Making a Murderer is more frightening and devastating than most true crime series. The show is no fun. In fact, it’s exhausting to watch. It sucks the hope, and the wind, out of you. Still, like the best dramas in the true crime genre, the brilliant 10-part Netflix show beats a steady drum of tragedy, shock, and disappointment.

Viewers, readers, and listeners like me who find themselves obsessed with stories like the one told in Making a Murderer have come to recognize a rhythm in their misery. According to the now well-worn true crime formula, first come the pangs of innocence robbed: we learn someone has died, or has been assaulted, or has disappeared altogether. We mourn for this victim first, keenly aware that there is more despair to come.

Any good true crime involves layers of overlapping tragedy. In The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary that gave birth to the modern pop genre, we sympathize with both a slain Dallas cop and Randall Dale Adams, the man wrongly convicted of the officer’s murder. Morris’s film led to Adams’s exoneration, and some have suggested it’s possible that a similar fate is in store for Steven Avery, the subject of Making a Murderer.

I doubt it. It’s clear from the get-go that Avery is, in a word, fucked. Making a Murderer follows the same rhythms as its true crime predecessors, but with hardly any hope. Between 1985 and 2003, after being wrongfully convicted of rape, Avery spent 18 years in prison until improvements in DNA testing led to his exoneration. Two years after Avery’s release, police arrested him in connection to an unrelated murder, and with that conviction, Avery found himself back in a prison cell.

A propulsive energy drives the storytelling of Making a Murderer. It’s impossible to stop watching, so it is ideal for Netflix, which released all 10 episodes at once. And while at times difficult to watch, the show depends on a different type of suspense than most true crime: the drama does not depend on demonstrating innocence; rather, it hangs on determining guilt.

The distinction between the two questions is subtle, one that also came up in the first season of Serial to a lesser degree. Most true crime involves a whodunit of some sort. This is true of Serial, and the brilliance of that show derived from the maddening uncertainty surrounding Adnan Syed and the murder of Hae Min Lee. After every episode of Serial, listeners contemplated and debated one question: Did he do it? Not so with Making a Murderer, which sidesteps this issue and substitutes an even more important dilemma: Was Avery guilty?

The key phrase, which comes up again and again in Making a Murderer, is reasonable doubt. Prosecutors must establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict someone in a criminal trial. In this way, you can be found not guilty without being innocent. A not-guilty verdict for a not-innocent person doesn’t necessarily signal a failure of the justice system. It can reflect a healthy criminal justice system yielding to the Constitution’s emphasis on the presumption of innocence.

As Dean Strang, one of Steven Avery’s heroic lawyers who feature heavily in Making a Murderer, put it, “Most of what ails our criminal justice system lies in unwarranted certitude on the part of police officers and prosecutors and defense lawyers and judges and jurors that they’re getting it right, that they simply are right—just a tragic lack of humility of everyone who participates in our criminal justice system.”

It’s scary to consider the prospect of a murderer going free, but it’s scarier still to think of an innocent person being imprisoned, or executed, for a crime he did not commit. Making a Murderer investigates the role of police misconduct in these injustices, drawing on the current debate surrounding police procedure. The show complements the many stories that have surfaced dealing with racial bias in policing. Last July, Rachel Aviv wrote a story for The New Yorker about Louisiana’s Caddo Parish and the murder of an infant for which the child’s 23-year-old father Rodricus Crawford was accused. After waking up next to his lifeless son, Crawford was tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death, all based on evidence that Aviv’s story compellingly calls into question. He’s most likely not the only in this situation. “Juries in Caddo Parish, which has a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America,” Aviv explained in The New Yorker. Over the course of the past 40 years, 77 percent of those executed in the Caddo Parish were black.

Less of a systemic failure, Avery’s predicament feels like being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which adds a particular gravity to the question of his guilt. It’s staggering to imagine that Avery could now, for the second time in his life, be behind bars for a crime he did not commit. “If I’m gonna be perfectly candid,” Strang said in the show’s final episode, “there’s a big part of me that really hopes Steven Avery’s guilt of this crime, because the thought of him being innocent of this crime and sitting in prison again for something he didn’t do, and now for the rest of his life without a prayer of parole—I can’t take that.” Making a Murderer makes you take that possibility and forces you to wonder if you can still call it justice.

Game of Thrones is the ultimate guilty pleasure. It’s like a super high-budget soap opera. The writ­ing is bad. Cliffhangers propel the story. Characters enter into the fold and die—violently—at random. And there is so much sex. The main difference be­tween Game of Thrones and, say, Days of Our Lives, is that Thrones features some very fine actors, Pe­ter Dinklage the best among them, his poor, tinny English accent notwithstanding.

I hope Tyrion Lannister, played by Dinklage, does not die; it will kill me. When Sean Bean’s character died at the end of the first season I was so shocked that I considered quitting the show. Since then so many characters that I’ve grown attached to have been point­lessly cut down that I’m desensitized to it. Last sea­son’s finale was no exception.

The first episode of season five, which aired on Sun­day, mostly attempted to pick up some of the pieces that had been strewn about at the end of season four. Skipping back and forth between all the show’s dif­ferent threads, the episode felt scattered in the same way Thrones as a whole feels scattered. There’s hardly enough time in a sixty-minute episode to check in with all the characters, let alone for the plot to advance in a really substantive way. This problem, of course, is not distinct to Thrones, but the show is sagging under its own weight.

I hate when people compare Game of Thrones to The Lord of the Rings—by which I mean the original Lord of the Rings, not those Hobbit movies, the bas­tard children of the outstanding original trilogy. A clear narrative arc drives The Lord of the Rings, and its po­litical allegories—most of which relate to the Second World War—are deliberate and thoroughly thought out. No part of Thrones feels deliberate. While watching Thrones, you can imagine its author George R. R. Mar­tin sitting in some dark room typing at an old Smith Corona typewriter and yelling, “And then this happens! And now this happens! And now this!” I haven’t read the books, and serious Thrones fans argue that there is indeed an overarching structure to the story; all will be revealed when Martin concludes the series, whenever that might be. I disagree, but in some ways the lack of direction doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to just go along for the ride, especially because Martin is very good at engineering interesting political machinations and relationships.

That’s when Thrones is the most fun, when it’s a show about backstabbing and conniving and deal mak­ing and politicking. The show is weaker when it leans too heavily on the supernatural—and on special effects in general. Starting with the opening sequence of the series, Thrones has been lurching slowly closer to a show about dragons, monsters, and sorcerers. I prefer the gaming that gave the series its title, and HBO isn’t really equipped to pull off a huge-budget CGI action sequence, although they’ve spent a ton of money on the series, and it shows.

As for this season, the first four episodes have leaked online, and they’re very entertaining, especially the sec­ond, third, and fourth episodes. The show is escapism at its best, without claiming to be anything more. Un­like House of Cards, which seems to fancy itself a seri­ous, intellectually-stimulating drama in the mold of The Wire, Deadwood, or Breaking Bad, Thrones, even while taking itself a little too seriously, is willing to double down on some really silly twists and turns.

