Review: Longform article: "Endgame" by Sheelah Kolhatkar

Endgame by Sheelah Kolhatkar
Longform article published May 2023 via Amazon Originals

Maybe you remember the headlines about GameStop in 2021—small-time investors going big on a struggling company in an effort to screw over big companies who were banking on GameStop going under (and, of course, in an effort to make some money of their own). Maybe you were one of those small-time investors.

In Endgame, Kolhatkar tracks the rise and fall of GameStop's stocks over those weeks, told partially from the lens of some small-time investors hoping to make it big. Less book than long-form essay, it is, to be perfectly honest, a stressful read—let's just say that I'm not cut out for the world of investing. It's probably helpful to go in with a bit of information about investing, and the GameStop chaos of 2021, but Kolhatkar does her best to break it down into terms that are accessible to lay readers.

Risk and profit and loss—that's what I think of with investing; but here there's also the 99 percent and Reddit and, you know, intentional chaos. Fascinating and weird.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing this long-form article through NetGalley.