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[...] Yes, it's great, this voice says, but might another product be greater? In this way Wallace expands the problem of use value and taste Karrier encountered: pursuing exhange value, especially as financial instruments grow more "advanced," almost inevitably leaves the body and feelings behind. …

[...] But "Crash of '69," the final title, suggests the theme is the crash of balance itself--note that the 6 and 9, unhinged from reference to a year, denote yin and yang, one's head chasing the other's tail. Wallace thus projects 1929 forward and expands it into a general crash of the American ps…

Wallace had an unerring sense that winners, examined from the oblique angles of his fition, were really losers--not schadenfreude, but a claim that any struggle other than that Kafkaesque one to "establish a human self" was utimately an illusory imposition of games' numbering and geometry on the fl…

[...] when the American winning streak had met another of its periodic, catastrophic ends--busts for a culture that seemed not so much expectant of constant boom as utterly dependent on it. [...]

[...] the open-ended, state-run lottery is a salutary vision: in losing week after week, Lenore is actually paying into a civic fund that is not unlike taxes, a fund of commonwealth that the young Wallace tentatively steps toward here. Many U.S. lotteries have historically been legally set up to su…