The question that the series faces is how its writers will handle the moment when the television show out­paces the series of books it’s based on. Currently, Mar­tin is finishing up the sixth book, out of seven planned, and at the end of this season the show will have covered most of the content through the fifth book, although some of the story lines in the show have departed from the chronology of the books. Bran’s storyline in the show, for example, has already reached the end of the fifth book, whereas Arya is somewhere in the middle of the fourth book. At some point, Martin will have to tell the writers of the show how he intends the books to end, and they will in turn have to decide whether they want to follow the plan he outlines or carve out their own path. It’s a weird dynamic, given the outsize popularity of the show and the relative obscurity of the books it’s based on. (By the way, the books are called A Song of Fire and Ice. The television show’s creators wisely took the name Game of Thrones from the title of the first book.)

Given that we’re only about halfway through what will probably be an eight- or nine-season television show, a lot of time remains for the writers and produc­ers to experiment with changes in pacing and style. For example, they might decide to include fewer gratuitous sex scenes. There seems to be an attitude at HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax that dictates if you can do it, you should—like when Julia Louis-Dreyfus tells Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm that she wants to be in a show on HBO so she can say “fuck.” But the sex in Thrones is either a drag on the plot or it’s pointless, not at all like the gritty violence in, say, The Sopranos.

Game of Thrones is HBO’s biggest attraction today, drawing far more subscribers than shows like Silicon Valley and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Coming into the fifth season, we’re a little desensitized. We’re not surprised by the constant surprises, and it’s unclear how they’re going to keep coming. But I’d be kidding if I said I wasn’t glued to the screen anyways.

To view the annotated version of this article, copy the link below into the address bar above: http://genius.com/yaleherald.com/news-and-features/covers/the-genius-out-in-the-cold

I

“No more free Whole Foods,” Mahbod Moghadam, CC ’04, said. He was explaining how his life had changed since his departure from Rap Genius—now simply called Genius—the website that allows users to upload and annotate any text from Eminem lyrics to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. Moghadam co-founded the site in 2009 with his two best friends, Tom Lehman, PC ’06, and Ilan Zechory, TC ’06. The biggest change since his departure? No more free Whole Foods, which had been a perk offered to all the company’s LA-based employees. “I was scared to get it taken away, but it’s actually been the greatest blessing. Free food is not a perk. It’s a curse. Thank God it’s gone. I’ve lost weight.”

I’ve met Moghadam only once, when he, Zechory, and Lehman came to Yale for a Master’s Tea in Calhoun last March. We sat down for an interview after the talk and they explained that they wanted Rap Genius, which by then also included poems, full length novels, and lyrics of every genre, to become a sprawling database of information, a massive human intelligence project, as they termed it. All of Dickens’s published works are on the site, in full, with detailed annotations and notes; the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are on the site, with links to the Bible passages he so frequently alluded to; and the King James Bible is on the site, Old Testament and New, with in-text annotations and visual aids. “It’s like a giant CliffsNotes for life,” Dominic Basulto wrote in the Washington Post last year.

The site, which Moghadam called an “intellectual social network” during our interview last March, has frequently been compared to Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia, the vast majority of the content on Genius is user generated, with millions of people around the world writing annotations and uploading texts to the site. Unlike Wikipedia, teams of moderators—company employees—regulate new annotations as they are uploaded, and all users are given usernames, partially ridding the site of the anonymity that Wikipedia features. Users who annotate frequently and whose annotations are approved by moderators and “up-voted” by other users gain “IQ” points, which incentivize users to keep working on the site.

In May 2014, things were looking up for Rap Genius. The company was about to announce a massive 40 million dollar investment from Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and it would soon rebrand itself as Genius, broadening its appeal beyond the world of hip-hop. The company was beginning its move from a series of makeshift offices in a residential apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a more traditional and more spacious office in—still hip—Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, Moghadam was recovering from brain surgery that he’d undergone the previous October; although he returned to work just weeks after the operation, he’s still feeling its aftereffects today. And then, on May 23, 2014, Moghadam wrote a series of distasteful annotations on a manifesto written by Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old gunman who had killed seven people, including himself, at the University of California, Santa Barbara days earlier. “I wrote some stupid shit,” Moghadam told me. He resigned the following day.

Over the course of the past six months, Moghadam and I spoke many times over the phone for this article, me in New Haven, him in LA. I had hoped we would be able to meet in person as I wrote my profile, but Moghadam can’t stand New York, and I couldn’t realistically fly out to LA for a weekend during the school year. So instead we talked over the phone, emailed, and texted. One of the things we talked about often—more often than you’d expect—was Whole Foods. Moghadam assured me that the Whole Foods in Santa Monica was LA’s finest. “Venice and West Hollywood have hotter girls or whatever, but if you’re just talking about the food, Santa Monica is the place.” Little did I know, Whole Foods was—is—somewhat of a point of fixation for Moghadam. A few months before that conversation, he had written an article for Thought Catalog reviewing every Whole Foods in Los Angeles. One entry reads: “West Hollywood—This is commonly referred to as the ‘pimp Whole Foods’—nowhere are there more beautiful ladies… The cool part is that they chop the kale up extra-fine (for the ladies)—also the smoothie makers here are Master Mixologists…”

But even if the free groceries that he’d been guaranteed when he worked at Rap Genius had become a curse, as he had told me, Moghadam found a way to recapture the glory days of free Whole Foods, publishing another article on Thought Catalog a few months later entitled “How To Steal From Whole Foods.” In it, he wrote, “I have probably stolen more from Whole Foods markets than any living person… When I started working on genius.com, Whole Foods was our first ‘angel investor’—without stealing all the food I stole from the Berkeley Whole Foods, I would never have been able to spend a year bootstrapping, working on the site full-time.”

Ever since Rap Genius was founded in 2009, Moghadam has attracted outsize attention for his antics; most notably, in February 2013 (just three months before he left the company), he made a splash after he was quoted in an interview saying Mark Zuckerberg “can suck my dick.” “Fuck that fool,” he added. The following month, when he, Zechory, and Lehman came to Yale for their Master’s Tea, he told the room that 2014 was “the year of humility. The goal is to tell only one billionaire to fuck off this year.”

Now, more than six months after his departure, Moghadam is adrift, consulting here and there for tech startups around LA, writing here and there (he’s shopping around a book about founding Rap Genius—I read it; it’s funny and weird), and tweeting everywhere. Whole Foods responded from its corporate Twitter account to a tweet from Moghadam sharing his article about stealing from their stores: “Well that’s not very nice. Thanks for the heads up on your sneaky tricks. #noted.”

Moghadam tweeted back five minutes later: “you guys should give me a gift card for all the publicity I generate.”

“I think we’re doing ok, thanks though,” Whole Foods wrote back, 19 minutes later.

The article about stealing from Whole Foods has since been removed from Thought Catalog. After receiving a call from the General Counsel of Whole Foods, Moghadam requested for the article to be removed, and all his articles have since been taken down by Thought Catalog. Still, as of this writing, the article that caused all the fuss can be found in its entirety on Genius.com.

II

Mahbod Moghadam’s family came to the United States from Iran 33 years ago, just before Moghadam was born, hoping to escape the ravages of the Iran-Iraq War. The family sent Moghadam’s older brother, Michael, to Los Angeles two years before the rest so that he wouldn’t be drafted into the Iranian army.

Moghadam, who is 32 years old, grew up in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, nestled in a small community of other Persian immigrants. “In LA, Persian Jews are all over the place,” said Moghadam, who is Persian and Jewish. “The rich ones live in Beverly Hills and the poor ones live in the Valley. I’m one of the poor ones.” His father worked downtown, in the diamond district with other Persian immigrants, while his mother stayed at home. The two never fully mastered English, and at home they spoke Persian with Moghadam and his siblings. They gave all four of their children Persian names; Michael, Moghadam’s older brother, legally changed his name from Mehrdad when he was 18. As a child, Moghadam never liked his name, and he went by Matt from elementary school through the first year of college, when his “hippie friends” convinced him to go back to his Persian name.

