On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court’s gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” delivered Marshall into a state of euphoria. “I was so happy, I was numb,” he said. After exiting the courtroom, he joyously swung a small boy atop his shoulders and galloped around the austere marble hall. Later, he told reporters, “It is the greatest victory we ever had.”

For Marshall, the “we” who triumphed in Brown surely referred not only, or even primarily, to himself and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues, but to the entire Black race, on whose behalf they’d toiled. And Black Americans did indeed find Brown exhilarating. Harlem’s Amsterdam News, echoing Marshall, called Brown “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” W. E. B. Du Bois stated, “I have seen the impossible happen. It did happen on May 17, 1954.” When Oliver Brown learned of the outcome in the lawsuit bearing his surname, he gathered his family near, and credited divine providence: “Thanks be to God for this.” Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Montgomery’s activists in 1955 by invoking Brown: “If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” Many Black people viewed the opinion with such awe and reverence that for years afterward, they threw parties on May 17 to celebrate Brown’s anniversary.

Over time, however, some began questioning what exactly made Brown worthy of celebration. In 1965, Malcolm X in his autobiography voiced an early criticism of Brown: It had yielded precious little school desegregation over the previous decade. Calling the decision “one of the greatest magical feats ever performed in America,” he contended that the Court’s “masters of legal phraseology” had used “trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated—Hooray! Hooray!—and at the same time … told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’ ”

[Read: The children who desegregated America’s schools]

But that criticism paled in comparison with the anti-Brown denunciation in Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation two years later. They condemned not Brown’s implementation, but its orientation. The fundamental aim of integration must be abandoned because it was driven by the “assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community,” they maintained.

To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community.

Although Black skeptics of the integration ideal originated on the far left, Black conservatives—including the economist Thomas Sowell—have more recently ventured related critiques. The most prominent example is Marshall’s successor on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995, four years after joining the Court, Thomas issued a blistering opinion that opened, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”

Desperate efforts to promote school integration, Thomas argued, stemmed from the misperception that identifiably Black schools were somehow doomed to fail because of their racial composition. “There is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment,” he wrote. Taking a page from Black Power’s communal emphasis, Thomas argued that “black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.” In a 2007 opinion, he extolled Washington, D.C.’s all-Black Dunbar High School—which sent dozens of graduates to the Ivy League and its ilk during the early 20th century—as a paragon of Black excellence.

In the 2000s, as Brown crept toward its 50th anniversary, Derrick Bell of the NYU School of Law went so far as to allege that the opinion had been wrongly decided. For Bell, who had sharpened his skills as an LDF lawyer, Brown’s “integration ethic centralizes whiteness. White bodies are represented as somehow exuding an intrinsic value that percolates into the ‘hearts and minds’ of black children.” Warren’s opinion in the case should have affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” regime, Bell wrote, but it should have insisted on genuine equality of expenditures, rather than permitting the sham equality of yore that consigned Black students to shoddy classrooms in dilapidated buildings. He acknowledged, though, that his jaundiced account put him at odds with dominant American legal and cultural attitudes: “The Brown decision,” he noted, “has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause.”

In her New Book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children, Noliwe Rooks adds to a growing literature that challenges the portrayal of the decision as “a significant civil rights–era win.” Rooks, the chair of the Africana-​studies department at Brown University, offers an unusual blend of historical examination and family memoir that generally amplifies the concerns articulated by prior desegregation discontents. The result merits careful attention not for its innovative arguments, but as an impassioned, arresting example of how Brown skepticism, which initially gained traction on the fringes of Black life, has come to hold considerable appeal within the Black intellectual mainstream.

As recently as midway through the first Trump administration, Rooks would have placed herself firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp, convinced that addressing racial inequality in education could best be pursued through integration. But traveling a few years ago to promote a book that criticized how private schools often thwart meaningful racial integration, she repeatedly encountered audience members who disparaged her core embrace of integration. Again and again, she heard from Black parents that “the trauma their children experienced in predominantly white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.”

