvar’s growing older—and increasingly using his films to reflect on illness and death, or at least just the inevitable slowdown that comes for most of us—is a bitter pill. None of us relishes thinking about our own mortality. But sometimes it feels worse to think about losing an artist we love, especially one as vital and ageless as Almodóvar. One of his finest, most moving works , 2019’s Pain and Glory , reckoned with the nuisances of aging, as well as the trauma of being an artist in crisis. But the director’s first English-language movie, The Room Next Door —playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival —delves even further into the murky waters of our feelings about death. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as Ingrid and Martha, old friends who bonded in New York in the 1980s but who have been out of touch for a long time. They reconnect when Ingrid learns that Martha is being treated for cancer, and their rekindled friendship veers into complicated territory.

The Room Next Door is an adaptation, written by Almodóvar himself, of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, and at first the movie’s tone feels a little strange, untethered to any easily identifiable genre. It’s a story about friendship, clearly, but also about a woman facing a solitary and difficult choice. The dialogue sometimes feels flat and wooden. At one point Martha reminds Ingrid of the lover they’d once shared, though technically, he’d drifted toward Ingrid after he and Martha had broken up. “He was a passionate and enthusiastic lover, and I hope he was for you too,” Martha says, and though she means it, the line hits with a thud. And even if Almodóvar goes for a laugh here or there, overall the tone of The Room Next Door is a bit somber—almost like a black comedy, but not quite.

Read more: The Best New Movies of August 2024

And yet, by the end, something almost mystical has happened: the movie’s final moments usher in a kind of twilight, a state of grace that you don't see coming. Ingrid, a successful writer, first hears of Martha’s illness at a signing event for her most recent book. Though she hasn’t seen Martha in years, she dutifully visits her at the hospital where she’s being treated. They catch up quickly: Martha, who worked for years as a war correspondent, has a daughter, Michelle, born when she was still a teenager. Michelle has accused Martha of being a bad mother, and is particularly resentful that she has withheld information about Michelle’s father. Martha denies none of it. Still, she wishes she and Michelle were closer, and her grave illness—she has stage three cervical cancer—puts a new spin on things. She’s hoping the experimental treatment she’s been receiving will work; she’s devastated when she learns that it isn’t.

And so she procures for herself— on the Dark Web , she tells Ingrid, almost in a whisper—an illegal pill that will put an end to all of it. She has worked out all the details: she’ll leave a note for the police, explaining that she alone is responsible for her fate. And she doesn’t want a stranger discovering her body. When she decides the time is right, what she wants, she says, is to know that a friend is in “the room next door.” She has decided Ingrid will be that friend, though Ingrid, who has a quivering, electric, nervous quality beneath her veneer of self-confidence, at first wants no part of it.

Ingrid has re-entered Martha’s life in a whirlwind of good intentions. But does she really want to help Martha die ? She’s not so sure. (She has also, unbeknownst to Martha, reconnected platonically with that old shared boyfriend; his name is Damian, and he’s played, with a kind of droll swagger, by John Turturro .) Ingrid and Martha’s rekindled friendship seems shaky at first. Martha has decided that she doesn’t want to die in her own smartly appointed Fifth Avenue apartment. So she books a tony modern country house somewhere near Woodstock—it has amazing views of nature that only money can buy—and she and Ingrid pack their bags and drive up. Almost as soon as they arrive, Martha panics. She’s forgotten the precious euthanasia pill; she insists that she and Ingrid drive back to Manhattan immediately to get it. Ingrid barely hides her annoyance; how did she get into this situation, anyway? Briefly, the movie tap-dances into screwball-comedy territory. It would all be very funny, if Martha weren’t suffering so much.

But The Room Next Door is on its way to place of tenderness and accord—we just can’t see it yet. At one point, Martha rages against her illness, but also against the cheap bromides people use when they talk about cancer, often referring to treating it as a “battle,” a test of strength that’s also somehow a measure of virtue. “If you lose, well, maybe you just didn’t fight hard enough,” she says bitterly. No wonder she wants to write the ending to her own story: “I think I deserve a good death."

