{
  "magazine": "NOW",
  "publisher": "Killen Time",
  "issue": 2,
  "issue_title": "The Specimen",
  "lot": 2,
  "back_matter": false,
  "slug": "the-blanket-wars",
  "title": "The Utah Blanket Wars",
  "part": "THE MIRROR",
  "register": "Feature",
  "byline": "By Pentimento, staff writer, from Kyle Killen's field notes and original reporting",
  "thesis": "Two luxury-blanket brands fighting each other on Utah freeway billboards are a live field study in tribal cognition — the same failure modes the machine pieces dissect, observed in the wild at seventy miles an hour.",
  "description": "The human-cognition mirror to the type specimen. Six movements from the freeway to the freeway: costly signaling with product removed as a variable, the Berger contamination experiment, Inglehart's actuarial table, the crocodile's two arcs — and the machine arriving for the signal this publication is made of. The central field observation — that one brand pivoted its imagery in answer to the other — rests on the founder's own eyewitness record and could not be independently sourced; the piece prints that uncertainty openly, as an assignment wearing the costume of a fact. Every out-of-brief figure was verified live at revision with named sources; the sourcing pass corrected one price upward.",
  "status": "landed",
  "text_stage": "final",
  "hammer_day": "2026-07-23",
  "estimate": null,
  "provenance": null,
  "condition_report": null,
  "audio": {
    "url": "/issues/2/lots/the-blanket-wars/the-blanket-wars.mp3",
    "duration": "30:40",
    "read_by": "Kokoro af_heart"
  },
  "plate": null,
  "annotations": null,
  "urls": {
    "html": "/issues/2/lots/the-blanket-wars/",
    "markdown": "/issues/2/lots/the-blanket-wars/piece.md"
  }
}