The former era of unpaid (at least officially) college athletes essentially ended when the NCAA allowed student-athletes to make money through promotional endeavors using NIL (name image likeness). Suddenly, college (and even younger) athletes could make money through advertisements and other deals. If NIL put a very big dent in how the NCAA worked, the settlement of an antitrust lawsuit will blow the system to smithereens. Big time college sports make big time money. And soon, students could be getting a piece of the action. NYT (Gift Article): Decades in the Making, a New Era Dawns for the N.C.A.A.: Paying Athletes Directly. "If approved by a U.S. district judge in California, the settlement would allow for the creation of the first revenue-sharing plan for college athletics, a landmark shift in which schools would directly pay their athletes for playing. This sea change, though, also carries its own questions, according to critics. Those include whether women would be compensated fairly, whether smaller conferences would bear a disproportionate burden of the settlement and whether this framework would do anything to limit the power of collectives — the booster-funded groups that entice players with payments to hopscotch from school to school." You can bet the money will be directed towards the biggest names at the biggest schools and there's a decent chance this will harm smaller, non-revenue producing sports. In other words, college sports will have an even more distant connection to college than they already do. 2Hitting a Sticky PatchGoogle is racing to replace their old search results with AI powered answers. Sometimes that works out. Sometimes things get weird. Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza. "The feature, while not triggered for every query, scans the web and drums up an AI-generated response. The answer received for the pizza glue query appears to be based on a comment from a user named 'f-cksmith' in a more than decade-old Reddit thread, and they’re clearly joking." 3Slappy Ending"The image that I can’t forget—the one that truly pulls me into the savage, surreal, and ridiculously compelling world of professional slap fighting—is the open hand of heavyweight champion Damien 'the Bell' Dibbell smashing into the giant bearded face of Ryan 'the King of Kings' Phillips in slow motion. In the moment, I can’t tell whether my horror or pleasure is greater. Phillips’s eyes are closed, all 255 pounds of him anticipating the blow, hoping to endure it so he can return fire. He can’t move to evade the slap. That’s not allowed in this relatively new, super-fast-growing combat sport. Flinching is a foul—spiritually, the greatest foul in slap fighting—and the penalty is that your opponent gets an extra chance to smash you in the face. So you just have to take the blow. Dibbell’s slap takes maybe a second to deliver in real time. Phillips drops—whatever was him, gone at least briefly—and his body crumples to the ground." Ander Monson in Esquire: Inside the Savage, Surreal, Booming World of Professional Slap Fighting. (There's got to be some connection between our raging politics and culture wars and the fact that we're inventing new—and ever more basic—ways to pummel the hell out of each other. I've been beating myself up trying to understand it.) 4Weekend WhatsWhat to Watch: Hacks, a shows about a Las Vegas comedian who hires a millennial writer, has always been excellent. And it's one of the rare comedies that gets better each season. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder are better than ever in Season 3 on Max. 5Extra, ExtraNauseation Nation: "Americans’ reaction is less like numbness and more a response to something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance." Charles Sykes on these profoundly disorienting times and why reading the news might make you puke. The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Trumpian Vertigo of American Politics. Among the reasons: The relentless lies. The more you get tired of them, the more their delivery is accelerated. Exhibit one: The Big Lie. "In the 2024 cycle, the falsehoods have been baked in since Mr. Trump announced his candidacy, almost two years before Election Day. They show no signs of subsiding." NYT: Trump’s Pattern of Sowing Election Doubt Intensifies in 2024. 6Feel Good Friday"Jake Portella, a student at Haddonfield Memorial High School in New Jersey, lives in the same neighborhood as Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper and had an idea. He walked over to Harper's house and knocked on the door, and when the outfielder answered, Portella asked for assistance in asking a classmate to prom." (I suppose it makes sense to request the assistance of a professional baseball player if you're trying to get to first base.)
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