Life intervened, pushing this week's newsletter later than I would normally want to send it out. Is the content below worth the wait? That's not for me to say. Really, I'd prefer if you didn't say, either.

I'm not what you would call a gambling man, as I prefer to limit myself to just a couple vices, so as not to hog them from other people. I don't mind a friendly poker game where everyone chips in $20 for Texas Hold 'Em, and the winner takes the pot, save for the runner-up getting the buy-in back. I say that I like playing the ponies, though it's literally been two decades since I've placed a wager at a track. And while I used to indulge in a little blackjack, the current sky-high minimun bets at most casinos have taken all the fun out of it for me. I used to travel to Las Vegas for CES as part of work, but I never carved out any time at the tables in half-dozen or so times I darkened the door of that event.

As for gambling on sports? Dear God, no. I have a miserable enough time watching teams I like lose without also costing myself cold hard cash. I used to place a sentimental $5 bet on the A's to win the World Series at the start of each season, but I might as well have taken a match to that $5 bill and delighted in fire's destructive warm glow for all the pleasure that annual losing bet brought me.

That no-gambling-on-sports-ever stance has only hardened since placing sports wagers has become easier than ever. A Supreme Court ruling a few years back throwing the issue to the states, the rise of mobile gambling apps and the assorted sports leagues throwing up their hands and climbing into bed with casinos have combined to ensure that you can't turn anywhere without someone trying to entice you to place a bet.

The consequences of this turn of events are on full display in this McKay Coppins article on the rise of sports wagering for The Atlantic. Coppins, even more of a non-gambler than myself, is given $10,000 of his publication's money and told to let fly with the bets during the recently completed NFL season. As you might imagine, Coppins turns out to be a gambling savant, increasing his bankroll by multitudes and graduating to a life of leisure that the rest of us can only dream of.

No, that's not what happens at all. Instead, he loses quite a bit of money, placing increasingly desperate bets in an ill-advised frenzy to break even while losing his enjoyment of watching sports and alienating himself from his family in the process. As normally happens with all but a handful of people who become ensnared in gambling on sports.

There's a bit of artifice to the article. I get the impression that Coppins' downward spiral wasn't quite as dramatic in reality as it may have been depicted in the article — he may have been feeling the emotions of an out-of-control gambler, but I suspect he employed a fair amount of dramatic license employed to drive home the article's central thesis: Things quickly go pear-shaped when you gamble, and they will nearly always go pear-shaped.

Despite my disinterest in gambling, I do confess to a perverse fascination with gambling-themed programming, most of it of the sponsored-content variety in which some betting sharp will reveal their stone-cold lock winners (usually in exchange for a fee). I was always bemused by the thought that if these guys were as good at gambling as they claimed, why would they be offering information that could potentially cut into their winnings by shifting the odds? (Sports books regularly adjust betting lines to avoid too many lopsided payouts one way or the other.) It struck me that they figured out the one surefire way to profit off of gambling — have some other sucker assume all the risk.

A couple of characters like that pop in Coppins; article — an Instagram-based gambling tout named Sean Perry and election prognosticator-turned-poker enthusiast Nate Silver, both of whom are so good at gambling, they have to loudly proclaim it in print. It's worth noting that the second the smartphone camera stops recording, Perry's braggadocio turns off as well. "I put on a character when I’m on the internet,” he tells Coppins. “You have to — that’s how you get views. That’s how I make money."

So, to summarize: gambling is ruining sports by making fans more interested in the outcomes of their bets than the exploits on the field. Broadcasts are now beholden to promoting betting, and athletes are facing torrents of abuse from disgruntled bettors when their parlays don't pay off. But don't worry — prediction market services like Kalshi and Polymarket will soon ensure that every aspect of our life will soon be overtaken by gambling addicts looking for their next big score. And won't that make things better?

An item from two weeks ago stirred up some controversy with 4% of the Get Your Phil readership. Dedicated subscriber and mortal enemy Aaron Cameron has taken issue with my love for liver and other organ meats, suggesting on BlueSky that my diet sounds like something a comic book villain might enjoy.

This libel will not stand. So let me dispel this notion that I'm holed up in some lair louchely munching on all manner of obscure animal parts by talking about the one bit of offal I simply can't abide — pork spleen.

As explained in the original item — an explanation Mr. Cameron opted to ignore in his quest to paint me as some sort of Brando-esque deviant — I tend to by my animals in bulk, which means getting organ meats alongside the usual chops, shanks, loins and butts. Most of the offal is quite easy to prepare. Pork spleen, it appears, is the exception that proves the rule.

Fergus Henderson, who is something of the leading advocate of nose-to-tail cooking, offers a rolled pig spleen recipe in which you wrap the offending offal in bacon. Some variation of this approach dominates the search result for "pork spleen recipe," and while I'm sure it probably yields a tasty enough meal, I've never cottoned to the ideal of taking one protein and making it more palatable by hiding it inside a better, more tasty protein. My protein budget is not unlimited, Fergus Henderson!

Instead, rigorous research produced a recipe for pani ca meusa, a Sicilian street food favorite, that seemed more in line with the assignment. It's a spleen sandwich, where the offal is topped with cheese and served on a roll, and while most of the recipes specify a beef organ meat, I figured spleen's spleen, so I tried this out with the pork I had on hand. I also made a few variations, adding caramelized onions — a good addition to any sandwich. I also swapped out the caciocavallo for provolone and added a schmear of 1000 Island dressing to the bun. 

