January 9, 2016

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$900 Million Prize, 1 In 292 Million Odds — And A Few More Lottery Numbers

A machine prints Powerball lottery tickets at a convenience store in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Saturday's jackpot has risen to $900 million.

A machine prints Powerball lottery tickets at a convenience store in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Saturday’s jackpot has risen to $900 million. Saul Loeb./AFP/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Saul Loeb./AFP/Getty Images

One number has everybody’s attention this afternoon. But why stop at one?

Here’s the prize jackpot, plus a few other lottery stats worth knowing:

$900,000,000

The eye-popping, record-breaking Powerball jackpot value, as of Saturday afternoon. If no one wins tonight, the jackpot could crack a billion.

That’s based on a single winner selecting the annuity option, which pays out over three decades. Alternately …

$558,000,000

The cash payout that rarely gets the boldfaced headline treatment, but it’s the more likely winning amount. The vast majority of jackpot winners choose the cash payout, even though it’s always significantly smaller than the jackpot.

You could hypothetically benefit from choosing the upfront payout — provided you invest the money instead of spending it. Which of course is exactly what you’d do, right?

$220,968,000

The tax man cometh. If you win and choose the lump-sum payment, expect to pay north of $200 million in federal taxes, at the 39.6 percent top income bracket — not counting state income tax.

1 in 292,201,338

One in 292 million. Those are your odds of winning the jackpot.

Not one in a million, not one in 10 million … one in 292 million.

Are you channeling your inner Lloyd Christmas right now … “So you’re telling me there’s a chance?”

Here’s a way to more viscerally experience the long odds. The Los Angeles Times put together a demonstration of playing the Powerball odds, in chunks of $100 or $1,000 or more — tallying up your total losses over time.

You can plug in truly enormous amounts of money and watch probability at work all afternoon, if that sounds like fun. So far, this reporter is down 104 grand.

15 percent to 73 percent

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That was the range, as of 2012, of total payouts by U.S. states, as Steve Tripoli reported for NPR in 2014. That is, of all the dollars paid for lottery tickets, that’s the percentage paid back to winners.

West Virginia claimed the 15 percent, Massachusetts the 73 percent, while most states were in the 50 to 70 percent range. (You can look up your own state in our chart).

For the record: Those are all abysmal rates by gambling standards. Most casino games pay back more than 90 percent, Tripoli says; the house still wins, of course, but it doesn’t win by nearly as much as state lotteries do.

44 states (plus D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands)

The vast majority of American states offer a lottery these days. Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah and Mississippi are holdouts, refusing to participate in either Powerball or Mega Millions. Some states cite religious objections, while in Nevada, the powerful gambling industry views lotteries as competition.

Residents of those states can still play the lottery — but they have to travel to a participating state to do it.

(Puerto Rico has Powerball but not Mega Millions. Now you know.)

$70,153,520,000

That’s more than $70 billion — the total amount Americans spent on the lottery in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries.

CNN Money calculates that’s more than Americans spend on sports tickets, books, video games, movie theaters and recorded music, combined.

NASA’s annual budget, for comparison, is around $17 billion. Total U.S. foreign aid for next year: just shy of $38 billion.

$230

That’s the average per capita spending on lotteries in America, as calculated by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic last year.

Of course, the cost isn’t distributed equally, he notes. There’s geographic variation — with annual spending north of $700 in Rhode Island, South Dakota and Massachusetts, based on state populations, while well under $100 per capita in other states.

There’s also variation based on income. Study after study has found low-income communities spend more of their money on lotteries than high-income communities, Thompson writes.

That economic variation is why people call state lotteries regressive taxes — that is, a way of funding the state that disproportionately takes money from the poor.

On Saturday, Vox pointed out an intriguing decade-old study suggesting that lotteries become less regressive as the jackpot size increases — that is, richer people are more likely to buy tickets for big prizes, lessening the disproportionate impact on the poor. Economist Emily Oster, then a graduate student at Harvard, suggested that a jackpot of $806 million would actually be progressive instead of regressive.

At the time, that jackpot size was theoretical — but not any more.

27 cents

According to the lottery industry’s own trade magazine, for every dollar spent on the lottery, an average of 27 cents goes to the “beneficiaries” — the oft-touted government spending programs supported by a lottery, usually in areas like education or recreation.

