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On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2013, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign staff will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”

The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.) In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”

It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration. During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.

Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.” The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.

I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.

But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth. Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.

Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”) At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.

The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.

Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024. It’s now offering bargain-basement pricing—digital subscriptions for less than fifty cents a week—but its subscriber base is under three million.

“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”

Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)

Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa. These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.

The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”

Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”

Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”

At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”

Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.” My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper. “Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦

In June, 1994, I took the F train out to Coney Island to root for my friend Phil, who was skating, solo, in the Gay Games. From the bleachers of the Abe Stark Arena, our college friends cheered wildly as Phil, who was a novice, performed a few simple spins. But the most startling event was the couples competition, which featured a pair of male skaters, dressed in camouflage, with tape over their mouths in an “X”—a direct protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The couple who followed them—two shirtless men, around the same height, alternately lifting each other up and rolling over each other with playful, affectionate aggression—struck me as equally political, suggesting not just what was banned but what was possible. It was like watching two trees dance.

In the short documentary “Icebreakers,” Jocelyn Glatzer and Marlo Poras explore the legacy of the Gay Games, nearly half a century after the institution was founded, in 1982, as an all-embracing extension of—and also a challenge to—the Olympics. Their film is built around a handful of key figures, including the renowned coach Wade Corbett (who trained Phil, back in 1994) and the lesbian skater Laura Moore, a cheerful firecracker who began her career after nearly twenty years in the closet. She sums up ice skating, crisply, as “a very gay sport” and “a very homophobic sport.”

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Glatzer and Poras dramatize that tension through interviews with Joel Dear and Christian Erwin, who teamed up for the couples competition at the 2018 Gay Games, in Paris, and Mark Stanford, a Black gay skater with H.I.V. Many of the obstacles these athletes face are institutional. Russia, where even discussing L.G.B.T.Q.+ identity is illegal, dominates Olympic-level skating; few pros are “out,” for fear of hurting their marketability. And, as Corbett notes, traditional figure skating hinges on a vision of heterosexual romance that’s both erotic and formulaic: a glittery princess tossed in the air, spun by a powerful man. This model gets into the head of gay competitors, too. After years of skating with a female partner, Dear felt “uneasy” skating with a man. When Erwin told his mother of his plan, she said, “Isn’t that a family show?”

There have been encouraging developments since “Icebreakers” was shot: the U.K., following the lead of Finland and Canada, has agreed to let same-sex couples compete on a national level. The success of “Heated Rivalry,” a Canadian TV series about closeted hockey players, has made these issues visceral (and hot) to a mainstream audience. But watching the film, with its dizzying montage of skaters—raw amateurs and sleek pros, swishy and butch, comedic and sincere, boldly solo and intimately paired—made me crave more than baby steps. Hearing Dear speak about his anxieties, then seeing him glide across the ice, tenderly, in tandem with Erwin, took me back to 1994, and to the sensation of witnessing something truly new: a liberation available to everyone, even those up in the bleachers.

Las Vegas is no longer the seat of the sportsbook gods. In most states, it’s now legal, and extremely popular, to place bets using apps or websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. From your couch, you can wager on everything from the results of snooker championships to the color of the Gatorade poured over the victorious coach after the Super Bowl. The N.F.L., along with the other major-league American sports associations, has officially partnered with sports-betting sites, and their alliance has proved so lucrative that other industries want in on the action; last month, the Golden Globes made a deal with Polymarket, a predictions-market platform, to encourage wagering (or “trading,” if you prefer) on the outcomes of its awards race. Betting, like cannabis and cabaret before it, has shed its reputation as a vice, and the nation has eagerly forgotten that sportsbooks exist to turn a profit. Even the addiction hotline 1-800-GAMBLER suddenly sounds like the number you’d dial to start gambling.

A new memoir by the retired bookmaker Art Manteris, “The Bookie: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode,” helps us to understand how we got here, and to glimpse the industry in its fledgling form. Manteris spent decades running sportsbooks in Vegas, presiding over such fabled dens of iniquity as Caesars Palace and the Hilton; the industry he left in 2021 bore little resemblance to the one he’d entered. That was thanks to the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which had restricted sports gambling largely to Nevada. Manteris had hoped that PASPA’s demise would wipe away “a hundred years’ worth of fierce opposition and moral outrage to sports betting.” But he concedes that the new regime has done more harm than good—by lowering the barriers to underage bettors, encouraging cheating among athletes, and making the industry vastly impersonal. Things were more manageable, he says, in his day, when he ran a good, clean shop.

