 Okay, so we're allotted six minutes, and given that Abraham Lincoln was able to bind a nation's wounds in fewer than 300 words, I can do this. Okay, so I've written four books, and the Devil's Tickets, which you see right there, is one of the four. My first book was called Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, and it was a story about race and family, and Atlantis' historic rise from the ashes. My second book was called Nine Minutes and Twenty Seconds, it's a story about a plane that fell through the air, ultimately crashed 29 people aboard. You might not have heard of this book, and for good reason, it came out the fall of 9-Eleven in 2001, and so no book got traction that fall, and I like to say about that book that Nine Minutes and Twenty Seconds is the only book in history with the same title as Shelf Life. My third book was about a historic night, a legendary night in sports history. It was the night that the basketball star Will Chamberlain scored 100 points in a single game in Hershey, Pennsylvania against the New York Knicks, and no, I can't confirm for you whether or not Will Chamberlain also slept with 100 women that night. It was famous for that, you know, bragged about 20,000 women, but if you look at these three books, we've got Race in the South, we've got a Fallen Airplane, and a basketball game, so naturally, this time I wrote about Bridge. I love history, that's what really connects my four books. I revere history. It speaks to me as I hope it speaks to you, because it does give us a context for who we are, where we're going, where we've been. Research is always my favorite part. Writing is no fun. It's hard work. It's lonely. But in this case, research took me to Kansas City of the Jazz Age and to New York, and I found my way into this apartment where the infamous Bennett Bridge Table Murder Occurred also got a hold of a 32-cold automatic pistol, which is no small thing. It hasn't been made for 50 years, but I had to fire it because I wanted to describe the killing sensation. That's the task for the writer of narrative non-fiction, to put the reader on the page so that he or she will experience on the page what the characters experienced in real time. Now, time's a waste, and so I put four subheads here, tick off each one, one by one. Warren Buffett, a craze, equality, and a gun. The idea for the devil's tickets came to me from Warren Buffett, who's a man I've never met. But as some of you may know, Buffett is an inveterate bridge player. He loves bridge. He plays online. He plays in tournaments. He plays with his good friend Bill Gates. He's even said that he'd happily go to jail if he knew that his three cellmates knew how to play bridge. Well, so a friend of mine talked to Buffett about three and a half years ago, knew I was looking for a book idea, and Buffett was talking about how in the late 20s, early 30s, bridge was all the rage. Warren was playing New York Yankees, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig, played with sports writers on trains in Hollywood, moguls like Samuel Goldwin and Lewis Mayer. They're playing bridge. Those catty writers at the Algonquin Round Table, they're playing bridge. And so the question for me becomes, how does this happen? How in this breakout time of the Roaring 20s does bridge take off? And when I heard about Buffett, he said a few good ideas, remember? I started to think, okay, let me get into this. Let me see what happens. And what happened was the best case for narrative nonfiction. The story thickened in a deepened. It became like quicksand, and as I consumed it, it was consuming me. The 20s has all these ridiculous crazes, right? They call it Roaring 20s for a reason. You have marathon floating contests in swimming pools, flagpole sitting. So my question is, how does bridge take off? And the answer is, this civilized game descended from WIST, a partnership game for two, WIST once played by Talleyran and Napoleon and their own Thomas Jefferson. It takes off because it needs, like all crazes, a galvanizing force and a flashpoint moment. The galvanizing force was E. Lee Culbertson, the Barnum of the Bridge craze, a tuxedoed urbane Russian, and he would use anything to sell bridge, his bridge instruction books, his Culbertson bidding system, and of course himself. And really what he was selling was equality, equality, the 20s, women not only get the right to vote, but beginning to find voice in new and exciting ways. And Culbertson told America's housewives, who adored him, if you want true equality, the bridge table is your place. There is the one place where by dint of your intellect and your skill, you can be your husband's equal and more. And he knew that most husbands then, some might say now, didn't want to follow their wife's lead at the bridge table or anywhere else. And so he knew combustions would happen. He knew there would be these explosions, and he wanted it because it dramatized it, sold his game that otherwise lived in the mind. So here we go, the flashpoint moment happens, Kansas City, three weeks before the stock market crashed, September 29, 1929. Two couples, the Bennets, the Hoffmans, Young in their 30s, On the Rise, Sunday night, and as the cards turned against the Bennet come midnight, the Bennets turned against each other, Myrtle criticized her husband Jack for failing his four spades contract, which became, unbelievably, the final bridge hand of Jack's life. She said, you're a bum bridge player, Jack. And the argument intensifies until Jack stands, looms over the table, looms over Myrtle, he reaches across the table, grabs her by the wrist and slips her in the face several times hard. Now, Jack was not only an alpha male, but a Philanderer. And as Culbertson knew, when husband and wife play bridge together, it's not just the cards on the table, but the marriage. And so, bad enough that Jack has slapped his wife, now he compounds his mistake, he says, get my gun. Well, there's a bad sequence. He carried it with him on the road for protection. She got the gun, four bullets later, Jack is no more. There's a trial of the century where Myrtle hires a democratic presidential candidate, and suffice to say I learned how to play bridge during my research, and my wife Kerry does not play. And we've come to believe that that might be the surest way to marital bliss. Thank you very much.