No. 85

The only guarantee in today’s America, it seems, is that you’ll pay more for less. That’s if you receive anything at all: A study published recently by the Commonwealth Fund found that one out of every five Americans was denied coverage for doctor-recommended care in 2025. The Wall Street Journal reported that same year that the five largest home insurers didn’t pay out on 44 percent of claims. In advanced modernity, wrote Ulrich Beck forty years ago, the production of wealth is accompanied by the production of risk—most importantly, radioactivity, toxins, and pollutants, all of which induce irreversible harm despite generally remaining invisible. The present-day consequences of industrial society have quite spectacular effects, however, intensifying the hurricanes and fueling the wildfires that insurers use as excuses not to offer home coverage at all.

In these cases, as the contributors to “Over Under” show, fortune might favor only those brave (and psychopathic) enough to bet on the flames consuming their domiciles via Polymarket; as David Hill writes, prediction markets have been trying to skirt regulators by selling themselves not as sportsbooks but as insurance. Of course, companies of the latter ilk are themselves in need of greater regulation, per Madeleine Baker’s history of the insurance industry’s frankly reckless profit seeking.

Such hedging takes money, however, that most Americans don’t seem to have. A Federal Reserve survey conducted last October found that only 63 percent of adults could cover a $400 expense in cash. Daniel Kolitz reports on how the poor rely on payday apps to subsidize everyday essentials from groceries to rent. (Our phones have colonized both our finances and our sense of humor, as Dennis M. Hogan argues in an essay about the decline of improv comedy.) In this issue’s exhibit, Kurt Woerpel recounts how often the only thing keeping needy patients from medical bankruptcy are doctors willing to stick their necks out. Unfortunately, given funerary costs, being dead can be more expensive than staying alive, to paraphrase the mother in Adrian Nathan West’s short story; elsewhere in fiction, Jimmy Cajoleas writes of a prom date with an odd preexisting condition.

The nobler gambles today have less clear payoffs. S. C. Cornell asks whether Marisol, a Mexican woman shot in the head by the Border Patrol while migrating into this country, can exact something like justice from the American legal system. Can American fiction ever escape the high-low conundrum disparaged by scholar and critic Leslie Fiedler, on whose career and influence Zoë Hu reflects? Will the humpback chub, an endangered fish at the heart of conflicting environmental concerns in a changing Colorado River, be saved by any of the solutions detailed by Ash Sanders? Maybe is the most hopeful answer one could give to each of these, likely not perhaps the truer. Still, probably worth the risk.