Mystery

by Jonah Lehrer

  You can see this in the statistics—the new pitching distance reduced the strikeout rate by 37 percent and dramatically increased the variability of hitters. One way to measure this variability is by looking at on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS).X More variable at bats produce a higher OPS, as the balls get spread around the field. After the rule change of 1893, OPS increased by nearly 26 percent in less than two years, as batters hit far more extra-base hits and home runs. (Those are the most exciting at bats.) This trend has persisted into the modern game: the OPS of National League hitters is still far higher than it was before the rule change.

  Another way to detect the increased variability is by looking at the performance of the best pitchers. In 1892, ten pitchers had an ERA of 2.76 or less; these throwers dominated the league. By 1894, not a single pitcher had an ERA that low. The extra four feet might not have turned baseball into a hitter’s league, but it did constrain the most talented throwers. And when a game constrains talent, mystery increases.

  In many respects, the pitching shift of 1893 invented modern baseball, turning a fledgling game into America’s pastime. Since then, the rules of baseball have been remarkably stable.XI After the discovery of the ideal mystery box, there was no need to change the dimensions of the field again.XII

  We think we watch sports because of the skilled athletes; it’s fun to witness physical genius. But this theory leaves out the real reason a few select games have come to dominate our culture.34 It’s not because they attract the most talent, but because they find ways to limit it. They pit the best athletes in the world against each other but ensure that the competition also includes enough mystery so that the better athletes don’t always win. As a result, these sports give fans what they subconsciously crave: not certain victory but dramatic uncertainty.XIII

  Professional sports have the luxury of developing their mystery boxes over time, slowly tweaking the game until they are perfectly pitched between talent and chance. But not every form of culture can evolve so slowly. In other arenas of life, people must work on much shorter deadlines.

  Something Happened

  While walking in Central Park on East Drive, Michael Chernuchin, the showrunner of Law & Order: SVU, had the idea for the best script he’s ever written. He’d jogged past the spot hundreds of times before—Michael used to run marathons and would circle the park—but now he was older and fifty pounds heavier. Now he walked.35

  “When you walk is when you notice things,” Michael says. “So I’m walking and I look over to my left and see these boulders. And on top of one of these boulders there’s a bronze mountain lion. He’s ready to pounce. But all these people are going by, pushing strollers, talking on the phone, totally unaware that there’s this lion right above them.… I saw that and I thought, ‘We’re all prey.’ And that one line gave me the whole show.”

  The episode begins, like every Law & Order episode, with a victim. This one is a middle-aged woman named Laurel Linwood, catatonic on the floor of the American Museum of Natural History. The victim is discovered by a class of sixth graders on a field trip. After an initial medical exam finds evidence of rape, Laurel is sent to the Special Victims Unit of the NYPD. The detectives ask her questions; Laurel has no answers. “You’ll never catch him,” she finally tells the cops. “I can’t remember a damn thing.” It’s an impossible crime—the perfect mystery box.

  But the police are patient, and the victim slowly recovers shards of her memory: the smell of Old Spice, his fancy watch, the bar where they got drinks. The SVU detectives fan out across the city, picking up more clues; the box is slowly opened. Then, eighteen minutes into the episode, the cops learn the suspect’s name and race to his apartment. It seems like a textbook case.

  It’s not. “The episode is called ‘Something Happened’ because that’s the essence of our show,” Michael says. “Something happened, but what? If we do our job well, you won’t know for forty-one minutes.” The show is forty-two minutes long.

  It’s easy to dismiss detective shows such as Law & Order: SVU. They can be formulaic and anodyne, especially when compared to the edgy character dramas of cable and Netflix. The good guys win; justice triumphs; resolution arrives before bedtime. But SVU has been on the air for twenty-two years. It has run longer than any other drama on television, recently eclipsing the original Law & Order. And the show is still going strong—“Something Happened” brought in more than 7 million viewers, a number that doesn’t even include its second life in syndication. Dick Wolf is the creator of Law & Order and SVU. He likes to point out that one of his shows is on somewhere in the world every hour of every day.

  Why are the Law & Order franchises so successful? How did they become such a staple of modern television? The answer returns us to the mystery box technique, as the television procedural relies on the same psychological tricks as a surprise egg video, baseball, and an Edgar Allan Poe mystery story. The only difference is that, instead of hidden toys and unexpected home runs, SVU features sex crimes with surprising twists. We keep watching until the box is opened.

  A few weeks after “Something Happened” aired on NBC, I met with Michael at a deli in Studio City, Los Angeles. The show is on winter break, and Michael looks relaxed, obviously enjoying a respite from the hectic production schedule. “Something Happened” got excellent press and high ratings—it was later nominated for an Edgar Award, given out to the best mystery writing—but Michael is already worried about the next episode, and the ones after that. “I’ve done cable shows, and let me tell you, doing a network show is much harder,” Michael says. “You’re doing twenty-four, maybe twenty-five stories, and they all have to be self-contained mysteries. You need the setup and the ending.”