[From the May 2018 issue: The report on race that shook America]

The onslaught dislodged Rooks’s faith in the value of contemporary integration, and even of Brown itself. She now exhibits the convert’s zeal. Brown, she writes, should be viewed as “an attack on Black schools, politics, and communities, which meant it was an attack on the pillars of Black life.” For some Black citizens, the decision acted as “a wrecking ball that crashed through their communities and, like a pendulum, continues to swing.”

Rooks emphasizes the plight of Black educators, who disproportionately lost their positions in Brown’s aftermath because of school consolidations. Before Brown, she argues, “Black teachers did not see themselves as just teaching music, reading, or science, but also as activists, organizers, and freedom fighters who dreamed of and fought for an equitable world for future generations”; they served as models who showed “Black children how to fight for respect and societal change.”

Endorsing one of Black Power’s analogies, she maintains that school integration meant that “as small a number as possible of Black children were, like pepper on popcorn, lightly sprinkled atop wealthy, white school environments, while most others were left behind.” Even for those ostensibly fortunate few flecks of pepper, Rooks insists, providing the white world’s seasoning turned out to be a highly uncertain, dangerous endeavor. She uses her father’s disastrous experiences with integration to examine what she regards as the perils of the entire enterprise. After excelling in all-Black educational environments, including as an undergraduate at Howard University, Milton Rooks became one of a very small number of Black students to enroll at the Golden Gate University School of Law in the early 1960s.

Sent by his hopeful parents “over that racial wall,” Milton encountered hostility from white professors, who doubted his intellectual capacity, Rooks recounts, and “spit him back up like a piece of meat poorly digested.” She asserts that the ordeal not only prompted him to drop out of law school but also spurred his descent into alcoholism. Rooks extrapolates further, writing:

Milton’s experience reflected the trauma Black students suffered as they desegregated public schools in states above the Mason-Dixon Line, where displays of racism were often mocking, disdainful, pitying, and sword sharp in their ability to cut the unsuspecting into tiny bits. It destroyed confidence, shook will, sowed doubt, murdered souls—quietly, sure, but still as completely as could a mob of white racists setting their cowardice, rage, and anger loose upon the defenseless.

The harms that contemporary integrated educational environments inflict upon Black students can be tantamount, in her view, to the harms imposed upon the many Black students who are forced to attend monoracial, woeful urban high schools. To make this point, Rooks recounts her own struggle to correct the misplacement of her son, Jelani, in a low-level math class in Princeton, New Jersey’s public-school system during the aughts (when she taught at Princeton University). She witnessed other Black parents meet with a similar lack of support in guiding their children to the academically demanding courses that could propel them to elite colleges. In Jelani’s case, she had evidence that teachers’ “feelings were hardening against him.” He led a life of relative safety and economic privilege, and felt at ease among his white classmates and friends, she allows, even as she also stresses that what he “experienced wasn’t the violence of poverty; it was something else equally devastating”:

We knew that poor, working-class, or urban communities were not the only places where Black boys are terrorized and traumatized. We knew that the unfamiliarity of his white friends with any other Black people would one day become an issue in our home. We knew that guns were not the only way to murder a soul.

Frustrated with Princeton’s public schools, Rooks eventually enrolled Jelani in an elite private high school where, she notes, he also endured racial harassment—and from which he graduated before making his way to Amherst College.

seven decades have now elapsed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Given the stubbornly persistent phenomenon of underperforming predominantly Black schools throughout the nation, arguing that Brown’s potential has been fully realized would be absurd. Regrettably, the Warren Court declined to advance the most powerful conception of Brown when it had the opportunity to do so: Its infamously vague “all deliberate speed” approach allowed state and local implementation to be delayed and opposed for far too long. In its turn, the Burger Court provided an emaciated conception of Brown’s meaning, one that permitted many non-southern jurisdictions to avoid pursuing desegregation programs. Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history.

[From the May 2014 issue: Segregation now ...]

Disenchantment with Brown’s educational efficacy is thus entirely understandable. Yet to suggest that the Supreme Court did not go far enough, fast enough in galvanizing racially constructive change in American schools after Brown is one thing. To suggest that Brown somehow took a wrong turn is quite another.