Swinton’s Martha is frail but still, somehow, has the vitality of a pale blond moon; Moore , with her burgundy-red hair and intense, searching eyes, brings a rush of color into her life. They talk about books, art, movies: Martha has been thinking about the closing lines of James Joyce’s The Dead, so they spend an evening watching John Huston’s gorgeous 1987 version on the rental's DVD player. They make conversation about little things: a recent book that interests them both, Roger Lewis’ Erotic Vagrancy, about the partnership of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ; the reproduction of Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun that hangs in the rented house’s hallway. Their idle conversations are a kind of casual nourishment.

It's a pleasure to watch these two actors together. Martha and Ingrid riff against and annoy each another until suddenly, they find their groove, and the movie does too. Shot by Eduard Grau, the film has a rich, handsome look, and the production and costume design are characteristically Almodóvarian in their jubilance. The sets include stunningly orchestrated combinations of pickle green and tomato red; there are artfully shabby velvet couches and walls casually sponged with cobalt-blue paint. (The production designer is Inbal Weinberg; the costumes are by Bina Daigeler.) It’s all marvelous to look at, but this kind of visual splendor might evoke some guilt, too. Is it wrong to be ogling Martha’s fabulous, mega-chunky color-blocked knit pullover when you know, as she does, that death is just one little pill away?

But as the story wheels forward, it becomes clear that the joy Almodóvar takes in colors and patterns isn’t beside the point; it is the point. He’s created a kind of cocoon world for these two women, as they embark together on a bumpy adventure. And that’s how he beckons us into their story. Lime and lilac, scarlet and saffron: he knows what colors work together, which combinations will surprise us or offer a jolt of delight. The colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it.

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• Release date: August 30, 2024

Culture & Literature Science

Frequency: Every other month Pages: 144 Publisher: Smithsonian Institute Edition: September-October 2024

OverDrive Magazine Release date: August 30, 2024

• Formats OverDrive Magazine
• Languages English

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Rachel Kushner’s Surprising Swerve

She and her narrators have always relied on swagger—but not this time.

“Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung,” Rachel Kushner writes in The Hard Crowd , her 2021 essay collection. “People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades.” As a girl in San Francisco’s Sunset District, Kushner ran with a group whom she has described as “ratty delinquents”—kids who fought, who set fires, who got high too young and too often, who in some cases wound up incarcerated or addicted or dead. At 16, she headed to UC Berkeley for college, but returned to the city after graduating, working at bars and immersing herself in the motorcycle scene . Almost immersing herself, anyway. Even when she was a 14-year-old sampling strangers’ drugs at rock concerts, some piece of Kushner was an observer as well as a participant, a student of unsung histories .

Explore the October 2024 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

In her fiction, Kushner gravitates toward main characters who occupy that same split psychological place . All of her novels—her latest, Creation Lake , is her fourth—feature a young woman, usually a narrator, who shares her way of viewing the world . Kushner often loans her protagonists her own biker swagger, the hard layer of confidence that helps a woman survive in a very male environment. Preferring to write in the first person, she also gives her central characters her distinctive style: Kushner is alternately warm and caustic , funny and slippery, able to swing from high-literary registers to street slang and back in an instant. Her recurring theme has been the limits that even groups of outsiders impose on women, and yet her female characters, no matter how constrained they find themselves, are roving, curious thinkers , using their keen powers of observation to escape subjugation and victimhood—in their minds, if not in their circumstances.

With every book, Kushner has grown more interested in the push-pull between material restriction and psychic freedom. She’s especially intrigued by the effect that gender roles have on her characters’ strategies for navigating that tension. In each of her novels, a woman tries to both resist and exploit conventional ideas about female behavior. One of the main characters in Telex From Cuba , her 2008 debut, is a burlesque dancer named Rachel K (her name is taken from a real historical figure, though of course Kushner is winking in the mirror), whose very literal performance of femininity attracts some of the most powerful men in prerevolutionary Cuba . Her evident goal is to use these men to her own ends, but she winds up getting conscripted into their service instead.