One might have a hard time believing him, at first. Born in Pittsburgh, Manteris followed his Uncle Jack to Sin City in 1978 and never left. Vegas was small then; you could wave to Robert Goulet at a traffic light or chat up Tony Curtis at the grocery store. The city was well in the palm of organized crime, and Manteris was soon surrounded by the kinds of characters who were later portrayed, under aliases, in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” “The Bookie” is so rich in Franks (Mastroianni, Regina, Fertitta, Rosenthal), Johnnys (Avello, Tocco), Tonys (Taeubel, Spilotro), and Jimmys (McHugh, Newman, Vaccaro) that I lost track of who was mobbed up, who was down-and-out, and who was genuinely having a good time. Skimming was endemic among bookmakers, enforcement was brutal, and several of Manteris’s early acquaintances met violent ends. He dispenses with these stories quickly: “Tony Spilotro was beaten to death in a cornfield in Illinois that summer.”

Bookmaking in those days was an artisanal craft, practiced by hand on elaborate legal-paper charts. Horse-race results came in on ticker tape. Setting the odds for a game was more a matter of delicate intuition than wonkish number crunching. By the end of the book, the mechanics of odds-making were still as arcane to me as Ptolemaic tax codes, but Manteris found that he was a statistical savant. “Odds, point spreads, and probabilities constantly floated around inside my brain,” he writes, tapping into the mystical appeal of risk management. “Numbers embedded themselves into my consciousness . . . maddening, wonderful, and addictive.”

Beating the odds, too, required grit and determination. Reliable information about injuries, coaching decisions, and the like was hard to come by, so bettors went to absurd lengths to gain an edge on the books. One of them hired a private eye to tail a finicky N.B.A. referee for an entire season just to know in advance which games he’d be working. The same gambler had an inside line to the Detroit Pistons’ timekeeper, who would manipulate the length of the game to eke out some extra points.

It helped to have technology on your side, too, no matter how primitive. Manteris’s nemesis, Billy Walters, one of the winningest sports bettors of all time, belonged to a syndicate called the Computer Group, which must’ve sounded fearsomely futuristic in the eighties. Walters and his crew were armed with a predictive algorithm developed by a math whiz whose day job was developing nuclear-submarine tech. Picks in hand, they would spread their gospel through a network of beepers or earpieces; his disciples, or runners, crowded sportsbooks around town and placed bets on his behalf totalling millions of dollars a week. They sometimes set up smoke screens so that the odds moved in the wrong direction, sending his competitors off course. Walters’s wagers were so successful that one casino hired a pair of mathematicians to deconstruct them.

To guard against runners and other forms of malfeasance, Manteris maintained a cutting-edge surveillance system. He’s still proud of the panopticon he helped develop at the Hilton SuperBook (home of the SuperContest), which boasted “upward of eight hundred VCRs” and a console manned by three or four people, “maneuvering the hundreds of cameras stationed throughout the casino, plus the forty pointed at and monitoring the sportsbook.” While the bettors were busy screaming at televisions or enjoying a comped round of Jameson, he could watch the beepers beeping and the symphony of cash changing hands—this if he wasn’t “returning from a light workout and rubdown at the Hilton Health Club on the third floor.” Surveillance cameras notwithstanding, Manteris got quite an eyeful over the years. He witnessed the “360 degrees of porn” wallpapering the Stardust boardroom; Rodney Dangerfield at a boxing match, snorting coke from a spoon during the national anthem; and early U.F.C. fights that convinced him the sport was “too brutal to go mainstream.” Still, he writes, “Through it all I loved my profession.”

It does seem that he approached his work with a measure of solicitude unusual in his field. Even so, “The Bookie” gives the impression that Vegas, even at its most corporate and aboveboard, runs on animosity and despair. (It must be said that plenty of other industries do, too.) The memoir shows little interest in the gambler’s psychology or the keening dramas of the floor. Manteris’s job, as he saw it, was “to create an entertainment experience to keep the ‘preferred customers’ coming back.” Those customers were the sort who could drop six or seven figures on a bet and still feel, after they’d lost, that they’d had “an entertainment experience.” Manteris allows that he “saw loved ones hurt by overindulgence,” and his own brother was consumed by a betting addiction, but there’s no flop sweat in his sportsbooks as he describes them—no one is gambling away the kids’ college funds just to feel alive. When he writes that he “always encouraged parlays”—bets that combine multiple wagers, becoming increasingly unwinnable every step of the way—because “the odds against them were so high,” we are not meant to dwell on the fact that he urged his customers toward suckerdom. We should assume they wanted to be pushed.

