#but no blow out wins i want nail biters!!!

[atopvisenyashill]

yes i did hyphenate jace’s name He Is Both, yes i did call daeron the drunken dreamer He Is Both. i’m giving everyone jon snow as an option and trusting that he isn’t gonna absolutely demolish the competition okay. i am having faith that we are normal and don’t have boring opinions (no shade to jon snow lovers as someone who has a breakdown about him every other week hah)

[whyanne4]

Memories

Pairing: Charles Leclerc x Verstappen! Reader

Part: 2/2

Category: hurt/comfort, fluff

Summary: Four weeks later, at the Monza GP, you see Charles for the first time since the devastating breakup. Soaked in champagne and high on adrenaline the Monegasque corners you, desperate to win you back.

Tag-list: @nerdreader

Masterlist

It’s been four weeks since you last saw Charles at the Belgian Grand Prix. You had been absent from the Dutch Grand Prix which everyone found odd since it was Max’s home race but you just couldn’t face him. Even with summer break in between the wounds were still raw. But after a week of reflecting you decided that you can’t let your feelings get in the way of your support for Max. He was your brother and your best friend and he’d been so disappointed when you didn’t show up for his home GP, you just can’t let him down like that again. Therefore you decided to attend Monza.

The Red Bull garage was exactly like how you remember it, of course it is, it’s only been a month after all but somehow you expected everything to be different now that you no longer had Charles. It was both comforting and sad to see that the world still turned after your breakup with the Monegasque.

Speaking of Charles, you’ve been avoiding him like the plague. You’ve arrived at the paddock late and barely left the Red Bull garage all weekend. Yet, with all of your efforts you still managed to lock eyes with him when he was coming back after securing pole position during qualifying. His smile was bright but you could see that the twinkle in his green eyes were not there anymore. When he saw you his smile dropped and you could see the sadness wash over him. You felt bad of course. He’d just gotten pole at Ferrari’s home GP and you just had to drag down his mood. You could see him starting to approach you but you were gone faster than the cars went around the track.  

As Sunday came you could feel the Tifosi buzzing with excitement at having their driver on pole. You couldn’t help but feel proud of him. You knew how much this meant to him, how much Ferrari and the Tifosi meant for him and even if you were no longer together you wanted the best for him. He was a once in a lifetime type of love and you knew that you would never find anyone who could live up to him, ever.

You felt a hand on your shoulder and turned your attention to Max who was smiling down at you. 

“Are you ready for me to beat Leclerc?” He asked jokingly. He’s starting second and with the way Red Bull have been performing this season you won’t be surprised if he blows past the Ferrari immediately. Yet, you still had hopes for Charles, he’s been incredible the entire weekend and you really do believe that he can get his second Monza win today. 

“Whatever you say” You tried to sound interested but your thoughts were elsewhere.

Max chuckled, sensing your distraction. "Hey, what's on your mind? You seem a bit out of it."

You managed a weak smile. "Just lost in thought, I guess."

“Alright?” Max seemed skeptical but time was running out and he had to get in the car so he couldn’t ask any further questions. “Wish me good luck.” He said before getting ready for the race.

As the race unfolded, you couldn't help but watch Charles closely. Despite the ache in your heart, you wanted to see him succeed. He had worked hard for this moment, and you couldn't deny the rush of emotions every time he sped past in his vibrant red Ferrari. The crowd's cheers, the adrenaline in the air – it was all so bittersweet.

The race was a nail-biter, with Charles and Max battling it out on the track. Lap after lap, the two drivers exchanged positions multiple times during the race, showcasing their incredible skills. The tension was palpable, but you found yourself unable to take your eyes off Charles. It was as if time had stood still, and you were transported back to the days when you watched him race with unbridled excitement.

And then, as the final laps approached, something extraordinary happened. Charles made a daring move and managed to secure the lead, pulling ahead of Max. The Tifosi erupted into cheers, and you couldn't help but smile through your tears. Charles had done it – he had won at Monza once again.

The jubilant atmosphere on the grandstands was infectious as the race concluded. The cheers, the applause, and the sense of victory permeated the air. As Charles celebrated on the podium, you couldn't help but feel a mixture of emotions. Pride for his achievement, happiness for his success, and a pang of sadness for what once was.

After the podium ceremony, you watched from a distance as Charles greeted his team, embraced his fellow drivers, and soaked in the victory and champagne. Your heart swelled with a sense of nostalgia. You remembered the times when you were there to celebrate with him, hidden away from prying eyes, sharing stolen moments of joy.

The post-race media frenzy began, and you slipped away from the crowd, finding a quiet and hidden spot to gather your thoughts. The memories of your time with Charles were flooding back, and you couldn't help but wonder if things could have been different. If circumstances had allowed, if the world hadn't been watching, if you could have been together openly.

Lost in your thoughts, you were startled when a familiar voice interrupted your reverie. "Y/N."

You turned around to see Charles standing there, a mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration on his face. His eyes locked onto yours, and for a moment, it felt like the world around you had faded away.

"Charles," you replied softly, not knowing exactly what to say.

He took a step closer, his gaze intense. "I know we should be avoiding each other, but I can't keep doing that. Seeing you there in the crowd when I was standing at the top of the podium, at Monza of all tracks, it made me realize something."

You met his gaze, curious but cautious. "What is it?"

"I can't let you go," he confessed, his voice earnest. "I can't pretend that what we had wasn't real. I can't deny that I love you, and I've missed you so damn much."

Your heart ached at his words, the flood of emotions almost overwhelming. "Charles…"

"I know it's complicated," he continued, his voice filled with determination. "I know there are challenges, but I can't just walk away from what we had. I don't want to. As I was standing there, celebrating, all I wanted was you. To hold you in my arms and spin you around. "

Tears welled up in your eyes as you looked at the man before you, the man who had once been your lover and your best friend. "Charles, I love you too. But you know as well as I do that it's not that simple."

"I know," he acknowledged, his expression a mix of frustration and hope. "But what if we try to make it work? What if we face those challenges together? I don't want to let fear control us."

You took a deep breath, conflicted emotions warring within you. "Charles, it's not just about fear. It's about the impact on our families, on Max, on your career. It's about the world watching our every move."

He reached out and gently cupped your cheek, his touch sending a shiver down your spine. "I'm willing to face those challenges. I'm willing to fight for us, for a future together. Y/N, I can't imagine my life without you."

You looked into his eyes, searching for answers, searching for the truth. In that moment, you saw the sincerity, the depth of his feelings, and the unwavering determination in his gaze.

"Charles…" you began, your voice trembling. "I want to believe that we could have a future together, but what about Max, what would he say?"

He nodded, understanding the gravity of the situation. "I know. But what if we start by taking one step at a time? What if we face those challenges head-on, together? I'm not asking for an easy path, but I'm asking for a chance. A chance to be with you to celebrate wins with you and to mourn losses. As long as I’m with you I know I can manage everything your family or the media throws at me"

Tears flowed freely down your cheeks as you looked at the man who had once held your heart and still did. The memories, the love, the shared moments – they were all there, etched into your heart.

"Charles, I can't promise anything," you whispered, your voice catching. "But I'm willing to try, to see if we can navigate this complicated road together."

A mixture of relief and joy swept across Charles' face, and he pulled you into a tight embrace. In that moment, the weight of the world seemed to lift, and it was just the two of you, holding onto each other in a hidden corner of the chaos of the F1 paddock.

As you both pulled away from the hug, he looked at you with a glint of determination in his eyes. "Y/N, I know this might be unconventional, but I want to ask you something."

You looked at him curiously, your heart pounding. "What is it?"

He took a deep breath and then dropped down to one knee before you, pulling out a small box from his pocket. Your breath caught as he opened it to reveal a stunning ring.

"Y/N, I love you. And I want to spend the rest of my life proving that to you, no matter how hard it may get." he said, his eyes locking onto yours. Will you marry me?" Charles asked, his voice filled with hope.

Tears streamed down your face as you looked at the man who had captured your heart and soul. It was a whirlwind of emotions – the memories of your secret love, the challenges ahead, the uncertainty of the future. But in this moment, all that mattered was the love you shared.

"Yes, Charles," you said, your voice filled with conviction. "I will marry you."

His eyes lit up with pure happiness, and he slipped the ring onto your finger before standing up and pulling you into a passionate kiss. The world around you seemed to fade away, leaving only the two of you and the promise of a new beginning.

As your lips met in that fervent kiss, it was as if time stood still. All the doubts, all the worries, they melted away in the warmth of your shared affection.

Charles held you close, his arms strong and comforting, sealing the promise of a new beginning. Little did you know, your private moment had been witnessed by an unexpected observer. 

Max had been on his way back to the garage, his mind focused on the previous race, when he saw the two of you sharing that passionate kiss. His initial reaction was a mix of shock, hurt, and anger. He felt a pang of betrayal, the feeling that his own sister and his rival had been keeping something from him. In his mind, questions raced like a storm. 

How long has this been going on? How could you both keep this from him? Why hadn't you trusted him with your feelings? His emotions were a tangled mess, and he found himself standing there, grappling with the rush of emotions coursing through him. 

Just as you were lost in the moment, a voice cut through the air, tinged with surprise and a hint of annoyance. "Well, well, what do we have here?"

You turned to see Max standing there, a mixture of disbelief and disbelief on his face as he looked between the two of you. His expression shifted from surprise to confusion, and then to anger.

"Max…" you started, your heart sinking as you realized the gravity of the situation.

Max's jaw tightened as he took in the scene before him. "So, this is why you've been so distant? Sneaking around with Charles, my rival?"

Charles stepped forward, his expression a mix of earnestness and determination. "Max, I know this looks bad, but please, let us explain."

Max's eyes flickered with a mixture of emotions, his frustration evident. "Explain? What could you possibly say to justify keeping this from me?"

You took a deep breath, mustering the courage to speak. "Max, I know this is hard to understand, but Charles and I… we love each other. It's not something we planned, but it happened. We've been trying to keep it a secret to protect you."

Max's anger seemed to soften slightly, replaced with a mixture of surprise and hurt. "So, you were both lying to me? "All this time? Y/N you’re my sister I expected you to be honest with me"

Charles stepped closer, his voice sincere. "Max, it wasn't about lying. It was about protecting our love and what we had. We didn't want it to affect our teams or our friendship."

“And we really tried to stay away from each other but we can't Max. I will never be happy without Charles in my life.” You pleaded with your older brother

Max's gaze shifted between the two of you, his emotions clearly in turmoil. "This is a lot to process, you know. My sister and Charles Leclerc, secretly in love? How am I supposed to feel about this?"

You took a step toward Max, your voice gentle. "Max, we understand that this is a shock. We didn't want to hurt you. We never wanted to betray your trust."

Max's anger seemed to soften as he looked at you, a mixture of vulnerability and uncertainty in his gaze. "Y/N, you're my sister. I don't want to see you hurt, and I don't want our relationship to be strained."

Charles nodded in agreement. "Max, I care about you, and I never wanted to jeopardize our friendship. But I also care about Y/N deeply. We're willing to face the challenges, whatever they may be."

Max sighed, his anger slowly giving way to a mix of resignation and understanding. "I can't say I'm happy about this, but I can see that you both have genuine feelings for each other."

You stepped closer to Max, your voice filled with emotion. "Max, you're my brother, and I love you. I never wanted to hurt you, but I can't deny my feelings for Charles."

Max looked between you and Charles, his expression shifting from anger to a mix of resignation and acceptance. "Fine, I can't change how you both feel. But I better not see any more secrets or lies. If you're going to be together, be honest about it. I won't stand in your way, but don't expect me to be your biggest cheerleader either."

Charles nodded, a grateful smile on his face. "Thank you, Max. We appreciate your understanding more than you know."

Max let out a sigh, his shoulders slumping slightly. "Just don't make me regret this."

As you stood there, the weight of the moment settling in, Max approves of your relationship with his rival.

"And you," he said, looking at Charles, his gaze hardening, "if you hurt my sister, you'll have me to answer to."

Charles held Max's gaze, his determination unwavering. "I won't, Max. I promise."

Max's gaze shifted back to you, his voice softer. "Take care of each other, okay?"

You nodded, tears welling up in your eyes. "We will."

Max let out a sigh, his frustration melting away as he looked at the two of you. "Fine, you have my begrudging approval. Just don't make a mess of it."

A smile tugged at the corners of your lips as you stepped forward and embraced Max tightly. "Thank you, Max. I promise we'll do our best."

As you pulled away, Max's expression had softened, a hint of a smile on his lips. 

Charles slapped his hand on Max’s back. “So I guess this makes you my future brother in law.” 

“Brother in law!” Max exclaimed and you froze before giggling. Guess you had forgotten to mention that you’d gotten engaged right before he caught you.

After the initial shock faded Max sighed "Well, I guess I should say congratulations. Just don't make me attend a secret wedding, okay?"

You chuckled, wiping away a tear. "Deal."

With Max's reluctant approval, you and Charles were ready to face the challenges that lay ahead. It wouldn't be easy, navigating a relationship in the spotlight of the F1 world, but you were determined to make it work. As you looked at Charles, the man you loved, and the ring on your finger, you felt a sense of hope and excitement for the future.

The journey wouldn't be without its obstacles, but together, you were ready to take on the world. And as the two of you walked back towards the paddock, hand in hand, you couldn't help but feel that the best was yet to come.

[aviagin]

ROTTMNT Personal HeadCanons

The way I’m a Leo kinnie longed to be Mikey, seen as Ralph, and could never be Donnie is just wow to me. A couple of stray thoughts.

Leo gives Jake Peralta from Brooklyn99 vibes tell me I’m wrong you can’t

Mikey learns how to make teapots to be able to replace ol'skully for their dad. RIP pour one out for a beloved member of the family for generations.

I bet Splints probably misses the taste of plastic and evil too lmao. Mikey makes two versions he made the “Jupiter Jim sure taste funny” and the “before a sports ball was found.”

Leo starts chipping away at his shell to compensate for breaking Raph's shell. They start to notice the carelessness he has for his shell. Donnie is the first to realize how often he’s just softening blows or covering Mikey. Sure he can walk it off but just as easily he could have dodged.

Raph goes into Leo’s room and sees him picking at his shell. “Now I know I’m not the medic but he’d tell me to not pick”

Leo gets startled and does immediately stop. “Raph! What can yours truly most handsome brother do for you!?”

Raph sits with him not sure how to approach the topic. Of course, Raph has always been a talk less act now type of turtle why should that change now. He can’t hesitate, not when it comes to his brothers. . .his family. He brings it up. . .Seeing the twinge of guilt flash across Leo’s face is enough for him to want to drop it. No he has to explain and reassure Leo it’s not his fault. He didn’t break his shell the Kraang did. “But if you start to break yours for me. That means I’m causing it. Come on you want big bro Raph to lose his #1 EXboss mug.” And Leo is just like no I would never want you to lose your mug. He would lightly chuckle teary eyed. Raph would give him the warmest bestest most big brother hug he can give Leo. “Let’s go we can’t leave the mad dogs watching pops commercials for too long!” They both head out feeling relieved. When they join the fam Donnie let’s a sigh of relief. Mikey has a bright smile. “Told y’all Doctor feelings is never wrong. Nothing can heal unless we disinfect the area ain’t that right doctor.” Mikey winks a Leo. April laughs hyping Mikey up. He shakes his head ready to have a movie marathon with the fam.

Donnie has fs Raph proofed everything that’s been destroyed. Of course he could do it all in one go scan what’s most likely too fragile and Raph proof it but BORE YAWN!!! Wheres the fun in that. When something does get broken usually by Raph hence the name Donnie makes sure it only happens once. He makes bets with the rest on what breaks next. Any on on purpose breaks means zero claim to the pot. They take their gambling very serious and have no idea how April keeps wining.

Leo gaslights and starts fights for the fun of it or causes fights for fun. He makes remakes like “me personally I wouldn’t take that” or “daaang bro you gonna let that one slide!” Just egging both sides.

Splinter tried his hardest to get his sons to call him master splinter or sensei at least during their training but clearly he didn’t win that war and now he knows when they get mad at him they call him splinter. He won’t say it out loud but he prefers it when his sons call him pops/dad/papa and finds it funny when they come up with new ones.

Leo and Donnie are nail biters. If Leo is a nail biter one hundred percent Donnie is too. Or vice versa. They compete to see who can go the longest without biting their nails, who bit less nails, and the loser who has shorter nails. Both started to get concerned for the other when their nails were so short there was a thin line of blood. I love the idea of how In sync they are without knowing. They’re both like I’m going to trick him by making it seem like a competition then he’ll have to stop! Nothing feels better to him then beating me what a great plan! It works for the most part. It started backwards at first with them biting even shorter to lose and give the other a win. Then one of them gloats too hard it finally flames the fire of competing. Of course there’s good weeks and bad weeks.

Sooo we all agree Leo is the type to make a big deal out of small cuts he’d ask nay he’d dramatically plead for a pretty blue bandaid from his brother Donnie. “Donnie it’s so dark I think I’m not going to make write my final Will please” when he trips. “Raph I can see the light gram gram what are you doing at the other side of the river” when it’s a scratch. But when it’s a serious injury “Tis but a flesh wound” he’ll take care of it himself pssh no need to worry. Your just being dramatic omg and multiple eye rolls. He still can’t understand how his brothers know is a serious injury or when it’s a bad one. Leo doesn’t realize he uses his brothers colors with bandaids.

Leo at first felt some resentment just the tiniest bit and even when he denied that resentment he still felt it. It was resentment towards Mikey his little brother, the tiniest turtle out of the 4. He loves his brother, he loves all his brothers of course he does…but why does MIKEY get a softer treatment from their one parent, why does Mikey get to be irresponsible because he’s younger. Why does Mikey get all the attention from their dad when here’s there too. Then one day when Mikey starts to really get into art he goes to Leo right away for his opinion on his first pieces. Leo feels that tangle in his feelings unravel. Then it happens again when Mikey starts to cook his first taste tester/judge was Leo and it happens again when he starts something new. Over and over Leo would be the first person to approve and praise his creations. Of course what kind of big brother could Leo call himself if he didn’t still get annoyed of Mikey from time to time. He gets it now tho. That tangle unraveled the moment he saw the enjoyment of watching Mikey grow. He felt pride in being the first one Mikey went to before showing off to the rest of the family. Leo likes to joke how he does have a favorite brother and won’t tell. But no matter how much thought, time, and effort he puts into answering that question it’s always the same answer they all are. Raph is his big brother their overprotective gentle boss man plus he practically carries them of course he’s his favorite. Donnie well Donnie is his twin of course he’s his favorite, and Mikey oh sweet sweet Angelo watching him grow *clutching pearls* becoming so strong with his naive trustworthy heart of course he’s his favorite. So yeah he does have a favorite. . .it’s April.

[ceterisparibus116]

From the Daredevil Ask Game, "Tell us one of your favorite headcanons!"

MATT AND FOGGY DID MOCK TRIAL IN LAW SCHOOL.

So although other parts of law school were more meaningful to me in terms of, like, actually making a difference in the world etc., my mock trial career was by far the most fun, and it was incredibly meaningful in its own way, and I refuse to consider the possibility that Matt and Foggy weren’t on mock trial (sometimes called trial team, NOT to be confused with moot court, which is appellate advocacy rather than trial advocacy) during their three years of law school.

So here’s how I imagine it. Matt and Foggy obviously got along well from the very beginning, so no need to an enemies-to-friends(-to-lovers, perhaps) mock trial experience (although a canon-divergent AU could totally play with that). As soon as they find out about Columbia’s mock trial tryout, they latch onto each other to sign up. Of course, they need two more people. I assume they grab Marci (which would add all sorts of spice to the mix), and the fourth person is Jennifer Walters.