Such failures of self-liberation continue through Kushner’s next novel, 2013’s The Flamethrowers , which was a breakout for her. Its protagonist, Reno, is a biker and an emerging artist who covets the independence and aura of influence that seem to come so easily to the men in both the art world and the 1970s Italian radical underground , of which she briefly becomes a part. Unlike Rachel K, Reno’s not a seductress. She’s not interested in seducing the reader, either. What Reno offers in place of charm is commentary so wryly smart and dispassionate that, especially in contrast with the male blowhards she repeatedly encounters, she seems powerful. But over the course of the novel, Kushner builds a skidding sense of perilousness, a feeling that no one, Reno included, is in charge or exempt from the mounting chaos. In the end, as Reno and the reader may have sensed all along, her detachment is just another performance , a cool-girl put-on not so different from Rachel K’s burlesque.

Read: Great sex in the time of war

The irony that the aloof-observer stance turns into yet another trap is not lost on either Kushner or her narrators. Romy, the protagonist of The Mars Room (2018), takes especially bleak stock of her plight, and for good reason. She’s serving two life sentences after killing a stalker who latched on to her at the Market Street strip club where she worked and began menacing her and her child in their private life. For Romy, her flat narration (counterposed with excerpts from the Unabomber’s diary and chapters voiced by a sex-obsessed crooked cop) is a way of walling herself off, creating the mental freedom to imagine escape. Whether flight is a real act of hope, though, remains deliberately ambiguous. It may be an attempt at suicide.

Again and again, Kushner scrambles conventional ideas about gender, skewering male bravado while also subverting familiar ideas of femininity. Who and what counts as weak, she wants to know, and why? Stubborn stereotype portrays women as prey to emotion, unable to rein themselves in, yet in book after book, her protagonists’ relentless restraint has stood in stark contrast to the egotistical, violent impulsiveness of the men around them . In Creation Lake , Kushner complicates this dynamic. Her protagonist, Sadie Smith, is another dispassionate observer, but one who appears to have far more independence and agency than her predecessors. She’s a lone wolf, a private intelligence agent who has shucked off her home, her past, and even her name: “Sadie Smith” is an alias.

At the novel’s start, she’s en route to the Guyenne, a rural region in southwestern France, where she’s been hired to spy on Pascal Balmy, the leader of Le Moulin, a group of environmental radicals intent on sabotaging Big Agriculture. She has no idea who’s paying her or what their larger agenda might be, and yet she’s convinced that she’s playing her assigned part to perfection. Indeed, she has such faith in her toughness, acuity, and ability to dupe men that she considers herself all but invincible. Her vigilant predecessors Romy and Reno were much warier and wiser than Sadie, who loves bragging that any innocence she displays is just a pose.

Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it

Creation Lake is not a conventional spy novel, but, unlike Kushner’s shaggy earlier books, it often feels as tight as a thriller. Sadie’s “secret bosses” have sent her to the Guyenne not just to embed herself in Pascal’s group, but to undermine it. Gradually, readers understand that her assignment has a deadlier side—a realization that Sadie either suppresses or notices less quickly than she should, perhaps the most glaring giveaway that she’s not quite the clever spy she thinks. She’s sloppy, distractible, as drunk on her perception of her own power as any engine-revving “king of the road,” to use her derisive phrase for the swellheaded bikers among whom she first went undercover.

Sadie is also more impressionable—and less happy—than she’s ready to admit, which generates psychological ferment beneath the surface espionage plot. Creation Lake gets some of its suspense from its action, but Kushner mainly builds tension inside her narrator’s head. Sadie spends much of the novel reading Pascal’s correspondence with Bruno Lacombe, an aging philosopher whose opposition to modern civilization inspired Le Moulin at its founding. Living in a cave now, he reveres the collaborative and artistic Neanderthals, “who huddled modestly and dreamed expansively.” Initially, she dismisses Bruno’s ideas as crackpot, but they come to preoccupy her. For years, she’s told herself that she was content to carry out small parts of big, murky plans, duly suppressing her curiosity. Bruno’s emails urge her to take a broader, more inquisitive view: of humanity, of history, of alternative ways she could live. But once Sadie starts asking questions, things inside her start falling apart.

Not least, she starts questioning masculinity—or, rather, her ideas about it, which have dictated her espionage strategies and what she considers her success in the field. In the presence of others, Sadie the operative plays up her feminine sexual allure and compliance, but Sadie the narrator treats readers to a distinctly macho version of swagger. More than once, she notes that her breast augmentation is a calculated professional asset; she seems convinced that the same is true of her rootlessness and emotional disengagement. A hard drinker and frat-boy-style slob, she often seems to be trying to outman the men around her in her own mind, even as she must submit to them in reality.