A cut goes towards administering the lottery (which is far more expensive than collecting a tax — one analysis by a conservative think tank found lotteries are up to 50 times more costly than tax collection). A chunk, of course, goes towards the winners. Some goes to retailers, some to the companies that design and operate the lottery systems. What’s left goes into state coffers.

The average might be 27 cents to state expenses, like the industry says, but it can be as low as 11 cents to the dollar, NBC News reports.

Zero

That’s the impact of a lottery win on net happiness, at least at first.

A famous 1978 study found that major lottery winners were no happier than ordinary folks, and actually got less joy from daily activities. A 2008 Dutch study found winning the lottery doesn’t make a household happier.

Now, a caveat: Two studies out of England suggest that it is possible to win the lottery and be content — but only eventually.

“No researcher has ever found that people are happier in the first year after winning the lottery,” one of the researchers told The New York Times

And the Times’ social science reporter suggests that it might take longer and longer to find contentment the larger your win is. So, about that $900 million …

Even numbers higher than 31

OK, if you insist: You can’t increase your odds of winning the lottery, but you can increase the chance that — if you do win — you won’t have to split the jackpot.

People tend to include birthdays and other dates in their lottery numbers, mathematician Aaron Abrams told NPR’s Robert Siegel in 2012, which means more numbers between 1 and 31. And people have a bias towards odd numbers.

So, for best results: Even numbers higher than 31.

But have we mentioned? One in 292,201,338.

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1 Year, More Than 75,000 Miles: Cyclist Breaks 76-Year-Old Record

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Seventy-five thousand miles is long enough to cross the United States about 25 times. Long enough to circle the equator — three times.

And for 75 years, 75,000 miles was long enough to be legendary. Or more specifically, it was 75,065 miles — the miles-biked-in-a-year record set by Tommy Godwin in 1939 and never broken since.

But on Monday, a man named Kurt Searvogel pedaled past that mark. On Saturday — the last day of his year of extraordinary biking — he’s pushing towards 76,066, a full thousand miles further than Godwin’s legendary feat.

Kurt Searvogel’s rode 230.73 miles on his first day attempt at the HAM’R. pic.twitter.com/i2JSuFZDH4

— Alicia Searvogel (@aliciaadventure) January 11, 2015

“He him-haws that 76,000 is good enough,” Alicia Searvogel, Kurt’s wife and and one-woman support team posted on Facebook Saturday morning. “No! He’s done but he’s not done. … 223 MILES TODAY!!!!”

It’s just 223 miles in a day, after all … only 15 miles more than the average daily pace that 53-year-old Searvogel, a.k.a. Tarzan, has maintained since Jan 10, 2015.

How exactly do you go about biking 75,000 miles in a year? “Only A Game,” at member station WBUR, spoke to Searvogel and shared a day in the life of a man tackling the HAM’R — the Highest Annual Mileage Record:

” ‘Normally I’ll wake up around 5:00 and get some breakfast,’ Searvogel said, ‘and be on the bike around 6:00, pretty much ride until about 8:00 or 9:00 at night. Keep it to a 14-15 hour day and then — and then get enough sleep to keep going for the next day.’

“This has been Searvogel’s schedule for 365 days in a row. Wake up. Ride 200 miles. Upload the data from his GPS. Eat and sleep.”

Searvogel’s planned itinerary called for a “rest and recovery” day every seventh day: a mere 176 miles. But his records show he usually blew past 200 even on those “rest” days.

2 days to break the record! pic.twitter.com/UAu6lsTImr

— Alicia Searvogel (@aliciaadventure) January 3, 2016

It was an eventful year. Searvogel got in two collisions with cars, was diagnosed with asthma, had a heart scare, traveled through eight states and went through multiple bikes, the Tampa Bay Times reports. And in October, he and Alicia, his crew chief from the start of the journey, were married. He still clocked 175 miles that day.

Searvogel’s not the only one avidly pursuing the HAM’R. The record first set by Godwin — a vegetarian Brit who battled foul weather and World War II food rationing, in a feat well worth reading about over at WBUR — is also being chased by Steve Abraham. Abraham was hit by a moped and broke his ankle — but kept riding. He restarted the year counter in August and is continuing his effort.