Billy Walters, the author of another recent insider’s account, “Gambler,” didn’t need any pushing. As a self-described “former degenerate gambler,” he never met a massive bet that he wasn’t willing to take—provided, of course, that he could convince himself the odds were on his side. Walters once wagered on which direction a robin would fly when it departed a phone line it was sitting on; as a young man, he made a bet on his own life expectancy. (The over-under was thirty-five, and he won.) Casinos would seem to depend on men like him. When Manteris writes, then, that “the rich history of Las Vegas is not written by the likes of Billy Walters,” it’s easy to object, not least because “Gambler” includes a rich history of Las Vegas. Intriguingly, it mentions Manteris not once.

Maybe that’s because Manteris was exactly the kind of bookie that Walters couldn’t stand: one who wasn’t interested in his business. Sports betting, for Walters, amounts to “psychological warfare between bettor and bookmaker—cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The posted line is just a way to trigger the game.” The best bookies relish that fight, no matter how dirty it may become or what sort of arms race it compels. He laments “the unwritten code of casino misconduct: beat us, and we’ll ban you.” When, in 1997, the Nevada Gaming Control Board tightened its regulations against “messenger” betting—professional networks of runners like those that Walters relied on—he felt that it was the work of “shortsighted sportsbook operators who were trying to put pro handicappers like me out of business.”

Walters had a hardscrabble upbringing in Munfordville, Kentucky. He moved to Louisville, where, by age thirty, he’d had three marriages, three kids, and a vasectomy, which he paid for with a set of used golf clubs. Though he’d found employment as a foundry worker, a custodian at a tobacco factory, and a car salesman, his penchant for drink and dice kept him in the red. In 1982, after state police broke up his illegal bookmaking operation, he moved to Vegas, where he crossed paths with the same sordid mobsters and two-bit hustlers that Manteris did. (Walters, too, shed nary a tear when Spilotro’s body turned up in that cornfield.)

Linking up with the Computer Group taught Walters that, if he stayed sober and disciplined, he could turn the boom-and-bust cycle of his addiction into a profession. At this point, he ceased to resemble the recreational gambler as we know him. An ordinary bettor may be guided by team loyalty, intuition, or emotion—Walters was governed by dispassionate information. An ordinary bettor might lay down money just to increase the pleasure of watching a big game—Walters was betting so much, so frequently, that spectatorship only reminded him of potential insolvency.

He didn’t mind: losing, according to an old adage he cites, is the second-greatest thrill in gambling. Plus, Walters had defanged chance by acquiring something close to sports omniscience. He spent his days immersed in the minutiae of games. A deal with cleaning crews at McCarran International allowed him to collect the crumpled newspapers that passengers left on airplanes, granting him access to sports pages from around the world. These, along with handicapping newsletters like GoldSheet and his intelligence from the Computer Group, gave him a competitive edge on bookies. Considering “S-factors (special situations), W-factors (weather), and E-factors (emotional),” he made careful calculations for home-field advantages, the amount of rest a team had had, the number of days they’d been on the road, the number of time zones they’d changed, dramatic shifts in climate or temperature, and “motivational factors such as revenge.” More than a gambler, he was a kind of athletic actuary.

Were his efforts strictly on the up and up? Manteris has his doubts: “Until the day I die,” he writes, “I will probably question how Walters had important player injury information first.” Bookies weren’t the only ones who wondered. The Computer Group was twice raided by the F.B.I., though agents never turned up enough evidence to make a winning case. In 1992, a federal jury acquitted Walters and his associates of charges of conspiracy and the illegal transmission of wagering information. His next company, Sierra Sports Consulting, faced allegations of money laundering following a raid by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; a judge later dismissed the charges. On the advice of his lawyers, Walters moved his operation to Panama, where his office had “the look of a CIA operation,” with legions of employees placing bets from afar using “two-ton Vonage boxes” to disguise their locations. They could bring in millions of dollars on one football game alone.

You won’t be shocked to learn that Walters wound up behind bars, though it was a more legitimatized form of gambling—the stock market—that ultimately did him in. In 2017, having curiously avoided losses on his shares of Dean Foods stock, he was federally convicted of insider trading; President Trump commuted his five-year prison sentence in 2021.