Rooks does not deny that integration succeeded in narrowing the racial achievement gap. But like other Brown critics, she nevertheless idealizes the era of racial segregation. Near Integrated  ’s conclusion, Rooks contends that “too few of us have a memory of segregated Black schools as the beating heart of vibrant Black communities, enabling students to compose lives of harmony, melody, and rhythm and sustained Black life and dignity.” But this claim gets matters exactly backwards. The brave people who bore segregation’s brunt believed that Jim Crow represented an assault on Black life and dignity, and that Brown marked a sea change in Black self-conceptions.

Desegregation’s detractors routinely elevate the glory days of D.C.’s Dunbar High School, but they refuse to heed the lessons of its most distinguished graduates. Charles Hamilton Houston—Dunbar class of 1911, who went on to become valedictorian at Amherst and the Harvard Law Review’s first Black editor—nevertheless dedicated his life to eradicating Jim Crow as an NAACP litigator and Thurgood Marshall’s mentor in his work contesting educational segregation. Sterling A. Brown—Dunbar class of 1918, who graduated from Williams College before becoming a distinguished poet and professor—nevertheless wrote the following in 1944, one decade before Brown:

Negroes recognize that the phrase “equal but separate accommodations” is a myth. They have known Jim Crow a long time, and they know Jim Crow means scorn and not belonging.

Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.

In the 1990s, Nelson B. Rivers III, an unheralded NAACP official from South Carolina, memorably heaved buckets of cold water on those who were beginning to wonder, “ Was integration the right thing to do? Was it worth it? Was Brown a good decision?” Rivers dismissed such questions as “asinine,” and continued:

To this day, I can remember bus drivers pulling off and blowing smoke in my mother’s face. I can remember the back of the bus, colored water fountains … I can hear a cop telling me, “Take your black butt back to nigger town.” What I tell folk … is that there are a lot of romanticists now who want to take this trip down Memory Lane, and they want to go back, and I tell the young people that anybody who wants to take you back to segregation, make sure you get a round-trip ticket because you won’t stay.

Nostalgia for the pre-Brown era would not exercise nearly so powerful a grip on Black America today if its adherents focused on its detailed, pervasive inhumanities rather than relying on gauzy glimpses.

No one has pressed this point more vividly than Robert L. Carter, who worked alongside Marshall at the LDF before eventually becoming a distinguished federal judge. He understood that to search for Brown’s impact exclusively in the educational domain is mistaken. Instead, he emphasized that Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life. Despite Chief Justice Warren formally writing the opinion to apply exclusively to education, its attack on segregation has—paradoxically—been most efficacious beyond that original context.

[From the October 1967 issue: Jonathan Kozol’s ‘Where Ghetto Schools Fail’]

“The psychological dimensions of America’s race relations problem were completely recast” by Brown, Carter wrote. “Blacks were no longer supplicants seeking, pleading, begging to be treated as full-fledged members of the human race; no longer were they appealing to morality, to conscience, to white America’s better instincts,” he noted. “They were entitled to equal treatment as a right under the law; when such treatment was denied, they were being deprived—in fact robbed—of what was legally theirs. As a result, the Negro was propelled into a stance of insistent militancy.”

Even within the educational sphere, though, it is profoundly misguided to claim that Black students who attend solid, meaningfully integrated schools encounter environments as corrosive as, or worse than, those facing students trapped in ghetto schools. This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t analysis suggests an entire cohort stuck in the same boat, when its many members are not even in the same ocean. The Black student marooned in a poor and violent neighborhood, with reason to fear actual murder, envies the Black student attending a rigorous, integrated school who worries about metaphorical “soul murder.” All struggles are not created equal.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Was Integration the Wrong Goal?”

Photographs by Zack Wittman

Everybody knows the secret of life. The secret of life is: Keep your eye on the ball.