Matt and Foggy insist on being attorney-witness pairs for each side. So let’s say it’s a criminal case and Matt really wants to be a defense attorney (he’d see that as good practice for real life), meaning that Foggy plays his defense witness whereas when they switch to prosecution, Foggy plays prosecutor while Matt plays his witness. Let’s say Marci stakes a claim on Foggy as co-counsel (making Marci another prosecutor, which let’s face it she’d be fantastic at), while Jennifer becomes Matt’s co-counsel by default. (And don’t tell me there wouldn’t be sparks of attraction across the co-counsel front here either.)

Matt, of course, is that Annoying Guy who never shuts up about mock trial. He’s drilling the rules of evidence between classes and throwing practice questions at Foggy when Foggy’s trying to eat and demanding that Foggy practice examining him when he’s trying to sleep. (In other words, Matt was me.) Foggy doesn’t bother practicing quite as relentlessly as Matt, but that’s okay because he’s still quick on his feet and charming enough that even if he makes mistakes or forgets something, it’s easy to forgive. Marci doesn’t practice 24/7 willingly, but she finds that she has to in order to compete with Matt. I’m not sure about Jennifer’s style (may have to return to this Ask after She-Hulk), but for now, I’d say she already knows most of the rules of evidence because she picked up thrifted Rules of Evidence in a Nutshell book and read the whole thing before the first day of class, so all she really needs to study now are the facts of their specific case and some stylistic courtroom stuff.

The day of the 1L competition draws near. All they know is that the two winning teams will get to join the school’s official trial team to travel and compete against other schools, but to win, they have to beat all other teams but one in a series of “rounds,” each of which could last 3-4 hours, in which they essentially put on a condensed trial in front of judges who are, in some cases, real judges(and in other cases are real trial lawyers which is also intimidating). Tensions run high. And someone at the school spied on one of Matt, Foggy, Marci, and Jennifer’s practice sessions, so word’s gotten out that this team is not to be messed with.

Proceed to the competition itself. I’d like to think they blow through the competition, including Marci and Jennifer getting some satisfying moments against sexist law school frat boys. The final round is a nail-biter, but Matt does something that seals the trial in their defense. Though it could be a fun sensory thing (that he’d then have to awkwardly try to explain to his teammates, which would be hilarious), I’d actually prefer it to just be Matt’s hard work paying off. They not only make it on the school’s team, but Matt wins the Best Student Advocate award (looks very flashy on a résumé). The only thing that makes the moment bittersweet is his awareness of how much Jack would’ve wanted to see this.

(I also have plans for a fic where Matt takes his mock trial experience and volunteers to be a coach at a local high school, which is actually Peter Parker’s high school where he got roped into doing mock trial in an effort to be closer to MJ, who thinks she never has enough extracurricular activities to get into college.)

Anyway, that’s my fave headcanon.

Others are:

Matt’s favorite season is fall. He always liked school, and fall represents the beginning of school. Also, the crackling of fallen leaves and their sharp scent when they break lets him enjoy some of the distinct elements of the season despite not being able to see the colors. The cooler weather makes the city smell less awful, but it’s not so cold that he’s worried about ice when out in the mask.

Matt listens to Spanish hip-hop and rap when he’s boxing, except when he’s boxing out of actual anger.

Matt’s favorite Disney move is Rapunzel. I saw a post about his favorite Disney movie as The Little Mermaid, and I see that, but I think he’d relate more to Rapunzel’s isolation from normal life (without the privilege of being treated as a princess) and her struggle to disbelief gaslighting. Plus, Flynn (I mean, Eugene) is just fantastic.

Foggy was a boy scout or did some equivalent thing that gives him a ton of survival skills, which he’s quick to point out when the firm discusses how they’d survive a zombie apocalypse.

Karen may have started wearing fewer swishy-frilly dresses and skirts to better accommodate her PI work, but she still loves a maximizing feminine styles when she dresses—partly because she genuinely enjoys it, and partly because she knows Matt likes the sound of fabric fluttering, and partly because she likes shocking people with ruthlessness after they assumed she was just sweet and innocent.

Matt, Foggy, and Karen have made up a bunch of extra holidays that only they celebrate, commemorating random things that are meaningful to them. Matt appreciates the continual reminders that their friendship is intact.

Thank you so much for the fun ask, and thank you @etherealwiitch for creating the awesome Daredevil Ask Game!

[haikyuu-scenarios-drabbles]

Let’s Pretend (Kuroo Tetsurou x F!reader)

this was for the hq writers net secret summer fic exchange! my partner was: @occasional-haikyuu   hope you enjoy 🤗 i love writing Kuroo sm and i got really carried away with this one, i enjoyed writing it a lot 💕

genre: fluff, college!au, fake dating, friends to lovers  words: 4k+

~

You and Kuroo have been friends since the first year of college. You met him through Akaashi, who you sat next to in English first semester. And at some point, you got comfortable enough to complain to him about how chemistry was totally kicking your ass and he mentioned that his friend who lived down the hall was pretty good at it. Akaashi offered to ask him if he’d help you out.

And that’s how you found yourself one afternoon waiting for a complete stranger in the library. You weren’t expecting the 6’2” middle blocker of the university’s volleyball team to slide into the seat next to you and introduce himself as Akaashi’s friend.

That was almost 3 years ago now, and it turns out the towering middle blocker you could barely speak a word to the first week of him tutoring you is a total dork that loves volleyball and science just a tad too much.

You plop down on the worn-out couch of your shared apartment with Kuroo, Akaashi, and Bokuto; who you met not long after meeting Kuroo, you shove Kuroo to the end to give yourself some space.

“There’s a perfectly good chair you know!” He complains, squished up against the arm of the couch.

“Huh.” You make a show of squinting at the empty chair. “I think that chair says ‘Kuroo’ on it though.”

He groans. “This couch isn’t made for four people!”

“It most definitely is, I just unfortunately happen to live with two freakishly tall volleyball players and one beefy one.” You jab a finger to the other side of you at Bokuto sandwiched between you and Akaashi on the couch.

Kuroo gives you a look, then turns his attention to the chair in question. “It says Kuroo on it, does it?”

You grin devilishly at him. “Sure does. Gotta squint to see it though.”

He sighs, but picks up his bowl from the table and moves over to the chair grumbling, “The things I let you do…” But you can see he’s trying to hide his smile. This time you smile innocently at him before taking a bite of your food and scooting over to his newly vacated spot. “Who’s turn is it tonight?”

“Mine—mine!” Bokuto shouts, nearly tipping his bowl over in his attempt to snatch the remote. He turns the channel to the college sports network, and you pull out your phone to scroll mindlessly through your feed. You’ve watched volleyball every night for the past week, giving up your nights in control of the remote because they all get unbearably antsy in the days leading up to a game.

So, to make up for it, you either get the remote for however many days you gave it up for or they do the dishes or something. You don’t mind too much, not when you’ve grown accustomed to it since all moving in together for second year. And besides, sometimes it’s just as entertaining watching them watch as it is watching the game itself. You like volleyball enough, having been to many of their games to support them, but watching it every night does get a little old for you.

Though, recently, you’ve found yourself watching Kuroo more often than not. The way his golden eyes intently watch the screen, his food forgotten halfway to his mouth—how his lips move almost imperceptibly as he counts to himself when he’d block. He’s so distracted that when his food slips off his utensil, he doesn’t notice, making a face when he bites at nothing. You don’t bother suppressing your giggles about it. To which he just slides a threatening look over at you before returning his attention to the TV.

“So,” you say loudly to get their attention, notorious for not hearing you when a game is on. “Which team are you playing?”

“The yellow one.” Akaashi points to the left side of the screen.

“Are they good?”

All three of them respond in unison, “Yes.”

You take that as a sign this isn’t a game you’re allowed to chat through. Kuroo surprises you by keeping the conversation going. “Are you going to come?”

Finishing your food, you shrug. “Sure, sounds like it’ll be a good game. Thursday, right?”

You stand, gathering the empty bowls to take to the kitchen. Again, Kuroo surprises you by pulling his attention from the match to hand you his bowl, muttering a quiet, “Thanks.”

Once you’re gone, he sighs internally, unsure why he wishes you’d come to every game. For a reason he can’t explain, during a game when he thinks his thighs will split the next time he jumps, or his fingers are finally going to break off, being able to glance up at you in the stands cheering them on gives him a burst of energy. And for months now, he’s been glancing at you a lot more frequently off the court.

He finds Bokuto and Akaashi staring at him, and all he can say is, “Shut up.”

~

You have to beg a couple of your girl friends to come to the game with you, enticing them with the idea of tall, attractive volleyball players. You would have gone alone of you had to but being with others is usually a lot more fun. Especially when your closest friends are in the game, it’s hard for you to find people to join you.

Volleyball is a pretty popular sport at your University for students to attend, so you annoy your friends to get their early, so you get decent seats. You arrive early enough to catch the tail end of both teams’ warm up, and you usually search for Bokuto’s unique black and white hair finding it easy to spot the familiar black mop of bedhead hair standing nearby.

Beside you, your friend asks, “Which ones are your roommates?”

You quickly point out Bokuto. “He’s the ace, and Akaashi is the one standing to the left of him—he’s the setter. And to the other side of him is Kuroo, a middle blocker, and the captain!”

“Middle blocker?”

You blink, realizing they don’t know much about volleyball in comparison to your strange knowledge of the sport you don’t even play. “Uh, yeah! So, most commonly tall players are in the position of middle blocker so that when the other team tries to spike, they can block it. You’ll see, it’s pretty crazy. I always think they’re going to get their arms ripped off, I don’t know how they do it.”

When the teams finish their warm-ups, they both line up on their respective sides to extend their thanks to the crowd for coming to the game. You beam and wave to your friends, doing your best to make the most noise out of everybody—probably looking ridiculous in the process.

Kuroo chuckles at your enthusiasm, Bokuto’s face splits into a smile and returns the gesture, making an effort to wave at the friends you’ve brought with you.

Once they head back to the coach, you friend leans over to whisper, “I know you live with them but…ever thought about dating one of them? ‘Cause—damn.”

“What? No!” You splutter. “I couldn’t! I know them a little too well.”

She raises an eyebrow suspiciously. Luckily, you’re saved by the referee blowing the whistle. “Oh, look! The game’s about to start.”

The boys were right, it does turn out to be an exciting game. A nail-biter, sit at the edge of your seat kind of game—your favorite kind. To your relief, your friends get really into the game, and don’t think about asking you more questions about your roommates. Though you can’t stop thinking about it. Not as you watch Kuroo’s jump serve, your eyes drifting to his shorts revealing his muscular thighs or the peek of skin you catch as his shirt rides up.

Have you thought about it in passing once or twice? Sure. Particularly when you’ve caught him just after a shower and he has the audacity to walk around the apartment with just a towel slung around his waist. The first time you saw him, your face set on fire and of course he caught it and chased you around the apartment yelling all sorts of playful jabs at you before you could sprint to the safety of your bedroom and slam the door in his face.

He never once has forgotten that instance, and even now you swear he walks around the apartment like that for longer than necessary on purpose just to fluster you. And sure, when you first met him a few years ago, you developed a crush on him, but it went away quickly after your friendship blossomed.

Didn’t it?

Your eyes widen ever so slightly, feeling like you’ve just had all the air knocked out of you.

Have you…liked…Kuroo all this time?

All those late nights studying, being with him nearly every weekend, enjoying almost every moment with him? The person you’d be so confident to say is your best friend and you’re just figuring this out now?

Holy shit—you think you’re going to pass out from the realization.

You watch Kuroo in a strange stupor, reeling from the emotions flooding you at the moment. But you come to a second realization shortly after the first.

That you’ve been friends all this time, and if he had ever felt that way about you…you assume it’s passed. And you can’t help but fixate on the fear that you’re too late in discovering the way you feel about him.

This isn’t going to be fun.

~

After the game, which his team fought tooth and nail to win, he notices you’re strangely distant. On the drive home while Bokuto is babbling about the game, you sit quietly in your seat, staring out the window, placating Bokuto with slight nods and occasional responses. It’s very unlike you and worries him.

What happened in the time span between the start and end of the game? Did one of your friends say something that put you off?

He shakes it off, as your spirits brighten slightly when Akaashi suggests you all pick up some takeout on the way home as he’s certain none of you want to put any effort into cooking. Kuroo suggests your favorite place to get food, but if you notice his attempt to bring you out of this weird silent slump, you make no indication of it.

That’s where you all end up getting food, but when you all return home and Akaashi says to you, “Well, what are we watching for the next couple days?”

You dig into the meal, shrugging. “You guys can watch whatever you want tonight, I have a quiz I need to study for.”

Kuroo nearly drops his container. Normally, you take the opportunity to watch whatever you want, no matter the complaints it might raise from any of them. He clamps his mouth shut around his chopsticks and catches the similarly surprised glances of Akaashi and Bokuto from across the table. They’ve caught on as well.

When you finish, you get up, throw your container away, and head up the stairs without another word. The moment you’re out of earshot, Akaashi notes, “Something’s up.”

“Yeah, you know she’s usually pretty amped after a game like that one…” Bokuto mutters, his mouth still half full.

“You should check on her.”

Gazing up the stairs, Kuroo gets the feeling you won’t be receptive to talking. Most of the time, you just need time to sort yourself out. You’re acting weird, but not enough to cause him real alarm yet. “I think she just needs some time,” he says, heart heavy that while he wants to go upstairs to help, he knows you well enough that he probably shouldn’t. He learned that the hard way.

Akaashi just shrugs. “Alright. You’d know best.”

“What does that mean?”

He’s unfazed. “I just mean that while we’re all friends, I think you know her better than us.” His eyes meet Kuroo’s, and just like Kenma could always see straight through him, Akaashi can too. “Just an observation.”

Leave it to Bokuto to say bluntly, “Yeah, we all know you’re in love with her.”

“Bokuto!” Kuroo hisses, glaring at him. She is right upstairs! “I am not—”

“You are,” Akaashi says. “And we all know it except for you and the only person denser than you who is currently directly above us.”

Kuroo slumps in his chair defeated. He does know it; he just doesn’t want to admit it. “Well, let’s all just keep that information to ourselves, shall we?” He groans, leaning his head back onto his chair. He can’t imagine what would happen if you accidentally overheard the fact that Kuroo thinks about you on a near daily basis and hasn’t been able to stop since he met you years ago.

Living together has only made it worse and with Akaashi and Bokuto on his ass about it now, he can’t imagine he’s going to be able to keep it a secret for much longer.

~

The next morning, you seem fine. Kuroo can’t detect any of the strange quiet that overcame you last night and things seem…normal. He couldn’t fall asleep though, too worried that you overheard the conversation after you left. But his worries are assuaged this morning when you saunter into the kitchen, unfazed by him, and even asking how he slept.

He swallows with difficulty. “Uh, not great if I’m honest.”

Without even sparing him a glance you say, “I know. I heard you tossing and turning all night.”

He smiles sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. “Growing pains.”

Now you turn to stare at him, giving him a complete once over head to toe. “Growing pains?! You’re joking—you already barely miss the tops of the doorframes!”

God, he really should have picked a more believable excuse. “Guess we’re gunna have to move,” he offers playfully.

“No—you’re gunna have to move. Or get used to ducking.” You stick your tongue out at him before taking a seat at the counter, sipping from your mug while scrolling mindlessly through your phone.

“Good game last night, huh?” He blurts trying to fill the silence, so he doesn’t start drowning in thoughts about how cute you look in your shorts or how he’s hyper-fixated on the cup you keep bringing up to your mouth.

You shrug. “My friends seemed to enjoy themselves, so that was fun. I got to show off my endless amounts of volleyball knowledge thanks to you guys.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Positions and plays and stuff. But I think they were much more interested in um—,” you cough, then glance at him from beneath your lashes. “The uh…players.”

He blinks. “What do you mean?” He knows exactly what you mean but he wants to hear you say it.

“I am not saying it.”

“But I really don’t know,” he muses.

A groan emits from you. “Yes, you do—I know you do.”

He smirks, making heat crawl up your neck. “What about the players?”

Burying your face in your hands, you shout defeated, “Ugh—they think all of you are hot okay?”

The mischievous grin that rises to his lips nearly sends you into overdrive. “Oh, we do get pretty warm,” he agrees, pouring his hot water into a travel mug and snagging a tea bag.

Your eyes narrow dangerously at him. “I hate you.” He just gives you a wink before slipping out the door. Wanting to scold yourself, you tangle your fingers in your hair, trying to convince yourself that was a perfectly normal interaction with him and there isn’t anything to read into. Not that insufferable smirk, or the way his golden eyes pin you in your seat.

You are royally fucked until you get over this.

Snapping you into reality, Akaashi clears his throat from the hallway behind you. “I swear if you say one goddamn word,” you threaten, shoving your mug into the sink and storming past a rather smug looking Akaashi.

~

On campus later that afternoon, Kuroo is on his way towards the station on the other side of campus to go home when ahead of him he spots one of the students he tutors coming the opposite direction. After tutoring you so successfully in chemistry, you had encouraged him to get a job at the tutoring center and he’s been working there since his second year. And this particular student, although he knows she means well, is by no means shy about her infatuation with him.

Just earlier today he tutored here and part of him thinks she actually does understand chemistry, but just makes appointments at the center solely to spend time with him. And today she asked him about the party being thrown by several sports clubs tonight, wondering if the volleyball club is a part of it.

He knows about the party, but the volleyball club had opted to not help host it and he had yet to ask the others if they wanted to attend. So, he’d given her a non-committal response.

When the session ended, she’d left with a suggestive, “Well, I hope to see you there Kuroo-kun!”

He can’t help that seeing her coming at him from the other direction, he instinctively panics and scans his surroundings for somewhere to hide until she passes. It’s then that he hears your familiar laughter fill the air and he immediately locates you sitting on the lawn with Akaashi. Relief fills him and without even thinking, he strides off the pavement into the grass and abruptly plops down beside you.

“Kuroo? What the—”

“Hi, sorry, please help me out.” He motions with his head in the direction of his tutee.

You tilt your head to glance behind his shoulder, catching sight of the girl whose been pursuing Kuroo since he started tutoring him at the beginning of the semester. “This is ridiculous.” You giggle quietly at the 6’2” volleyball player trying to hide behind your frame.

“You can’t just stop to chat for a few minutes?”  Akaashi asks in a hushed tone.

“She’s going to ask me to go to a party with her tonight.”

“Ah,” you say in understanding. Kuroo is far too nice to tell her no flat out.

And despite his attempts to avoid her, she spots him anyways and makes a detour out onto the lawn to talk to him. “Hi Kuroo-kun! Done with classes for the day?”

“Hey Suzuki.” He admirably gives her a warm smile. “Yeah, just enjoying the rest of the afternoon.” He feels awful. She’s a nice girl, but unfortunately, he’s pathetically in love with the one sitting next to him.

“Have you decided about the party yet?”

Unsurprisingly, Kuroo turns to the two of you for the answer. You shrug, looking at Akaashi. “Sounds fun, we haven’t been to a party in a while. Think Bo will be up for it?”

“Bokuto? Up for a party? Never.”

You chuckle at that and try not to laugh at the glare Kuroo points in your direction. He was hoping you’d say no, so he doesn’t have to endure advances from Suzuki all night.

Suzuki grins and tells him she’ll see him tonight before bounding off, and once she’s out of earshot he grips your arm hissing, “Are you trying to kill me?”