“Gambler,” thus, has an air of reputation management to it. Walters maintains his innocence, presenting himself as a man with no secrets left to hide; he even includes a raft of “charts and numbers that [he’s] never shared before” to help aspirant bettors partake of his expertise. Where Manteris is leery of the era of DraftKings, Walters believes that PASPA’s fall has fuelled job creation, generated tax revenue, and minimized the criminal element in sports gambling. Maybe it’s telling that the bookie prefers more regulation, whereas the gambler enjoys playing fast and loose; clearly, Walters’s brand of widespread “psychological warfare” is best practiced with minimal government oversight. Both memoirs prepare the lay gambler for a world of gruelling, bruising defeats and unglamorous back-of-the-envelope calculus. I’ve seldom met a vice I don’t like—and yet these stories incline me to stay away from the sportsbook, be it onscreen or on the Strip. It’s not just that the house always wins. It’s that I can imagine sharing in Walters’s quest for perfect prediction, his desire to tame uncertainty, and I fear where that obsession might lead. If I started wagering on Polymarket’s natural-disaster odds, for instance, would I develop a deeper interest in geology, or the megalomaniacal desire to cause an earthquake? The latter, of course. You can bet on it. ♦

In February, a pop-up science column, Annals of Inquiry, is appearing in place of Kyle Chayka’s column, Infinite Scroll. Chayka will return in March.

Jane Goodall, the late primatologist, was known for her imitations of chimpanzee greetings. When she met with Prince Harry, in 2019, she approached him slowly, making panting noises through circular lips. She prompted him to pat her lightly on the head, then reached up for an embrace, making soft hooting sounds. During her career, Goodall observed chimps engaging in more than a thousand such greetings. They sometimes touched their lips together, breathed into one another’s open mouths, or stood on two legs and hugged.

Greetings are found across the animal kingdom. Dogs sniff each other’s rears, African elephants swing their trunks, and songbirds peck at one another’s feathers. Orcas face off in rows before rushing into a sort of whale mosh pit, in which they slap tails, squeak, and whistle. Greeting behaviors are universal enough that they are thought to be ancient, emerging before primate groups evolved. When a spectral bat wraps its wings around another bat in what looks like a hug, it seems to be communicating something that we’re familiar with.

Goodbyes, on the other hand, were long understood as a behavior that only humans perform. In 2013, Goodall watched as a chimpanzee named Wounda, who had almost died at the hands of poachers, was released to a Congolese animal sanctuary. Before Wounda walked into the trees, she hugged Goodall for several seconds. After Goodall died, this past October, some claimed that the video showed Wounda saying goodbye—but the Jane Goodall Institute had only described the embrace as a way of “giving thanks.” Indeed, a survey of researchers at ten wild-chimpanzee sites, co-conducted in 2016 by Lucy Baehren, a Cambridge student, documented numerous chimp greetings but nothing that could be construed as a “leave-taking” behavior. “The idea that nonhuman animals say goodbye did not exist,” Susana Carvalho, a primatologist and a paleoanthropologist at Oxford who became Baehren’s supervisor, told me.

The mystery of the missing farewells inspired many theories. It led scholars to think that goodbyes must have evolved separately from greetings, and more recently. The study of leave-taking was assumed to be more complicated than the study of greetings. Some researchers suggested that goodbyes required cognitive abilities that many nonhuman animals might lack, such as the capacity to imagine and plan for the future. “Why are you going to say goodbye if, upon return, no one remembers?” Carvalho said.

But a few years ago, after analyzing dozens of hours of footage of Chacma baboons, Carvalho and Baehren noticed a subtle body movement that happened only right before baboons ended a social interaction. They went on to publish what they called the first empirical evidence of a nonhuman animal’s goodbye. “The presence of leave taking in baboons could suggest a deep evolutionary history of the behaviour, present since the last common ancestors of humans and baboons,” they wrote. (Humans and baboons diverged more than twenty million years ago.) Goodall argued that greetings were proof of how similar humans were to other animals. Goodbyes gained the opposite meaning: they symbolized our differences from other creatures. Where would a new theory of leave-taking leave us?

The sociologist Erving Goffman thought that when two people encounter each another, they both try to manage the impression that they’re making, following a kind of script that ends with a goodbye. “The goodbye brings the encounter to an unambiguous close, sums up the consequence of the encounter for the relationship, and bolsters the relationship for the anticipated period of no contact,” he wrote in his 1971 book, “Relations in Public.” Goffman also described the special awkwardness of “failed departures”—for example, when two people say goodbye, only to start walking in the same direction.