The end result was not the worst thing I ever ate. The onions were tasty, the cheese and dressing did their part. Even the bread was nicely chewy. But the spleen itself felt like it was just along for the ride, providing ballast for the rest of the sandwich.

The biger problem, though, comes from the fact that you boil the spleen to prepare it. Very few meats improve from boiling, and the cooking process produced an odor that I don't remember as being particularly pleasant, though I have no plans to cook spleen any time soon to see if that's a false memory.

So yeah, organ meats get a bum rap by and large, but not spleen. Every slander you've heard about that particular offal is well-earned.

I feel like I need to cleanse all of our paletes with an actual recipe I came up with to prove that I eat real food that does not require you to close your eyes and take a bite to prove your courage. This recipe requires two bits of background.

1) My wife does not care for beans, by and large — a complaint that comes down to mouthfeel. Using dried beans instead of canned options mitigates that problem somewhat, so we have joined a bean club — the Rancho Gordo bean club to be precise. And that means every quarter, a shipment of beans arrives at our house.

2) I cook at a couple different shelters around town, and as it turns out, having bulk beans is quite helpful in that regard. Beans can feed a lot of people on the cheap, they can headline vegetarian dishes if that’s on the menu, and they're also pretty filling. As a result, I find myself trying out a lot of different bean recipes, with an eye toward making straightforward repeatable dishes that can serve 20 people or so at a throw.

The other day, I had a big bagful of mayocoba beans — they're a white bean from down Mexico way and they figure in a lot of Peruvian dishes, too. You can do a fair amount of things with them, but for my purposes, some sort of chili seemed to be in order, especially since I needed to supply a meat-based entree to supplement the vegetarian option someone else was on the hook for.

I found a recipe for mayocoba bean chicken chili, bought the ingredients and then sat down to whip everything up. It was upon closer examination that I noticed the recipe itself was a bit of a disaster: the author suggested cooking raw chicken and unsoaked dried beans in the same pot, and if the prospect of cross-contamination doesn't put you offer, the cook time of several hours in which any flavor gets boiled out of the chicken certainly will. So I improvised, swapping out raw chicken for one of those store-prepared rotisserie chickens that I stripped for its meat. (A bonus: You're left with a carcass that you can then use to make chicken stock.)

Your ingredients for a chicken chili that can serve a crowd (scale it down if you want a more reasonable amount of chili):

See? It's not all kidney pies and plates of liver.

Man does not live by chicken chili alone. Feast on this week's links to other interesting content around the web.

The Greatest Night in Pop hit Netflix in 2024, but I really wasn't in a hurry to give it a stream. The documentary, chronicling the one-night turnaround recording of "We Are the World" by a galaxy of 1985's finest pop stars, doesn't tackle the kind of topics that usually draw my interest, and I feared the whole project would be overwhelmed by a sense of self-congratulation over a song that, frankly, wears its hastily-assembled quality on its sleeve. And to be sure, there is a reasonable amount of that, but The Greatest Night in Pop goes a little bit deeper than you might imagine.

I found this out by way of my daughter, who is responsible for most of the regrettable-at-first viewing decisions we make as a family. For reasons I still don't fathom, she was loudly singing "We Are the World" around the house last week, and I told her if she didn't knock it off, I'd make her watch The Greatest Night in Pop. That was when she called my bluff, the crafty rascal.

The documentary benefits from the fact that fairly enjoyable company — Lionel Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, Sheila E. — provide a lot of the talking head moments. And there's some fun little tea to be spilled, like Al Jarreau winding up a little bit in his cups the longer into the night the recording session ran. We get Stevie Wonder suggesting that they work some Swahili phrases into the lyrics — Swahili is not a native language in Ethiopia — and that being a little too much for Waylon Jennings to bear. Also, I always have time for the anecdote about Stevie Wonder showing Ray Chalres where the restroom in the recording studio was located — "the blind leading the blind," Richie marvels.

(My all-time favorite conspiracy theory, by the way, is the notion, apparently fervently held in some corners of the internet, that Stevie Wonder has been putting us on all these years about just how impaired his vision is. I don't believe the Stevie Wonder Truthers for a second, but it's a such a low-stakes conspiracy theory, you can't help but be relieved. No one's going to try to shoot up a suburban pizza parlor because they're convinced Stevie Wonder has 20/20 vision.)

But to me, the highlight of The Greatest Night in Pop occurs when Tom Bahler is on the screen. He was a jack-of-all-trades in the music business with a particular talent for vocal arrangements, and Quincy Jones tasked him with figuring out which artists would take which solos based on whose voices blended together the most seamlessly. It's a fascinating look into the creative process and all the thinking and planning that goes into making music — as a non-musician, I found it really eye-opening.

Really, I have just two complaints about The Greatest Night in Pop, which addresses Prince's absence from the recording — he was never really going to take part, and Sheila E. wound up feeling quite used by the song's producers as Prince bait — but doesn't explain where Madonna was. Apparently, the answer was she just wasn't invited, which seems like an oversight that merits more than the one off-hand comment an interviewee makes.

The other question The Greatest Night in Pop leaves unanswered — just what the hell is Dan Aykroyd doing there? I mean we can all argue about one omission or another, but even the most ardent Blues Brothers partisan would have to wonder how Aykroyd wound up wedged between Harry Belafonte and Lindsey Buckingham. Was he someone's Plus One? Was he living in the A&M Recording Studio at the time and people decided it would be awkward to ask him to leave? These are the questions great filmmakers answer.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Maybe John Candy's invite got lost in the mail.