Een podcast over de lotto in Amerika, is dat interessant? Ja! Journalist Ian Coss wilde weten hoe het kan dat er in de staat Massachusetts gemiddeld duizend dollar per volwassene per jaar aan gokken wordt uitgegeven en ging op onderzoek uit. Het resultaat is Scratch & Win, een zeer goed gedocumenteerde en heerlijk lange serie. Coss vertelt de geschiedenis van de legale loterijen in Amerika. We volgen de opkomst van de loterij in de jaren zeventig, waarbij onder meer stil wordt gestaan bij de maffia, de uitvinder van de kraskaart en wat de katholieke kerk ermee te maken heeft. Vandaag de dag is de vraag: moet de staat zich überhaupt bezighouden met gokpraktijken?
Never in American history has it been so easy to gamble, legally at least. We’ve got casinos, sports betting, online poker, keno — but it was all made possible by state lotteries, which brought gambling out of the shadows and into the public square — into the government itself.
“Scratch & Win” follows the unlikely rise of America’s most successful lottery. We begin in 1970s Boston, with state bureaucrats going toe to toe with mafia bookmakers, and each other, as they struggle to launch the state’s greatest innovation: the scratch ticket. But the story reaches all the way to the present moment. How do we feel about the gambling industry that lotteries helped summon into being? And should the state be in this business at all?
“Scratch & Win” is made by the Peabody Award-winning team behind “The Big Dig,” produced by GBH News and distributed by PRX.
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Credits:
Host and scriptwriter: Ian Coss
Executive Producer: Devin Maverick Robins
Producers: Isabel Hibbard and Ian Coss
Story Editor: Lacy Roberts
Editorial Advisor: Jen McKim
Fact Checkers: Ryan Alderman and Isabel Hibbard
Scoring and Music Supervision: Ian Coss
Graphic Design: Bill Miller
Project Manager: Meiqian He
Last week, we heard about a movement to challenge the authority of government agencies and push power down to the people. This week, the story of a central figure in that movement: Ralph Nader.
This episode comes from NPR’s Throughline, co-hosted by Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei.