I’m borrowing that from a 1998 song by America’s sweetheart, Faith Hill, but if you don’t know the song, you still know that simple truth. You also know that to fail is to strike out; to fail valiantly is to go down swinging; to be surprised is to be thrown a curveball; to help a buddy out is to go to bat for him; and to succeed brilliantly is to knock one out of the park. And even if you haven’t seen A League of Their Own, or have somehow missed Jennifer Garner’s Capital One ads, you’ve probably heard the maxim “There’s no crying in baseball.”

In January, I was standing in the locker room of George M. Steinbrenner Field, in Tampa, next to my teammates, whom I had met only the night before. When we heard the immortal words of Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the aggrieved manager of the Rockford Peaches women’s baseball team, piping out of a nearby speaker, we recognized them and laughed. Then we clapped (or took out our phones for photos) as Len Milcowitz, the field coordinator and unofficial emcee of the weekend, emerged wearing a full Peaches uniform to drive home the point. He’d worn it in our honor, he said. “You represent the true spirit of baseball in this country, period,” he told us.

By that he meant that we were here only for the love of the game. As women, it was true, we could have no other motive, such as being signed by a team or even reliving high-school glory days. In fact, we had paid about $2,500 for the privilege. There were 87 of us, divided into six teams. This was the first full day of the 2025 Women’s Mini-Fantasy Camp, an annual event advertised with retro panache: “Ladies, opportunity is finally knocking and your chance to experience life as a New York Yankee is here.”

Though many Major League Baseball teams host fantasy camps for men, only the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox have offered them for women. This year’s camp was more immersive than usual. On top of receiving full uniforms (to keep!) and access to ice baths and physical therapists and real Yankees catering (memorably good pot roast), we were technically playing in a major-league stadium: The Tampa Bay Rays will be using the Yankees’ spring-training facility this year for their home games because Hurricane Milton took the roof off Tropicana Field.

[Read: Climate change comes for baseball]

Over the course of two days we would play 35 innings of baseball—five games of seven innings apiece, coached by former Yankees, whom camp employees referred to by the official title of “Legends.” I had several good reasons to be nervous. A friend had encouraged me to read George Plimpton’s 1961 book, Out of My League, which is about him pitching to major-league players at an All-Star exhibition game for a story in Sports Illustrated. I did read it, and that’s how I learned that Plimpton had been “a fanatic about pitching” while in school. I, in contrast, had never played baseball at all, despite being completely obsessed with watching it (at the stadium, on TV, on my phone while at work or at weddings). And I had not trained as much as I’d meant to in the weeks leading up to the camp—I’d gone to the batting cages a few times, played catch with my dad, and done several squats, but it was winter and it got dark at 4 p.m. It had been hard to work baseball into my days.

The other problem was that I don’t like the New York Yankees. When I signed up for the camp, I hadn’t thought this would be much of an issue. But then my favorite team, the New York Mets, signed the Yankees’ superstar Juan Soto out from under them, and my situation became politically sticky. When I tested a reveal of my Mets fandom to a friendly seeming woman on the shuttle bus to the opening dinner, she shushed me sharply, and for my own good.

So I kept quiet. And in this way, it was easy to get along with my assigned teammates, and it was easy to have a good time, even though our team name was the Pinstripes, which really rubbed the Yankees of it all right in a girl’s face. Our roster ranged in age from 24 to 70, and in experience from Division I softball to, well, me. Two women who’d gone to school together in New Jersey were there celebrating their 60th birthdays—Nina Kaplan, a Boca Raton mother of four who had never played baseball before, and Elizabeth Osder, who goes by Bitsy, a Los Angeles media executive who holds a place in baseball history. On April 21, 1974, she appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News when she became one of the first girls legally permitted to join a Little League baseball team, in New Jersey.

Players stretch before a game. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

Everyone was there for fun, and so was I, but I was also there because I wanted to briefly see a real-life staging of something that is still mostly a dream and that most people associate only with a 30-year-old Hollywood movie. There’s no crying in baseball, and there are no women in baseball either.

Sure, girls can play on Little League baseball teams, as Bitsy did, with boys. They can play on high-school baseball teams with boys. A scant few of them have even played on college baseball teams with boys. But they don’t get their own teams. There is no such thing as high-school or college baseball for women. There is no such thing as professional baseball for women, apart from a World Cup team that is assembled and disassembled every few years. Not only is this the baffling reality; it’s a baffling reality that hardly anybody talks about.

