The Long Read

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.

Among the Dopers at the Steroid Olympics (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

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