He told me he liked Yale and excelled, winning a Fulbright Scholarship to study in France after he graduated. He was in the Independent party, majored in History and International Studies, and smoked weed. Senior year he moved off campus to an apartment in the Oxford on High Street, which he called “the high class part of campus. Howe Street and whatnot is like the bohemian part, that’s the Brooklyn,” he told me.

When he speaks and writes, Moghadam is relentlessly ironic, but the boundaries of his jokes are often blurry. He takes to Twitter and Facebook to air a lot of these jokes—in all, he has tweeted over 5,000 times, often many times per day. Last year, on Nov. 2, he tweeted, “MY REFLECTIONS ON 3 MONTHS OF HEAVY LOS ANGELES TINDER USAGE: the women of los angeles are beautiful and have terrible taste….” Later that day, he tweeted, “can’t wait until I have 1944 followers on twitter so that I can think about the holocaust more often……..” Both were jokes, characteristically ambiguous in tone, a tone that has landed him in hot water on countless occasions. One month earlier, he tweeted, “THROWBACK THURSDAY: the original @RapGenius twitter password was ‘69rapgenius69.’” This, Moghadam told me, was true.

In the fall of 2005, after his Fulbright in France, Moghadam enrolled in law school at Stanford, and from there he took a job at Dewey & LeBoeuf, the ritzy—now defunct—corporate law firm then headquartered in Manhattan. It was quite the sought after and prestigious trajectory—Yale, Fulbright, Stanford, Dewey. Still, friends of Moghadam told me that he was never suited to the world of corporate law. Jessica Hubley, a friend of Moghadam’s from Stanford Law who went on to work as one of Rap Genius’s first contracted lawyers, said she was shocked he’d entered the corporate world at all. “He’s very intellectually curious and intellectually capable, and I think it makes a lot of sense that he would choose to go to Yale and Stanford Law to have those discussions,” she told me. “But the big paycheck at the law firm, the kinds of things that people generally go to those jobs for, he had never cared about anyway.”

As it turned out, his time at Dewey would be short lived. In 2009, many major law firms began placing low-level associates on deferral, which essentially amounted to time off with reduced pay, in order to cope with the effects of the recession. The firms urged associates to seek out internships during their time off, and Moghadam landed one with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, Neb. For two years, Moghadam had maintained a blog under the alias Beneficent Allah, where he posted jokes, poems, and reflections. (He still posts to it today.) The night before he was set to leave for Nebraska, Moghadam got a call explaining that someone at Berkshire Hathaway had discovered the blog, on which he’d posted a joke memo to the “Ballstate Insurance Company,” a lazily cloaked reference to All State, which was a Dewey client. “Then I got burned,” Moghadam said; Berkshire Hathaway rescinded their offer that night and Dewey fired him the following day.

Disconsolate, Moghadam sought refuge, as he often had, at Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman’s apartment in the East Village. He spent the night on a yoga mat on their floor. Moghadam and Zechory had been close at Yale, and although Moghadam hadn’t met Lehman until after college, they bonded quickly. By the time Moghadam was canned by Dewey, the three of them had become a tight-knit group.

As Moghadam tells it, that same night he was fired, in 2009, Tom Lehman built the prototype for Rap Genius.

III

In the beginning, none of them took Rap Genius—or Rap Exegesis, as it was initially called—too seriously. “It’s not like Tom built it thinking that it was going to be a business,” Moghadam told me. “He built it overnight because it was pretty easy to build, and I started putting songs up because I was depressed and I was bored.” Lehman built the site after he asked Moghadam to explain a lyric from a Cam’ron song.

A couple weeks after he was fired from Dewey & LeBoeuf, Moghadam returned to LA and bounced around for a while, alternating between stays at his girlfriend’s apartment, his parents’ house, and Lehman and Zechory’s place back in New York. Eventually, he contacted some of his law professors at Stanford and moved to Palo Alto to help work on some law review articles, but that didn’t last. He became obsessed with Rap Genius, annotating and uploading texts all the time, and soon he left Stanford to fully commit his energies to promoting the site.

By 2011, Rap Genius had picked up enough momentum that Zechory and Lehman both quit their jobs to work on the site full time (Zechory left Google; Lehman left the hedge fund D.E. Shaw). They applied to the tech incubator Y Combinator, a startup boot camp that helps to pair promising companies with investors, and they left with 1.8 million dollars in funding. One of their early angel investors was Ashton Kutcher. “When I met him he was mad at me for telling Mark Zuckerberg to suck my dick,” Moghadam told me. “He comes up to me and he’s like, Hey buddy, I have some advice for you, how about stop telling people to suck your dick? And I was like, Oh Ashton, I’m so sorry, I’m so embarrassed. I don’t even ask my girlfriend to suck my dick anymore.”

By the time they left Y Combinator, the company was on the map. Millions of dollars began flooding in from marquis investors and firms, none more important than the 15 million dollar infusion in October 2012 from the tech venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Rap Genius used the money to hire more employees and expand their offices. And they bought a mansion in Bel Air, the west coast Rap Genius headquarters, where Moghadam spent most of his time.

Today, although Genius does not have revenue streams from advertisements or subscriptions (Lehman and Zechory have said that they are putting off introducing ads so that the site can remain cool, just as Facebook and Instagram once did), industry watchers estimate that Genius could be worth close to half a billion dollars. When Dan Gilbert, the Cavaliers owner, decided to put 40 million in the company last February, he said his investment was based on an estimated value of the company at several hundred million dollars—the exact number is rumored to be around 400 million. In an industry in which high profile acquisitions happen almost on a monthly basis, with companies like Instagram topping 1 billion dollars in value, it is not far fetched to imagine that a Genius IPO—or a sale to, say, Google—could make Lehman, Zechory, and Moghadam all hundred-millionaires.

While neither Andreessen Horowitz nor the three co-founders will reveal the website’s precise traffic statistics, Moghadam has publicly claimed that it is the most visited hip-hop site on the Internet, and it’s consistently the top hit when searching for lyrics of any genre through Google. Moghadam told me that his departure did not affect the portion of the company that he owns, although it did cost him his seat on the board.

Once dismissed as a website for white people to translate black urban slang, Genius is now viewed by many as a potentially revolutionary service, a company that could change the nature of the web. That’s the goal—to annotate the world using the Genius platform. According to Lehman and Zechory’s vision, eventually all websites will include annotations powered by Genius. Annotated articles using embedded Genius code have already appeared in the Washington Post, Forbes, and Business Insider. This month, Genius began beta testing a system that allows users to type “genius.com/” in front of any URL, and voila—the page becomes annotatable. (The online version of this article uses the Genius software for embedded annotations.)

Recently, Genius has made a number of moves aimed at shedding the label of a startup manned by brogrammers in order to rebrand itself as a more serious company. Its director of operations, Russell Farhang, came from a job at the hedge fund Bridgewater, and this month Genius drew Sasha Frere-Jones away from his job as the New Yorker’s pop music critic to make him the company’s Executive Editor. (Farhang, at 40, was the company’s oldest employee until they hired Frere-Jones, who is 47.)