Perhaps Sadie’s most traditionally masculine quality is her terror of weakness. But over the course of Creation Lake , as Sadie’s mission within Le Moulin gets riskier, she sees that her constant projection of control is alienating her from her desires, hollowing out her vaunted autonomy, making her easy to manipulate. She’s shattered—doubly so, because falling apart emotionally shocks her. It’s a fate Kushner withheld from her previous, more guarded protagonists. By letting tough-guy Sadie break down, she writes a radical conversion that is also a bold authorial leap: Kushner lets herself ask, for the first time in her career, what happens to a woman unmoored by masculine and feminine categorizing.

Putting Sadie under such intense pressure changes Creation Lake ’s nature as a story. Once Sadie starts cracking, the novel doesn’t become digressive and loose like its predecessors, but it certainly stops feeling like a thriller. After many chapters that seemed to build to a dramatic act of sabotage, the story shifts register, heading into a very different, more emotional denouement. Relinquishing some swagger, Kushner opens up in her writing to new levels of feeling and possibilities for change.

In the process, she shakes up gender stereotypes in new ways. Creation Lake asks what sources of strength might be found in the kind of vulnerability, physical and emotional, that is associated with femininity. Sadie has prided herself on her supremely instrumental view of sex; she’d never get hysterical, never get too attached or lose her reason over a man. Although the strategic romance she’s begun with Lucien, a friend of Pascal’s, physically disgusts her, she boasts about not letting that get in her way. Kushner leans into the irony here: The reader sees well before Sadie does that her employers are exploiting precisely this blind willingness to obey them at real emotional cost to herself.

For all that she wants to treat her body as a professional resource, she can’t do it. Kushner’s exploration of sex as a catalyst for Sadie’s emotions breaking free is fascinating. Repelled by Lucien, she risks her job by beginning an affair with a partnered member of Le Moulin that starts out enjoyable but leaves her feeling abject; in its aftermath, Sadie begins nursing bigger doubts about her life. This drama could seem retrograde, but coming from Kushner, a restored connection between female body and mind feels less traditional than transformative.

Read: The book that teaches us to live with our fears

Sex isn’t Sadie’s only route to a softer self. She also follows a more intellectual path to which she is led by Bruno, the cave-dwelling philosopher. Although Bruno has retreated from contemporary society, his reflections are what get Sadie to reconsider her pride in her nomadic self-sufficiency. She has long bridled at the notion that women should do—and enjoy—domestic work, and is emphatic that she will never have a baby. But she’s swayed by Bruno’s devotion to the painted caves and their former inhabitants, and by her own images of Bruno as a father, after she learns that he has grown children. Indeed, she develops a sort of daughterly love for Bruno.

By the end of the novel, his meditations bring out the feelings that she has most wanted to suppress: homesickness, nostalgia, loneliness. After reading an email in which Bruno describes his sense of being existentially lost, she says aloud, “I feel that way too.” The sound of her voice “let something into the room,” Sadie goes on, “some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above.” What Sadie sees is herself crying alone in bed, an image more suited to a teen movie than a Kushner novel. Yet this moment is no performance. In the grip of uncontrollable emotion, Sadie recognizes both her vulnerability and her desire to drastically change her life.

For Kushner, too, lowering the barricades against the clichés of femininity has an effect at once jarring and liberating. Her earlier novels veer away from culminating clarity, their explosive yet enigmatic endings reminding readers that her characters are too trapped and disempowered to change in the ways they want to. In Creation Lake , Sadie’s transfigured consciousness is a kind of resolution that might be mistaken for a sentimental promise of sunniness ahead—except that Kushner gives her narrator a new, daunting challenge. At the novel’s close, Sadie has already started experimenting with a life in which she engages fully rather than contorting herself to perform roles that others expect. She’s now armed with an agenda of her own, one that promises to turn her into a woman who couldn’t care less about what anyone thinks woman means. Creation Lake ’s radicals aren’t likely to upend society, but Sadie’s swerve suggests that Kushner is ready for big change.

