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# Among the Dopers at the Steroid Olympics, Against Oligarchy, Part I: Progressive
- URL: https://adjacent.media/weekend/2026-07-19-long-read/
- Published: 2026-07-19T11:04:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-19T11:04:52.000Z
- Description: This week: a journalist goes inside the Enhanced Games — Las Vegas’s steroid-sanctioned mini-Olympics — and finds something stranger than sport. Paul Krugman opens a series on the economics of American oligarchy, starting with the case for progressive taxation.
- Author: Jonathan Greene
- Tags: #long-read, #weekend

This week: a journalist goes inside the Enhanced Games — Las Vegas's steroid-sanctioned mini-Olympics — and finds something stranger than sport. Paul Krugman opens a series on the economics of American oligarchy, starting with the case for progressive taxation.

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#### [Among the Dopers at the Steroid Olympics](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/20/rope-a-dope?ref=adjacent.media) (paywall)

The New Yorker piece does what the publication still does better than most: the writer embeds in a genuinely weird subculture and lets it speak before drawing conclusions. The Enhanced Games, held in Las Vegas this past May, billed itself as a performance-unbound alternative to the Olympics — an event where doping is the premise rather than a violation. The piece refuses easy mockery and easy sanctimony alike. It portraits the athletes, the ideology behind the event, and the strange philosophical coherence of a competition asking what human performance looks like without the pretense of clean sport. The six-foot-ten, 320-pound Russian who opens the essay is a hook, but the piece earns its length by sitting with harder questions about bodies, consent, fairness, and what "clean" sport was ever protecting.

*The New Yorker · \~30 min read*

> The largest person I met at the Enhanced Games, a mini Olympics for steroid users that was held in Las Vegas this past May, was a six-foot-ten, three-hundred-and-twenty-pound Russian man named Lukas Lakutsin.

#### [Against Oligarchy, Part I: Progressive Taxation](https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/against-oligarchy-part-i-progressive)

Krugman is doing something methodical here: a series, not a column — a sustained economic argument that wealth concentration in the United States has been actively reinforced by policy, not merely permitted by it. This first installment focuses on progressive taxation as both a corrective mechanism and a political battleground. Krugman separates what the economics says from what the politics has allowed to happen. He grounds abstract distributional arguments in specific policy choices and their measurable consequences — economics writing that treats readers as capable of following evidence rather than absorbing conclusions. The series sets up a framework for understanding how rules get written in a concentrated-wealth environment, and this installment is its foundation.

*Paulkrugman on Substack · \~20 min read*