“Don’t worry.” You nudge him. “We’ll protect you all night. C’mon, lets have fun tonight!”

He’s in no position to deny you.

~

The party is already in full swing by the time you all get there, and Bokuto is none too shy to immediately drag Akaashi out onto the thumping dancefloor. You can’t help smiling softly at them, knowing that only Bokuto can get Akaashi to loosen up like that. Meanwhile, you and Kuroo hang back near the bar, sipping idly from your cups, laughing at Bokuto’s dance moves.

Though the unease rolling off Kuroo is palpable. Despite making humorous comments about how Bokuto is bound to take out someone’s eye with his limbs flailing around like that, he can’t hide his nervous glances as he scans the crowd for Suzuki.

Eventually he spots her, and he’s not sure how she hasn’t spotted him yet. He thought she’d be actively on the lookout for him, but instead she’s chatting with some other people, and unaware of his presence yet. He’s unsure if he can handle a night of being pursued by her but god—he also can’t stomach breaking her heart either. Not when he has to tutor her for the rest of the semester.

Glancing down at you next to him, he follows your gaze fixed on the dancefloor, smiling softly at your two friends enjoying themselves. “You want to dance?” He shoves off the wall to stand in front of you.

“What?”

“Didn’t you say let’s have some fun tonight?” He jabs a thumb behind him. “Looks like fun to me.”

A grin spreads across your lips that makes his heart stutter in his chest.

Following him down to the floor, you both shove your way through the crowd to reach Akaashi and Bokuto near the middle of the mass of people. When you arrive, Bokuto shouts a happy greeting and takes your hands into his to help you start dancing before returning his attention to Akaashi. There’s not much room down here, pressing you close against Kuroo, but you don’t think much of at as you’re pressed close to everyone around you too.

But Kuroo can’t think of anything but how close you are. Your laughter filling his ears as you lift your hands and start moving your hips to the beat—he realizes what a terrible idea this was. He wants to set his hands on those hips so bad and pull you even closer against him, close enough that he can feel your heartbeat against his chest and—fuck, he’s going to lose it tonight.

Before he can spiral into his fantasies about you, he instinctively looks for Suzuki again to see if she’s noticed him yet. He hopes he’s obscured enough on the dancefloor that it gives him a bit longer before the onslaught of suggestive words and here she won’t be pressured to keep it in check like she is on campus.

But just as he’s about to overthink that situation, a warm hand reaches up to grasp his face pulling his attention back to you. Any thoughts he had are tossed out the window as you stare at him openly and seriously.

“That doesn’t look like fun.” You point out.

“She’s here.”

You do a quick survey of the room and locate her; blissfully unaware the object of her infatuation is right under her nose. “Why don’t you just reject her?” You say out of the blue, startling him. He opens his mouth to object, but you just continue, “I get that you think you’re too nice and all, but wouldn’t it be nicer than leading her on like this?”

He has no argument against that.

“In my experience, most girls would much prefer you be honest with them. Just tell her you’re not interested. Simple.”

He stares at you. Mulling over the words you just said.

Be honest with them.

“You’re right,” he says, no longer thinking about Suzuki. “I’m not interested in her.”

“See? I told you, easy—”

“I’m interested in you.”

You make a small choking noise and blink dumbfounded at him. “That’s not funny.”

His expression doesn’t change, and your knees almost buckle under the weight of his stare. “It’s not a joke.”

“You…you—what? That’s…what?” He tries not to chuckle that he’s broken you into being unable to put together a sentence. “For how long?”

He shrugs, a little embarrassed to admit it. “A while.”

“I—ugh. You’re damn lucky I realized it recently too.” His eyes widen, lips curving into a smile as you throw your arms around his neck and press your lips to his.

He’s perfect and warm and solid against you, kissing you like he’s thought about this moment a million times. And by god is he fucking good at it. In the back of your mind, you swear you hear Bokuto’s whoop of excitement breaking through the music shouting, “Finally!!”

[bad-beats]

Bad Beets Ch. 1 (11/04-11/10)

Do you find enjoyment in other people’s gambling misery? Do you live by the phrase “Life is too short to bet the under?” Would you rather place a sports bet that seemingly has no chance of winning right after tip-off, or would you rather lose a heartbreaker on a meaningless Furman breakaway dunk that covers the +13 in the closing seconds? 

Welcome to Chapter 1 of the Bad Beets Blog. I am your degenerate gambling host, Jonah, and I am happy you have decided to take this rollercoaster journey with me. I hope you find enjoyment in my gambling misery, as you will soon realize that I am the unluckiest gambler in the world (*Please note I had action on all of these games, and yes, my bank account was harmed in the making of this blog).

11/4/19

League: Turkish Super Lig

Bet: Ankaragucu PK (+105)

Units: 0.8 to win 0.85

I can tell you from firsthand experience that betting on an 11am Turkish soccer game generally doesn’t end well. Ankaragucu went down 0-1 early, but my guy I. Parlak found the back of the net to equalize in the 68th minute. That was the score up until stoppage time. My bet was looking fine, but I wasn’t expecting a win by any means. I was hoping to escape with a push (because as they say in the world of gambling degenerates, “A push is a win”). It was my bet against the clock, and then this happened…

P. Djilobodji (is it legal to have that many j’s in a name?) scores a 90+3 minute heartbreaker. That is a beet that committed arson. Bad Beet #1 of the week came at the hands of Gaziantep.

11/4/19

League: NBA

Bet: 76’ers vs Suns Over 224 (-110) as part of a 3x2 round robin

Units: 3.7 to win 8.6

This was a classic bad beat. The Suns and 76’ers both have high powered offenses, and they were well on pace to hit the over after scoring a combined 116 points in the first half. My round robin was looking great - the other legs of Wizards ML and Blazers vs. Warriors 1H over 106.5 had both hit and I was in good shape for a great Monday payday. However, the Suns and 76’ers had other plans for me.

This Beet committed a double-homicide (my hopes and dreams). I still made a profit on this bet. Just take the 8.6U winnings that I had basically in the bag, drop the 8, and that’s how much I took home. Bad Beet #2 (I am going to feel like The Count from Sesame Street once this blog is over).

11/5/19

League: NBA

Bet: Bulls ML (+260)

Units: 0.7 to win 1.7

I have lived in Chicago my entire life, so naturally, I blindly bet on my teams regardless of their actual skill. Gambling with your heart never ends well, especially on this specific Tuesday when Lebron and Lakers came to town. The Bulls were up a cool 17 points at halftime and really had me believing that they could pull off this miracle. Hopes were high after the Bulls took a 13-point lead into the 4th quarter. And then the Bulls did exactly what the Bulls do - blow 4th quarter leads.

The Lakers went on a 16-0 run to start the 4th quarter and it was all but over from then on (The Bulls, however, did hit a miracle 3 with 15 seconds left to cover the +7). You know what they say, “Good teams win, but great teams cover.” Those 1.7 units would’ve been a nice addition to the bank account, but Bad Beet #3 got in the way. 

This is a bad beet. Thanks to our friends over at https://userbeets.com/signs-that-your-beets-have-gone-bad/ for providing us with some wonderful tips on when it might be time to “toss that beet as far as you can.” 

11/6/19

League: UEFA Champions League

Bet: Man City vs Atalanta 1H over 1.5 (-123) (Bonus: live bet at halftime over 2.5 (-176))

Units: 2 to win 1.65 (and the live bet was 4.4 to win 2.5)

This was the kind of game that screamed ‘Goal Fest’ from the beginning. Raheem Sterling slotted the ball into the back of the net in the 7th minute of the game, and I thought the 1H over 1.5 was going to be the easiest bet of all time. Throughout the next 30 minutes, both teams had some chances to score that they couldn’t capitalize on. Then controversy struck! Man City got pulled down inside the box (or so I thought) and were awarded a penalty kick, which is ever over bettor’s wet dream. However, V.A.R decided to be a cock-block and determined that the Man City player was fouled just outside of the box. Great, just my luck. The following free kick looked like it was headed for the upper left corner of the goal, but an Atalanta defenseman stuck his arm out and handled the ball. Back to V.A.R and just like that, Man City was awarded a penalty kick (ball don’t lie). Gabriel Jesus stepped up to the spot with swagger, and I knew my bet was going to cash. 

He struck the ball with the strength of an 83 year-old grandmother and put the ball wide of the left post. Fuck. That 1.65 unit win turned into a 2 unit loss real quick.

Naturally, as a gambling degenerate, I had to chase my losses (word to the wise - Do Not Chase Losses). I loved the pace of play and the scoring opportunities from the first half, so I live bet the game over 2.5 (and naturally threw 4.4 units on it to cover my losses from the first half). Four minutes into the second half, Mario Pasilic netted the equalizer for Atlanta, and once again I was sitting pretty. There was no doubt in my mind that at least 1, if not 3 more goals would be scored in the remaining 41 minutes plus stoppage time.

Many moments later the final whistle blew and that was that. The teams combined for 18 shots, and only 2 found the back of the net. What a horrible and cruel world we live in. Bad Beet #4 slaughtered 15 innocent ducks (and my checking account).

11/6/19

League: UEFA Champions League

Bet: Dinamo Zagreb ML (+117)

Units: 0.75 to win 0.9

As I was getting annihilated by Atalanta and Man City, Dinamo Zagreb simultaneously decided that they didn’t want my future children to be able to afford college. This game gives me PTSD, so I will just post the results of the game and you can laugh at my misery.

How you let up not 1, but 2 (!!) stoppage-time goals to blow a 3-1 lead along with my +117 ML bet is beyond me, but Bad Beet #5 of the week kidnapped my sanity and will give me nightmares for months. 

11/7/19

League: UEFA Europa League

Bet: Under 2.5 (+117), Under 2.5 (-122), and Under 2.5 (-143)

Units: 0.75 to win 0.85, 1.05 to win 0.85, and 2.15 to win 1.5

Classic cases of “Life is too short to bet the under.” Stoppage time is where unders go to die. I present to you Bad Beets #6, #7, and #8.

Thursday afternoon signals the middle of a gambling week, so naturally, this is the halfway point in the blog. I would recommend you get up to stretch, grab a snack, and take your dog for a walk, because we are just getting started. 8 Bad Beets before Thursday night is cynical. 

11/7/19

League: NFL

Bet: Keenan Allen over 68.5 Receiving Yards

Units: 2 to win 1.5

If you don’t bet player props often, I would recommend you start. It’s like fantasy football on crack. They are an absolute thrill. Speaking of thrills, that Chargers vs. Raiders Thursday night football game was full of them for every party involved; the outright winner, spread, and full game total were all still in the balance heading into the last drive of the game. Phil Rivers and his Bolts got the ball back with 1 minute left, down by 2, after Josh Jacobs rumbled into the endzone from 18-yards out to give the Raiders a 2-point lead. Phil Rivers has seemingly lead his team down the field for more game-winning drives than he has children. At this point in the game, Keenan Allen had 8 catches for 68 yards. Keenan is one of the most dynamic receivers in the league along with being one of Phil’s favorite targets. I needed ONE SINGULAR YARD from Keenan on the last drive of the game.

FUCKKKKKKKKKK! Three targets on the final drive, 0 catches and 0 yards. I hate everything. Bad Beet #9. 

11/7/19

League: NCAAF

Bet: UCF vs. Tulsa Over 68 (-120)

Units: 1.5 to win 1.25

There’s a lot to unpack in this one. The two teams combined for 45 first-half points. Needing just 3 TD’s and 1 FG in the 2nd half seemed like a cakewalk to me. The offenses in the 2nd half just weren’t as crisp as they were during the first 30 minutes of the game. I knew this game was destined to be a nail-biter heading into the 4th quarter. With 5 minutes left, I needed a field goal for a push and a touchdown for the win. Here are the last few drives of the game…

Trailing Tulsa by 3, UCF turned the ball over on downs and gave the ball back to Tulsa with just a few minutes to play. UCF stuffed the Golden Hurricanes on 4th down to get the ball back and keep the Over 68 hopes alive...or so I thought. ILLEGAL SUBSTITUTION PENALTY GIVES TULSA AN AUTOMATIC FIRST DOWN AND INTO VICTORY FORMATION THEY WENT! FUCK ME IN THE BEARD! Bad Beet #10. I am running out of ways to describe these horrible losses and it’s only Thursday.

11/10/19

League: Swedish Allsvenskan and English Premier League

Bet: Under 2.25 (-108) and Under 2.5 (+102)

Units: 1.2 to win 1.1 and 0.75 to win 0.75

“Life is too short to bet the under” Part 2! Bad Beets #11 and #12.

11/9/19

League: NCAAF

Bet: TCU vs. Baylor Over 48 (-110) as part of a 3x2 round robin

Units: 5 to win 11.5

This is a bit of a different entry, as for the first time in seemingly my entire life, I was on the right side of a Hero Win. The Over 48 in the TCU vs. Baylor game was basically dead from the opening kick. The game was 9-6 Horned Frogs with just a few minutes left in the game. Overtime in college football is every over bettor’s best friend (and every under bettor’s worst nightmare). The Bears kicker drilled a 51-yard field goal with 30 seconds left to send the game to overtime.

This is probably the best comeback hero win I have ever had. If I had been on the other side of this bet, I would have jumped off of a bridge. Luckily, Hero Win #1 saved me.

11/10/19

League: NFL

Bet: Panthers vs. Packers 1H Over 24 (-110)

Units: 1.4 to win 1.25

I would make a far bigger deal about this upcoming bad beet if it was a loss instead of the push that it was, but man this was an all-time push. Check out the final drive of the half for the Packers, leading 14-10. 

This drive had it all. A touchdown that was reversed by replay. Matt LaFleur whipping out his big boy balls, only for Jamaal Williams to get stuffed on 4th and Goal. And of course, a legendary push for 1H Under 24 bettors. 

11/10/19

League: NFL

Bet: Devonta Freeman over 40.5 Rush Yards (+105) and Lamar Jackson over 65.5 Rush Yards (-130)

Units: 1.2 to win 1.25 and 2 to win 1.55

Remember what I said about player props two paragraphs ago? I would like to now state that I hate player props. Devonta Freeman had 30 rush yards in the 1st half and then got injured, and Lamar broke a sweet, video game-like TD run in the 3rd quarter against the Bengals, and didn’t run the ball a single time after that (along with getting pulled in the 4th quarter because the Ravens were up by a billion). Take a look…

Bad Beets #13 and #14 come at the hands of two weak things: Devonta Freeman’s bones and the Bengals’ secondary. 

11/10/19

League: NBA and NCAAB

Bet: Hawks +8.5 (-110) and Fighting Illini 1H ML (184)

Units: 1 to win 0.9 and 0.5 to win 0.9

Every degenerate knows that Sunday night basketball games are known as “bailout specials.” After 12 Bad Beets throughout the week, I was in desperate need of a few bailout wins. However, as the self-proclaimed “unluckiest gambler in the world,” I should’ve guessed that more Bad Beets were on the way. My fingers are getting tired from typing due abundance of horrible beats I had this week, so I’ll just leave the screenshots here to show you my Sunday night demise…

The Hawks not covering was a sick joke, and of course I would lose Illinois 1H moneyline on a buzzer-beater three-pointer. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Bad Beets #15 and #16. 

For those of you who stuck with me throughout this post, thank you. I hope you found the enjoyment that your gambling careers can’t be anywhere near as bad as mine. Here are some final tallies from the week:

Bad Beet Count: 16 (with 1 Horrible Push and 1 Hero Win)

Unit Swing: 28.85 to win 30.8 (Basically a 50+ Unit swing due to Bad Beets)

Hopefully, next week’s blog is far shorter than this as I would love to not go through the gut-wrenching destruction of a backdoor cover. Unfortunately, there will likely be many more where these came from. Thanks again for taking the time to read through this! Please leave comments, suggestions, and tell me some of your Bad Beets so that I don’t feel alone on Bad Beet Island. See you next week! 

[kakiokuru]

NOBORIZAKA: NOVEMBER RAIN

Chapter Nine | Shitty Brats

“If this is war, we’ll take it from here.” A small group stood proud in front of Rappappa. Their uniforms clashed with their tracksuits, red as bright as their uniform’s scarf. “If you want to play yankee, we’ll gladly put you back in your place. You’re all still a million miles away from reaching Rappappa.” The leader of the pack had a similar haircut to the Rappappa woman, though their auras were completely different. They all shared a look of amusement as they scanned their eyes across the students. Their thoughts were as plain on their faces as the garish colour they sported. They saw Noborizaka as nothing but flashy upstarts biting off more than they can chew. Suffice it to say, the Norborizaka team didn’t appreciate that.

Otabe’s eyes widen in slight interest, flitting to the back of each Hinabe head. She had to admire their confidence but if she had any experience with the food-themed teams, they couldn’t stand a chance longer than a few minutes. She sighed, her lips spreading in a smile encouraging smile. “I suppose it’s customary. I’ll leave it to you all.” Her head shifted towards the remaining girls standing behind her, nodding her head upstairs. “Posts everyone.” Slowly, Yoga, Magic, and even Katsuzetsu filed up the stairs, the subsequent Rappappa leader following in tow. However, upon taking the first step, she halted turning her head to the side to address their new rival. “Whether you choose to attempt us all in one day or over the course of several is up to you. Come at us anytime.” With that, Otabe disappeared behind the graffitied wall. She’ll have to update Salt soon.

With their upperclassmen gone, Team Hinabe took an authoritative step towards the opposing team. “Because Sakura isn’t here, to even rank in you’ll have to defeat us to even touch the stairs.” The dead-eyed girl fronting the gaudily red team boasted, cracking her knuckles in the palms of her fingerless gloves. Uonome’s lip curled upward in a lopsided grin. “So let’s get this over with quickly. We don’t want prissy bitches in our school any longer.”

“Huh?! Who the hell are you calling prissy?” Yumi stomped forward in a growl, getting in the girl's personal space. They wanted a yankee, they got one. She may have been from a princess school, but Yumi was in no way a princess in the slightest. “I’ll gladly take on any piece of trash who thinks they can win so easily…” Yumi’s eyes darkened, peering into the other girl's. It was dead eyes versus devilish eyes. Yumi was a 24/7 yankee but it was a side rarely seen and lived, well, save for Nanase. She had a rough and merciless way of finishing a challenge so Hinabe was surely in for a treat. Tilting her head back, she puffed out her chest. “I took out your sorry excuse for a gate protection squaf in less than a minute, I have no problem crushing ugly girls like you.”

“The fuck did you say?” Another girl ripped the Hinabe leader out of her stance, taking her place. This one had her curled mess of hair flicked behind her shoulders, her bangs pulled into a ponytail atop her head. “Who are you calling ugly you–” She froze, colour rose in her cheeks. Her mouth formed sentences of retaliate but the yankee in front of her was perfect. From her eyes to her lips, not a single flaw was apparent. Her mouth was agape for a moment, her snaggletooth showing as she tried to find the words to say. Thumping in her ears, why was her heart beating so loudly suddenly? Her eyes were like Uonome’s only… Not dead. She had become putty in Yumi’s hand, despite the Noborizaka yankee not doing a single thing. “You… spoiled… Ah… Rich girl.”

Yumi smirked in response; this was going to be too easy. She could tell from looks alone these girls were disorganized and barely worth the effort. This girl in particular was loud, hotheaded, clearly homosexual. She could play that, easily too. Her wandered a split moment to judge what she was seeing. Yumi lifted her hand, rubbing her own bottom lip with her thumb in amusement. “You remind me of someone, a certain brat I know.” Right down to the curled brown hair that seemed to need a brushing after a fight. A shitty brat, just like the girl she loved. Yumi tilted the opposing girl's chin up with her forefinger and thumb, biting the corner of her lip. Her eyes met with Nanase tauntingly before she leaned closer to the brat. “Maybe you can replace her when all this is over.”