This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve.”

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The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player

Keeping a poker face had never struck me as much of a feat—until I had to keep one. My pulse quickened, my cheeks felt flushed, and my eyes were desperate to dart and size up the pot. What had been a mediocre hand was transformed, after the flop came down, into something spectacular: every card from seven to jack—a straight. All that remained was to play it cool and build up my cash prize. The bets started small, and then grew. The next two cards looked innocuous enough. My beautiful straight was intact, and the pot had expanded rather nicely.

Truthfully, I’ve never been much of a gambling man. My previous experience was limited to a few college poker nights during which my friends would hastily explain the difference between a straight and a full house and then rake in my charitable contributions to their respective beer funds. You could safely call me risk-averse. In fact, the only really reckless financial bet I can recall making was deciding to become a professional journalist.

Nate Silver, America’s most famous elections prognosticator, got me to cut loose. His new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” (Penguin), uses poker as a model for responding to uncertainty. Having drawn the lot of reviewing it, I realized that I couldn’t do it justice without learning more about poker—specifically Texas hold ’em. “On the Edge,” like his previous book, “The Signal and the Noise,” is a hefty set of meditations on probabilistic thinking, only this time the author is taking in broader horizons. Silver left FiveThirtyEight, the statistics-based news site that he founded and sold to Disney, but is still in the business of predicting election results. Yet his first love is poker—he once played it professionally—and “On the Edge” sees him return to that passion.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

“I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention,” Silver writes in the new book, a treatise that extends the lessons of poker and modern gambling to arenas like artificial intelligence and ethics. He has spent time interviewing such notables as William MacAskill, the philosopher-evangelist of effective altruism; Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced cryptocurrency billionaire; and Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI. The people changing the world are doing it by thinking like poker players, Silver contends. If we want to keep up, we’ll have to learn the mind-set of the successful gambler.

My chronic risk aversion aside, I figured I had the right foundations to do so. Chess had always been my game of choice; I squandered many afternoons of my adolescence playing, move by move, through Alexander Alekhine’s best games and “Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual.” My college years contained less chess, but lots of problem sets in math, economics, and statistics—many of them involving probability theory. I graduated knowing my martingales from my Markov chains. Among my first assignments as a journalist was to build forecast models for British and French elections. If I applied myself to poker, I thought, I’d probably be decent: I could multiply fractions fast enough in my head to calculate the probability of, say, drawing a flush on the river. (I was also picking up the lingo.)

After giving myself a crash course, I decided that I was ready for some real action. I set up a family game, recruiting my wife and my teen-age brother. That may have been my first mistake. Somehow, I’d forgotten that my wife had once been a foreign-exchange trader, and I later learned that my brother, fresh from a summer camp for academically talented students (a.k.a. nerd camp), had spent the season card-sharking his camp mates. I’d also forgotten to get poker chips; we played with pie weights for puny stakes. Things started badly. Baby brother, barely old enough to hold a driver’s license, bluffed me out of a decent hand, and then he smugly called my audacious revenge bluff. (Brat summer, indeed.) Finally, my straight arrived, a chance at redemption. In a spousal showdown, I confidently displayed my hand—only to find that my wife had a straight of her own, and that hers ranked higher. My once proud pile of pie weights was reduced to a pittance.

Probability and gambling have always been intimately intertwined. The mathematics of probability can be traced to a well-known stumper about how best to divide a pot, which a seventeenth-century gambling enthusiast posed to two leading mathematical luminaries of the time, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. Their inquiry would spawn the powerful idea of “expected value”—the average outcome of an uncertain event, calculated by multiplying the outcome in every possible state of the world by the chance of it happening. How powerful? The once alien notion that humans could be precise about uncertainty gave rise to the discipline of statistics. A model in which people were treated as rational actors trying to maximize the expected value of their utility became the cornerstone of modern economics. And systems based on feeding statistical prediction models with gargantuan helpings of data and computing power have already started to roil this century.