In the seventies, a communication researcher at Purdue University, Mark Knapp, argued that behavioral research—Goffman’s work notwithstanding—had neglected goodbyes, even though they were a ritual that everyone participated in. “Unique and terribly human interpersonal forces are unleashed when people say goodbye to one another,” Knapp and his colleagues wrote. They tried to break down leave-taking beat by beat, noting, for example, that goodbyes could be preceded by “explosive hand contact”—slapping one’s hands on the surface of a table or on one’s thighs. The linguists Emanuel Schegloff and Harvey Sacks described verbal markers that indicated an interaction was wrapping up, for example, “well . . .” or “O.K. . . .” Others found that, for children, greetings may come more naturally than goodbyes. (Think of the kid who says goodbye to every stranger on a bus, or to every diner in a restaurant.) One hint that the goodbye requires effort, and carries real social weight, is that we even have a name for its absence: to leave a party or a bar without saying farewell is to make an “Irish exit.” Apparently, the same phenomenon is sometimes known in Germany as “the Polish goodbye” and in France as leaving “in the English way.”

After I started writing this piece, I became hyperaware of the goodbyes in my life. Visiting a restaurant in Brooklyn where I used to work, I remembered that it was customary to kiss regulars on both cheeks, as some Europeans do. I’m not sure who started the ritual, but it became rude to skip it, even when I was saying farewell to someone with a cold or trying to leave at the end of a tiring shift. My husband’s father, when talking on the phone, will interrupt you mid-sentence to say, “Well, I should probably let you go now,” and then hang up. It’s jarring, but charming, and no one holds a grudge. I’m told that acquaintances hint at an impending farewell by gesturing toward the future, saying something like “So what are you up to this weekend?”

Goodbyes can be staggering in their variety, and they can’t be predicted based on how a person says hello. In the early twentieth century, on the Andaman Islands, social anthropologists observed ritualistic greetings that involved wailing and weeping. Locals took their leave from friends and family in a much more demure way: a person would lift their hand toward their mouth and blow air on it gently. Many familiar ways of saying goodbye are actually quite recent. The “hello” handshake has been around for a long time, but there are few recorded instances of a “goodbye” handshake until the fifteenth century, according to Torbjörn Lundmark, the author of “Tales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals Around the World.” He notes that, as recently as the nineteen-seventies, handshakes weren’t a commonly recognizable way of saying farewell in China.

Lundmark also wrote that a farewell meal in China often includes long thin noodles, to symbolize the winding road ahead, but not cut-up pears, whose Chinese word sounds the same as the word for “separation.” A host may prolong the encounter, he added, by insisting that guests stay as long as possible—a ritual that “can reach a highly emotional pitch, ending up almost in an outright argument between host and visitor.” In England, leave-taking is similarly drawn out, the anthropologist Kate Fox writes in “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior.” Just when you think that the farewell has been accomplished, one of the hosts or guests might start the process all over again.

Primates were rumored to say goodbye at least a few times before Baehren and Carvalho’s study of Chacma baboons. In the 1982 book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes,” the primate behaviorist Frans de Waal wrote that chimps in a sign-language experiment learned to signal “bye-bye.” A gorilla in a zoo in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, is said to have kissed zookeepers before going inside her enclosure. But Baehren and Carvalho pointed out that these behaviors, which took place rarely and in captivity, might only be imitations of human communication.

Captive chimpanzees and bonobos do make gestures and share eye contact at the beginning and end of activities that they do together. A skeptic could consider these “exit behaviors” rather than leave-taking ones, Evelina Daniela Rodrigues, a researcher at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, told me. (A human exit behavior might include checking around your table at a café, to make sure you haven’t left anything behind.) It’s also difficult to distinguish between “goodbye” and “do you want to come with me?” Rodrigues said. Baboons will show their buttocks to others before walking away; the entire troop then departs. This could be a signal to the group, instead of a leave-taking behavior. In 2022, while reviewing videos of twenty-two wild chimpanzees in Guinea, Rodrigues found very few instances when chimps ended a social interaction with a behavior that could be considered leave-taking. In addition, those behaviors were repeated in other contexts, so they might not have been goodbyes. It’s been difficult to study leave-taking, Rodrigues said, because researchers haven’t agreed on a precise definition or a way of searching for it.

Baehren and Carvalho’s process was to record all of the times a baboon ended a social interaction, wait to make sure they really parted, and then rewind to analyze the encounters. They accumulated more than sixty-five hours of footage from Gorongosa National Park, in Mozambique, where baboons live in large groups that feature strong female relationships; males tend to come and go. Baehren was the first to notice that baboons appeared to shift their bodies and gaze in the direction of an impending departure. (They didn’t shift their bodies when they were alone and preparing to head in a new direction, or when they were close to another baboon with whom they weren’t interacting.) Carvalho declared the finding a breakthrough. “We could say out loud: primates do say goodbye, and we have found how baboons do it,” she said.