  When Michael talks about his creative process, about the long journey from inspiration in Central Park to the finished episode, he returns again and again to the attention span of his audience.XIV Tolstoy and Faulkner are his favorite writers—Michael rereads them every year—but he knows that good television has a much quicker pace than War and Peace. “The first thing I always tell my writers is you can’t be boring,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if it looks good on the page. If it doesn’t keep people from changing channels, then it doesn’t work.”XV

  SVU solves the attention problem by structuring the show around multiple mystery boxes. The first box arrives with the teaser, the segment before the opening credits. Given the structure of the show, the writers have ninety seconds to hook people with a premise. They need a crime that can be explained in a single scene but still generate multiple twists. Their ideas come from everywhere: the New York Post, a consulting forensic psychiatrist, local cops, stray conversations, even statues in a park.

  Once they settle on the crime, the writers begin plotting out the episode. They usually figure out the end first—the who-did-it part—then begin working backward, looking for ways to withhold information for as long as possible. “Basically, you want a little mystery before every commercial,” Michael says. “The question is always the same: How do you break the idea so that people don’t see what’s coming?”

  Much of the plotting is written down on colored index cards, each of which contains a short scene description. (“Blood work comes back—not his” or “Carisi talks to Jim, Jim says fuck off.”) The cards are mounted on a corkboard, allowing the staff to follow the general flow of the story. Larry Kaplow, a coexecutive producer on the show, takes me through the arc of a forthcoming episode that’s still pinned up in his office in the sprawling SVU complex in Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. “We’ve completely restructured this episode twice,” Larry says. “You think by now we would have learned how to make the process easy. But it’s never easy.”

  Larry has a shock of white hair and the quick wit of someone who writes dialogue for a living. (His wit runs even faster when he’s chewing nicotine gum, which seems to be most of the time.) While pointing at the corkboard, he tries to explain how the episode evolved. The changes can be sorted into two main categ
ories: removing scenes that gave away too much and adding threads designed to mislead. “The investigation is what pulls people along,” Larry says. “You have to always know what they [the audience] know and make sure they don’t know it too soon. If they know what’s going to happen”—if they can guess what’s inside the box—“then what’s the point of watching? But those tricks also can’t feel cheap or like they don’t make sense in terms of the characters.… Nobody wants to feel manipulated, or that you hid something for no good reason.” The show might be formulaic, but the best episodes hide the formula.

  That’s what Michael tried to do with “Something Happened.” He imagined the story as a case study in interrogation, with most of the action unfolding in a single room, just two women talking about terrible events. This meant he couldn’t rely on any so-called CSI cheats. “You know, when they come in at the last act and announce that they found a hair and it’s a perfect match,” he says. “So unsatisfying.”

  If the first mystery box is a classic whodunit setup—we’re searching for the rapist—the second mystery box arrives soon after the cops arrive at his apartment. Instead of arresting the suspect, they find him dead in his bed, scissors plunged into his skull. From this gruesome image, the show cuts to commercial.

  The detectives initially assume that Laurel must have stabbed her rapist in self-defense; the killing was justified, an innocent prey striking back at her predator. However, as Detective Benson continues to interrogate Laurel, she keeps talking about her father. He also smelled like Old Spice, she says, just like her rapist. He also wore a fancy watch. As these details emerge, Laurel shows flashes of rage. Why is she so angry? And what does her father have to do with the rape? These questions set up the third mystery box.

  After the last commercial break, the truth comes out: Laurel’s father raped her sister. After some wily interrogation, Detective Benson coaxes out a confession. Laurel killed the man in the bar with scissors because he resembled her monstrous parent. “The episode works because it’s so unexpected,” Michael says. “The character begins as the prey, one of those antelope trying to run away from the lion. But then at the end you realize that she’s the lion. She’s the predator hiding in the park. It’s a complete reversal.”

  After talking to Michael, I go back and rewatch “Something Happened.” This time I notice the artistry of his misdirection, the sly way he lays down track for an ending we never see coming. The show is a slew of grisly mysteries, artfully timed to keep us watching the commercials, but Michael’s ending still feels emotional and earned.XVI “I love fooling the audience,” Michael says. “And if I do my job, I also show you how much fun it is to be wrong. Because really that’s why you watch: you want to be wrong. I mean, you also want to know, but you only care because you don’t know, at least not yet.”

  CHAPTER 2 THE MAGIC GASP

  Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

  —THEODOR ADORNO

  I only asked for wonder.

  —RABBI ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

  I first met Mohan Srivastava in 2010, after a friend of a friend told me that Mohan had found a way to defeat a scratch lottery. I was skeptical of the claim. The lottery is a random system, run by professionals. No way could an amateur identify the secret pattern that marked winning tickets. There wasn’t even a pattern to find.