Silver’s book falls into a long tradition of using games to model real-world decisions. John von Neumann, whom some consider the greatest genius of the twentieth century, was working at the Manhattan Project when he published, together with his frequent collaborator Oskar Morgenstern, a book titled “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” (1944). The work, which included a detailed chapter on “Poker and Bluffing,” essentially gave birth to game theory, a field that, neatly enough, would provide the basis for contemporary doctrines of nuclear deterrence. Decades before artificial neural networks could generate personalized poems and wacky images, computer scientists were using them to build backgammon programs.

What Silver offers is a tour of what he calls “The River”—the community of people (often based in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Las Vegas) who think about the world in terms of expected value and comfortably use words like “Bayesian prior”—and its face-off with “The Village,” basically the political and media establishments. The River’s name is an homage to the river card, the fifth and final card revealed in a game of Texas hold ’em. Where the Village gets its name is left unexplained, though it’s presumably meant to convey a sense of conformity. The dichotomy is not a particularly illuminating one, but this detracts little from the stimulation of each individual subject. Silver’s meandering itinerary through the River and all its oxbows makes for an enjoyable ride.

He begins with the world of gambling, where being “degen,” or degenerate, is something of a badge of honor. My homemade humbling helped me grasp the grand scale of Silver’s own poker achievements. At one point, he was in the top three hundred of the Global Poker Index rankings; he has also won eight hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars in high-profile tournaments (and presumably further significant sums in private games). It’s understandable that he sees poker as a model for the game of life. Poker calls for properly calibrating risk in the face of very imperfect information—and recalibrating it as you gain more information about your companions. In that respect, it is a decidedly human undertaking.

Even so, the computer—having already established its dominance in other classic games (chess, Go, StarCraft II)—has come to surpass the best human players in poker. Just as chess grand masters rehearse their opening lines with superstrong programs, the best poker players, Silver reports, now spend hundreds of hours honing their skills with computer-based “solvers.” Unlike chess—in which the solution is deterministic and there’s always a best move—the solution to poker is stochastic and requires you to play identical hands differently, because once you’re predictable you’re beatable.

In recent years, the game has been swept up by what’s known as the “game-theory optimal,” or G.T.O., approach. It has been accepted that the best way to play—to maximize expected value—is to randomize between calling, folding, and raising according to a computer-calculated list of probabilities, which serious players memorize. As for randomizing? “The player wasn’t just staring out into space—she was probably looking at the tournament clock,” Silver writes about one G.T.O. adept. “She could randomize by taking an aggressive action if the last digit was an odd number or a passive action if it was even.”

When you read about the lengths to which poker sharks, shrewd sports bettors, and savvy slot-machine players (they do exist) must go in order to scrape together a narrow edge—to get “positive expected value,” or “+EV,” against the house or their fellow-gamblers—you realize what a slog big-time gambling actually is. Even if you’re exceptionally talented, you will find it hard to make serious money, and you may have to spend seventy or eighty hours a week to achieve it. There are reasons that the house always wins: identifying a real edge is hard to do, that edge tends to be thin (as in less than one per cent thin), and the house is constantly trying to shove you off the precipice. Casinos will politely but firmly ask you to leave if they notice you counting cards. The major sports-betting sites will sharply curtail your wagering privileges once they figure out that you are playing to win. Big edges are fleeting, and usually exist only for gigantic events like the Super Bowl, or Presidential elections, in which the sheer volume of dumb money resists correction by the sharks.

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So Silver is justifiably proud that, in 2016, his statistical model gave Donald Trump a twenty-nine-per-cent chance of winning, when the betting markets put his odds at seventeen per cent. His results made it rational to bet on a Trump victory: assuming that Silver’s model was accurate, the expected value of the bet was high. Because the markets were giving odds of roughly five to one, if you risked a hundred dollars betting that Trump would win, and he did, you’d earn five hundred dollars of profit. The value of a twenty-nine-per-cent chance of getting five hundred dollars outweighed the seventy-one-per-cent chance of losing a hundred. The expected value of your bet was a seventy-four-dollar gain on what you’d wagered. How often would you find such a sizable edge? By Silver’s calculations, even an outstanding poker player, one in the top two hundred in the tournament play, has even odds of finishing in the red in any given year.