[From the September 2016 issue: Breaking into baseball’s ultimate boys’ club]

After the World Series ended in October, with nothing to look forward to but the long and empty months before the next baseball season, I settled in to watch Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary, Baseball, which is broken up into nine episodes. “There are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization,” the writer Gerald Early says in the first one. “The Constitution, jazz music, and baseball. They’re the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.” Well, women aren’t constrained in their enjoyment of jazz, or of the Constitution (for now), but …

Over the nights that I spent being thoroughly entertained by the documentary, I nevertheless felt a pit in my stomach that got deeper and deeper. Burns very explicitly articulates the sport as being foundational to our culture and reflective of our society’s ideals. The game is democratic because it’s fair, egalitarian because it’s simple, and perfectly designed because its creators—energetic, imaginative people—arrived at the measurements for the diamond as if through divine inspiration. Baseball rewards commitment and reveals character; it loves rule-benders but judges cheaters. It has lofty goals and serious expectations, but it allows for theatricality and fun. It glorifies teamwork (double plays, rallies, sacrifices, and even sign-stealing are collaborative) but also reveres the hero (when a man comes up to bat, he comes up alone). It provides a convenient excuse to eat a hot dog.

Women play basketball, which is almost as old as baseball but has never carried the same level of cultural significance, and they play soccer, which is not predominantly an American game. They play hockey and lacrosse. They don’t play the vulgar, stupid sport of football, but nobody should. Yet they play basically everything else—every sport ever invented, even the weird ones. For no obvious or practical or logical reason, they are allowed to love, but almost never to play, baseball. They don’t get to play America’s game.

Actually, contrary to some of my sweeping statements, in baseball’s earliest days, women were eager to play and sometimes allowed to do so. Several women’s colleges had baseball teams in the mid-to-late 1800s—by 1875, Vassar had a number of them, including the Sure-Pops and the Daisy-Clippers. The all-Black, all-women Dolly Vardens barnstormed in the 1880s as some of the first documented professional women baseball players; their history, largely forgotten, has been revived by the historian Leslie Heaphy, a co-editor of 2006’s Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball (which she is updating).

But doctors were convinced, or so they said, that physical activity could render women infertile or even kill them. In 1867, a nationally syndicated newspaper story blamed baseball-playing for a young woman’s death from typhoid. One of the best-known baseball players in the country at the time, John Montgomery Ward, then of the New York Giants, wrote in his 1888 book, Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, “Base-ball in its mildest form is essentially a robust game, and it would require an elastic imagination to conceive of little girls possessed of physical powers such as its play demands.” When the game became big business at the turn of the 20th century, women were welcomed at the ballpark as spectators. Their presence was thought to help civilize the environs and increase the likelihood of entire families becoming fans and spending money on the sport. But that welcome didn’t extend to the diamond.

[From the May 1928 issue: Women aren’t fans]

A few months ago, I had a long call with the historian Jennifer Ring, the author of the 2009 book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball. We talked about her work for a while, and then we talked about how much we love baseball. For many years, she said, she’d felt alienated from the game and angry that her daughter, who was an excellent player, had run out of options and was forced to abandon the sport. “There was probably a decade of my life where I was just too pissed off to even watch baseball,” she said. But Ring grew up a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and she’d recently been roped back in by their World Series run and by the otherworldly superstar Shohei Ohtani. “I watched again this year, and it’s still the game I love,” she told me. “It’s brilliant. And the best players are just thrilling to watch.”

Of course, hardly anyone resembles Ohtani, even in Major League Baseball. Mookie Betts, another Dodger great, is nothing like him. He’s seven inches shorter and at least 30 pounds lighter, and plays multiple defensive positions with charisma and flair. Ohtani, one of the best hitters and pitchers to have ever lived, is faintly aloof and carries himself woodenly (and has a fantastic head of hair). “It’s the people’s game because it calls for a variety of different kinds of body types and skills,” Ring pointed out. There are smaller and faster men in the middle infield; bigger guys at the corners; pitchers who look like Gumby dolls and pitchers who look like they belong to the Teamsters. All of this diversity gives the lie to the suggestion that women physically cannot play.

