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A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a text that read, “The Atlantic gave a journalist $10k to gamble on sports betting apps to see how it affected him. I’m pretty sure they just created a gambling addict.” It seemed like a weird thing for the Atlantic to do in the year 2026, like a story from a bygone era, maybe something in Vice of the “I Tried Out Herbal Club Drugs, and It Was a Nightmare” variety. Surely, I thought, there must be something to the Atlantic’s piece that made it less reckless than it sounded.
There wasn’t. Published under the headline “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler,” Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins chronicles his foray into the booming world of sports betting apps. A practicing Mormon, Coppins had no previous experience with gambling but quickly learned how easily the “joyful naivete” of his initial use “could curdle into delusion and compulsion.”
Coppins is an excellent writer; the story compellingly highlights the perils of having 24/7 access to tiny electronic casinos in our pockets and the seductive allure of betting on anything and everything. Ninety percent of bets are now placed on phones; the proliferation of these apps makes it easier than ever to develop a gambling addiction (or gambling disorder, as it’s called in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), a condition that can have catastrophic and even lethal consequences for a person’s life. As Coppins notes in the piece, 1 in 5 people with gambling disorder will attempt suicide, a higher rate than with any substance use disorder.
The story immediately struck a nerve among vocal gamblers who criticized Coppins’ sports-betting naivete and called the article a “hit piece.” Among nongamblers, the story was simply a hit. Praised by scores of journalists, Coppins made the rounds on PBS’s Amanpour & Company, NPR’s Fresh Air, CBS Mornings, and the Ringer’s Plain English With Derek Thompson. In each of these interviews, Coppins reiterates his thesis about the addictive nature of gambling apps and why we should take this exploding market seriously.
In a stark contrast to Coppins’ message, the Atlantic’s editors appeared to treat the endeavor as an entertaining, lighthearted stunt. “I think my editors thought there was something inherently funny about taking a suburban Mormon dad and dropping him into this world,” Coppins told Thompson on the Plain English podcast.
Certainly, Coppins’ participation was something the editors wanted from the beginning; after taking on the story, the writer began outlining whom he would interview for the piece. Coppins told Thompson that his editor suggested, “It would really be better if you had a little skin in the game, experienced it firsthand.”
After informing his editors that, as well as alcohol, Coppins’ religion prohibits gambling, they came up with a work-around. Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s editor in chief, suggested “staking” Coppins $10,000 so he wouldn’t be betting with his own money.
I am not religious, I don’t gamble, and my sports knowledge begins with Simone Biles and ends with Alyssa Liu. Nothing about a sports-betting Mormon offends me. I think drugs—like any potentially addictive thing—should be legal and regulated. But I’m also a recovering alcoholic who has been researching and writing about addiction for more than a decade. I’m all too aware of how quickly behavior can turn compulsive and how even the most temperate individual can unknowingly find themselves in over their head. The piece had all the hallmarks of a splashy and ultimately viral story. But funding a nongambler’s entrance into the gambling world as a kind of comedic protagonist not only puts the writer at risk but also flattens the seriousness of the story’s subject.
Consider an alternative scenario: Coppins’ editors want him to report on the most widely used intoxicant in the United States—alcohol. Knowing that he has no experience with it—what addiction researchers call being “alcohol-naive”—the editors give him a case of liquor for a journalistic experiment. He has to drink at least some of the alcohol provided, but he ultimately gets to decide how much. Then, he’ll report on what it was like going from teetotaler to drinker. Having this firsthand experience, they tell him, will put him in a better position to report on the country’s alcohol consumption.
It’s easy to brush off the hypothetical: Substance use and gambling aren’t inherently comparable. But that’s effectively what the Atlantic did with Coppins. Developing an addiction to either alcohol or gambling is entirely possible; gambling disorder is the only behavioral (i.e., nonsubstance) addiction recognized in the DSM. And like alcohol, betting apps are legal for most adults in the United States, readily accessible, and popular.
Since Coppins’ religion prohibits alcohol and gambling, it’s fair to assume he has as little experience with one as the other. This matters because whether someone develops an addiction depends at least as much on who they are as on what they’re consuming, and there’s no way to predict how Coppins will respond because he likely had never gambled at that level before. Finding that out is, after all, the point of the story. Ultimately, whether it’s a case of liquor or $10K in gambling money, a writer’s employer encouraged him to engage in addictive behaviors with which he had no previous experience.
“I don’t think people would respond the same way to this story if you gave [Coppins] alcohol or a bottle of Xanax,” Ryan Marino, a physician specializing in addiction medicine, medical toxicology, and emergency medicine, told me. “But that speaks more to public perception than a real difference between the two; there is a definite disorder associated with gambling, and the diagnostic criteria we use for gambling disorder are very, very similar to those we use for drug addiction.”
Indeed, part of what makes the story so engaging is how open Coppins is about his escalating behavior. When he asks Craig Carton, the host of a call-in show about gambling addiction, what warning signs a new gambler should watch for, Carton promptly relays a list of questions on the DSM criteria for gambling disorder. Are you going to sleep and waking up thinking about your bets? Are you “chasing”—making reckless new bets to win back the money you lost? Are you placing bets on your phone in the bathroom so your family doesn’t see you gambling?
We don’t have to wonder why Coppins describes these questions as making him shift “uncomfortably in my seat”; he’s already told us that the answer to these questions is yes.
By Week 7, Coppins writes that he is “surprised at how quickly and extensively the experiment [is] bleeding into the rest of my life.” Six weeks later, he experiences his “first bout of gambling withdrawal.” Unable to place bets while in Florida with his family, Coppins realizes he can’t get excited about a football game because he can’t bet on it.
