That is an version of The Marvel Reader, a publication by which our editors suggest a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Enroll right here to get it each Saturday morning.
Faculty athletics have been as soon as informal and enjoyable, extra like a membership sport than a severe endeavor. However “over the previous 75 years, NCAA sports activities has develop into ever extra professionalized,” Marc Novicoff wrote not too long ago. “Soccer and males’s basketball started to generate eye-watering sums of cash, incentivizing schools to speculate extra assets in them.”
Now, latest courtroom circumstances have allowed athletes to receives a commission by advertisers, followers, and their faculties. As school athletes’ standing adjustments, each their careers and the expertise of college-level sports activities are beginning to look totally different. As we speak’s studying listing explores the that means of college sports activities.
On Faculty Sports activities
The Finish of Area of interest Faculty Sports activities
By Marc Novicoff
Letting faculties pay revenue-generating athletes is lengthy overdue. If which means letting squash and water polo die, so be it.
Faculty Sports activities Are Affirmative Motion for Wealthy White College students
By Saahil Desai
Athletes are sometimes held to a decrease commonplace by admissions officers, and within the Ivy League, 65 % of gamers are white. (From 2018)
The Logical Finish Level of Faculty Sports activities
By Marc Novicoff
If gamers are employees, faculties must pay them.
Nonetheless Curious?
- Meritocracy is killing high-school sports activities: Athletics are purported to be nice equalizers in American life. However they’re being hijacked by the rich, Derek Thompson wrote in 2019.
- Do sports activities matter?: In 2022, readers weighed in on the position of athletics in right this moment’s society—and if they need to have one in any respect.
Different Diversions
P.S.

I not too long ago requested readers to share a photograph of one thing that sparks their sense of awe on this planet. Nancy Farese despatched this photograph “of my chilly dip buddies who courageous the icy temperatures of the SF Bay at 7am on Sunday mornings.” She provides: “It is a time of fellowship (we circle up and skim Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early) and braveness, the shiny heads of seals, the clatter of gulls, and the cloak of fog rolling again below the Golden Gate Bridge because the solar is rising.”
I’ll proceed to characteristic your responses within the coming weeks.
— Isabel