As the company has matured, Zechory and Lehman, now the president and the CEO, respectively, have attempted to keep lower public profiles. They would not speak to me for this article, and, aside from a piece in New York Magazine earlier this month, they’ve successfully stayed out of the news, more or less. Quite the reversal for the two, who once, along with Moghadam, comprised a trio of media darlings, willing to say or do almost anything to generate publicity for Rap Genius. In May 2013, for example, just weeks before Moghadam wrote the annotation that led to his departure from the company, the three spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup conference in New York. Each walked on stage in a more ridiculous costume than the last—Lehman, in sunglasses, was clad in a pink floral blazer and high top Jordans, Zechory, in sunglasses, sported a coat one writer aptly described as “the top half of a bathrobe,” and Moghadam, in sunglasses, sauntered onstage in big multicolored high tops, carrying a gallon jug of water.

In the early days, Moghadam’s main role at Rap Genius involved spreading hype about the company. He reached out to artists, bloggers, and writers, and he worked to build a community of users from the ground up. “You’d go by his computer and there’d be ten Gchat windows open,” Zechory told New York Magazine this month. “And it would be some 14-year-old kid in the Midwest saying ‘You fascinate me’ to Mahbod.” One such acolyte was Zach Schwartz, now a junior at Columbia, who took off the second semester of his sophomore year in spring 2013 to work as an intern at Rap Genius. “It was crazy, because I had wanted to work for Mahbod for years,” Schwartz told me. “I wanted to be friends with him, I wanted to get in touch with him because I thought he was, well—I looked up to him so much.”

In December 2013, Moghadam’s compulsion to promote Rap Genius blew up in the company’s face. A tech blogger revealed a plot by Moghadam to inflate the company’s position in Google’s search results by offering to advertise various music blogs from the Rap Genius Twitter account in exchange for posts including links to lyrics on Rap Genius. The scheme, which aimed to subvert Google’s search algorithm and push Rap Genius links to the top of Google’s search results, violated Google’s webmaster guidelines, and on Christmas morning, Google slapped the company with a “minus-50 penalty,” which pushed all Rap Genius pages down 50 spots in its search results. It was a disaster, with traffic dropping from an average of 1.5 million visitors per day to 200,000. Frantically, the Rap Genius staff searched for all the problem links and removed them. To their credit, they had the site back on Google in less than a week.

But if the bad links were relatively easy to scrub off the Internet, the damage to Moghadam’s reputation both inside and outside the company was more difficult to repair. Through the years at Rap Genius, Moghadam always had a complicated, sometimes contentious relationship with Zechory and Lehman. He spent most of his time—often more than six months a year—living in the “Rap Genius Mansion” in Bel Air, where he directed a few interns as the head of the internship program. They threw parties, hosted rap groups who wanted to film music videos, and debauched. “It wasn’t an office, it was a house, and it was his fiefdom,” Dan Berger, MC ’05, Rap Genius’s first employee, told me. “It would just be in disarray every time you’d come. It would be in total disarray.” (Zach Schwartz, the intern who lived with Moghadam at the Bel Air house from February through April of 2013, said this characterization of the LA headquarters was wrong: “The parties that we had, they were just readings”—for Poetry Genius—“they were still for business. They were promoting the company.”)

Berger was close with Moghadam, Lehman, and Zechory in college, and he jumped on board just after Lehman designed the site in 2009. He left the company in 2013, about six months before Moghadam, and now works for MSNBC. He explained that over time, fissures started to open in Moghadam’s relationship with Lehman and Zechory. “As the company was becoming bigger, Mahbod’s role was becoming more nebulous, especially since he wasn’t in New York, and people got hired to do some of the things that he had previously done only himself, like the Twitter account and reaching out to artists,” Berger said. “He was competing with people and he had clashes because of that.”

Moghadam’s raunchy sense of humor caused problems as well—it always had. “Mahbod is also willing to go certain places with his humor where other people aren’t, where other people don’t even consider it humor,” Berger said. “I do, but that was a big issue, that he would do stuff that would have gone under the radar during the early years, but by the end everyone was watching it, looking for him to do weird things. That caused friction.”

Paul Augustine, CC ’04, who lived with Moghadam freshman and sophomore year at Yale and remained close with him through college and after, said that as the culture at Rap Genius became increasingly corporate, Moghadam came to feel more and more stifled. “There was more oversight from investors and things became a little bit more corporate, and all the sudden he was—there were people telling him, you can’t say this, you can’t say that, and that’s just not who he is. That’s not consistent with how he operates.”

In February 2014, as Moghadam faced health problems from brain surgery he’d undergone the previous October, he negotiated a change in his contract with the company he co-founded. From that point on he would work for Rap Genius only part time, and almost exclusively from LA, rarely traveling to Brooklyn. He was slowly walking away, it seemed. And then in May, just three months later, he was gone.

Moghadam insists that he was not pushed out, but rather resigned by his own volition. “The racist-ass reporters keep saying I got fired, but the simple fact of the matter is I resigned,” he told me. He’d annotated parts of a 141-page manifesto written by Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old gunman who went on a killing rampage last May on UCSB’s campus. In annotations posted on the site, Moghadam complimented Rodger more than once for “beautifully written,” “artful” sentences. He speculated that at the root of Rodger’s sexual frustration, which Rodger outlined in the manifesto, was a sexual desire for his sister, who Moghadam guessed was “smokin hot.”

“I had written some stupid stuff and then I had gone to the beach,” Moghadam told me. “I get back from the beach and I had a text from Natasha Tiku, who works for Gawker, and I was like, Fuck. As soon as I saw the text from her I knew I was totally fucked.” Moghadam said Tiku was asking about the annotations he had written on the Rodgers manifesto, seeing whether he wanted to comment for a story she was about to post.

In September 2014, Zechory and Lehman were invited back to Yale for another Master’s Tea, this time in Pierson, just six months after they’d come with Moghadam for a Master’s Tea in Calhoun. The majority of the hour-long talk was almost exactly the same as the one they’d given the previous spring. Then, toward the end, someone in the first or second row asked if it was weird to work at the company without their third co-founder. Zechory and Lehman gave a nervous laugh. Then Zechory said, “He is a very funny, brilliant, creative person. He’s also one of the most difficult people I’ve ever been around. He says insensitive things, he doesn’t care about consequences. Over time the horrible behavior added up.”

After his annotations on Rodger’s manifesto, Moghadam was barred from annotating on the site, which agonizes him to this day. After Lehman blocked him from the site, Moghadam made a second account, which Lehman eventually also blocked. In response, Moghadam tweeted, “Top 3 people who can suck my dick: 1. Tom Lehman 2. Mark Zuckerberg 3. Warren Buffett (in that order).”

IV

Moghadam never liked New York. Now he hates it, because he associates the city with a brain tumor that he had removed in October 2013. His hand had been shaking for months, but he’d put off getting it checked out. “I was a total mess, I couldn’t go to the gym anymore, I felt nauseous all the time, I had headaches all the time, but that was, like, the most decadent period. We had a bunch of artists shooting music videos at the Rap Genius mansion, like every weekend would be a new music video, and they would all turn into parties, and I was getting like all this attention from girls. Right now, I’m a healthy man and I get zero attention from girls, but at this time, with my hand shaking and I’d gotten really fat, I was getting all this attention from girls. It had become a serious issue for me, how do I hide my shaking hand from girls?”