But this is a storied idea that has been repeated across generations. In the mid-1920s, the all-female Philadelphia Bobbies were completing a barnstorming tour of Japan, where they surprised journalists, impressed fans, and received celebrity treatment. Back home, girls were being encouraged to play a version of baseball, with a larger ball and a smaller field, that would be more suitable for them—a game variously known as kitten ball, playground ball, diamond ball, and mush ball, and originally invented in the winter months to be played by men, indoors. The game is now called softball. The details were laid out by Gladys E. Palmer in Baseball for Girls and Women, published in 1929. Palmer was an early advocate for girls’ athletics, but her attitudes were still of their time. She offered advice on how to throw properly (girls “do not have a natural aptitude for throwing, which all boys have from early childhood”) and discouraged girls and women from sliding. As Palmer acknowledged, the version of the game she promoted was meant to be “less strenuous.”

Members of the Rockford Peaches, 1944. The team was part of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created by the Chicago Cubs owner and chewing-gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley. (Bettmann / Getty)

That word, strenuous, comes up often. It was used by A. G. Spalding, an early baseball executive who also founded the country’s first sporting-goods empire, when he said that a woman was free to wave her handkerchief and root for the home team, but that “neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts, may play Base Ball on the field … Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind.” The same word was used against the 17-year-old pitching phenom Jackie Mitchell, who was signed by the Minor League Chattanooga Lookouts (and who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in a 1931 exhibition game). The baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, reportedly voided Mitchell’s contract, explaining that the baseball life was “too strenuous” for women.

One of my great loyalties, odd though it is for even me to contemplate, is to Brett Baty, a 25-year-old from Texas who was a first-round draft pick for the Mets in 2019 and was supposed to be their third baseman of the future. We have essentially nothing in common, obviously.

But something about his story has grabbed me. Baty hit a home run in his first major-league at-bat, in front of his family and against a hated division rival, but he’s never been able to string enough of those moments together. He has flashes of brilliance, and then he gets rattled by something. He starts making mistakes and looking bewildered. He loses his head. Then he goes down to the minors and plays with such dignity and grace. He wears the ugly promotional jerseys they make you wear at that level, and he hits some more home runs and learns a new defensive position in case that will help his chances of being called back up. Last year, his best friend, Mark Vientos, ended up taking the job that was supposed to be his and has excelled at it. In the playoffs, during which Vientos broke the Mets’ record for postseason runs batted in, the camera cut to Baty, watching from the dugout, whenever his friend did something great, and he was always, with no hesitation, ecstatic.

Then, in the offseason, another insult and injury: His jersey number, 22, just happened to be the one that the superstar Juan Soto wanted, and the Mets reportedly had promised it to him in his $765 million contract. Soto may have gone through the ceremony of offering Baty a fancy present, such as a watch or a car, in exchange for the number, as players typically do in these situations, but it wasn’t immediately clear that he had. I took exception to this even though hardly anybody else—just a few other fans on social media—seemed to care. Are we not owed dignity even when we’re kind of a flop?

That’s a long way of explaining how my career as third baseman (baseperson?) for the Pinstripes began and ended. Though I had no experience, I reasoned that I was young and fairly coordinated, and I wanted to try my hand at the hot corner.

Our first game was on one of the Yankees’ many practice fields, against another fantasy-camp team, the Bombers. When I walked out in my uniform, I felt like a ballplayer. I thought I’d watched enough of the game on television—almost every night for half of the year—to know what to do, at least basically. I quickly handled the first ball that a Bomber hit down the line to me, and I stood up with plenty of time to throw the runner out. But when I heaved the ball across the infield, it fell far short of the first baseman and way off line. The same thing happened with the next ball that came to me. And the next. My team was down by two runs at the end of the first inning.