Nanase's eyes shot up. Those words, the two were too close, that look. How dare she? Her fists balled around the red umbrella, threatening to snap it in half. Rage sparked in the scout. “No. I want her.” Nanase spoke up, instantly jutting her crimson umbrella between the two with enough force to leave a bruise against her teammate’s chest. Watching the scene didn’t sit well with her, eliciting a burn in her that would be remedied by their distance and her fist in the tiny girl’s disgustingly blushing face. “They want a prissy girl, I’m more prissy than you. I’ll take care of it. Move. Over there. Now.” Though their eyes met for only a brief second, Yumi received the full brunt of her anger. Pressing her umbrella against her teammate’s chest even harder than before, Nanase finally had enough space to slide in. She made a point to stare the older but clearly smaller girl down. How could Yumi like a girl like her? Her stare quickly turned into a glare. “Don't even try it.”

However, Yumi only groaned in response. A fake one, but a groan to play along. “Jealous much?”

“To see you throw yourself at yet another girl who might open her legs to you?” Nanase face her frustrating partner while she raised her brow. “Not at all. However…” She paused, nearly forcing the umbrella into the girl's hands as she leaned in close to her face. Speaking in a hushed tone she whispered just loud enough for the rival to hear her. “…I don't like being compared to fugly dykes from a rival school. I especially don't like being replaced by clearly lesser girls, so allow me to destroy my competition. Hold my fucking umbrella, Wakatsuki.”

“Hot.” Yumi grinned to herself. Of course she gladly took it off her hands, but handed it off to Kazumi to carry. Somehow she ended up carrying everyone’s umbrella. Happily so too from the way she hooked them off her shoulders. Just like a semi-colourful idiot.

“You can do it Naachan!”

“Son of a bitch…” Kusogaki gritted her teeth.

Turning back to the group, the fires of jealousy could finally clearly be seen. Nanase could deny it all she wanted, but anytime another girl became close to her Yumi, she couldn't ever sit quietly. Even if the two were separated. This alone propelled her anger towards to group. “A shitty brat, a useless leader, and what are you two? Extras? Figures that shark bitch’s followers were just as disappointing. Are you going to run away like her?”

“Sakura would never run away.” The leader spat the same distaste back, fists clenched and nails digging into her fingerless gloves.

“Funny. Then why is she hiding in a hostess club, whoring herself out for money?”

“Her exact words were–”

Her shoulders shrugged dismissively. “I don't give a shit what her reasoning is. She ditched you all to feed you to wolves.” Nanase didn't bother even lifting her fists, she’d finish this quick enough. “Let's get this over with, so we can climb the stairs and clear our school's name.”

Though, the opposing forces readied themselves. Jisedai narrowed her eyes at the girl in front of her. “Bitch… Don't look down on us just because you cleared the road to the building.” She gave her team a side-eye in an attempt to communicate their formation.

“Sakura trusted us to guard the stairs in her place. We're more than enough for a bunch of spoiled ankle-biters!” Kusogaki snarled as she spoke, balling her fists. “Come at us, we’ll show you why rich kids like you should stay home!!” With a low growl, Kusogaki lunged into the jealous girl.

Nanase smirked in response, not moving from her spot. Not until she was inches away, Nanase took one step back, letting the older girl hit the floor. Sloppy. She couldn't help but laugh, seeing the brat miss so easily. “Slow.” Nanase taunted her, taking careless steps forward. “Sakura trusted people like you? I wouldn’t even trust you to watch my dead pet rock.” The red clad team then formed a square around her to gauge her every move. Nanase could only smirk at the worthless attempt intimidate her. “Are you sure she didn't just find a quick fix to fill her place while she gets her holes resized?”

Hearing such slander made Uonome’s blood boil. Under her breath, she cursed as she dug her heel into the floor, dashing inward to the center. With her arms tucked against her chest, she brought her leg up for a mid-kick at Nanase’s back. “I’ll make you eat your words!!”

Without needing to turn, Nanase swiftly sidestepped, absorbing the blow by wrapping her arm around the ankle. Seriously, did they have to grunt so loud before throwing a hit? “You noisy bitches make it so easy to counter. God, what did that slut see in all of you? Oh right. A scapegoat for responsibility.” While being resisted, the scout stepped back, one hand latching to the dead-eyed girl’s ankle and used the elbow of her other arm to smash into her knee, throwing her opponent's weight back when she buckled. “Messes, all of you.”

There was a sickening crack heard from the girl's leg, just before she released the opposing girl, matched with the blood curling screams of pain. The other girls all rushed to crowd their apparent leader. There was a brief second where Nanase felt guilty, but it was shirked off. From what she experienced, attacks from behind were cheap and she brought this upon herself.

In an instant, the box around her dispersed upon seeing the leader’s leg bend the opposite way. Kusogaki was immediately at her side, followed by Dodobusu and Jisedai. “Uonome!!”

“Gagh… My knee… Fuck… Sh-she broke my knee!”

“Nishino–!!” Mai stared in shock. That was too far, breaking bones wasn’t in the plan. She body reacted by stepping forward nearly into the fray but Erika’s hand around her arm kept her back. Even Yumi was there to give her a shake of her head. Was this really the yankee way?

She smirked, crossing her arms. “That's my victory then. That was fast.” It was very clear the rest were more concerned with their broken leader. There would be no more fighting from this lot. With a sigh, Nanase rubbed her neck, striding back to her team. “Shall we prepare for the next?”

“A cheap one-hit victory like that… you're trash!!” The girl with a single clip keeping the hair from her eyes called out to her from the floor.

Nanase glanced at her over her shoulder. “Is that so?” She never did like people insulting her; Nanase did the cursing, never tolerated taking it. While she would typically let girls come to her, this was a special case. Nanase stomped over, grabbing the girl by her ear. Soft cries of pain escaped her as the scary student began to force her to her feet. “Dodobusu, right? Your name precedes you.” Nanase wore a sweet and teasing smile. “You think that victory wasn't enough? She didn’t hit back did she?”

“You–… You still have two more of us…” The other girl attempted to grip at her arm, pull away, anything to stop the pain of her ear tearing off. “If you fought fair… Uonome could have destroyed you.”

That prompted a small, amused chuckle. “Really? Fair? So, you don’t like me winning with one hit, but as I recall didn’t Sakura take you down with one hit too? The one-inch punch. Now look at you, at the beck and call of a shark bitch who left you to the wolves.” There is was, that flicker of realization and fear in Dodobusu’s eyes that Nanase occasionally liked to ride on. “You don’t have any right to talk. But, clearly you feel for your stupid leader so… Should I show you how she feels right now?” She released the girl’s ear, but no relief would come for her as she gripped Dodobusu’s nose with her other hand. “You should be careful who you call trash.” Her eyes darkened. Without warning, Nanase swung heavy fists against her lower abdomen. One after another until she tossed the red-jacketed girl haphazardly into the only other unscathed member of the team, slamming both into the wall. There wasn’t any way they’d come back from that. She proved her point. “I win. Again.”

“Not quite.”

A voice called out from the end of the hall. Turning around the corner, two more girls appeared to join in on the downed Team Hinabe’s aid. One was sporting another red jacket though weathered and dull, her visage matched that of a humanized otter that rivalled Nanase’s. The other fashioned a pompadour and her red scarf lazily hanging off her shoulders, her facial features sharp and eyes intense. Kamisori and Katabutsu, feigned their tough exterior and stared their enemy down.

“Are all you Majijo girls so dramatic?” She rolled her eyes as she watched the final two girls approached. “Oh well, it makes for a more satisfying defeat.” Nanase waved her hand in a way she couldn’t care less. Glancing between them she crossed her arms. “I heard you were strong. Want to have a go?” Nanase raised her hand, beckoning them both over. However, she paused, putting a finger to her chin. Her tone was cheeky and but dripped with venom. “Wait… Or was it that you were only strong with a lame partner? Or only strong when people remember you exist?”

“You…!” The otter-faced female squeaked. Sure Zombie wasn’t around but her razor sharp nails were more than enough. She didn’t waste time in dashing forward with her fingers out stretched.

“Each Majijo girl has a strength of their own, don’t underestimate us.” The shorthaired girl raised her head, narrowing her eyes. Clearly she wasn't one to mince words. Without another word, Katabutsu raised her fists and charged at the Noborizaka student.

Nanase scoffed. “Two at once, hm? We’ll see about that.” Once more she raised her hand, beckoning the two over. Kamisori was faster than she expected, needing to dodge from getting slit in the cheek. However, a quick but firm grasp of the sharp girl’s hands and then a twist of her fingers ensured her safety. Nanase then turned the girl around, twisting her arm behind her back, using her as a human shield from Katabutsu’s incoming strike to the face. Disoriented, the Majijo girls cursed at each other for attacking their own. Idiots. Nanase took the chance to twirl the girl around and launched a powerful kick to the gut followed by another roundhouse kick to side of the head. Kamisori was sent crashing to the wall next to the pile she called her friends. “Well that was disappointing. You’re all so uncoordinated.”

“Son of a…” The remaining girl cursed, going in low to tackle her enemy down.

Expected. “Please.” Nanase remained still, taking the tackle in with her body and letting herself be forced back. But she wouldn’t go down. Latching on to the girl’s uniform, the scout planted her loafer down into the dirtied tile of the floor in a display of strength. “You’re going to need to do better than that.” Nanase laughed, lifting her knee repeatedly into the girl’s stomach until she felt her opponent’s arms weaken around her. Yanking her up by the collar to face that pained expression, she let loose a flurry of hooks straight to the jaw. And just like the rest, she hit the floor in a beaten, bloody mess. “Just like Majijo to be all hype and no game.” Nanase won a fourth time.

The pile of bodies on the ground at their feet, it was clear to every witness they weren’t putting on airs. The display showed just how much of a threat Noborizaka truly was.

“Impressive.” Yumi finally chimed in as she leaned against the locker.

Her voice resparked her adrenaline. Nanase whipped her attention to her yankee teammate, glaring her down with the embers of jealousy still burning with her. Of course, she couldn’t forget why she was triggered in the first place. This wasn’t a victory she could rejoice in. Not while that person-sized irritation pricked at her. Nanase couldn't let that go, she was too prideful, too petty. Marching back to her group, she snagged her umbrella from Kazumi’s shoulder.

“Good work. Cleared the second and third tier. Should we continue on ahead or come back tomorrow to challenge the first Queen?” Reika stepped forward as she recorded the fight into her tablet.

“It’s probably best that–” Erika started.

“Wakatsuki and I will be walking home separately.” Nanase finished.

“Eh, Naachan–” Kazumi waved her arms slightly, letting the umbrellas clack together. Once more she resembled a disgruntled toddler. “It’s dangerous!”

“We’re still in enemy territory, you could both get hurt.” Mai warned.

“Don’t care.” Nanase almost completely forgot her team was even there. Blind hate would do that. With one hand she carelessly waved them off, completely ignoring them. She didn't allow a chance for Yumi to protest, grabbing her growing irritation by the red uniform ascot. With a firm look, she peered into the others eyes. “We need to have a talk. Now.” She wanted them to know how pissed she was.

“Well, that answers that…” Erika, and the rest, watched Nanase strangle Yumi away. Hopefully they’ll see them both unharmed again.

A strained grunt of a choke escaped as she was yanked away, weaving through the various faceless small fry. She was mad and Yumi expected it. Such scornful rage always inhabited the petite girl and Yumi always felt pity at who the anger was directed to. However this time, she dug herself in this grave but she knew how to handle it. At least, she thought she did. Well, this case was a little different. She spoke the unforgivable line. Yumi had to think fast. She watched the back of Nanase’s head as she was dragged along, a less fearful but more thoughtful grimace on her face. To save herself, Yumi would have to put up a good defense.

Nanase made sure to drag the girl somewhere they shouldn't be bothered. She finally stopped in what look to be the overgrown school courtyard, where Sakura fought Bakamono in the beginning. Empty barrels, broken chairs, and dented cabinets still laid about untouched; it was a place long since forgotten and never cared for. Pebbles shifted under her feet as she paced briefly, trying to think of where to start. Her emotions and mind were in overdrive, still riding high on her anger and the burn of her jealousy. Her hands cupped her cheeks, rubbing up and down in frustration.

“You have a lot of fucking nerve, Wakatsuki.” Pausing, she turned her head to daggers into the yankee opposite of her. “Always telling me ‘don't let people push your buttons’. Then you do it yourself?” Nanase mocked before letting out a disgusted grouse. It was a minor thing, but still something on her mind. Honestly, she had three million things she wanted to yell about, yet conveying them was the difficult in itself with how stubborn she knew herself to be. She groaned in frustration as she stomped across the yard to face her again. “‘Maybe you can replace her’? Are you kidding me?! What the hell was that about?!”

Yumi just simply let her blow off her steam, giving her a small shrug. “I wasn’t serious.”

That response earned her a sharp resounding slap across the cheek, one that echoed off the dirtied walls. “Do not give me that.” The scout gritted her teeth. Deep down, she didn’t like seriously hurting Yumi for any reason but her body acted on instinct, feeling the sting of the impact in her palm. “You know exactly what I don’t like and you still do it. What kind of passive-aggressive shit are you trying to pull?”

“Nothing really. I was pushing their buttons too. Get them riled up and they’ll fuck up. You know that.” Yumi sighed, unfazed by the smack to the face.

“That is not an excuse.”

"Look, if I get you riled up at me, at least you won't fuck up in a fight against them, right? You won, lighten up."

"What kind of logic is that?!"

Yumi rolled her eyes, shifting her weight to lean against the wall. “Honestly, you have to loosen up. Getting your panties in a tizzy by everything I say shows bad character.”

“Bad chara– You’re one to talk, chasing everything in a skirt, getting down on any girl who might open her legs for you. First that sleazy hostess club, now the bitch with the snaggletooth. Don’t think I don’t know about you and Sakurai in our spot on the roof. As soon as you’re available, anyone will do, huh?”

Fuck, she knew about Reika. Good thing she never pursued her. "Just living by your old motto. 'Enjoy yourself,' right?"

"I thought you hated that."

“I do but do you really think I have such low standards to actually want to get it on with any of the girls from this trash heap of a school?” She scoffed.

“Oh, I know you do.”

“So you’re saying that you’re also a low standard.” She smirked.

Nanase’s eye visibly twitched. She was doing it again, pushing buttons that should never be pushed, even going as far as twisting her words. Yumi could be a real bitch if she wanted, Nanase knew that best. Taking a deep breath, she tried to show that measly words wouldn’t crawl under her skin. She knew better, or at least tried to. “That’s not what I meant.” She growled out. Her hands clenched so tight blood threatened to spill from the nails against her skin and all to contain the urge to strangle the girl before her.

"See, this is your problem, you don't say what you mean, you don't talk about anything. I never know what you want because you never tell me and then get pissed at me when I do something wrong. So I have to either wait or force it out of you, both things I don’t want to do but you leave me with no choice. What happened to talking shit out? I’m sick of being expected to understand you when I really don’t know what going on in your head. You just do, you never think. Why is it so hard to talk to me?"

"It's hard for me, you know that! I’m not an open book unlike someone. I’m not throwing myself at everyone like I've been sex deprived."

"Yeah well, I'm not as petty as to start throwing shit at people after being suggested to take a break to sort out my feelings."

"That’s not fair. You put me in position where I didn't know how to respond. When you didn't like my answer, you turned tail."

Yumi pushed herself off the wall and paced to Nanase, narrowing her eyes at the girl. She wanted to play it like that, fine. "You gave me a 'thank you' to my 'I love you'. Not something someone wants to hear after they've spent three years with that person. I wanted to give you time and space until you can either figure out if you actually cared about me enough back. If you did, cool. If you didn't, I still would have stayed. But you took it as me ending it permanently."

Nanase's lips twisted and curled as she tried to muster up something to form a rebuttal. "So, I jumped the gun, it doesn't give you the excuse to flirt with everything and everyone around us while I'm still here. You love me? I could hardly tell."

Okay, Yumi had to admit she was in the wrong for that. "You can have your fun but I can't? Talk about fair, then again, I always had the short end of the stick."

"Yumi– I didn't mean it like that!"

The yankee threw her arms up, letting out a sigh as she walked away from the scout. “Then what do you mean? What do you want? Seriously, we have better things to do right now at this very moment then talk about my love life. On Majijo grounds too.” Yumi sighed, running a hand through her hair as she looked around for watchers. “You really know how to pick the place.” Honesty dripped from her words, coated with sarcasm in her tone.

Nanase let her glare stay firm. How else did she really expect this to go? She couldn't deny it; dragging Yumi by the collar to 'talk' to a place like this was a bad idea. Her emotions got the better of her judgement… again. ‘Just do and never think’. Both of them were too stubborn for their own good, Nanse could recognize that this situation would only become a vicious cycle in they continued on. Their future had begun to show signs of bleakness. Even being friends seemed impossible. “… You aren't worth it.” Letting the tension out of her shoulders, she deflated with the realization herself. If she were honest, she never wanted them to be this way.

“Yeah. Clearly.” Yumi looked away, feeling a heavy weight of her words. Her mind had come to the same conclusion, almost three years of work crumbling in front of her, as if it never happened at all. “Apparently I never was…”

Nanase wanted to insult her, fight back, something, but what point was there? She licked her lips, glancing everywhere that wasn't the opposite girl. Her chest hadn’t ached this much in a long time, she could feel her eyes sting from the pain alone. It took a lot of courage to look her in the face again. “When this war is over, don't speak to me ever again.”

Slowly, Yumi let her focus fall on the scout, her brow slightly rising in surprise. “That far, huh?” She let a moment of dead air to pass in order for the nothing to sink in. Talking and talking things out, it was one of her favourite things to do. Nanase knew that. It was the best way to get her to open up; years of trial and error had gotten them so far. Until now. Yumi exhaled a quiet breath and nodded. “…Fine.”

Heavy tension hung in the balance as neither word or sound came from either of them. It was as if they were waiting, an empty promise of hope that one would take back their words. But nothing.

Nanase turned away, leaving the courtyard. “… See you.”

As soon as she was gone, Yumi cursed, showing a faint sign of the same aching feeling Nanase felt. “… Fucking brat…”

To be continued…

[bluewatsons]

Michael Millner, Homo Probabilis, Behavioral Economics, and the Emotional Life of Neoliberalism, 29 Postmodern Culture (2019)

Abstract

Neoliberalism often operates by privatizing what was once public and by turning questions of moral value into questions of market finance. This essay expands our understanding of these operations by examining the way neoliberalism takes hold at the most intimate level—the level of feeling. It argues that the field known as behavioral economics has helped to produce the neoliberal subject as a person of feeling. While it shows the alignment of behavioral economics with neoliberalism, the essay also suggests how the field might put its observations to work in very different ways.

"The hot hand is bunk."

LeBron James's Miami Heat was playing a tight NBA championship series with Tim Duncan's San Antonio Spurs in June 2013. I had just offered a rather inept analysis of the Heat-Spurs matchup, simply as a way of continuing a cocktail conversation on a subject about which I knew next to nothing. "The Heat will win if LeBron gets the hot hand" was all I could muster. To which my friend countered, "The hot hand is bunk." In retrospect, I see this exchange as my introduction to one of the hegemonic principles of our moment.