As an experiment for the book, Silver, a basketball fanatic who developed his highly regarded statistical model for player performance, took up betting on N.B.A. games. Despite being limited by many major sports books, he managed to place $1.8 million in bets a year. His profit: $5,242, a return of about one-third of a percentage point. That wasn’t for lack of trying. “Sports betting took more mental bandwidth than I expected, even when I wasn’t on the clock,” Silver writes. “Checking betting lines was often the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did before going to bed.”

The effort to improve one’s rationality as a gambler easily approaches the irrational. Even my own study of poker became moderately obsessive. I watched hours of poker-strategy videos and long montages of televised poker tournaments with commentary; I went through the lecture notes of a class taught at M.I.T. called Poker Theory and Analytics. Learning about pot odds—it turns out that you can confidently meet an opponent’s call with positive expected value (that is, money-making on average) if your chance of winning is greater than the share of the pot you’d be contributing—made me understand where I’d erred. The concept of “fold equity” could help me decide how big my bluff ought to be. The concept of “blockers,” or cards one possesses that limit the winning combinations available to one’s opponent, further refined the rudimentary calculations I had been trying to make. I spent a few hours playing against a G.T.O. poker program and analyzing my play with a solver. All this because of losing forty ceramic balls and some of my dignity.

Silver acknowledges the paradox here. Although poker is an arena that prizes decision-making, most pros would, he writes, be better served financially doing something else for a living. Clearly, its rewards aren’t fully reflected in the +EV models. The dopamine rush that follows a successful bet will trump the slow-burning satisfaction of contributing to your Roth I.R.A. The first time Silver played a poker game with two-hundred-dollar stakes, he recalls, “I literally felt like I was on the sort of narcotics that I used to do a lot of in my twenties.” Our understanding of the mathematics of gambling has never been greater, but no one captured the psychology of gambling quite like the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. Alexander Pushkin’s short story “The Queen of Spades” tells of a Russian officer who is obsessed with gambling but able to contain himself until he hears about an unbeatable card trick. He scares an old woman to death in order to learn it, but she has the last laugh: the officer ends his career in an asylum. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was himself a roulette addict. (“I pawned both my ring and my winter coat and I lost everything,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, begging her for fifty francs to settle his hotel bill.) His novella “The Gambler,” one of the finest studies of the compulsion to gamble, was written in less than thirty days to pay off his own debts. He had wagered a prominent publisher to whom he owed money that he would complete a novel and an edition of writings by a specific date, or else he would surrender the rights to all his works—past and future. He finished the manuscript with only hours to spare.

What about the games of chance that Silicon Valley venture capitalists play when they stake millions of dollars on tech startups that have a roughly one-in-ten chance of making it? Success comes when the returns on a breakthrough firm more than make up for their losses elsewhere, so venture capitalists have to be thoughtful about their bet sizes. Being good at this game is different from being good at founding a company, Silver argues. He sees it as the difference between the fox, who, proverbially, knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one big thing. The venture capitalist is a fox: risk-tolerant, probabilistic, adaptable, and comfortable with complexity. The founder in whom the V.C. invests is a hedgehog: risk-ignorant, stubborn, drawn to order. V.C.s, spreading their bets, will acquaint themselves with multiple markets and try to adjust their exposure on the basis of the latest information. Founders, committed to their company, will persevere through setbacks and fight for their singular vision. The genius of Silicon Valley, Silver maintains, is in creating a symbiotic relationship between the two: the founders get to take their shots, and the venture capitalists get their positive expected value in returns.

In Silver’s account, large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude are like poker players, too. The job of a large language model is to maximize the chance that the next word it outputs makes sense given its previous output and the user’s query. (For the latest version of ChatGPT, this has involved training on a vast Internet corpus and fine-tuning a trillion or so parameters.) The linguist Noam Chomsky described these models as “a kind of super-autocomplete,” and, though he meant it dismissively, it’s a fair description of the mechanics. Super-autocomplete can do more than just solve high-school homework problems. It has already revolutionized computer programming, in which co-piloting with A.I. is now routine, and you can imagine lots of white-collar tasks getting more efficient with its use—up to the point where they are automated away.