But for now the HAM’R is Searvogel’s, and the only question is how high he’ll push the record mark.

The final stretch is a ride from Jupiter, Fla., to St. Augustine, Alicia Searvogel said on Facebook. You can watch Kurt Searvogel’s progress through his GPS tracker.

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60 Years Later, A Wild, Baffling Recording Finds A Modern Spark

The Brothers Nazaroff is five klezmer musicians from three continents, brought together by a love of the curious 1954 recording Jewish Freilach Songs.
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The Brothers Nazaroff is five klezmer musicians from three continents, brought together by a love of the curious 1954 recording Jewish Freilach Songs. Fumie Suzuki hide caption

toggle caption Fumie Suzuki

Playing Yiddish music in public was once so common among Jewish immigrants who lived near the beaches in New York and Los Angeles that it came to be known as “boardwalk music.” That’s where I found The Brothers Nazaroff: on the boardwalk at Coney Island, being filmed by a Hungarian director making a documentary about the klezmer group.

“Not everybody loves this, you know?” says the band’s accordion player, Daniel Kahn. “And I don’t expect everybody to love it. This is for people who are willing to have a good time, people who understand it’s subversive to be joyous in public.”

That’s an understandable attitude when you consider the band’s namesake. In 1954, Folkways Records released an album by a mysterious man known as “Prince” Nazaroff. The 10-inch Jewish Freilach Songs sold so poorly that to date, the royalties total less than a thousand dollars. And yet, the recording has inspired several generations of musicians and writers since then.

The cover of the original Jewish Freilach Songs.

The cover of the original Jewish Freilach Songs. Folkways Records hide caption

toggle caption Folkways Records

The Brothers Nazaroff are remaking the disc with a tribute release called The Happy Prince — though the group, which comprises klezmer musicians from three continents, is a lot more polished than their inspiration. Michael Wex, author of the best-selling book Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, says he was taken aback when when he heard the original 1954 recording.

“My my initial reaction to it was, ‘How the hell did this get recorded?'” he says. “It sounds like the Yiddish-speaking janitor and a bunch of his friends at Folkways broke in one night, and just sort of seized the equipment and started playing songs.”

Wex points out that Folkways Records head Moe Asch was the son of Sholem Asch, the most important Yiddish writer in America in the early 20th Century — so he was certainly plugged in to the Yiddish arts scene. But he thinks there may be another reason Asch put out the Nazaroff 10-inch.

“The Nazaroff stuff was recorded right after Asch had released Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music,” he says. “It’s almost as if Asch wanted to do a kind of Yiddish pendant to Harry Smith’s anthology.”

Bob Cohen, the Budapest-based mandolinist of The Brothers Nazaroff, concurs: “It was a fluke that he was recorded. People recorded what would elevate the culture. They didn’t record what Jewish drunks did in the back room of a bar. But why were we in the back room of a bar?”

Because that’s where this music was often played: in Yiddish bars. Daniel Kahn says his bandmates think of Prince Nazaroff as the wild grandfather they never met.

“His mandolin, it’s out of tune. The accordion’s out of tune. But nobody cares — they’re just playing as hard and as wild as possible,” Kahn says. “The way he spits out his Yiddish lyrics has a kind of raw energy. Frankly, it’s the same raw energy that I hear in early punk rock.”

Prince Nazaroff’s sole album of Yiddish music has brought together some of the biggest names in klezmer music today. In addition to Cohen and Kahn, The Brothers Nazaroff includes the fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment, Russian singer Psoy Korolenko and vocalist and guitarist Michael Alpert, who was named an NEA National Heritage Fellow this year.

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But as exuberant as the music is, many of the details of Prince Nazaroff’s life remain less clear. We do know that he was born in Russia in 1892, and that a man named Nicholas Nazaroff is listed in U.S. census records as having two children — but Kahn says no one in the band has been able to track them down.

“We have yet to hear from any of his relatives, nor have the people at Smithsonian,” Kahn says. “He was buried in countless bargain record crates at the back room of many used record stores. That’s the only grave of his that we know of.”

But Kahn and the rest of the Brothers Nazaroff have managed a kind of closure: Their new CD is out on the same label that released their namesake’s vinyl record more than 60 years ago.

Jon Kalish is a New York-based reporter and writer.

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