I have to admit that, when I saw photos of the baboon goodbye, my first thought was that a human would be considered pretty rude for doing the same. Imagine you’re at dinner with a friend; at some point, she turns her torso slightly, gets up, and walks off. But I had to check myself. If goodbyes change from one country to the next, then we surely can’t expect them to translate between species. Human goodbyes depend heavily on context; something as subtle as a nod of the head is sometimes an acceptable way to part. Perhaps, in context, the baboons’ gesture is as friendly as a handshake. I wondered how often we misunderstood animals in an effort to interpret them with our terribly human assumptions.

Lydia Hopper, a primatologist and comparative psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research, thought it was plausible that a nonhuman animal’s goodbye would be subtle and gestural. “Even if we had been looking, we might have missed it,” she said. She considered Carvalho and Baehren’s finding “tantalizing,” but not definitive. “Maybe animals do perform some leave-taking behaviors,” she told me. “Maybe it’s not to the same frequency or degree as humans, and not the same strength or style as humans.”

Human goodbyes have a lot to do with how strong our bonds are. I am likely to say one goodbye to my sister and another to a colleague or a barista. Ironically, I’d probably be nicer to a stranger than I sometimes am to my relatives—but not too much nicer, which would be creepy. “If you’re buying something at a store, you are not going to hug them when you check out,” Hopper said. But intimacy can’t explain everything. In November, Hopper wrote in a scientific paper that our goodbyes depend in part on an understanding of what’s going to happen in the future. Last summer, after my sister moved to my neighborhood and we began going to the grocery store and the gym together, I noticed that our farewells became truncated—we’d exchange a brusque goodbye and then leave the other on the sidewalk. But when I parted with my best friend late last year, in Berlin, I knew I’d be away from her for many months. We hugged each other close and said, “I love you.”

Our relationship to time may be one of the most important differences between us and other animals. Cats and dogs certainly greet us, and they act troubled when their people prepare to leave them, whether by whining or curling up in an open suitcase. But they presumably can’t understand “I’ll see you in two weeks.” To a dog, our fervent and prolonged goodbyes at the front door might seem as peculiar and impenetrable as the greetings of an orca do to us. Perhaps it would be better to give our pets an Irish goodbye (or one in the English way).

Humans have a complicated history of assessing nonhuman animals. In some cases, we have overinterpreted their behaviors. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a horse named Clever Hans was credited with talking and doing math—until a psychologist determined that he was responding to involuntary cues. But in other instances we can be prone to what De Waal has called “anthropodenial,” an overcorrection from anthropomorphism. Researchers are so careful to differentiate humans from other species that they say primates have a “close social associate,” not a friend, and that they engage in “vocalized panting,” not laughing. Animals could have ways of saying goodbye that we haven’t acknowledged yet.

We shouldn’t assume that primates are missing the cognitive capacities that I employ with, say, my sister or my barista, according to Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews. Wild chimpanzees can plan where they are going to sleep based on what fruit they want for breakfast in the morning. A male chimpanzee at the Furuvik Zoo, in Sweden, hid rocks from zookeepers and threw them at visitors the following day. Chimpanzees recognize individuals that they haven’t seen for years. “They have a sense of absence, and I certainly think that they have a sense of death,” Hobaiter told me.

If primates may be capable of saying farewell, why wouldn’t they? There are many explanations, Hobaiter said. Long after two chimpanzees part, for example, they can trade vocalizations from one treetop to another. “The species at which we’re currently looking might not need to take leave,” Hobaiter said. It’s a striking thought—that other primates simply don’t need goodbyes as much as we do.

Goffman wrote that our farewells help us transition into “a state of decreased access” to one another. “One of the biggest stresses to social bonds is when somebody leaves you,” Hopper said. A goodbye manages the uncertainty of separation; it’s a signal that you won’t be gone forever, that you’re parting on good terms, and that eventually you’ll pick things up where you left off. Studying the rest of the animal kingdom reminds us just how much we’ve complicated that message. For a baboon, maybe it’s enough to turn away. ♦

This past week in New York City, fifteen inches of snow fell and more than twenty-two hundred snowplows pushed it away. Twelve thousand miles of sidewalk were shovelled. Two hundred and nine million pounds of salt were spread, and, after it got really bad, two hundred thousand gallons of calcium chloride, a chemical ice melt, were deployed. Sometimes the work you do leaves its mark; sometimes it doesn’t. With snow, the evidence has a tendency to melt. But, this year, as the temperature refused to rise above freezing, what remained hardened into ice, and settled. In the streets, these conditions have brought attention to something called a sneckdown.