He and Lehman had been at the University of Michigan giving a talk, and when they got back to New York, Moghadam went to Beth Israel Hospital. The doctors ordered an MRI of his brain. When the results came back, they told him to go to the emergency room, which is on 1st Avenue, a five or ten-minute walk from the wing at Union Square. “To get to the emergency room I had to walk through Stuyvesant Park, and that’s my favorite park in Manhattan, and it was just so nice. It was like perfect weather, and I was like, you know, for the first time in my life I was enjoying New York. Then I got to the emergency room and they said, Look you’ve got a brain tumor, and they made me change into a gown.” He didn’t have his cell phone on him, so he called Lehman and Zechory to come and bring it to him in the ER. He had surgery the following day.

Moghadam had a benign meningioma, which, according to the website of the Mayo Clinic, is a tumor that arises in the tissue between the brain and the skull. Some meningiomas don’t require surgery, but Moghadam’s had grown and was pressing on the region of his brain that controls motor functions, causing seizures and violent tremors in his left hand.

By all accounts, including Moghadam’s, the surgery was an incredibly traumatic experience. “I think that the whole brain tumor was such a shock,” Masteneh Moghadam, Mahbod’s older sister, told me. “Finding that he had the tumor to having the surgery was such a quick turnaround, and he was so consumed with his work at the time that I’m not sure that he ever really had a chance to process what had happened to him. I think it’s still really hitting him.”

According to friends and family, and to Moghadam himself, the surgery has had a dampening effect on him, both physically and behaviorally. “On the one hand, I don’t need surgery again and my MRIs look good and stuff. On the other hand, it’s not like you ever truly fully recover from something like this,” Moghadam told me. “I think whatever he told you,” Masteneh said, “in the eyes of myself and my family, multiply it by one hundred. That’s how extreme it’s been. He’s barely aware how much this has affected him.”

Mojgan Moghadam, Mahbod’s other older sister, told me that he returned to work far too quickly after his surgery. She said she was shocked that Lehman and Zechory seemed to expect Moghadam to get back on his feet far faster than she thought appropriate. “These people”—Zechory and Lehman—“are so smart, they’re so intelligent,” she said. “They’re so technologically advanced. They can solve all kinds of mathematical, technological problems for you. But they have no sense of reality. They are so out of touch that they could not even understand what it means to have a brain tumor, to have brain surgery, and they expected him to work three days after he was out of the hospital.”

Mojgan told me that she called Zechory and implored him to force Moghadam to take more time off. “I said, ‘Ilan, everybody needs convalescence time, even after a toe surgery. He had brain surgery and you’re not giving him convalescence time.’ And he said, ‘No, no, he’s doing well. He’s functioning.’ And I said, ‘No, he’s functioning because he sees you want him to function! You have to force him to take a year off.’” According to Mojgan, Zechory replied, “No, no, he’s fine.”

As we talked over the course of the last six months, the terms Moghadam used to describe his relationship with Lehman and Zechory changed. In some ways, it seemed that the relationship deteriorated. In the fall, I asked Moghadam if his relationship with them had been strained since his departure from the company. “We’ve never like actually gotten into a fight, you know, they’re my friends,” he said. “I make fun of them. I think they’re losers and I make fun of them, but I’ve been doing that for the past 10 years. They’re nerds, I always remind them that they’re nerds. They appreciate that. It’s been kind of scary to watch them turn into corporate scum, especially over the past 18 months, but that happens. Genius is going to become a huge, huge company, so obviously someone has to be the Zuckerberg. He’s got to step up and turn into scum.” (In Moghadam’s mind, Lehman is the Mark Zuckerberg of Genius.)

“I’ve always been shitting on them,” he added.

So, you shit on them, I said. Do they shit on you?

“No, no, they look up to me in reverence,” he said. “They really look up to me. I’m older than them. I was class of 2004 and they were both class of 2006.”

A few weeks later, we spoke again. “I’ll never—how can I ever actually be mad at them, you know? Like obviously I’ll fuck around with them, and they give me shit, I’ll give them shit. But I’m never gonna actually”—he paused—“That being said, we haven’t actually hung out for a long time. Like, I’m not—I have no plans to go to New York. I told you about my traumatic relationship with New York, and, you know, if they came out to LA I’m sure we would hang out.” He paused again. “I think we would hang out.”

V.

The first time Moghadam and I talked for this article, I asked him if we could meet sometime when he was in New York. No, not going to happen. “I hate New York,” he told me. “Right now my attitude on New York is the same as my attitude on the Holocaust, which is never again.” I laughed. I asked if anything could drag him to New York. Would you go for a wedding? “No, actually I missed the wedding of one of my best friends,” he said. “He got married last month and I didn’t go, and apparently he was very hurt and very pissed at me, but I just can’t stand that place. It gives me the creepy crawlies.” For Moghadam, New York has become “Ghost of Brain Surgeryville, USA.”

I wasn’t sure if it would work to write this profile over the phone. To really profile someone, you can’t just listen to him. You’ve got to watch him speak, watch him eat—what’s he wearing? What shoes? What DVDs does he have on the coffee table? What’s his car like? Messy with fast food wrappers and stuff on the floor? Does he wear socks around the house or go barefoot?

Of course, we all have mannerisms that come through over the phone, and since I never got to spend time with Moghadam in person—other than the time I interviewed him, Zechory, and Lehman for this newspaper last March—I paid particular attention during our phone conversations to the way he spoke, the way he told stories. He always called me homie, or dog. “Yooooo whattup dog!” he’d say when he picked up the phone. Then we’d talk about Gucci Mane, or he’d tell me about a story he’d recently read in the New Yorker. One time he compared Kanye West’s most recent album to Picasso’s Blue Period.

To be sure, he’s also capable of being extraordinarily crass. Once, he told me about a poem that he’d written and addressed to his twin sister, who was miscarried. “We had this guy who used to run Poetry Genius, and he was telling me about his twin sister, and I told him, Dude, if I had a twin sister, I would fuck all of her friends. I was like, You must have fucked so many of your sister’s friends. He’s like, Actually, I never fucked any of my sister’s friends. I’m like, Wow, you’re a nerd dude. If I had my twin sister, I would have fucked all of her friends. That sentiment inspired me to write the poem. The poem is like a letter to my twin sister. I’m telling her she would have been really hot, she would have a good body, and I say she would have gone to Stanford.”

Without being able to meet in person, I was forced to spend my time trying to get to know Mahbod Moghadam over the phone, and I think I did. One thing I couldn’t get a sense of was where he’s going next, what’s his next project, what’s the next thing he wants to devote himself to. He says working full time is unrealistic. “I can’t go back to full time work, because, you know, I’m still fucked up from the brain surgery,” he told me. So he works part time—now he’s advising a company that’s developing a fashion app, which he’s excited about. A few months ago he told me he’d recently consulted for a company called Underground Cellar, which delivers wine. “They sent me three cases of bomb, bomb, like hundred-dollar wine, so yesterday I ordered a mini cellar on Amazon, the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever done, but I needed it—I have all of this baller wine. I want to do shit like that. I don’t want to do anything full time, but I’m sure there are a lot of small companies that I could help. I’m just trying to spread the love wherever I can.”