  During our first conversation, at a Chinese restaurant in the Toronto suburbs, Mohan explained why I was wrong: “The lottery pretends to be random, but the reality is that the lottery company has to very tightly control the number of winning tickets. There’s nothing random about it.” Mohan has graying hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and the disinterested wardrobe of an academic. He works as a geological statistician, summoned by companies all over the world to assess the value of their underground assets. It’s a difficult art, as Mohan has to infer the unknown—say, how much gold is beneath a stretch of the Mongolian desert—from a scattering of drill data and theories about ancient geology. When Mohan starts talking about one of his favorite subjects—statistics, Alice Munro, the history of precious metals—his sentences accelerate until the words run into each other. It’s the slight stammer of a fast mind.

  Mohan’s lottery story begins in June 2003, when his squash partner gave him a few tickets. After scratching off the latex coating, Mohan became fascinated by the algorithm that laid down the lottery numbers. How did it generate millions of unique tickets while also ensuring the correct payout percentage? (Lotteries are highly regulated and generally have to pay out at least 50 percent of ticket sales.) After thinking about the statistical problem for a few minutes, Mohan settled on a likely solution: he was confident he knew how the lottery software worked.

  Mohan returned to work. He forgot all about the lottery. But then, as he walked home later that evening, something strange happened. “I swear I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices,” Mohan says. “But that night, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head. I’ll never forget what it said: ‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’ ”

  The North American lottery system is an $83-billion-a-year industry.1 The sheer size of the lottery system convinced Mohan that his internal voice must be wrong: “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable. There’s no way there could be a flaw, and there’s no way I just happened to discover the flaw on my walk home.”

  Yet the voice refused to be silenced. Unable to sleep, Mohan surrendered to wakefulness. After a few hours, he realized that his inner voice was right: the tic-tac-toe lottery was breakable, as the visible numbers revealed essential information about the digits hidden underneath. Nothing needed to be scratched off—if you knew the secret code, you could pick the winners just by looking at them.

  The trick is ridiculously simple. Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—seventy-two in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers repeat multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 repeats three times, and the number 38 repeats twice. A few numbers, however, appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Mohan was looking for singletons, numbers that appeared only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was almost certainly a winner.

  The ticket above shows how the singleton trick works.2 The ticket on the far left is the actual ticket as displayed before sale. The ticket in the middle reveals how Mohan transformed each number in the original ticket by frequency. The ticket on the far right shows the location of the three singletons (18, 20, and 30) in a row. This ticket is almost certainly a winner.

  The next day, on his way into work, Mohan stopped at the gas station and bought more lottery tickets. These tickets also contained the telltale pattern. The day after that he picked up even more scratchers from different stores. He broke these tickets, too. After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time.

  What did Mohan do with this illicit knowledge? Although his first impulse was to plunder the lottery, Mohan realized that he’d have to spend all day staring at tickets in convenience stores. He preferred his day job. Besides, it didn’t seem fair to leave only the losers behind. Mohan ended up working with the Ontario lottery system as a consultant to fix the problem.

  Mohan would later break several other lotteries, including a Colorado scratcher and a Super Bingo game. There were plenty of other tickets that he
couldn’t defeat, but still managed to use statistical analysis to increase his odds of winning. (I first wrote about Mohan’s exploits in Wired.)3 While Mohan thinks the lotteries have gotten better in recent years, he still worries that organized crime is using these games to launder money. “If you can increase your odds of winning by even a small percentage, then the lottery is a perfect way to clean your dirty profits,” he says. “Think about it. You can buy and cash in the tickets just about anywhere. They’re an untraceable currency. And they’re run by the government.”

  The scratch-lottery story captures the tilt of Mohan’s mind. He’s a deductive sleuth in the mold of Sherlock, only he isn’t drawn to murder or mayhem—he’s fascinated by the enigmas of everyday life. When Mohan encounters an alluring puzzle, he’s liable to become obsessed. He buys every book on the subject, scours online chat rooms, and stays up way too late thinking about possible solutions. “There have been moments when I wish I could stop working on one of these puzzles and get some sleep,” Mohan says. “But once a problem gets a hold on me, I generally have to figure it out.”

  That’s what happened on July 2, 2014, when Mohan and his young son, Ravi, watched the celebrated German magician Jan Rouven perform at the Riviera in Las Vegas. Most of the act was standard Vegas Strip magic—big props, clouds of smoke, and a loud, thumping soundtrack. (That year, Rouven received the Merlin Award for Illusionist of the Year, the most prestigious award in the magic community.) “It was good stuff,” Mohan remembers, “but most of the tricks I could guess how they were done. If you know the principles, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on.”