“Sneckdown” is a portmanteau of “snow” and “neckdown,” a term for a part of the sidewalk, also known as a curb extension, that juts into the street, to protect pedestrians. The sneckdown is the snow that builds up on parts of the street that cars don’t use, acting as a natural curb extension. At intersections, it can be found mostly on corners, as the city pushes it one way and property owners push it the other. The sneckdown is also what people awkwardly have to step through as a result. Recently, I have encountered sneckdowns while going to work, going to the gym, popping to the store, hurrying for the bus, and on the way to a hard-to-get dinner reservation that a friend made, perhaps unwisely, weeks before the snowstorm. Almost any New Yorker who has to cross the street has become familiar with the sneckdown, often at a level just between the sock and the waterproof shoe.

I saw my first sneckdown of the year on a corner of Gates Avenue, in Clinton Hill, a few yards from my apartment. The snow had stopped falling, and a plow had come through. My neighbors had shovelled their stoops. But there remained a solid mound of ice, curving out across the road, like a bumper on one side of a pool table. I walked out and tried to avoid becoming a billiard ball. Sneckdowns are something of a gray area, as they live partly on the sidewalk and partly on the street. They are where the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the state meet. It gets slippery.

To some urbanists, a sneckdown offers a vision of a better world. The term was popularized by Clarence Eckerson, Jr., a documentarian who started filming sneckdowns in the early twenty-tens, for the pro-transit website Streetsblog. “It’s the space that is revealed that we could take back for other things,” Eckerson told me recently. Sneckdowns slow cars as they turn, and make pedestrians more visible. Ahead of the storm, Streetsblog called on readers to send photos of sneckdowns to the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to show him where the city could make more room for pedestrians. This past Tuesday, Eckerson ran around City Hall and his home, in Jackson Heights, hunting for the best sneckdowns, for a new video. He had a full shoulder-replacement surgery scheduled for the next day. That morning, he shot some pickups; an anesthesiologist fitted him with a mask a few hours later. “I’m very dedicated,” he told me over Zoom, his arm in a padded black sling. Out on the street, he’d seen a huge eighteen-wheeler truck, hauling Goya beans, bend around a sneckdown in Jackson Heights—and nail the turn with five or six feet of snow to spare. “You could take back some of it at the very least,” he said.

The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway, in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, to watch the destruction of a few sneckdowns. It was the sixth day in a row below freezing, and Goodman wore a green D.S.N.Y. jacket, a gray beanie, and duck boots. Together, we watched a skid steer, a maneuverable miniature excavator, attack a sneckdown that had built up on a street corner, near a gas station. Conditions were tough. Handheld tools sometimes broke. “These are one of the only things that can break an ice boulder,” Goodman told me.

Not every pile of ice is a sneckdown. There is a complex taxonomy. (It helps to know your enemy.) Sanitation workers call sneckdowns corner caps. The narrow path through a sneckdown that lets people cross the street is known as a “curb cut.” A blocked-off bus stop is not a sneckdown. “I’ve seen people post their own photos and I’ll be, like, ‘Well that’s not a sneckdown,’ ” Eckerson told me. One helpful heuristic: if you can see tire tracks, it’s not a sneckdown—the cars have been using it. Whether the furrow of snow in a lane of parked cars is a sneckdown depends on your philosophical opinion of what the street is for.

Most of the time, when people complain about lingering, no-man’s-land snow, they are complaining about something called the curbline. This is the snow that piles up between the cleared path of the sidewalk and the street, often against parked cars, maybe crowned with trash. Property owners don’t have to clear more than a four-foot-wide path, enough for a stroller or a wheelchair; the city doesn’t have to, either.

Goodman told me it’s simple: if snow is on the street, it’s the city’s responsibility. If it’s on the sidewalk, it’s the property owner’s. But there are complications; the snow around a parked car is the responsibility of the driver—even though it’s on the street. If a bus stop is sheltered, the Department of Transportation is on the hook. A regular bus stop is the responsibility of the property owner whose place abuts the stop, but the city must insure that the bus can pull up to the curb. Previous mayors, Goodman told me, thought it was fine as long as the bus door could open. This year, Mamdani insisted to Sanitation that there be pedestrian access at every stop.

