Amid a backdrop of states like Texas aggressively selling $100 lottery scratch tickets in communities where citizens earn a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and policy makers of both political parties talk continuously about ways to improve opportunity and attain financial security for more Americans and their families, we urge you to watch this important national webinar on what many believe is one of the country’s most-neglected yet consequential problems: state lotteries.

The event is for reporters, opinion leaders, public officials, and members of our national network interested in learning how state governments’ experiment with lotteries has failed and how this failure affects you, your community, and the nation, regardless whether you ever buy a single lottery ticket.

The forum is titled “How States’ Experiment with Lotteries Has Failed and Why It Affects You.” It features prominent national lottery expert Dr. Jonathan Cohen, author of the important new book “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” and Sean Mussenden, data editor for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and a key figure behind the publication of the 2022 groundbreaking national series on state lotteries, “Mega Billions: The Great Lottery Wealth Transfer.”  Brief background about each speaker is below.

After you watch the webinar, we strongly urge you to share the video with your email list and your social media networks, inviting people to learn for themselves how serious and urgent the problem of state lotteries has become and how it affects all of us, including those who rarely, if ever, gamble on the lottery.

We also strongly encourage you to share the video with every local, state, and federal official in your region, along with members of the local and state media.

The video is posted to our YouTube channel and it can be watched here.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Jonathan D. Cohen is a program officer at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the co-editor of All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States and Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen. He received his PhD in history from the University of Virginia. His new book “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America” was published by Oxford University Press and can be purchased here. 

Sean Mussenden is data editor for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, an investigative reporting unit at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism that partners early-career journalists and veteran journalists at news organizations like the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio to produce deeply reported investigative stories. He was a key figure in the Howard Center’s recently published, “Mega Billions: The great lottery wealth transfer,” an in-depth look at lotteries in nearly every state.