Ok, picture this: fade from black, Steve Zahn is crawling on all fours through the mud, tight closeup on his face, he’s got war paint on and he’s holding a knife in his teeth, rain pouring pouring pouring, he can’t even see, bang, cut to this big ass snake, an anaconda, a garden snake, a rattler, a big juicy boa—whatever, it’s snaking through the mud, ssss, ssss, snaking it’s way through the rain, and now we’re back with Zahn, he’s got that fire in his eyes where you know he’s gonna be eating animal meat tonight, you know he’s chowing down on flesh, he’s got that Zahn look from the end of A Perfect Getaway, or even parts of Sahara where he wasn’t doing just the comic relief, it’s vintage Zahn, like he’s a young man again, like in Daddy Day Care but he’s got this fire in his eyes, and now we’re back with the snake, it’s sticking its tongue out in the rain and the mud, slithering quickly now, gliding through the elements until BAM the knife chops its head off and you see it’s Zahn’s knife, who else! He’s chopped the beast’s head off and he lifts the decapitated snake up and turns his eyes to the camera and goes: “snake eyes—capture the rattler.” It’s a commercial, snake meat jerky. All I can say is you’re gonna want to ride this wave while there’s still a chance to get in on the ground floor. Send me your CV at kohler.bruno@yale.edu.

The OP is a wreck. “How old were you when you lost someone you love?” he writes. “Today i received the worst news of my life, lung cancer stage 4. My mom, strongest woman i know….. i can’t even finish saying what i want to. Can’t stop crying, being mad, blaming myself, cope with this shit.”

The first response comes three minutes later: “Keep your head up OP. There’s a good chance she beats it.”

Then: “Everybody dies sometime OP. It’s a fact of life. But don’t let that stop you from living. Shit happens that you can’t control. You just gotta accept it.”

OP stands for original poster—the person who started the message thread, which after thirty-six minutes has been replied to two hundred and twenty one times. As a rule, the OP is always teased, fucked with. Usually he’s labeled a faggot—that’s a matter of course here on 4chan, the website where this conversation is taking place. No matter what, no matter whether the OP sparked a really good discussion that got a lot of replies, he is probably going to be called a faggot. For example, on a different thread the OP asks how best to smoke weed (joint or bong?), and the third response on the thread is: “OP, you’re fucking retarded. I’m making a stoner thread for coherent individuals who like weed and porn. You’re a faggot.”

This is 4chan.org, the nightmarish website—really, better described as an online message board—where everyone is anonymous and everything is temporary. The gross underbelly of the Internet, the dark web. Or just a place to talk about anime. When the site was launched in 2003 (out of the bedroom of a fifteen year old living on Long Island) that’s what it was intended for. Now it’s divided into sixty-three subsections, or boards, some of which relate to anime, manga, and other Japanese pop comics, but the vast majority of which do not. There is 4chan.org/an/ (animals and nature), /lit/ (literature), /sp/ (sports), /mu/ (music), /k/ (weapons), /s/ (sexy beautiful women). Thousands of people visit these boards everyday, debating and discussing topics that range from science and politics to classic films and Pokémon.

And then there is 4chan.org/b/ (the “random” board), which is the object of this piece (all of the message threads that I’ve quoted from here took place on /b/). /b/ is where most of the scary stuff happens, and it’s the most interesting part of 4chan.

***

The OP is in pain:

>>left arm is numb/tingly
>> 29 yo
>>no health insurance
wat do?

The first response comes one minute and 13 seconds later: “what do you expect to achieve by giving very little info nigga.”

The OP responds: “idk, should i sit on my hand or something?”

Some anons offer genuine advice: “sounds like a heart attack or a blood clot, go to a walk in clinic, they’re usually a lot cheaper and don’t require health insurance.”

Then the next one: “Don’t be a faggot ur 29.”

People who post on 4chan are called anons because their usernames on the website are usually simply “Anonymous.” (The hacker group Anonymous, which gained notoriety in 2010 for disabling the websites of Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal after those companies blocked donations to Wikileaks, was born on 4chan about a decade ago.) Within each thread on 4chan, anons are assigned eight-character ID codes, but the IDs are randomly generated each time you enter a thread and apply only within a given thread. So if you post in two different threads, you’re given two different randomly assigned ID codes, one for each thread, which means a specific anon can be tracked within a specific thread but you can’t identify him anywhere else on the site.

For twenty-four minutes the thread about the numb arm evolves normally, with anons bickering at each other, bickering at the OP, offering advice, making jokes. Then one anon asks the OP to film his own death on a webcam so that the rest of them can watch it (“set up cam before you start convulsing and die op”). This is a common request on /b/; it comes up in threads that have absolutely nothing to do with death or health issues. In the thread about how best to smoke weed, most of the anons offer advice (“get a cheap bong, no need to be fancy about it”) until out of the blue one asks for a suicide video: “suicide. film it, post here. many keks.” On 4chan, kek means lol, or laugh out loud. Many laughs. Film your own suicide and post it here. It will be hilarious.

This is one of the most troubling parts of 4chan, this desire for images and videos of violence—gore, in 4chan parlance. Many anons love gore and come to 4chan to find it. In August, when the terrorist group ISIS videotaped the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, YouTube removed the videos from its site. They were immediately re-uploaded onto 4chan, and every few days, sometimes every few hours, the images and videos are reposted on /b/.

Far more prevalent than this type of high-profile carnage, though, is regular, run of the mill gore. Videos filmed from traffic cameras of people getting into car accidents. Images of amputations. Self-inflicted and self-documented physical violence. Videos of random street attacks. After a particularly gruesome video of a man running in front of a moving car, anons ask, “is he kill?”

Is he dead?

***

My first semi-successful post on /b/ is about amputated toes—“how many toes would you give up before you gave up a finger?”—and I add a photo of a foot (with all its toes intact) from Google. I post it at 8:45 p.m., which is a time when there’s a good amount of traffic on /b/, new threads popping up every minute. For some time my post sits there all on its own, gathering Internet dust. My previous attempts had all fallen flat. “let’s free associate /b/, what’s the first word that pops into your head?” 0 responses. “what’s the worst text message you got today /b/?” 0 responses.

But after a little over six minutes someone responds to my post about toes: “i am a professional piano player so i would never give up a finger.” Then another person: “three for one but not the big toe and no thumb or index finger.” Both anons had taken the question seriously, which I found satisfying and somewhat surprising. A third anon writes a more involved response:

it depends what the situation is and which toes
if i were being tortured or if i had the potential of being given large portions of money i would probably give up a finger for 3 or 4 toes, but not if they were all on the same foot and the thumb or index are more valuable, for that it would have to be all ten toes probably

Then the next anon: “well i have an amputation fetish so…”

With that the trickle of posts stops and I consider bumping the thread. To bump is to post a comment with just the word “bump.” Anons do it when they don’t have anything to add to the thread but they do want to continue reading responses; a bump keeps the thread alive. Threads that don’t get a lot of responses are the first to be removed. I decide to leave it be and wait to see how my post plays out on its own. I refresh the page a few times and no new responses appear. I refresh the page and the post is gone—Page Not Found. Fifteen-minute lifespan. I’m still learning how to stoke the fire on /b/.

Some posts remain on the site for hours. After mine is deleted I return to the board and look through the posts that are really popular, the ones getting a lot of responses. One post (“In this thread we post the last 3-5 items that you’ve spent at least 50$ on, excluding bills-and food, and get judged by other anons based on your list”) has two hundred and forty nine responses after just under two hours. Another (“Fast food experiences thread”) has one hundred and sixty seven responses in less than an hour. Some have fewer than ten responses, but most have more than twenty or thirty.