One thing I thought I knew about basketball was that in the final few seconds of a close game you look to get the ball to the player with the so-called hot hand—the player with the flow, who is completely in the zone, hitting everything from everywhere. In one way or another, the idea of the hot hand seems to apply to almost any athletic contest, but especially to basketball, a game characterized by a fluid stream of infinitesimal, instantaneous decisions and movements of great complexity by a group of players essentially untethered from playmaking coaches (who have only so much control over the back-and-forth stream of action). It makes a kind of folk sense that talented players might suddenly be able to put all this complexity together, if only for a few minutes, through a rare synchronicity of mind and body—and shoot the lights out. You better get them the ball while it lasts.

But my acquaintance in this conversation—not incidentally, it seems to me now, a law professor of the economics and law persuasion—proceeded to blow up that folk wisdom. He set out for me Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky's debunking of the hot hand, which originally appeared in 1985 in the journal Cognitive Psychology. It is worth noting that Tversky was the Israeli psychologist who, with his close friend and later Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, laid the foundation for the field known as behavioral economics through a series of extraordinary experiments and observations in the 1970s and 1980s. As Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky explain (writing in this case without Kahneman), the sense that a basketball player has the hot hand derives from the common tendency to misperceive a particular experience involving probabilities. People tend to see significant coordination in small numbers of sequential events where more careful statistical reasoning would show much less coordination. For instance, in a paradigmatic example, naïve weekend gamblers may believe they are on a hot streak when they've tossed three or four good rolls of the dice, but, of course, their odds of getting a good roll haven't changed at all (each roll is distinct with exactly the same odds). The dice rollers are simply experiencing a statistically expected repetition of good rolls, which exists in any significant sequence of rolls. The problem is even easier to see when discussing coin flips. We know that coin flips are essentially random and if we flip a coin a very large number of times it will land nearly 50 percent of the time "heads" and 50 percent of the time "tails." But within this large number of flips, there may be sequences of several "heads" in a row (or several "tails"). In the case of coin flips, we might be intrigued by such repetitions but we tend not to significantly misperceive the probability of these sequences (we don't seriously talk of hot streaks in coin flipping) because the coin flip is so clearly understood as random. But in the case of more complex activities, like a series of basketball shots, we do often fall into such misperceptions. The hot-hand essay relies on empirical evidence to argue that a series of successful shots by an individual player during a couple of minutes in a single game is best understood as a statistically expected sequence of successful shots—not evidence of a hot hand—within the context of the player's season-long shooting average. Put slightly differently, but to the same end: the next jumper that the player takes doesn't have any significantly greater chance of going in than his or her average from the field determined by a large number of shots across a number of games. As Tversky, Vallone, and Gilovich found by running various experiments and by closely observing real-game shooting statistics, the laws of probability do a better job of predicting the next shot than does a sense of the hot hand. So the best thing for the coach to tell the team in the final seconds of a nail-biter is to get the ball to the player with the best shooting percentage across the season.1

In my experience, debunking the hot hand tends to conjure up disbelief in just about everyone, and in die-hard sports junkies this disbelief can turn quickly to outright hostility. Indeed, a part of me simply couldn't believe it either when I watched the Heat and the Spurs in 2013—and perhaps still doesn't want to believe it today. For both the player and audience, the experience of the hot hand is so intense, feels so accurate and real, and is associated so deeply with an altered state of mind and body, that it's nearly impossible to relinquish it simply on account of a statistical analysis. The apparent naturalism of the hot hand, as well as the emotional investment it conjures, is at the heart of the argument put forth by Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky. Their point is not simply that we typically misunderstand statistical reasoning and probabilities—a fact unsurprising to anyone who has taken a stats course—but that those misunderstandings actually feel just right, are again and again our regular initial response, and are almost impossible to shake, even after we fully understand the logical probabilities. We feel in our bones a truth that is an illusion.

In this essay, I'm interested in this feeling of certainty. And not just this feeling, but other closely associated feelings that arise in response to gambles, calculations, or predictions we make under pressure. One of the striking observations of behavioral economics (the hot-hand essay from 1985 is foundational in the field) is that we often feel our way through probabilistic decisions. Whom to throw the ball to for the final shot? What retirement fund manager to choose? How much money to borrow for an education? What insurance contract to purchase? Such questions are only the starting points in our nearly daily encounters with probabilities. In a neoliberal world ever more characterized by the privatization of risk and the financialization of everyday life, we contend with probabilities relentlessly. We have become what the political theorist Ivan Ascher calls "homo probabilis" (85 and passim). And I will add to Ascher's helpful conceptualization that homo probabilis is, counterintuitively in many respects, a man of feeling (or more generally, a person of feeling). Behavioral economics has played a considerable role in the theorization of this new person of feeling, a role that has had mass appeal and influence. Behavioral economics has popularized particular ideas of the subject, reason, and agency, which call for interrogation. I will argue that behavioral economics has helped produce homo probabilis as a person of feeling, and that the field's theorization and instrumentalization of affect around probabilities is in league with neoliberalism. But, in the end, I will also argue that ideas about what may be called "probabilistic affect" shouldn't be completely critiqued away, but rather redirected towards ends very different from those valued by neoliberals.

This argument will unfold by first outlining the contours of homo probabilis—that is, the neoliberal subject—and by emphasizing the importance of understanding subjects who feel their way through probabilities. This subject isn't natural—it had to be made—and the two middle sections of the essay examine how that making began with the Chicago School economists in the early 1960s and continued through the rise of behavioral economics in the 1970s through 1990s, culminating with its recent popularity. The account offered runs against behavioral economics's history of itself as a radical break from the Chicago School. My description of behavioral economics also presents the field as developing a theory of affect that it takes to describe natural experience. "Affect" is not a term behavioral economics itself uses, but application of the term—highly developed in the humanities and in sectors of the social sciences—helps provide a critical perspective on behavioral economics. The penultimate section of the essay presents this theory of affect as ideological and aligned with neoliberalism, while the final section suggests different directions we might move in, putting the observations of behavioral economics to work.2

Who Is Homo Probabilis?

Ivan Ascher uses the term homo probabilis to distinguish the older idea of economic man—homo œconomicus—from the newer, neoliberal subject—homo probabilis, or speculative man. The older idea of homo œconomicus, so important to classical economics from Adam Smith onward, sees the individual as a partner in exchange. This individual partners with others in exchange so as to maximize his utility—in the language of economics, the term "utility" refers to his needs and wants. In doing so, this classically liberal subject is thought of as free, agential, and rational. But for the neoliberal subject, homo probabilis, the central activity is not exchange but investment, and that investment is often an investment in himself, that is, in his own human capital. Using a memorable phrase, Michel Foucault calls this new neoliberal subject an "entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital" (226). Like an entrepreneur, the neoliberal subject invests capital in an enterprise, and that enterprise is himself. These investments are risky, and like all investments require consideration of probabilities. However, Foucualt writing in 1979 could not foresee the rise of financialization and the intensification of privatization that have made playing the probabilities ever more complex, becoming one of the primary characteristics of homo probabilis.

In Portfolio Society, Ascher explains that homo probabilis is a fairly recent creation—or, perhaps better put, a fairly recent necessity. In the last forty years, homo probabilis has been cultivated in relation to the rise of a society backed by financialization (what Ascher calls a "portfolio society," or a society that is viewed as an investment portfolio that balances risk with potential returns). With the dismantling of the security provided by more socialized forms of education, retirement, health care, and living assistance, the neoliberal homo probabilis has been compelled to securitize itself in financial markets. This subject seeks its security by turning itself into a kind of security that can be bought and sold, aggregated and spun off, complete with futures contracts and other kinds of derivatives. Homo probabilis has little choice but to take risks in the market: student debt for education and 529 plans for the education of future generations, 401K investments in retirement, a 30-year loan in the mortgage market, 3-to-6-year financing in the auto loan market, various insurance contracts, and often significant credit card debt (necessitated by slow wage growth). This subject is also managed in terms of risk in the market. Among other things, homo probabilis is a credit score with associated hazards to banks and credit card issuers, an age and gender with associated risks for health insurers, a collection of points with associated probabilities to auto insurers, and, if this person is an immigrant, a collection of data associated with dangers to national security and a panoply of additional concerns.3 This subject speculates in all these markets when it makes decisions about its future—its human capital—while simultaneously being the object of speculation in these markets. Ascher notes that homo probabilis is what some political theorists have recently begun to refer to as a "dividual" (89).4 A "dividual" is no longer a subject that is "not divisible," but one who is divided into parts, separated into data about this and that, and aggregated into pools of other subjects with similar data. A dividual is a means, not an end. This dividual subject, so entwined with speculation and probabilities, invests in itself as the means of collecting dividends and in the hope of having, say, a retirement and medical care in the future—or simply a future in the future.

There is much more to Ascher's important book, but for now it will suffice to say that it helpfully expands the baseline definition and history of neoliberalism through an examination of financialization and the subject that emerges, homo probabilis. But this subject didn't simply emerge—it was made, as Ascher well knows: "this neoliberal Homo probabilis, this 'entrepreneur of the self' or this investor on which today's capitalist mode of prediction depends, does not exist in the wild: it has to be bred" (106). And the central question may not be how this subject was made, but why it has had such an astonishing grip—so strong that it has not been broken by economic meltdowns, wide disparities between the 1% and the 99%, a deep sense of precarity in health care and education, and other tribulations fairly easily traceable to the new political economy that began to develop in the early 1970s. As William E. Connolly notes, "most [accounts of neoliberalism] may not come to terms sharply enough with the subjective grip the state, media, and neoliberal combine exerts on the populace even after it has been rocked" (23). The strength of the grip is in part explained by the making of homo probabilis in very intimate, affective ways. Homo probabilis, as we will see, is constructed by behavioral economics as a very particular kind of feeling subject.

History: Toward "A Colossal Definition"

Behavioral economics outlines an array of theories about the everyday, intimate, affective operations of homo probabilis, and through both mainstream media popularity and the advancement of multiple policy initiatives, the field has put those theories into practice to shape homo probabilis. Perhaps no other body of research has thought so thoroughly about the routine, nearly automatic processes we use to make decisions about the future, to calculate risks, to understand, forecast, and analyze data—all the skills that will make one a good homo probabilis and all things that we do affectively as often as we do rationally, according to behavioral economists. But before turning to behavioral economics per se, I want to spend a moment examining its prehistory, where we can first see neoliberalism's interest in affect and emotion. This history will be nothing like the history that behavioral economics presents of itself. The economic behaviorists often represent their findings as a break from the rational choice theory articulated by the Chicago School economists of the 1950s and 1960s—Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and others. For instance, in the bestselling Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, perhaps the most influential book of policy suggestions derived from work on cognitive misperceptions, economist Richard Thaler and legal policy scholar Cass Sunstein mock the idea of a "species" of "Econs" who are "Mr. Spock"-like and believe in an old-fashioned rational agent (7, 22). In The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, the account of Kahneman and Tversky's extraordinary and tumultuous friendship and the work it produced, Michael Lewis paints the two psychologists as outsider hero-geniuses who deconstruct the idea of rational choice. The rational actor is what gets undone in The Undoing Project.5

From one perspective, this notion of a radical break rings true. The work in behavioral economics deeply complicates the standard economic model of an individual who maximizes utility through decisions made about exchanges with others. That model understands the individual as guided only by payoffs determined rationally. That rationality is unaffected by emotion, the framing/context of decisions, or the difficulty individuals have predicting the future—all areas that behavioral economics has focused upon. As postwar economists "constructed their new approach to economics upon the foundation of utility," economist George Lowenstein explains, "they rapidly became disillusioned with utility's psychological underpinnings and sought to expunge the utility construct of its emotional content [developed by philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill]" (426). This is certainly true in the main, if we think of emotions as passions that might upset reasoning. But even at the University of Chicago, ground zero for rational choice theorizing, and especially in the work of Gary Becker ("the most radical of the American neo-liberals," as Foucault remarks [269]), there was interest in something like feeling or emotion from the beginning of the reconstruction of the economics discipline in the post-World War II era.6 Regarding this interest, there are two central points to make—one about human capital and utility and another about rationality.

Becker's idea of "human capital"—a transformative idea in twentieth-century economics—was essential to expanding the notion of what might be considered a utility so as to include aspects of life that are hard to pin down as rational, like satisfaction and wellbeing. A bank account, a stock portfolio, and an assembly line traditionally count as capital because they might produce income or other useful yields. Forms of human capital, including "[s]chooling, a computer training course, expenditures on medical care, and lectures on the virtues of punctuality and honesty" are "capital too," Becker explains, "in the sense that they improve health, raise earnings, or add to a person's appreciation of literature over much of his or her lifetime" (15-16).

That rational agents might trade in "appreciation of literature" or the "virtues" of certain values (or the satisfactions of motherhood, another area of interest to Becker and the Chicago School) ranks as a significant expansion of the traditional idea of utility. Foucault in his remarkably prescient 1979 Collège de France lectures on "American neo-liberalism" calls such emotional payoff "psychical income" (244). In the case of the mother-child relationship, the child benefits from the mother's investment in obvious ways that maximize utility—better care and education lead, potentially, to a better income—but the mother also benefits: "She will have the satisfaction a mother gets from giving the child care and attention in seeing that she has in fact been successful" (244), as Foucault explains, summarizing the Chicago School position. When such "satisfaction" can be incorporated into economic analysis, an economic rationality is implemented all the way down—the human at a very intimate level is a homo œconomicus. "[T]he generalization of the economic form of the market beyond monetary exchanges," Foucault remarks, "functions in American neo-liberalism as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior" (243). Economics can be applied to the most private of realms.

The rationalization of "psychical income"—like a sense of virtuousness, appreciation, or satisfaction that may become an object of economic analysis—is only part of Becker's proto-neoliberal project. What Foucault calls Becker's "colossal definition" (269) involves significantly expanding the notion of rationality to incorporate affective response. Foucault observes that Becker's idea is in essence a new conception of labor. The Chicago School replaces older classical understandings of labor, as well as the Marxist understanding of labor, with a new interpretation of it as essentially decision making (or "choice," as the Chicago School proponents like to say)—and decision making, ultimately, involves affective response. As Foucault puts it, the Chicago School inspires economists to take up

the task of analyzing a form of human behavior and the internal rationality of this human behavior. Analysis must try to bring to light the calculation—which, moreover, may be unreasonable, blind, or inadequate—through which one or more individuals decided to allot given scarce resources to this end rather than another.

Labor takes the form of "calculation," and the object of study for the new Chicago School economics is essentially the study of how decisions are made using "internal rationality" and how calculations lead deciders to "allot given scarce resources" in a market.

But what exactly is "internal rationality" for Becker? In the traditional economic view, individuals, firms, and markets are deemed rational because they consistently maximize the utility function. A "calculation" that is "unreasonable, blind, or inadequate" doesn't sound like a form of rationality under any definition—economic, philosophical, or commonsensical. But Becker develops just this position in his 1962 essay "Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory" (Foucault's point of reference). Here Becker enters the fray over what might count as rationality in economic theory and how economic theory might approach the "impulsive," irrational behavior of individuals and firms ("Irrational Behavior" 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12). He says that his purpose in this essay is "not to contribute yet another defense of economic rationality" but rather to argue that "economic theory is much more compatible with irrational behavior than had been previously suspected" (1, 2). Specifically, Becker reasons in his technical analysis that economic theory is not best understood in terms of rationality but in terms of "systematic" (4, 5, 11, 12), "consistent" (1, 3, 7, 8, 13) responses to the environment. Becker concludes that "[s]ystematic responses might be expected, therefore, with a wide variety of decision rules, including much irrational behavior" (12). "Rational conduct," Foucault writes, explaining Becker's view, "is any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a non-random way, in a systematic way, and economics can therefore be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables" (269). "Homo œconomicus," Foucault summarizes, "is someone who accepts reality"—that is, accepts those "environmental variables"—in a regular, predictable way. Foucault calls Becker's take on rationality "a colossal definition, which obviously economists are far from endorsing" (269). It is "colossal" in the sense that so much calculation and decision-making fall under the definition of "internal rationality," which isn't logical rationality, or even the more narrowly defined rationality of neoclassical economics, but rather the systematic, predictable, and nonrandom response to an environment. Foucault also suggests, in terms that again seem accurately predictive, that this notion of rationality will require a new kind of "environmental psychology" (259). Becker's "colossal definition," Foucault explains,

has a practical interest, if you like, inasmuch as if you define the object of economic analysis as the set of systematic responses to the variables of the environment, then you can see the possibility of integrating within economics a set of techniques, those called behavioral techniques.

That was then—1979. Foucault doesn't have much more to say about these "behavioral techniques" beyond quickly gesturing toward B. F. Skinner's behaviorism and remarking on the techniques' impersonal application (they are "brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players" [201]). But since 1979, many economists, psychologists, and even the general reading public, it seems, have been willing to accept Becker's "colossal definition." I am suggesting here that Foucault is describing in Becker, avant la lettre, the form of rationality developed more fully by behavioral economists. From this perspective, behavioral economics looks more like a reformist project, not a radical break from the Chicago School economists. In the next section, I will turn more fully to this new rationality and its emphasis on affect.

Theory and Policy: The 4 in Probabilistic Affect

Foucault foresaw in 1979 the development of what would eventually become a mainstream project, as evidenced by the popular consumption of books and other media that investigate our "systematic responses to the variables of the environment" and suggest in turn various "behavioral techniques." A list of such mainstream work would include Daniel Kahneman's overview of his and Tversky's research, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which has remained in the top ten of the New York Times Business Best Sellers List since its publication in 2011. Lewis's The Undoing Project climbed to number four on the New York Times Best Seller List a few weeks after its publication. Sunstein and Thaler's Nudge has been a best seller since its publication in 2006, and its policy influence has been considerable. Sunstein served in Barack Obama's administration as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, where, by his own account, he implemented dozens of nudge policies.7 All of these books call upon a great deal of specialized research and make it available to a general audience. I will refer to this threading together of technical research and popular outreach as "the project in probabilistic affect." It deserves to be called a project because it has a set of policy aims. I also want to give it a name because I want to describe it in terms different from those that behavioral economics would use to describe itself. In doing so, I emphasize its affectual dimensions and its particular constructed-quality (rather than its universal naturalness) as a project that serves specific ends and that could possibly take a different form.

First let me describe the project in probabilistic affect without focusing on the criticisms I want to make (to which I'll turn in the next section). The project stems from two different but related fields of psychological research: the psychology of decision-making and the psychology of cognitive dual processing. Both have been important to the field of behavioral economics. As we have already begun to see, the former finds that in many different instances, but especially when involving probabilities, our decisions are guided by feeling rather than what would traditionally be called rationality. The latter—the psychology of cognitive dual processing—provides a theory of affect that matches up well with and underwrites the research on probabilistic decision making. Both of these areas of research are applied through a number of policy suggestions, especially those put forth by Thaler and Sunstein in Nudge. Let me explain each of these areas of work in a little more detail, focusing on how together they produce and instrumentalize the project in probabilistic affect.