On Broadway, a crew of emergency shovellers, whom the city pays a starting rate of $19.14 an hour, were deployed to another corner, outside a radiologist’s office. One shoveller, Anthony Gutierrez, who is normally a truck driver, was hacking away at a sneckdown with an ice scraper. Next to him, Daniel Johannes wore a bright orange vest that said “laborer” and an ushanka hat. “I have shovelling experience—I once excavated a big hole,” he told me. Johannes lives locally and usually works in construction. This was his third twelve-hour shift. “Our neighbors need to pass these streets,” he said, undeterred.

Before the recent snowstorm, the city activated PlowNYC, a real-time map showing when every street in the city was last plowed. The computer program that tracks the snowplows is called Blade Runner. When it isn’t snowing, Sanitation uses it to track trash collection. This is because the vast majority of New York City’s snowplows are regular garbage trucks with a plow attached.

The snowstorm presented an outlet for Mamdani’s embrace of “sewer socialism,” which focusses on everyday municipal problems. (It could also be a trip wire: the former mayor John Lindsay was pelted for poorly handling a blizzard in the sixties.) During the storm, Mamdani was shovelling out a car trapped near public housing in Bed-Stuy. The Governor, Kathy Hochul, told him to put on a hat. Javier Lojan, the acting commissioner of sanitation, told me that Mamdani was at morning roll call with the workers on the first day of the storm. (He said, of the mayor’s shovelling form, “He’s got to bend his knees a little more, maybe.”)

Despite the murkiness of sneckdowns, sanitation workers often end up taking care of them. Back on Broadway, the ice on the corner was, technically, the business’s responsibility. “The fact that it’s on the corner doesn’t change the fact that it’s sidewalk,” Goodman told me. “But we’re doing it—we can’t leave it there.”

Arguing about snow in subfreezing temperatures can remind you of the first law of thermodynamics—that snow can’t be created or destroyed. It has to go somewhere. The curbline may be ugly, but it is where property owners are supposed to put the snow—it’s out of the way. The city also doesn’t clear every sneckdown. “Not all sneckdowns are created equal,” Goodman said. “Some of them are not obstructing anything at all. They can just stay there.” Anyway, the sun usually deals with it for us. We’re only vexed by the sneckdowns now because it’s still freezing. “There is a Foucaultian aspect to it,” Goodman told me. “What’s public and what’s private isn’t inherent. It’s socially constructed. It’s shaped by cultural factors and the fact that it is below thirty-two degrees.”

One way out could be simply to heat the ice. In New York, the city has snow melters, which are just slightly warm trucks, but are commonly called hot tubs. The melter sits over a sewer line, idling while heating the snow to thirty-eight degrees, barely above freezing, and drips the water directly into a drain. The city is running twelve melters; I visited one in Inwood, by the Harlem River, that handles all the snow in Manhattan above Fifty-ninth Street. When I arrived, the melter was surrounded by a pool of water, a few inches deep, which gently lapped against my shoes. Three twelve-foot-tall orange excavators took bites out of a mound of snow and ferried it to the hot tub. It had been so long since I had seen snow melt that it was almost intoxicating. The trucks hauling the snow frolicked in the water, sending dirty gray ripples toward me. I resisted the urge to run my hand through the slush.

Usually, a sneckdown is a fleeting thing. But this year’s never-ending freeze showed that cars could still get around without the extra space. Do we want to live in a world carved out by the sneckdown? “I don’t want the snow there permanently,” Eckerson said. But, he asked, could we imagine the space where the ice sits transforming into concrete and trees, somewhere to rest, or a spot for children to safely cross the street? “You can make them pretty,” he said. “Bushes, trees, seating, if there’s a big enough street.”

Earlier, in Washington Heights, I’d asked the shovellers whether they could imagine the sneckdown before them as something else. “I think that New York City is a pedestrian and transit city, so I’m a hundred per cent behind that,” Johannes, the construction worker, said. “But that takes up the space for the cars,” his fellow-shoveller, Gutierrez, said. “The traffic is a nightmare. It’s not good. You don’t get anywhere to park.” Gutierrez continued, “You fix one thing, you mess up the other stuff.”

Over the days, I saw my local sneckdown more than I saw my friends and family. I watched it yellow slightly, like the fingers of a smoker. But on Monday I walked to Gates Avenue, and my sneckdown was gone. The curb showed evidence of scraping. I sailed through the intersection. It felt slightly unfair to me that it hadn’t been given an honest chance to melt. But the air was still frigid, and there was plenty of snow to step around. ♦