***

In a 2011 Vanity Fair article that ran under the headline “4chan’s Chaos Theory,” Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote, “Anonymity is part of the culture of 4chan, a complex network of millions of trolls—(mostly) young men who are entranced with the notion of acting as one, as a ‘hive mind,’ and at the same time desperate to assert their individuality apart from whatever pressures they feel in society, or ‘I.R.L.’ (in real life).” That’s true, except not everyone on 4chan is a troll. A troll is someone who goes online just to mess with people, to fuck stuff up—“destructive agitators who torment and heckle others online,” to borrow from the New York Times. There are tons of them on 4chan, to be sure, but to characterize the site as a network of trolls is wrong. What Grigoriadis is right about, if you ask me, is the fact that 4chan is dominated by young men. In this piece, I’ve referred to every anon with male pronouns because it has seemed to me during my time on the site that most of them are men and boys. There’s no way to prove that, though. As Grigoriadis writes, “4chan does not have archives or searchability. It’s one of the last places on the Internet where you really can say anything you want and it won’t come back to haunt you.”

I had not heard of 4chan until recently, when a hacker caused an international media frenzy after breaking into the private files of dozens of female celebrities. He stole large caches of their intimate photos and dumped them onto 4chan—specifically, onto /b/. Other people immediately ripped the files off 4chan and placed them elsewhere on the Internet—mostly public data storage websites, but also blogs and porn sites—so that they would not disappear after the 4chan boards recycled. For a moment, the name 4chan had entered into the water supply. The Huffington Post wrote about the site and the photo leak many times. The New York Times mentioned 4chan when they covered the story, as did the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, to name just a few. I went on 4chan to see what the site was about, which inspired me to write this piece.

If online anonymity is dying, 4chan is one place where it is alive and well. On 4chan you can say whatever you want, you can scream it, and people will hear you—they just won’t know it was you that they heard. I wonder what the site will look like ten years from now. Today’s 4chan is certainly much different from the 4chan of 2004, when it was mostly nerdy teenagers who wanted a place to talk about anime. Now FBI agents stalk the site—they have for years, ever since a hacker broke into Sarah Palin’s email account in 2008 and chose 4chan as the first place to dump the messages. Maybe ten years from now the site will no longer exist. Or maybe it will be more robust, more immune to federal intrusion, more bold. With a site that reinvents itself one thousand times per hour, I’m not sure anyone can say.

5. Wear a Goldman shirt to the JP Morgan meeting. Can you even imagine?

4. Bring a date. Great food at those things.

3. Bring a duffel bag to put that great food in. Haha.

2. Try to get a selfie with Lloyd Blankfein. Linkedin prof pic.

1. Ask them for help on your econ p-set.

On Mar. 12, Yale announced a series of changes to its cost per term and its financial aid budget for the 2013-14 school year. Tuition will rise by $2,200 next year, and students on financial aid will be expected to earn an additional $100 of their scholarships through term-time job commitments, bringing the total student contribution to $3,300.

Twenty-two hundred dollars is a big jump in the cost of Yale tuition—3.98 percent to be exact—but this article is about the $100. While at first it may seem a minute, relatively inconsequential change, in the eyes of many students it reveals a disconcerting trend.

A term-time job is work that students must do in some capacity on campus in order to earn part of their financial aid package. According to Caesar Storlazzi, Yale’s director of financial aid, the average term-time job commitment this year for a student on financial aid at Yale is eight to 10 hours a week.

“It means you have 10 hours less time per week to devote to your studies or to devote to extracurricular pursuits,” Diana Rosen, PC ’16, who has written two columns for the Yale Daily News about the experience of being a Yale student on financial aid, said in an interview. The University calls this a student’s “self-help contribution,” and Storlazzi echoed this language of personal advancement. “We do think that having a hand in the financial aid picture actually is a good thing for students, training for life after graduation,” he said. “There is an investment of time, not an onerous one, toward that student’s self help.”

Yale, it should be noted, has a robust financial aid system. Fifty five percent of undergraduates receive aid from the University, and the average grant for the 2012-13 school year tops $39,000. Families who make less than $65,000 per year pay nothing, and Yale meets 100 percent of demonstrated need.

Perhaps in an effort not to tarnish this sterling report card, the University announced the changes to next year’s budget in a whisper: it was posted in a bulletin on the YaleNews website—not an especially popular destination for Yale undergraduates when web-surfing—on Mar. 12. No email was sent announcing the changes. Moreover, most students were off- campus for spring break, far away from Yale’s ivy towers. “The decision to release the information then disenfranchised a student voice,” Yoni Greenwood, BR ‘15, said. Greenwood is a member of Students Unite Now (SUN), a campus student group whose goal, according to its Facebook page, is to “unite to change our university, our city, and our world.” But SUN had no opportunity to organize a discussion on the decision because many of its organizers, along with most Yale students, were not around to talk.

“It’s a big decision that has a really large effect on the student body,” said Greenwood, “and it was made when most students weren’t on campus to comment on it and to talk about it and to think about it.” Other students echoed this concern. “I thought the timing of the announcement was problematic,” Alejandro Gutierrez, CC ’13, said. YaleNews did send out an email on Mar. 12., but it neglected to mention the change. Instead, the lead story of that email reported, “Infants prefer individuals who punish those not like themselves.”

Storlazzi unambiguously denied the claim that the University had specifically chosen to release this information at a time when students would not be on campus to react. “The timing was pure coincidence,” he said. “We make the announcement as soon as we can, and all these decisions are being made and weighed and balanced against the University’s budget over January, February, and March. Would we like to see those numbers broadcast earlier? Sure, but we do it as soon as we can.”

For many students on financial aid, the problem was not just the way in which the University publicized the changes. Rather, they voiced disappointment over the content of the reforms for next year, citing the time pressure created by term-time jobs. Rosen explained that the student contribution for her financial aid package was covered this year by a private, outside scholarship, but she worried about the prospect of balancing her time next year with a term-time job once her private scholarship expires.

At the beginning of last semester, Rosen worked at an organization outside Yale called Vote Mob, an organization that rallied support for Chris Murphy’s senate campaign. The work was unrelated to her private scholarship or Yale’s work requirements, but she put in 10 hours a week at Vote Mob, a roughly equivalent amount of time to that which will be required next year for her term-time commitment. “That was a lot,” she said. “It was hard, and I definitely am concerned about that going into next year. I know it means that I’m going to have to cut back somewhere, whether its on free time with friends, or with the amount of time I spend on classes, or on extracurriculars.”

The actual change in time commitment created by the extra $100 is relatively small, amounting to less than 10 more hours of work over the course of a school year, or roughly one more hour of work per month. But any increase in time commitment, Gutierrez claimed, is bad policy. “It’s astonishing the ways this policy creates a different Yale experience dependent on class,” he said. “Oftentimes reputations are measured by extracurricular activities, but people who have to work jobs because they have no other choice don’t get to fully have that part of the Yale experience.”

Storlazzi agreed that looking forward he would be wary of increasing the term-time work contribution. Since 2008, the amount of money that students must earn has risen $800, from $2,500 in the 2008-2009 year up to $3,300 next year. “Are we getting to a point now where if we increase it anymore, [it would] be difficult for students?” Storlazzi said. “Possibly.”