The psychology of decision-making is vast, but the findings most often repeated in the popular literature of behavioral economics involve bets, gambles, and other games of probability and risk. Experimental subjects aren't very good at these calculations, at least from the perspective of maximizing their utility. They make irrational decisions ("nonstandard" decisions, in the parlance of economics), which often seem based on a feeling or impulse rather than on rational analysis. Importantly, they make the same mistakes consistently. Some examples of the research:

The gambler's fallacy, where after rolling several good rolls of the dice, you expect a bad roll (or vice versa), on the theory that the odds in a game of chance must even out. In reality, you are operating more on inclination than on rational analysis. The probability of each roll is exactly the same (as almost everyone knows) and, as with the hot hand, any large number of rolls can exhibit strings of good/bad rolls. However, the intuitive-feeling decision that events are connected and your luck will change is hard to shake. That feeling affects experts who should know better and who are not playing games of chance. Researchers have shown that even experienced immigration judges are susceptible to the gambler's fallacy when deciding asylum cases, as are bank loan officers when making decisions about mortgages, and professional baseball umpires when calling balls and strikes.8

Loss aversion, where you feel a loss much more intensely than you feel a gain. In lab experiments, subjects will characteristically risk losing $100 on a 50/50 coin flip only if they might win $200. From the perspective of the standard model of utility maximization, it is irrational to require so much surplus upside before you are willing to risk a downside. But because you dread a loss so much more than you appreciate a gain (about twice as much, it seems from the laboratory experiments), you consistently respond to risks in skewed ways, following your initial felt response more than your rational analysis. Loss aversion shapes many everyday decisions facing homo probabilis: goods bought for discounted trial periods are hard to give up when the trial ends; stocks are sold in panic at relatively minor losses; more resources are sunk into lost causes in the hope of avoiding further losses.9

The endowment effect, closely related to loss aversion, where you irrationally endow something you own with more value than you place on the same object on the open market. In the well-known experiments on this effect, participants who are given coffee mugs or pen packets (to keep as their own) typically require twice as much payment to sell their mugs or pens than they would spend to buy the mug or pens in the first place. Standard economic thinking finds it illogical to attach yourself to a mug (or a house, job, or plan for the future) so much more intensely simply because you've owned it for a few minutes.10

Predictions/projections of the future, where you are terribly and consistently bad at thinking logically about the future, and instead follow your nose and trust your feelings. There are many different varieties of this problematic relationship with the future. Overconfidence in the ability to predict the future has been shown in surveys about health, where individuals on average underestimate the possibilities of future hospitalizations. Just about everyone knows that it will take longer to finish a complex project than predicted, even as this knowledge doesn't make one less susceptible to bad predictions about the completion date (so powerful is the intuitive sense of how the future will unfold). In field observations, CEOs and employees alike overestimate the prospects of their companies, irrationally staying highly invested in company stock, and stock traders overestimate the precision of their information about companies and make bad trades. The standard theory of economic utility doesn't take account of such systematic overconfidence. And akin to overconfident predictions are many other kinds of prediction problems. For example, people tend to project current states into the future in ways that again and again prove wrong (yet they continue to make such projections). One of the key findings in studies of wellbeing is that individuals often believe a certain event will bring happiness or unhappiness in the future, but then it doesn't. For example, in studies assistant professors report that they will be very unhappy in the future if they do not receive tenure and very happy if they do, but when the event occurs, there isn't much change in reported levels of happiness. This misperception of future states plays mischief with the standard model of economic utility, which assumes that one can predict what will be satisfying in the future.11

Framing, where your decisions are shaped by the way they are presented, even when you know the decisions are presented from a particular perspective. It is perhaps not surprising that the framing of a choice will play some role in the decision. For instance, when subjects are presented the same gamble in somewhat different ways (with different framing), they make very different decisions in a predictable manner. What is more surprising is just how much individuals underestimate the influence that the framing of a decision has on the decision. Research has shown the ways experimental subjects' decisions are shaped by framing even when they know that the presentation of their choices is being manipulated. Often, however, it is very difficult to recognize the framing, as is the case in our world of media and information saturation, which taxes our limited capacity for attention. Instead of responding logically to all the available data in complex, information-saturated choices, laboratory and field subjects tend to attach themselves to the most recent and the most familiar information. The standard model of utility does take account of incentives and the interestedness of buyers and sellers, but not how much we allow ourselves to be pulled and coaxed hither and thither, even when we recognize the manipulation.12

All of these examples touch on probabilities—how we evaluate risk and make decisions about the future—and all of these examples suggest that we often act irrationally when it comes to probabilities—that we make such decisions by feeling rather than by calculative deliberation in relation to maximizing utility. We feel something in the ownership of the mug, we sense the hot hand, and we just know that the way we feel now will be the way we feel in the future. It is also important to recognize that these responses are not random one-offs, but are generally consistent and systematic. The findings indicate that humans are not simply irrational in these respects, but systematically irrational (and thus rational in Becker's sense of economic rationality, as a systematic response to one's environment). From a distance and with adequate time for deliberation, we can all recognize the irrationality, but in the moment such decisions feel just right.

There is in these findings a notion of affect, if not a full-blown and fully articulated theory. In outlining this point more fully, it is worth taking a moment to distinguish affect from emotion. As Brian Massumi says, "affect" frequently indexes a force that is "irreducibly bodily and autonomic," rather than stemming from our beliefs, desires, or mental relations with the world (like emotions) (28).13 Affects don't so much mediate, frame, or shape decisions (the way our emotions might), as much as they are the basic response upon which the decision is made: get the ball to the player with the hot hand; a series of good outcomes must be followed by a bad result; avoid losses more than appreciate gains; if it's not working, sink more resources into it; if it looks like it will bring unhappiness in the future, it will bring unhappiness in the future. These are affective responses rather than emotional responses. It is thus salient that it's hard to put a name to the intense response that many have to the hot hand, for instance. We have names for emotions, which derive from our somewhat discernible beliefs, desires, and mental representations of the world, but we don't often have names for affects. Possibly a "gut reaction" or "reflex," a "sensation" or "perception," an "impulse"? These possibilities don't name feelings so much as different kinds of responses to a choice or situation, responses that are feeling-related in that they reference a bodily reaction, rather than one based in reason. In other words, they index, without precisely naming, affect.

We now come to the second field of psychological research, dual processing. If the research on decision-making only gestures toward a theory of affect, the work on dual processing, important to a great deal of the key ideas of behavioral economics, provides a much more elaborate account. The dual-processing view splits cognitive processing into two very different systems or types often called System 1 and System 2 (or Type 1 and Type 2). Decisions made with System 1 are involuntary, intuitive, and uncontrolled; they are made without deliberation or rationalization. They are also made very quickly. System 1 isn't exactly natural and nonconscious because in it one does learn rules through practiced nurture—like 2 + 2 = 4—but it often feels natural and nonconscious. It also is a fait accompli: it is hard to change or control System 1—it is what it is, and it accepts the environment it encounters, reacting to it automatically. We use System 1 when we respond to something with disgust, turn to a loud and sudden sound, or do highly practiced activities like drive a car on an open, straight road. We also frequently use System 1 when we say "get the ball to the player with the hot hand," or when we rashly hold onto a Bitcoin investment after it loses half its value. System 1 has systematic reactions to probabilistic situations, but it's just not very good at probabilities. Because it is automatic, and because its decisions feel nonconscious and natural, System 1 can be closely associated with the way we think of affect.

Decisions made with System 2 are the opposite in many respects from decisions made with System 1: they rely on logic, deliberation, and working memory, and thus require effort. We use System 2 when we reason out complex math problems, or identify hard to see patterns, or evaluate probabilities consciously and deliberately. System 2 isn't affective, but rationalist. Because System 2 requires effort and the use of working memory (the kind of memory needed to do long division in one's head), it is a limited resource requiring considerable energy and focus. The two systems have different time signatures: if System 1 decisions are fast, then System 2 decisions are slow (hence, the title of Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow).

The second key point to make about the dual-processing structures concerns the relationship between System 1 and System 2. They are in many instances understood as being in conflict with each other. System 1 says "get the ball to the player with the hot hand," and System 2 says that the hot hand is bunk if you carefully examine the probabilities. However, the relationship is more complex than a pure, diametrically opposed conflict, in that the two systems are understood as working together while still in opposition. Jonathan Evans and Keith Stanovich, two preeminent researchers of dual processing, refer to the relationship as "default-interventionist": "Default interventionismallows that most of our behavior is controlled by Type 1 [or System 1] processes running in the background. Thus, most behavior will accord with defaults, and intervention [from System 2] will occur only when difficulty, novelty, and motivation combine to command the resources of working memory" (236-37). Many of the policy suggestions developed out of the findings of behavioral economics employ this default-interventionist conceptualization of System 1 and System 2.

A nudge policy typically overrides or corrects System 1 decision making by figuring out how to allow System 2 interventions and make them easier. From the perspective of nudge theorists like Thaler and Sunstein, when System 1 encounters certain areas of experience—like probabilities—it needs to be restrained and guided by the slower, more effortful system in order to achieve rational outcomes. A "nudge" is a policy that provides a gentle prod or a soft push in a particular direction, not by directing or explicitly forcing, but by shaping the decision-making environment, by jiggering the "rules of the game" (to use Foucault's previously quoted phrase describing the new "behavioral techniques"). A nudge policy isn't a mandate or a demand, and it doesn't provide a direct incentive like a financial fine or a tax refund. Importantly, in Thaler and Sunstein's conceptualization it doesn't significantly limit choices. In their view, a nudge seeks to leave open potential choices while using frameworks and structured environments to nudge an individual's behavior toward specific decisions. (Some critics of nudges, as we will see, have found this delimiting of possible choices in turn limiting of agency and autonomy, but Thaler and Sunstein emphasize that nudge policies try to limit choices as little as possible.) Some nudges use "defaults," like the popular nudge that automatically enrolls individuals in retirement accounts. Policy makers frequently combine this nudge with another one in which the default retirement account is low-cost and routinely rebalances according to the owner's proximity to retirement. A similar default strategy is used when automatic enrollment plans nudge utility consumers into slightly more expensive but more environmentally beneficial "green" electricity plans. Users can always opt out of a default nudge—they can choose to invest their retirement in their own way or to continue with the established mix of coal, oil, and gas energy—otherwise it wouldn't be a nudge under Thaler and Sunstein's definition, but a mandate. Another category of nudge doesn't work with defaults but shapes the decision environment when a "choice architect" (3) arranges choices in specific ways. For example, if a cafeteria is organized so that the French fries are slightly more difficult to reach and the salad is up front, it might lead to healthier decisions by molding availability while allowing all options to remain available. As Thaler and Sunstein explain, "A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions" (3). Most (perhaps all) of the nudges that Thaler and Sunstein discuss involve managing and correcting for our difficulties with probabilities. Default enrollment, automatic investment allocation, and choice architectures of various sorts find their rationale in the difficulty that humans have with calculating the present's probable relationship to the future. But whether a default nudge or a choice-architecture nudge, the System 1 affectual response to probabilities is guided towards System 2 ends. Nudges turn non-rational, affective responses into responses that better match up with the rational, standard model of utility.

I don't want to underestimate either the technical expertise (and brilliant creativity) or the pragmatic value of this three-prong project in probabilistic affect (the psychology of nonstandard decision making, the psychology of cognitive dual processing, and the development of nudge policies). We are better off recognizing the hot-hand fallacy in our evaluation of a potential retirement fund manager, and we are well served by understanding our propensity to irrationally endow with value, say, our current job or marriage, and it's also certainly a good idea to appreciate the tendency to irrationally risk more and more on lost causes. But we should also ask, at what costs the pragmatic gains of the project are purchased.

Critiques: "Someone Who Accepts Reality"

There are a number of established criticisms of the project I've just laid out. I will not belabor the more technical critiques internal to psychological research, which have questioned the differences between naïve experimental subjects and experienced decision makers, the extrapolation of individual behavior to behaviors of markets, and the reproducibility of various laboratory studies. More aligned with my discussion here are broader criticisms of nudge policies like the critiques by the legal theorist and philosopher Jeremy Waldron. Waldron speculates that nudges affront the autonomy and even the dignity of individuals because they rely on a "choice architect"—"an elite who kn[ow] the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people) to use" (21). "There's a sense underlying such thinking," Waldron goes on to say, "that my capacities for thought and for figuring things out are not really being taken seriously for what they are: a part of my self" (21). Waldron is particularly interested in the claim that nudge policies are not interested in people learning from their mistakes and thus practicing a kind of agency and autonomy. Sunstein for his part (writing without Thaler in this case) has directly responded to Waldron's argument by offering survey data that suggest just how much people approve of and even appreciate many kinds of low-cost, unobtrusive, pragmatic nudges that they feel improve their lives—hardly an affront to dignity in Sunstein's view if so many people find nudging useful (7).

If questions of morality and of the autonomy of the self trouble Waldron, the political theorist John McMahon is concerned with the ideological work of behavioral economics. In an argument akin, in part, to the one I'm offering, McMahon sees behavioral economics as a "technology of neoliberal governance" (146) and outlines several ways that it furthers neoliberalism's valuing of the market and the market's diffusion into all aspects of life and policy. "Behavioral economics problematizes not the market itself, only the assumptions made about the actors on the market, whose behavior is then measured against the truth of the market," McMahon explains. Behavioral economics "seeks not to challenge or defy the market but to provide tweaks so as to better assimilate all to the market" (146). We have seen this dynamic in nudge interventions in and corrections of System 1 "mistakes" that aim to produce more systematic (if not quite rational) actors who will better invest in retirement funds and other parts of the "portfolio society" that Ivan Ascher describes. As I have suggested here, behavioral economics isn't so much a break from the initial American theorists of market-based social policy—like Gary Becker and the Chicago School—but should be understood as an effort to reform and thus continue fundamental aspects of their thinking.

But if behavioral economics is a "technology of neoliberal governance," why is it so popular? This question returns us to William Connolly's challenge to consider the "grip" that neoliberalism seems to hold on the contemporary moment, especially in light of its manifold failures. Part of the answer is that behavioral economics offers specific tools with which to address the neoliberal order's demand that each of us becomes a homo probabilis. To some degree humans cannot escape thinking probabilistically, but the necessity of such thinking has surely intensified for people in the economically developed world over the last forty years. Behavioral economics provides specific tools for living in this kind of new world—for being a homo probabilis. Those tools are also grounded in experimental psychological science and seem to be closely connected to natural ways of being. This sense of naturalness is attractive and reassuring, but it can obscure questions about the forces behind the intensification of probabilistic thinking in everyday life.

The attachment to the project of behavioral economics also stems from the familiarity of its mode of operating. It functions along the lines of a century of self-help and therapeutic mass culture. In this well-established model, the self is understood as fractured and conflicted; it can only be put back together with the proper therapy, with various self-care products and regimes, with an idealized love. The project in probabilistic affect follows the same design: as we've seen, the deficiencies of the System 1 part of the subject (it is often wrong and conflicted, especially when it comes to probabilities) mean that it's in need of an intervention in order to achieve its better System 2 self. It seems appropriate, even wise, to put guardrails in place in order to achieve a more ideal rationality. In this schema, the typical indicators of fractured selfhood—anxieties, addictions, and destructive desires—are replaced with System 1's systematic irrationality and wayward affects in relation to probabilities. Note that the fracturing is still located at a very intimate level—the level of affect. The typical solutions to fracturing and conflict—good love or a sense of wholeness and wellbeing—are replaced with the achievement of System 2 rationality. Part of the popularity of the recent decision-making books is that they repeat the established form of therapy culture.

But there is reason to wonder if this neat scheme of conflict and repair isn't more of a construction than it often appears to be in work on behavioral economics. The concept of System 1 and System 2 processing has produced significant and complex debates among cognitive psychologists, which are often ironed out in the writings by behavioral economists. Some of the complexities of these debates are outlined in a series of highly technical articles in Perspectives in Psychological Science from 2013. The current debates are wide-ranging and fundamental, and include questions like the following: Is dual processing actually better conceived as one process? Are the two processes associated with two different parts of the brain or with multiple different parts of the brain (thus perhaps suggesting multiprocessing rather than dual processing)? And is it accurate to understand the relationship between System 1 and System 2 as "default-interventionist" (where System 1 defaults continually run in the background with necessary interventions from System 2 as needed), or is the relationship better described as "parallel-competitive" (where the two systems operate simultaneously in competition with each other)?14 These criticisms frequently extend beyond calling for alteration in, amendments to, or further research into the theory of dual processing: instead, they often advocate abandoning it. Gideon Keren concludes his criticisms: "two-system theories offer a good story—one that 'pleases the mind,'" but "[a]fter two decades in which two system models have blossomed yet added little if any new insights, the time is probably ripe to divert our scientific efforts into new and more promising avenues" (260-61).15

It is impossible to adjudicate these debates here, but my point is that the dual-processing understanding of cognition is far from settled science. Significantly, the further one gets from the psychological research literature in the technical journals—and the closer one gets to the mass-cultural, best-selling presentation of these ideas—the more simplified and metaphoric the dual-processing structure becomes. In their 2008 Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein present dual processing as a given, but in Thinking, Fast and Slow Kahneman speaks of dual processing as a "metaphor" (13), as does Sunstein in more recent writing. While Sunstein and Kahneman seem to recognize the debates over dual processing, this recognition doesn't dissuade them from using the idea to structure their arguments. Kahneman writes in the introduction of Thinking, Fast and Slow: "the labels of System 1 and System 2 are widely used in psychology, but I go further than most in this book, which you can read as a psychodrama with two characters" (21, see also 48). Similarly, Sunstein references the debates but says he thinks of the identification of System 1 and System 2 "as a helpful metaphor, not a reference to something concrete in the human brain" (5). It is difficult to know what to think of these descriptions of dual processing—as a metaphor and a psychodrama. These authors seem to use the term "metaphor" or the genre of "psychodrama" as synonymous with "generalization," "idealization," or "helpful fiction" in that System 1 and System 2 are generalizations or idealizations that are helpful to think with—"a good story," in Gideon Keren's words. Ironically, rational choice theory, from which behavioral economics is attempting to escape, is itself an idealization/generalization/fiction used as a thinking tool. As a metaphor dual processing may still be useful, but we may want to ask the kind of question humanities professors like me typically ask: "What is this particular metaphor in the service of?"

The answer I've been suggesting is that the dual processing metaphor underwrites a popular therapy-like framework so important to the instrumentalization of behavioral economics. Homo probabilis might need something more, but in light of the constantly risk-assessing life of homo probabilis, this therapy has its attractions. We find ourselves drawn to it because it takes account of the dividual nature of neoliberal experience, in that it sees the subject not as rational, agential, and free, but as reacting to an environment and making the best of it. Not only does this therapy framework jettison liberal principles that are difficult to maintain in the contemporary world (like rationality, autonomy, and freedom), it also provides a vision of the acting and feeling subject that makes sense of that jettisoning. This new subject is better off without a false confidence in its ability to be rational, agential, and free, and it is better off with the recognition that it needs help, guidelines, and nudges. In a world where economic crises have become ever more frequent,16 this idea of the subject serves as a kind of cushioning device. It posits a subject who can ride out these crises by following pragmatic rules rather than by battling for its agency and rationality against the current of neoliberal risk-taking and dividualism. The neoliberal, to recall Foucault's description, "is someone who accepts reality" (269).

Redirecting Probabilistic Affect

Reading through the policy theorists who ground their work in behavioral economics and enthusiastic reports from the field of choice psychology in popular media, I am frequently reminded of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street." The unnamed narrator of Melville's story—a lawyer on Wall Street in antebellum New York—is a great nudger, if only his scrivener, the strange Bartleby, would allow himself to be nudged. Bartleby, however, famously refuses. Initially he refuses his mind-numbing job as a scrivener who repetitively copies documents and reads contracts, and eventually he declines to speak, eat, or even move. The generally kind and well-intentioned boss-narrator tries to nudge Bartleby to cooperate and participate in the law firm's work by suggesting that Bartleby will be healthier, wealthier, and happier if he does so, if he would simply be reasonable. Variations on the word "reason" appear a dozen times in the story. But in agreeing to be nudged, Bartleby knows, on some level, he will be offering consent to a larger system or supposition—a system of reason and labor that is also a system requiring a particular kind of subject and sense of agency—and he prefers not to do that. Eventually, he prefers not to live at all.