The only time in the story Coppins mentions an editor taking an interest in his mental health occurs four months into the “experiment.” The writer’s co-workers begin to notice his “twitchiness” around betting apps, and Goldberg allegedly becomes concerned about Coppins’ mental health. The EIC’s suggested remedy? That the writer “log off and touch felt.”
By “touch felt,” Goldberg means that Coppins should get on a plane to Las Vegas and place bets in real life. That’s right; the editor’s response to his ostensible concern about his employee’s declining mental health and assignment-induced fixation on betting apps is to send him to the gambling capital of the country with Tom Nichols, “a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College and a blackjack obsessive.”
According to Marino, that decision is “like trying to get someone off heroin by switching to morphine.” When Coppins returns to the newsroom after his Vegas education, Goldberg asks about the writer’s losses and jokes that the future of the publication depends on Coppins winning big. Even the piece’s title (“Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler”) is decidedly tongue-in-cheek. Yet this frivolity is incongruous with the seriousness of a story about an addiction that drives 1 in 5 people to attempt suicide.
It’s not as though this information was unavailable to Coppins’ editors. A Commission review published in the Lancet in 2024 notes that “online gambling products are designed to be rapid and intensive, characteristics that are associated with higher risk of harm for consumers,” and estimates that 8.9 percent of the adults and 16.3 percent of the adolescents who gamble using sports-betting products will develop gambling disorder. Even those who don’t meet the clinical criteria are at risk. The same review finds that “a substantial proportion of harm is suffered by those individuals who fall below the threshold for gambling disorders.
Yet there’s a gap between public perception of gambling and reality. A 2025 survey by the National Council on Problem Gambling found that only 39 percent of Americans view gambling addiction as “very serious,” compared to 62 percent for drug addiction and 55 percent for alcoholism. Research suggests that this gap is due partially to gambling being an easier addiction to hide than addictions to substances, something Coppins notes in the story. “The addict doesn’t have glazed eyes or slurred speech, and no one can smell it on him,” he writes.
Betting apps also seem to be in their surgeon general cigarette-ad era. Athletes so famous even I’ve heard of them (Lebron James, Rob Gronkowski, the Manning brothers, and Tom Brady, to name a few) and celebrities like Kevin Hart and Kendall Jenner all feature prominently in ads for betting apps, undeniably contributing to their normalization.
Michael Ostacher, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, told me that it felt as though the editors thought Coppins’ intelligence, talent, and otherwise sober demeanor would inoculate the writer from potential harm.
“It was like, ‘Ha ha, you’re not going to be the one who gets in trouble with this because you’re McKay Coppins,’ ” Ostacher told me. “Maybe that turns out to be true for him. But you just never know … there’s no guarantee of coming back.”
It’s possible—even likely—that some of what occurs in the story is exaggerated for dramatic effect. Certainly, everyone involved is an adult and can make their own decisions. We also don’t know everything that happened behind the scenes. Perhaps the editors constantly checked in with Coppins about his mental health. Perhaps the writer was eager for firsthand experience with betting apps and asked his editors to find a spiritual workaround. If that’s the case, it’s unfortunate they declined to include those details in the story. Because what we’re left with is a piece that asks us to take the problem seriously while the publication demonstrably does not.
One hopes that such an experiment would be undertaken to reveal something we don’t already know. The addictive potential of gambling is well established. There’s plenty of research into betting apps that tells us what we already know—ease of access and immediate gratification amplify the addictive potential of a substance or behavior. By design, betting apps provide plenty of both.
“I get that he’s an adult and gave his consent, but it’s still reasonable to question the ethics of doing this without any real purpose,” said Marino. Coppins’ editors “didn’t even try to intervene or get him help; it seemed like they just hoped that his being a Mormon who wasn’t using his own money would protect him from gambling addiction.”
When I asked Eric Deggans, the Knight Chair of Journalism and Media Ethics at Washington and Lee University, about the ethics of the story, he stopped short of calling it unethical but noted that encouraging a reporter to engage in risky personal behavior to produce a first-person story is a type of journalism he’s “generally skeptical of.”
The ethics, he told me, come down to whether the publication evaluated the risk enough to know if the story was worth doing in the first place, and if so, “what safeguards are in place if the reporter gets in too deep.”
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“I would love to hear that [the editors] checked in with [Coppins] regularly to make sure he was OK while he was doing this, and if they didn’t, then I think that’s a lapse on their part,” Deggans said.
Coppins, Goldberg, and The Atlantic for the piece all declined to comment when I reached out to them for this story.
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But there are undeniably warring interests that complicate the publication’s motivation. If the reporter doesn’t make it through the extreme situation (ideally with dramatic results), there’s no story. Abandoning a feature cover story after months of reporting and a $10,000 investment is a tall order for any publication; I can’t help but wonder how obviously bad Coppins’ mental health would have to become to warrant that.
For Marino, the ends simply don’t justify the means. “If you’re just saying that gambling apps are bad, OK, nine out of 10 people would probably agree. They didn’t offer any solutions, they didn’t intervene to see if [Coppins] needed help,” he said. “If the point was to say that gambling apps are addictive, it makes it even more unethical; there was no purpose other than to get people to read the story.”
In that respect, the piece was an unbridled success, as Deggans was quick to remind me. “We’re in a media universe where the results carry a lot of weight,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to make the case that this was ill-advised because the story turned out so well.”
Deggans does have some uncertainty about the story—and some questions he’s curious to ask. “I’d be interested to know if [Coppins] is still feeling the effects of working on the story,” Deggans said. He paused and thought for a moment before adding, “And I wonder if his editors are checking in on him now that it’s over.”
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