Silver finds a cautionary tech-industry parable in Sam Bankman-Fried, who granted him several interviews after FTX, his cryptocurrency exchange, went bust but before he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Although Silver thinks the stodgy Village types are too risk-averse, Bankman-Fried shows what happens when you’re a compulsive gambler without limits. He had “hacked the VC algorithm and catered to some of its worst biases,” Silver writes. Because Bankman-Fried looked the part, had the right pedigree, and had placed himself in the right networks, nobody cared to examine the financial details of FTX too closely. Silver’s take on his rise amounts to a mini-book within the book, and an enlightening one.

Still, Silver might have spent more time exploring domains where expected-value thinking may be even more consequential. One involves the government’s role in funding and fostering scientific innovation, which requires balancing the reality of repeated failure with the huge potential of success. It could do with a serious reboot. That probably means taking more chances rather than rewarding scientists for their ability to fill out labyrinthine grant applications and channelling money toward the gerontocrat who coasts on a discovery made decades ago while the next generation languishes unfunded.

Another domain that Silver scants is Wall Street. Hedge funds are named for their ability to mitigate risk; quantitative-trading firms hired hundreds of math and physics Ph.D.s to craft ultrasophisticated probability models. The late Jim Simons, a mathematician who got his start breaking codes for the N.S.A., founded a “quant” hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies that was essentially a money-printing machine for decades—a forty-per-cent return per year on average. And what gambler alive could hold a candle to George Soros, who so heavily shorted the British pound, in 1992, that he “broke the Bank of England,” forcing a devaluation while he netted at least a billion pounds?

If the concept of expected value can be applied to the task of earning billions, or of rivalling the cognitive function of a human being, can it also be fashioned into a system of ethics and social planning? Utilitarianism—which was formulated around two centuries ago, and holds that what is morally right can be determined by whatever maximizes the greatest good (or utility)—is a natural fit. It’s little surprise that many of the people Silver terms Riverians—Will MacAskill chief among them—embrace a kind of ultra-utilitarianism that seeks to apply rigorous cost-benefit analysis on the scale of all of human society, not just today but centuries into the future. These “longtermist” expected-value calculations can lead you to unexpected places: reducing the probability of human extinction, whether by nuclear war, unchecked climate change, or rogue A.I., becomes all-important. When you consider the sum total of possible human life in the future, this existential peril—cutely called x-risk, and sometimes p(doom)—swamps the other, happier states of the world, implying that you should do everything you can to avoid it. Surveying the field, Silver finds that “the domain experts give a trimmed mean forecast of an 8.8 percent chance of p(doom) from AI—defined in this case as all but five thousand humans ceasing to exist by 2100.” But this isn’t something he’s taking bets on. “I think AI x-risk is a question on which we ought to have a lot of epistemic humility. It’s not as simple as a poker hand.”

I have my doubts, too. It’s absurd to think that you can realistically model the sum total of human flourishing in all the possible states of the world a century hence. Our statistical tools can be powerful predictors when it comes to the here and now—the next best action to take in a poker match, the likeliest next word in a line of code, the next best trade to make, the likeliest location of the next amino acid in a protein sequence. But the magnitude of uncertainty when we’re projecting far into the past or far into the future is, well, incalculable. There is a reason that religion specializes in matters of cosmogony and eschatology. The Abrahamic faiths conceive of God as an omniscient creator and generally abjure gambling as a result; one of the first laws passed by the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony banned the possession of cards, dice, or gaming tables. Hinduism is more accommodating: the events of the Mahabharata are set off when the eldest Pandava brother loses his kingdom to his cousin in a rigged gambling match, eventually triggering a colossal civil war. Each of the four ages in Hindu cosmology, in fact, is thought to be named for a throw of the dice.

The metaphysical debates will rage on, but the immediate material benefits of the study of chance remain inarguable. After concluding my laptop-based training, I reconvened the family match—this time with real chips. I called a bluff of my brother’s, having diagnosed him as playing too loosely, and confiscated his chips with some satisfaction. My wife and I found ourselves battling for a big pot yet again. My bets were just large enough to keep the action going; my chance of winning didn’t just feel vaguely right—it felt like positive expected value. It all came down to the river. Against her respectable two pairs, I had made both a flush and a straight. I took down the pot and took back my dignity. It was a fitting moment, I decided, to retire from my gambling career. For all that I’d learned about pot odds and fold equity, I recognized the wisdom in the old adage: quit while you’re ahead. ♦

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