Bartleby isn't a neoliberal subject. He doesn't live by risk, probabilities, and investments in his own human capital, as much as he lives by an older economy of factory-like regimentation that restricts his autonomy and freedom. He doesn't live by the logics of twentieth-century therapy culture (although the lawyer-narrator does call upon the logic of sentimentalism, a nineteenth-century version of self-help). But I do think we can imagine a current-day Bartleby. He would say no to the policies derived from behavioral economics for a number of different reasons. They limit agency and prevent us from learning from our decisions because they so often operate as defaults and through difficult-to-discern choice architecture (as Waldron suggests). They seem like individualized solutions to large-scale, public problems—how to take care of an aging population or impending environmental catastrophe. They have not been able to confront the structural inequalities associated with race and gender. But perhaps the current-day Bartleby (who, like the nineteenth-century Bartleby, resists interpellation) would also say "no" to nudges because they underwrite and produce a particular kind of subject, one who is seen as in need of rules and nudges in order to be a better calculator of probabilities and thus a better inhabitant of neoliberalism.

Alternatively, it is difficult to see what our contemporary Bartleby might respond to with a "yes." It's an important question because we do need projects that go beyond critique. In imagining such a project, we might well want to pay close attention to the same kind of everyday reasoning, choice, and error that cognitive scientists and behavioral economists detect, if only we could take those lay responses in a different direction. What I've called the project in probabilistic affect has explained everyday experiences, but it has often been bent on correcting that experience toward a standard of rationality that will allow people to mesh better with markets. How might we use this knowledge to a different end?

A redirection might begin by exploring what is learned if we don't correct what has been called System 1 responses. The scholarly investigation of affect in the humanities and the social sciences is diverse, but it takes as a central interest the breakdown of the long-held dichotomy between feeling and thinking, affect and reason. Affect is understood across an array of fields—by neuroscientists like Antonio Demasio and by philosophers like Martha Nussbaum (who have very different ideas of what affect is)—as inseparable from decision making and discerning interactions with our world. The choice psychologists and the behavioral economists inadvertently and unwittingly overlap with this work in the sense that they take seriously what was previously cast off as mere impulse or irrationality, and, importantly, they develop an understanding of that affect as nonrandom and systematic. But when it comes to the question of what to do with this affectual knowledge, the answer often given by behavioral economists has been to correct it into a different kind of knowledge. If instead we ask what these affective responses might teach us, we might find ourselves in a different place. For instance, what is the idea of the hot hand good for? Most of the limited work on this question focuses on its evolutionary importance. The hot hand requires few resources and limited information, and it is good at identifying short-term patterns quickly. For these reasons, it may have been evolutionarily selected. Rhesus monkeys, a recent study by the psychologist Tommy C. Blanchard and others suggests, use the hot hand to find food, and the strategy is particularly successful when encountering "clumpy resources" (280) in the environment (often the case when foraging for food) rather than randomly distributed resources. In other words, food tends to be lumped together in the wild because of environmental conditions that are hard to discern rationally, but the affectual draw to the hot hand experience might help identify these resources. This way of understanding the hot hand shifts the focus from the subject who is mistaken in his thinking to the environment, where something is different or changed and a new pattern has emerged. To put this shift in terms of basketball, the sense of the hot-hand might be used to identify a "clumpy resource" in, say, the form of an unrested, slightly injured, or hungover defensive player. It's not that the offensive player is "hot," but that the environment has changed. Such changes in the environment can be extremely difficult to identify rationally on the fly; the affective hot-hand sense might be better at noticing them. As the psychologist Gorka Navarrete notes, "From an ecological standpoint it is rare for one to observe sequential events that are completely independent of each other" (1), as in situations characterized by chance. How we might incorporate the knowledge available in hot-hand experiences (or the experience of loss aversion or the endowment effect) into our larger social structures remains an open question.

One of the most surprising findings in the behavioral-economy laboratory is that individuals are not as purely self-interested as the standard economic model of the rational agent has assumed. In one particularly simple lab experiment, called the Dictator Game, subjects will give away part of their holdings to anonymous others without social pressure. In addition, where the standard economic model suggests that self-interested people only work with as much effort as required by the market, in field observations people have worked harder for higher pay and gifts (and also have been less productive in response to lower pay and labor disputes). In these experiments and observations, individuals seem to have a social preference—a feeling for others—rather than a preference for pure self-interest. The literature on nudges, dedicated as it is to individual choice making, has thus far not been particularly interested in how to maximize this preference or affectual orientation to any great degree, when in fact it might well be one of the most important orientations for any society to maximize.17

A modern-day Bartleby might well say "yes" to further thinking about the knowledge available through so-called System 1 responses, finding them rich terrain for developing the social compact rather than responses to be corrected. Because these responses are nonrandom and predictable, they may serve as a foundation for policy, and because there seems to be at least a tendency toward social preferences, such policies might also tend toward the nonindividualistic and intersect with an ethics or might help provide a structure for public values. As Amanda Anderson has made us aware, recent attention to affect in the humanities has often ignored the need for both foundational structure and ethics (9–10). Our imagined Bartleby may also helpfully note that what we have been taught to think of as System 2 (and value as our goal) comes with its own deficiencies. Daniel Kahneman, often less sanguine about the policy uses of his findings than others who use his work, observes that System 2 misses things as it focuses its working memory and other deliberative energies on calculation and reasoning. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in The Invisible Gorilla discuss what is perhaps the most famous example of the shortcomings of System 2 dependence: about half of the viewers of a short video miss the appearance of a women in gorilla suit (clearly on screen for nine seconds) because they have been asked to count the number of times a ball is passed between players on one team while ignoring the other team. Kahneman notes about this experiment that "we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness" (24). In other words, appealing to System 2 as an interventionist corrective to System 1 may be little better than relying on the standard model of economic utility to describe or normalize human behavior. We may not want to discard System 2, but we may want to think carefully about its overvaluing.

The picture of the subject that begins to emerge from placing more emphasis on System 1 responses—more attention to social preferences, and less faith in System 2 deliberations—is very different from the picture of the subject that emerges in either liberal theory (agential, autonomous, rational) or neoliberal theories and policies (someone who accepts reality, a dividual who needs guidance). Within behavioral economics there are findings that might be put to work in very different ways than have thus far been used. What this essay's observations recommend is not the dismissal of behavioral economics as a technology of neoliberalism, but a much-expanded project in probabilistic affect that redirects some of its findings, hopefully toward the unmaking of homo probabilis and toward a kind of new subject, a new "homo___________."

Footnotes

The original hot hand essay has produced a considerable body of follow-up research and meta-analysis across a number of fields (and a number of sports and other activities). Most of this work supports the debunking of the hot hand, but some of this work debunks that debunking. For a helpful overview of at least a sample of the research, see Michael Bar-Eli, et al., "Twenty Years of 'Hot Hand' Research."

For important accounts of neoliberalism and affect that serve as touchstones for this essay, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism and Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy. My essay also engages with the historiography and critique of neoliberal subject making, and it contributes to recent but still underdeveloped criticisms of behavioral economics as a technology of neoliberalism (this work is discussed in detail in the section "Critique: 'Someone Who Accepts Reality'"). Because this essay offers a critical perspective on behavioral economics as popular psychology, I count as kin—if at times distant kin—works like Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Epidemics of the Will"; and Daniel Horowitz, Happier?

Ascher allows us to see the connections to an early form of capitalism when he explains that what we have seen in the last forty years is a new kind of "enclosure of the commons"—an "enclosure of the market" (85-107). If for Marx one of the foundational moments of capitalism's development was the enclosure of land held in common by communities, resulting in the forced migration of people to the cities where they had little choice but to enter the labor force as supposedly "free labor," then for Ascher one of the foundational moments of neoliberalism is the "enclosure" of welfare state programs (pension funds, state-sponsored medical care, public schooling), forcing people into markets (401Ks, private insurance, privatized public universities). Individuals, rather than communities as a whole, face risk. The switch to such limited and individualistic focused thinking is a continuation of the shift made by the Chicago School toward human capital and away from questions of large-framed constituencies of labor and capital. For complementary accounts of this recent history and the structuring of the neoliberal subject, see Michel Feher, "Self-Appreciation," and Wendy Brown's reading of Foucault's neoliberalism lectures in Undoing the Demos, 47-78.

The concept of the "dividual" is important to Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, as well as to others who often trace it back to Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control," but a fuller account of its history and origins in anthropological research is provided by Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words, 101-124.

The break between traditional economic theory and behavioral economics is repeated in just about all the books about decision making and behavioral economics written for a popular audience. See for instance Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational. Ariely notes that "the very basic idea, called rationality, provides the foundation for economic theories, predictions, and recommendation, … [but] "wouldn't it make sense to modify standard economics, to move it away from naïve psychology" (xx) that understands humans as acting rationally. For similar understandings of a break with traditional economics, see Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Sway, 17-19, and David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, 6-7.

Michel Feher quips: "Becker largely remains a neoliberal theorist trapped in a utilitarian imagination. Thus his relationship to the neoliberal condition may one day be described as that of G. W. F. Hegel to Marxism—or, for that matter, as that of Moses to the Promised Land" (27).

7. I have already mentioned books written for a popular audience like Ariely, Predictably Irrational; Brafman and Brafman, Sway; and Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit. Other significant books in this niche of mainstream publishing include Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide; Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing; and Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice. Center and center-left news outlets like National Public Radio and the New York Times energetically update their audiences on the findings and arguments of the science of decision making and its economic ramifications through columns like "Economic View" and shows like "Freakonomics Radio." TED Talks on the subject abound.

In these bullet points I have, of course, greatly simplified the discussion of these various findings, and I have concentrated on areas of research that are often repeated in the popular literature. One of the best technical overviews of the findings in behavioral economics is Stefano DellaVigna, "Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field," and I have used DellaVigna's work as a guide to the key academic papers (on the gambler's fallacy, see 344-345). For field research on the gambler's fallacy in immigration court cases, loan applications, and major-league umpiring, see Daniel L. Chen, et al., "Decision Making Under the Gambler's Fallacy." On the similarities and difference between the gambler's fallacy and the hot-hand fallacy, see Peter Ayton and Ilan Fischer, "The Hot Hand Fallacy and the Gambler's Fallacy." Kahneman focuses on these problems with large and small numbers (109-118). Thaler and Sunstein discuss the gambler's and the hot-hand fallacies in Nudge (27-31).

On the $100/$200 gamble, see Kahneman 284; the surrounding pages discuss loss aversion and associated issues in great detail (278-288). DellaVigna outlines the research on loss aversion (324-326), and the examples of some of its real-world consequences are taken from those pages. Thaler and Sunstein address loss aversion at several points (33-34, 122-123) and propose several investment and personal finance policies to correct for its mistakes.

For the foundational accounts of the endowment effect in the technical literature, see Richard Thaler, "Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice," and Daniel Kahneman, et al., "Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias." DellaVigna discusses application of the endowment effect to understand behavior in housing, financial, insurance, and labor markets (328-335). Kahneman dedicates a chapter to the endowment effect (290-299), and Thaler and Sunstein present a number of policies to mitigate the endowment effect in retirement investing, such as default plans which automatically rebalance retirement funds by proximity to retirement (132).

DellaVigna offers an overview of the academic research on prediction and projection problems (341-344, 346-347), and the examples of the real-world consequences are taken from these pages. The work on future emotional states, like happiness, has been investigated by the psychologist Daniel Gilbert and made popular in his bestselling Stumbling on Happiness; see especially 113-117.

Kahneman frequently discusses framing; see especially 363-374. DellaVigna discusses decision-making when the framing is well-known as well as decision-making under conditions of attention overload (347-360). In Thaler and Sunstein, the academic work on framing is essential to the conception of "choice architecture" (11-13, and passim) explained in this essay.

"Autonomic" refers to the autonomic nervous system. Massumi is one of the central proponents of affect as bodily and pre-personal, and, as such, a category wholly separate from emotion and feelings, which are personal and social in his view. But this particular understanding of affect, and what follows from it, are by no means accepted by all in the voluminous writings on the subject, and I don't wholeheartedly accept Massumi's position. Rather, I find that the distinction between affect and emotion/feeling is helpful in describing the experience of probabilistic decision making as it is discussed by Tversky, Kahneman, Thaler, Sunstein, and other behavioral economists. In these pages I will think of the behavioral economists as theorizing affect—even though they don't use this term—in ways that overlap in some respects with the affect theorists proper, like Massumi. At various points throughout, I attempt to navigate some of the central debates in affect studies, although adjudicating these debates is not my purpose here. For a critical overview of affect studies (helpful for mapping the field as well as providing a specific argument about its shortcomings), see Ruth Leys, "The Turn to Affect."

On the single-system position, see Arie W. Kruglanski, "Only One? The Default Interventionist Perspective as a Unimodel"; on the multi-system position, see Elizabeth A. Phelps, et al., "Emotion and Decision Making"; on "default-interventionist" and "parallel-competitive" theories, see Evans and Stanovich, "Duel Processing Theories" (227).

It may seem strange that the unconscious—so central to the understanding of the self and decision making in the humanities—plays no role in this account of System 1 and System 2, but that is certainly the case. Behavioral economics is little interested in the Freudian tradition. I've tried in this essay to focus on some of the problems with what behavioral economics does endorse rather than consider traditions that it ignores, but the absence of the unconscious calls for further inquiry.

There is little doubt that financial crises are more frequent than ever before. A 2017 Deutsche Bank report (a missive from the heart of the beast) found that "prior to the post WWII Bretton Woods system, financial crises existed, but the frequency was not as intense as the post Bretton Woods world [early 1970s to present]. Interestingly this period between the mid-1940s and early 1970s was the longest stretch without an observable financial crisis for 200-300 years" (Reid et al. 10).

DellaVigna offers an overview of research in social preferences (and the Dictator Game) (336-341). Thaler and Sunstein have little to say about social preferences but suggest two nudges focused on charitable giving that involve an automatic giving plan and a special credit card/account for charitable gifts (231-232).

Works Cited

Anderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton UP, 2006.

Appadurai, Arjun. Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance. U of Chicago P, 2016.

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Ascher, Ivan. Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction. Zone Books, 2016.

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Bar-Eli, Michael, et al. "Twenty Years of 'Hot Hand' Research: Review and Critique." Psychology of Sport and Exercise, vol. 7, no. 6, Nov. 2006, pp. 525-53. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2006.03.001

Becker, Gary Stanley. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. 1964. 3rd ed., U of Chicago P, 1993.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.

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Brafman, Ori, and Rom Brafman. Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. Doubleday, 2008.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.

Chabris, Christopher F. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown, 2010.

Chen, Daniel L., et al. "Decision Making Under the Gambler's Fallacy: Evidence from Asylum Judges, Loan Officers, and Baseball Umpires." The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 131, no. 3, Aug. 2016, pp. 1181-242. Oxford Academic, doi:10.1093/qje/qjw017

Connolly, William E. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Duke UP, 2013.

Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. G. P. Putnam, Avon, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October, vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3-7. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/778828

DellaVigna, Stefano. "Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field." Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 47, no. 2, 2009, pp. 315-72. JSTOR, doi:10.1257/jel.47.2.315

Evans, Jonathan St B. T., and Keith E. Stanovich. "Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate." Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 8, no. 3, 2013, pp. 223-241. JSTOR, doi:10.1177/1745691612460685

Feher, Michel. "Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital." Public Culture, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2009, pp. 21-41. Duke University Press, doi:10.1215/08992363-2008-019

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Gilbert, Daniel Todd. Stumbling on Happiness. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Gilovich, Thomas, et al. "The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences." Cognitive Psychology, vol. 17, no. 3, July 1985, pp. 295-314. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1016/0010-0285(85)90010-6

Halpern, David. Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference. W. H. Allen, 2015.

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Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Kahneman, Daniel, et al. "Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias." Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 1991, pp. 193-206. American Economic Association, doi:10.1257/jep.5.1.193

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[latestnews2018-blog]

Japan swim queen Ikee sweeps to fifth Asian Games gold

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/japan-swim-queen-ikee-sweeps-to-fifth-asian-games-gold/

Japan swim queen Ikee sweeps to fifth Asian Games gold

Jakarta: Japan’s golden girl Rikako Ikee created a slice of history while Singapore’s Olympic swim champion Joseph Schooling edged a nail-biter in the 50m butterfly at the Asian Games on Thursday.

The irrepressible Ikee propelled Japan to victory in the women’s 4x100m medley relay in Jakarta to equal countrywoman Yoshimi Nishigawa’s five gold medals at the regional multi-sport event in both 1970 and 1974.

“I feel a bit broken and my body aches,” said Ikee, who can win a record sixth gold in Friday’s 50m freestyle. “But the joy I get from winning blows all those thoughts away.

“I’m proud to be an Asian champion, but I want to achieve more,” she added. “I don’t feel pressure — I thrive on it.”

Japanese swimmers finished the evening with 17 gold medals, one ahead of China as the fierce rivals head into the final day like a pair of punch-drunk boxers unable to land the killer blow.

Ikee, who has emerged as one of Japan’s brightest hopes for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, crushed the third leg, the butterfly, as the favourites stormed to gold in a new Games record of 3:54.73.

Drama followed as China were disqualified for an illegal changeover, while South Korea were also thrown out, gifting silver and bronze to Hong Kong and Singapore.

But once again the magic came from Ikee, who has also scooped gold in the 50m fly, 100m fly, 100m free and the 4x100m free in a sparkling week.

Also pocketing two silver medals, the 18-year-old matched countryman Kosuke Hagino’s haul of seven at a breakout 2014 Asian Games.

“It’s been a real battle with China,” said Ikee. “I just want to end on a high note tomorrow.”

Schooling, who shocked Michael Phelps in the 100m fly in Rio two years ago to capture Singapore’s first Olympic title in any sport, beat China’s Wang Peng by a fingertip to win the one-lap final in 23.61.

“It was very, very, very close,” said the 23-year-old, who retained his Asian 100m title earlier in the week with a little more to spare.

“I didn’t know who won until the end. I had to look up at the board — I almost couldn’t believe it actually. It feels great, it was another huge week.”

China’s Xu Jiayu completed the backstroke treble, thrashing Ryosuke Irie in the 200m final for his fourth gold medal of the meet.

“My first target was the backstroke treble — job done,” said Xu, who clocked 1:53.99.

“Now I’ll try to make it five out of five in the medley relay.”

Japan’s Shinri Shioura won the men’s 100m freestyle in 48.71, pipping countryman Katsumi Nakamura to go one better than at the 2014 Asian Games.

China’s Yu Hexin, winner of the 50m free, faded badly to finish with bronze.

Japan’s Satomi Suzuki retained her title in the women’s 50m breaststroke in a Games record 30.83 to complete the 50-100m double, with Singapore’s Ho Ru En Roanne a distant second.

Wang Jianjiahe smashed the women’s 800m freestyle final in 8:18.55 — almost 10 seconds clear of close friend Li Bingjie in a battle of Chinese 16-year-olds with bright futures in the sport.

[fa-cat]

Japan's Rikako Ikee competes in the final of the women’s 100m butterfly swimming event during the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta on August 21, 2018.

Japan swim queen sweeps to fifth Asian Games gold

Japan's golden girl Rikako Ikee created a slice of history while Singapore's Olympic swim champion Joseph Schooling edged a nail-biter in the 50m butterfly at the Asian Games on Thursday.