Yet while some students feel that open discussion about Yale’s financial aid policy has been lacking, Yale College has begun to set up a wider infrastructure around financial aid. This spring administrators announced the establishment of a five-week summer program for incoming low-income freshmen—as well as first-generation college students—in order to soften the adjustment to life at the University. In 2004, Yale established the student ambassador program in order to recruit low-income high schoolers to apply to Yale College. The ambassador program sends Yale undergraduates to high schools in low-income areas near their hometowns in order to inform students of the financial aid opportunities Yale provides.

Andrew Wang, SM ’16, visited two high schools just outside of Los Angeles through the ambassador program, and he felt that the program was reflective of Yale’s earnest interest in recruiting a more socioeconomically diverse applicant pool. “A lot of people have preconceptions that Yale is this distant place that is really expensive and inaccessible,” he said, “Based on my visit I think I drastically changed a lot of those preconceptions, so I think it was successful in that regard.”

At the two high schools Wang visited over spring break, one in a markedly poorer area than the other, he noticed that the students at the less affluent school were distinctly more receptive to his presentation. “There were clearly a lot of kids who perked up when they heard that if your family makes less than $65,000 Yale will cover your whole education.”

Other students similarly touted the student ambassador program as a reflection of Yale’s desire to make financial aid concerns a priority. “I can’t think of a better way for Yale to reach out to low-income kids,” Karl Xia, SM ’16, said. Xia also visited two high schools over spring break near his hometown of Canton, Ohio. “They literally have a fleet of eager and willing foot soldiers traveling to high schools across the country to talk about how accessible the college is for low-income high schoolers,” said Xia, “That’s pretty good, I think.”

Nonetheless, Gutierrez said he felt that there is an issue in the way Yale approaches financial aid in its budget. “I’m not sure what the University’s priorities are when it comes to spending,” he said. Rosen echoed this concern. “I think it’s somewhat misleading that Yale sets itself up as this place that is accessible for students of any race, of any sexuality, any gender, and now any economic class, but then for those students to be told that when they come here, ‘Well, you’re lower class. You’re going to have to work for your education.’” She hastened to add that she doesn’t have a problem with the idea of working for money during college, but argued that the fact that only Yale’s lower-income students must spend 10 hours a week working creates an imbalance on campus and propagates a problematic culture. “I think the problem is when it’s only the bottom half of the population that has to do it,” she said. “Then it creates a class divide.”

Storlazzi acknowledged the fact that the term-time work requirement eliminates a degree of free time from the schedules of Yale students on financial aid. “A student who doesn’t have to work has more hours in the day,” he said. But he struck a note of realism. “There’s a basic unfairness in the world, and that’s not going to go away,” Storlazzi said. “But again, we don’t think that the 10-hour average weekly commitment adversely impacts a financial aid student. In fact, we think it helps them connect to the University in a different, more meaningful way.”

Perhaps this is so, but it is also true that term-time work contributions further cramp schedules that many Yale students feel are already packed with social, academic, and extracurricular commitments. In the past six months, both Rosen and Gutierrez have written columns in the Yale Daily News about the financial aid culture at Yale, and they both said that having an open conversation about financial aid issues at Yale is the best way to effect change. They added that open discussion of issues regarding financial aid was important not just for the students whose daily lives are impacted by financial aid reforms, but also in determining the texture of Yale’s culture when it comes to class.

“I think people feel weird talking about class on this campus,” Rosen said. “But I think it’s wrong to feel indebted to the university because of the financial aid package that you’re given and to feel that they’re in some way purchasing your silence. It shouldn’t be a $40,000 grant to keep your mouth shut.”

Gambling is like cocaine,” Bob Cavenis told me. “It most closely mirrors cocaine, that is.” He was discussing the nature of a gambling addiction, a problem that affects more than two million Americans, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG). Cavenis is a recovered gambling addict who works at Williamsville Wellness, a residential treatment center in Virginia that treats gambling addictions. “Gambling is an immediate high,” he explained. “That’s why it’s so addictive.”

Currently, the American Psychiatric Association categorizes gambling addictions separately from substance abuse disorders, like cocaine or heroin addictions. This May, however, the association is set to release a revision of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the standard U.S. classification of mental health disorders). Dr. Marc Potenza, GRD ‘93, MED ’94, expects that in the revised version of the manual, gambling addictions will be grouped in the same category as substance abuse disorders.

The upshot is that an addiction to gambling is indeed more or less akin to an addiction to cocaine. This switch in classification is in large part due to work by Potenza and his team here at Yale, work that has earned him more than a few accolades. On Mar. 14, the National Center for Responsible Gaming awarded Yale a three-year, $402,500 grant to continue researching gambling. “We are honored to award one of the three-year NCRG Center of Excellence in Gambling Research to Yale University’s Dr. Marc Potenza and his research team,” Christine Reilly, the senior research director for the NCRG, said. “His research has really helped us to understand the neurobiology of gambling addiction,” commented Keith Whyte, the executive director of the NCPG.

Potenza teaches both psychiatry and neurobiology here at Yale and talks about gambling in decidedly antiseptic, scientific terms. “Gambling,” he said in an interview, “particularly the problematic forms like pathological gambling, does constitute a significant psychiatric, or mental health, condition.”

Potenza is, by all accounts, one of the world’s most important voices on this subject. “He’s always been right at the forefront,” Cheryl Lacadie, a research support specialist at the Yale Medical School who has worked with Potenza for 15 years, said.

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Yet the change in classification notwithstanding, pathological gambling is nothing new. Potenza cited a fable from the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian text written in Sanskrit, in which a prince gambles away his fortune and eventually gambles his wife into servitude on a game of dice. “Nonetheless, most people gamble,” Potenza said, “and gamble without developing problems.”

Adolescents, especially college-age young adults, are at heightened risk to develop gambling disorders. “The inherent problem with young adults is that they’re used to gaming with video games, and they’re used to winning,” Cavenis said. “Then they get into a gambling situation and they don’t win and they don’t understand why they don’t win.” In gambling terms, “chasing” is when a gambler tries to recoup a set of losses through increased gambling. Young adults are especially susceptible to this temptation, Cavenis explained. “Once you start chasing your losses you can become an addictive gambler a lot faster,” he said.

Much of Potenza’s research has revolved around this issue of the vulnerability of adolescents to gambling disorders. Research he conducted last fall, for example, found that adolescents who were given scratch lottery tickets as children were more likely to begin gambling earlier in life. According to the report, this early gambling may be a risk factor for more severe gambling disorders later in life.

Part of an adolescent’s susceptibility to the development of a gambling disorder is derived from the normal process of growing up, Potenza explained. “Adolescents, as compared to children and adults, may be particularly prone to engage in risk taking behaviors, and part of developing into an adult may involve a certain amount of risk taking,” he said.

But some observers also blame American culture for the problem, maintaining that the United States unduly promotes recreational gambling. “We’ve always been a nation of gamblers,” Whyte said. “Some of our earliest forefathers were predisposed to take risks. We embrace risk, and that’s great in business, but this hasn’t always been a nation where it’s been so heavily government endorsed.” He pointed to lottery advertisements as examples of the U.S. government endorsing a potentially addictive—and harmful—recreation. “The state of Connecticut is telling you to play the lottery, but you would never see Connecticut put up a billboard saying to smoke more Luckies.”

With addictive gambling on track to be classified as a mental health disorder, there’s no safe bet on what the future of gambling culture and gambling disorders holds. In the meantime, more than eight million March Madness brackets—many of which, it’s safe to assume, are linked to betting pools—were submitted to ESPN this month.