“There have always been Americans driven to ruin by gambling. But never have so many been driven to ruin so easily, and never has government done so much to enable them to gamble.” So writes Jonathan D. Cohen in Losing Big, an incisive and efficiently written account of the slow rise and sudden ubiquity of legal sports gambling in America.
Sports betting spilled into America’s consciousness in 2018, when the Supreme Court, in Murphy v. NCAA, struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. PASPA, though passed by large majorities in Congress, was constitutionally preposterous—it banned sports betting throughout the country, except where it didn’t: chiefly Nevada and a few states’ “sports lotteries.”