The irrepressible Ikee propelled Japan to victory in the women's 4x100m medley relay in Jakarta to equal countrywoman Yoshimi Nishigawa's five gold medals at the regional multi-sport event in both 1970 and 1974.

"I feel a bit broken and my body aches," said Ikee, who can win a record sixth gold in Friday's 50m freestyle. "But the joy I get from winning blows all those thoughts away.

"I'm proud to be an Asian champion, but I want to achieve more," she added. "I don't feel pressure -- I thrive on it."

Japanese swimmers finished the evening with 17 gold medals, one ahead of China as the fierce rivals head into the final day like a pair of punch-drunk boxers unable to land the killer blow.

Ikee, who has emerged as one of Japan's brightest hopes for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, crushed the third leg, the butterfly, as the favourites stormed to gold in a new Games record of 3:54.73.

Drama followed as China were disqualified for an illegal changeover, while South Korea were also thrown out, gifting silver and bronze to Hong Kong and Singapore.

But once again the magic came from Ikee, who has also scooped gold in the 50m fly, 100m fly, 100m free and the 4x100m free in a sparkling week.

[marilynngmesalo]

Bismark Boateng’s switch from soccer to track pays off with national silver medal

Bismark Boateng’s switch from soccer to track pays off with national silver medal https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bismark Boateng’s switch from soccer to track pays off with national silver medal

TORONTO — For a moment, the announcers at the recent Canadian track and field championships thought Bismark Boateng had won the tightest 100 metre final in the history of the meet. And so did Boateng.

The 26-year-old from Toronto let out a jubilant roar, and ripped off his race singlet in celebration.

“I took my shirt off and ran around the field like a soccer player,” Boateng said, laughing.

Boateng would end up second to Aaron Brown, just a thousandth of a second separating the two. Three-time Olympic medallist Andre De Grasse was third.

Absolute nail-biter in the men's 100m at the Canadian national track and field championships.

Aaron Brown lands on top of the podium with a time of 10.16.

Bismark Boateng 2nd (10.16), Andre De Grasse 3rd (10.20). https://t.co/53Po5FgIaD pic.twitter.com/tipLCMMADN

— CBC Olympics (@CBCOlympics) July 7, 2018

But Boateng’s impressive result against the country’s fastest men confirmed a choice he made a few years ago, when he decided to quit soccer and follow his heart to the track.

“I grew up playing soccer my whole life, but deep down I always wanted to do track,” Boateng said. “In elementary school I did track one time and I beat some guys who were much older than me, so deep down I knew I wanted to do track.”

Boateng’s speed at Ryerson’s open tryouts earned him a spot as a striker, and for two seasons he’d sprint onto through balls and blow past defenders.

Ivan Joseph, the Rams’ former coach and athletic director, remembers Boateng coming to him to talk track.

“He was a guy who (would) get a lot, a lot of breakaways, like he was fast. Man was he quick,” Joseph said. “I said to him ‘Bismark, I think you have a really bright future in track.”‘

Ryerson doesn’t have a track team, so Boateng transferred to the cross-town rival York Lions and would win gold in the 60 metres at the Canadian university championships in 2015 and silver in 2016.

His big breakthrough came when he got a call to replace De Grasse, who was still rehabilitating his hamstring injury, at the Commonwealth Games in April in Australia.

Boateng’s first major international meet wasn’t worthy of any shirtless celebrations — he qualified for the 200-metre semifinals, but not the final, and he and Oluwasegun Makinde dropped the baton in the heats of the 4×100 relay. But for perhaps the first time, Boateng felt at home on track and field’s big stage.

“For some reason I wasn’t nervous or anything, I felt I belonged on the international level, so that’s what gave me the confidence. I thought ‘I think I’m good for this,”‘ Boateng said.

//<![CDATA[ ( function() { pnLoadVideo( "videos", "VtDDgYLEIp8", "pn_video_916641", "", "", [] ); } )(); //]]>

The five-foot-10 sprinter ran a fast 10.14 in the 100 a couple of weeks later in Baton Rouge, La.

His coach Charles Allen wasn’t surprised by the breakthrough, saying this season has been all about keeping Boateng healthy after some injuries, and exposing him to international competition.

“That (fast time in Louisiana) was the plan all along,” Allen said. “Nobody really knows what’s in the mind of the coach, other than you kind of let the athlete in on what they need to know as they’re preparing . . . and when he had the opportunity to compete at the Commonwealth Games and prepare with Team Canada that really helped his motivation and allowed him to commit more to what he is doing in terms of execution.”

Allen, a former 110-metre hurdler who was sixth at the 2004 Athens Olympics, said Boateng’s need to make a living outside track — he’s a personal trainer — has thrown a wrench in his training in the past. Boateng is at that tricky in-between stage athletes inevitably face where they need to train full-time, but aren’t quite at the level globally to make any money doing it.

“But we made a pact: you can’t sacrifice what we’re trying to get done on the track for anything, because one injury or one step backwards really takes away a lot,” Allen said. “So he made that commitment to put track first in every way. He made a heck of a sacrifice and I’m glad it’s paying off for him.”

Boateng receives some federal funding to covers expenses for things like travel and physiotherapy as a “next generation” athlete, but that “doesn’t allow him to live. He has every day bills and so forth,” Allen said.

The coach is with Boateng in Ireland this week for a pair of meets, two more opportunities to line up against international competition in preparation for the NACAC championships.

The NACAC meet, Aug. 10 to 12 at Varsity Stadium, is Canada’s major international meet of the summer, and includes athletes from North America, Central America and the Caribbean.

//<![CDATA[ ( function() { pnLoadVideo( "videos", "pJfVMLkBMu4", "pn_video_643699", "", "", [] ); } )(); //]]> Canoe Click for update news world news https://ift.tt/2mlh70X world news

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The guy beneath me is still fucking me hard with that thick cock and I start to think he's going to come inside me. 'Your turn to cum,' I tell the last guest. My husband plunges his cock into my mouth, knowing I like my mouth full when I cum, and the guy beneath me pumps his cock into my mercilessly while my clit is rubbed. 'Jerk me off onto your tongue,' he pleads. I swallow and lick my lips. The guy on the ground gets underneath me and starts to tug on my hips. It doesn't take long for him to burst, shooting his cum all over my tongue and lips. 'Thanks for letting me have all those cocks,' I say. 'God damn you're hot,' he says and I lean forward to kiss him. ' He grins but shakes his amateur nude photo galleries head, giving me fingers to suck instead. I moan and cry onto my husband's cock and writhe in pleasure, having to be held up as all my muscles twitch in ecstasy. I take his cock into my hand and work him hard, his eyes closing and hips pushing forward into my hand. 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He picks up his pace and pulls me hard onto his cock as I feel that ache free amateur porn pictures start to build up again. I feel the cum shoot up into me and give him a goofy, satisfied grin. I gasp and moan as he fucks me out of my mind and then I lose it, my legs shake, fingers dig into his chest, and I cry out loudly as I gush all over his cock. If you have any concerns regarding where and how to use karups pic, you could contact us at our own internet site.

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How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan

What would you do to rescue a special dog? Would you risk your career and even the dog’s life if it meant a better future for him? Craig Grossi found himself in just this situation. A Marine intelligence collector stationed in a remote part of Afghanistan in 2010, Craig found love in a stray dog and risked it all to bring the puppy home to America.

The Story of Craig and Fred

Craig & Fred by Craig Grossi.

In his new book, Craig & Fred (Harper Collins, 2017), Craig tells how he met the puppy in a compound his Marine unit was occupying in Taliban country. Despite the constant anxiety of being fired at by Taliban fighters — or perhaps because of it — Craig found himself drawn to a stray pup who was hanging out within the compound walls.

While most dogs Craig had seen in Afghanistan traveled in packs and ran from humans, this dog wagged his tail when Craig approached and gently took some food from his hand. A bond instantly formed. Craig named him Fred, and the two became constant companions. Fred soon made friends with all the Marines in the compound, taking turns sleeping with them and sharing their meals.

When it became time to leave the compound, Craig had a decision to make. Should he try to take Fred with him or leave the pup behind to fend for himself? Fred made the decision for both of them when he followed Craig to the helicopter that was waiting to take the Marines back to the U.S. base. “It was Fred’s decision,” Craig says. “I wasn’t going to risk all that unless he gave me a sign. When he followed me to the helo and wasn’t scared off by all the noise, wind and blowing dirt, I knew he wanted to go.”

How Craig Got Fred Back to the U.S.

Craig and Fred in Afghanistan. Photography courtesy Dave Moran.

The story that unfolds as Craig tries to get Fred back to the U.S. is a nail-biter. Befriending dogs and bringing them on base was strictly forbidden. The consequences would have been harsh for Craig but even more severe for Fred, who would have been euthanized. Craig had to find a way to ship Fred to the States without authorities finding out.

Fred made it back to the U.S. with the help of a number of people, many unlikely advocates for a stray mutt from Afghanistan. “They helped because they could see Fred was a special dog,” Craig says.

Craig and Fred Today

Craig and Fred in the U.S. Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

When Craig finished his tour of duty, the two were reunited back home. Both had suffered the ravages of war. Craig had sustained a head injury and was experiencing post-traumatic stress, and Fred was struggling with having grown up in a war zone with never enough to eat. But, the pair began to heal each other.

Today, Craig and Fred tour the country, talking about their experiences and helping raise money for animal rescue.

Thumbnail: Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

Award-winning writer and editor Audrey Pavia is a former managing editor of Dog Fancy magazine and editor of the AKC Gazette. She is the author of The Labrador Retriever Handbook (Barrons) and has written extensively on horses as well as other pets. She shares her home with two rescue dogs, Candy and Mookie.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Dogster magazine. Have you seen the new Dogster print magazine in stores? Or in the waiting room of your vet’s office? Subscribe now to get Dogster magazine delivered straight to you!

Read more dog news on Dogster.com:

Dug Up at Dogster: 10 Unusually Cool Dog Products at Global Pet Expo 2018

Ending the Dog Meat Trade: How Far We’ve Come and How Far We Have Left to Go

PupSocks Lets You Put Your Dog’s Photos on Socks

The post How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan appeared first on Dogster.

[daddyslittlejuliet]

How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan

What would you do to rescue a special dog? Would you risk your career and even the dog’s life if it meant a better future for him? Craig Grossi found himself in just this situation. A Marine intelligence collector stationed in a remote part of Afghanistan in 2010, Craig found love in a stray dog and risked it all to bring the puppy home to America.

The Story of Craig and Fred

Craig & Fred by Craig Grossi.

In his new book, Craig & Fred (Harper Collins, 2017), Craig tells how he met the puppy in a compound his Marine unit was occupying in Taliban country. Despite the constant anxiety of being fired at by Taliban fighters — or perhaps because of it — Craig found himself drawn to a stray pup who was hanging out within the compound walls.

While most dogs Craig had seen in Afghanistan traveled in packs and ran from humans, this dog wagged his tail when Craig approached and gently took some food from his hand. A bond instantly formed. Craig named him Fred, and the two became constant companions. Fred soon made friends with all the Marines in the compound, taking turns sleeping with them and sharing their meals.

When it became time to leave the compound, Craig had a decision to make. Should he try to take Fred with him or leave the pup behind to fend for himself? Fred made the decision for both of them when he followed Craig to the helicopter that was waiting to take the Marines back to the U.S. base. “It was Fred’s decision,” Craig says. “I wasn’t going to risk all that unless he gave me a sign. When he followed me to the helo and wasn’t scared off by all the noise, wind and blowing dirt, I knew he wanted to go.”

How Craig Got Fred Back to the U.S.

Craig and Fred in Afghanistan. Photography courtesy Dave Moran.

The story that unfolds as Craig tries to get Fred back to the U.S. is a nail-biter. Befriending dogs and bringing them on base was strictly forbidden. The consequences would have been harsh for Craig but even more severe for Fred, who would have been euthanized. Craig had to find a way to ship Fred to the States without authorities finding out.

Fred made it back to the U.S. with the help of a number of people, many unlikely advocates for a stray mutt from Afghanistan. “They helped because they could see Fred was a special dog,” Craig says.

Craig and Fred Today

Craig and Fred in the U.S. Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

When Craig finished his tour of duty, the two were reunited back home. Both had suffered the ravages of war. Craig had sustained a head injury and was experiencing post-traumatic stress, and Fred was struggling with having grown up in a war zone with never enough to eat. But, the pair began to heal each other.

Today, Craig and Fred tour the country, talking about their experiences and helping raise money for animal rescue.

Thumbnail: Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

Award-winning writer and editor Audrey Pavia is a former managing editor of Dog Fancy magazine and editor of the AKC Gazette. She is the author of The Labrador Retriever Handbook (Barrons) and has written extensively on horses as well as other pets. She shares her home with two rescue dogs, Candy and Mookie.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Dogster magazine. Have you seen the new Dogster print magazine in stores? Or in the waiting room of your vet’s office? Subscribe now to get Dogster magazine delivered straight to you!

Read more dog news on Dogster.com:

Dug Up at Dogster: 10 Unusually Cool Dog Products at Global Pet Expo 2018

Ending the Dog Meat Trade: How Far We’ve Come and How Far We Have Left to Go

PupSocks Lets You Put Your Dog’s Photos on Socks

The post How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan appeared first on Dogster.

[jeffreyrwelch]

How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan

What would you do to rescue a special dog? Would you risk your career and even the dog’s life if it meant a better future for him? Craig Grossi found himself in just this situation. A Marine intelligence collector stationed in a remote part of Afghanistan in 2010, Craig found love in a stray dog and risked it all to bring the puppy home to America.

The Story of Craig and Fred

Craig & Fred by Craig Grossi.

In his new book, Craig & Fred (Harper Collins, 2017), Craig tells how he met the puppy in a compound his Marine unit was occupying in Taliban country. Despite the constant anxiety of being fired at by Taliban fighters — or perhaps because of it — Craig found himself drawn to a stray pup who was hanging out within the compound walls.

While most dogs Craig had seen in Afghanistan traveled in packs and ran from humans, this dog wagged his tail when Craig approached and gently took some food from his hand. A bond instantly formed. Craig named him Fred, and the two became constant companions. Fred soon made friends with all the Marines in the compound, taking turns sleeping with them and sharing their meals.

When it became time to leave the compound, Craig had a decision to make. Should he try to take Fred with him or leave the pup behind to fend for himself? Fred made the decision for both of them when he followed Craig to the helicopter that was waiting to take the Marines back to the U.S. base. “It was Fred’s decision,” Craig says. “I wasn’t going to risk all that unless he gave me a sign. When he followed me to the helo and wasn’t scared off by all the noise, wind and blowing dirt, I knew he wanted to go.”

How Craig Got Fred Back to the U.S.

Craig and Fred in Afghanistan. Photography courtesy Dave Moran.

The story that unfolds as Craig tries to get Fred back to the U.S. is a nail-biter. Befriending dogs and bringing them on base was strictly forbidden. The consequences would have been harsh for Craig but even more severe for Fred, who would have been euthanized. Craig had to find a way to ship Fred to the States without authorities finding out.

Fred made it back to the U.S. with the help of a number of people, many unlikely advocates for a stray mutt from Afghanistan. “They helped because they could see Fred was a special dog,” Craig says.

Craig and Fred Today

Craig and Fred in the U.S. Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

When Craig finished his tour of duty, the two were reunited back home. Both had suffered the ravages of war. Craig had sustained a head injury and was experiencing post-traumatic stress, and Fred was struggling with having grown up in a war zone with never enough to eat. But, the pair began to heal each other.

Today, Craig and Fred tour the country, talking about their experiences and helping raise money for animal rescue.

Thumbnail: Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

Award-winning writer and editor Audrey Pavia is a former managing editor of Dog Fancy magazine and editor of the AKC Gazette. She is the author of The Labrador Retriever Handbook (Barrons) and has written extensively on horses as well as other pets. She shares her home with two rescue dogs, Candy and Mookie.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Dogster magazine. Have you seen the new Dogster print magazine in stores? Or in the waiting room of your vet’s office? Subscribe now to get Dogster magazine delivered straight to you!

Read more dog news on Dogster.com:

Dug Up at Dogster: 10 Unusually Cool Dog Products at Global Pet Expo 2018

Ending the Dog Meat Trade: How Far We’ve Come and How Far We Have Left to Go

PupSocks Lets You Put Your Dog’s Photos on Socks

The post How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan appeared first on Dogster.

[grublypetcare]

How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan

What would you do to rescue a special dog? Would you risk your career and even the dog’s life if it meant a better future for him? Craig Grossi found himself in just this situation. A Marine intelligence collector stationed in a remote part of Afghanistan in 2010, Craig found love in a stray dog and risked it all to bring the puppy home to America.

The Story of Craig and Fred

Craig & Fred by Craig Grossi.

In his new book, Craig & Fred (Harper Collins, 2017), Craig tells how he met the puppy in a compound his Marine unit was occupying in Taliban country. Despite the constant anxiety of being fired at by Taliban fighters — or perhaps because of it — Craig found himself drawn to a stray pup who was hanging out within the compound walls.

While most dogs Craig had seen in Afghanistan traveled in packs and ran from humans, this dog wagged his tail when Craig approached and gently took some food from his hand. A bond instantly formed. Craig named him Fred, and the two became constant companions. Fred soon made friends with all the Marines in the compound, taking turns sleeping with them and sharing their meals.

When it became time to leave the compound, Craig had a decision to make. Should he try to take Fred with him or leave the pup behind to fend for himself? Fred made the decision for both of them when he followed Craig to the helicopter that was waiting to take the Marines back to the U.S. base. “It was Fred’s decision,” Craig says. “I wasn’t going to risk all that unless he gave me a sign. When he followed me to the helo and wasn’t scared off by all the noise, wind and blowing dirt, I knew he wanted to go.”

How Craig Got Fred Back to the U.S.

Craig and Fred in Afghanistan. Photography courtesy Dave Moran.

The story that unfolds as Craig tries to get Fred back to the U.S. is a nail-biter. Befriending dogs and bringing them on base was strictly forbidden. The consequences would have been harsh for Craig but even more severe for Fred, who would have been euthanized. Craig had to find a way to ship Fred to the States without authorities finding out.

Fred made it back to the U.S. with the help of a number of people, many unlikely advocates for a stray mutt from Afghanistan. “They helped because they could see Fred was a special dog,” Craig says.

Craig and Fred Today

Craig and Fred in the U.S. Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

When Craig finished his tour of duty, the two were reunited back home. Both had suffered the ravages of war. Craig had sustained a head injury and was experiencing post-traumatic stress, and Fred was struggling with having grown up in a war zone with never enough to eat. But, the pair began to heal each other.

Today, Craig and Fred tour the country, talking about their experiences and helping raise money for animal rescue.

Thumbnail: Photography courtesy Josh Tuohy.

Award-winning writer and editor Audrey Pavia is a former managing editor of Dog Fancy magazine and editor of the AKC Gazette. She is the author of The Labrador Retriever Handbook (Barrons) and has written extensively on horses as well as other pets. She shares her home with two rescue dogs, Candy and Mookie.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Dogster magazine. Have you seen the new Dogster print magazine in stores? Or in the waiting room of your vet’s office? Subscribe now to get Dogster magazine delivered straight to you!

Read more dog news on Dogster.com:

Dug Up at Dogster: 10 Unusually Cool Dog Products at Global Pet Expo 2018

Ending the Dog Meat Trade: How Far We’ve Come and How Far We Have Left to Go

PupSocks Lets You Put Your Dog’s Photos on Socks

The post How One U.S. Marine Rescued a Stray Dog From Afghanistan appeared first on Dogster.