Then came my time to bat, which was my true fear. I had to be called back and reminded to put on a batting helmet. I panicked and momentarily forgot which side of the plate I was supposed to stand on. It came to me just in time, but I struck out on three pitches. Our coaches were throwing to us, and they were not trying to strike us out. They were “trying to hit your bats,” as they put it.

The author at bat, George M. Steinbrenner Field (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

After this, I sat in the dugout and watched the other women watch the Yankees shortstop, Anthony Volpe, who was working out on a field behind us. (“He wasn’t very friendly,” one of them complained mildly, after admitting that she had more or less been catcalling him.) I moved to center field after a few more wild throws, and Kaley Sullivan, a 30-year-old police officer from California, took over third base. One ball slipped past her, and I scooped it up and threw it back to her; she stepped on the base and made the out. This was a highlight of my life, but in my next at-bat, I managed only two foul tips before striking out again. We lost the game 9–4 and mollified ourselves by saying we would work out the kinks in the afternoon.

At lunch, I sat next to Leslie Konsig, a 42-year-old insurance representative and plainly the best athlete on our team, who had been making plays at shortstop as reliably as I had seen the guys do it on TV. It was difficult to look anywhere other than at her on the field. She wore her dark hair in a single braid, smiled easily at everyone, and moved with the ease that comes with total competence. She treated us all like real ballplayers—meaning she was a bit more specific and direct at times than our actual coaches.

Leslie was there with her friend Lainey Archenault, 43, an animated woman with a strong Jersey accent. They are both moms, and they play together on a New Jersey softball team called the Sluggers; Lainey conspired with Leslie’s wife to sign her up for the camp as a surprise. Lainey, I learned, is a die-hard Yankees fan who has been watching almost every single game for as long as she can remember. She clocked immediately that I’d chosen the jersey number 0 in reference to the somewhat random relief pitcher Adam Ottavino, who grew up in Brooklyn near where I live and who played for the Yankees in 2019 and 2020. (More recently, he played for the Mets.) Though she has coached her son’s 10-and-under travel baseball team, this was the first time she’d played a game of baseball instead of softball. Growing up, she told me, she’d been obsessed with Don Mattingly—she was left-handed, as he is, so she’d hoped to be a first baseman, as he was. But she’s petite, so that wasn’t in the cards. Instead, she was put in the outfield, which she now prefers, because you get to watch a whole game unfold in front of you.

By contrast, Leslie didn’t care much about the Yankees. She was wearing the number 22 and had no idea that it was a sore spot for Yankees fans who were mourning Soto’s betrayal. “I’m more here to play,” she told me. “To feel, like, what it is to be on the field, wear these uniforms, use the amenities.” She’d been the only girl on her Little League team, and she’d played until high school, when she had to switch to softball. But Leslie still had a Yankees-fan story: She’d gone to the 1996 World Series with her dad and his friends, and they were so overcome by giddiness that they’d even included her, at age 14, in the celebratory cigars.

This set off some table-wide chatter about the most recent World Series, which the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in somewhat humiliating fashion, capped off by a disastrous error-riddled inning that saw a five-run lead evaporate in the decisive Game 5. “We played better than they did, today,” Bitsy Osder said.

High on camaraderie, I went into the afternoon games confident that I could improve my performance. For the second game, we were on the main field—an intimidating change of venue, as this meant music blaring over the loudspeakers while we warmed up, use of the giant scoreboard, and an announcer to read off our names as we went up to bat.

We were quickly down by three, but my teammates rallied for five runs in the fourth inning, and we ended up winning 7–3. The rally was exhilarating—I was Brett Baty in the dugout. Again, I contributed no hits. I had been dropped to the bottom of the batting order. But I pinch-ran for a teammate and accepted my status as role player. This time, at least, I hit a grounder and was thrown out, rather than just flailing at the plate.

Before our third and final game of the day, back on the practice fields, we got a pep talk. One of our coaches, or Legends, was Ray Burris, a journeyman pitcher who played with the Yankees in 1979. (At dinner, he let us each hold the American League Championship ring he’d been awarded in 2012 as a pitching coach in the Detroit Tigers organization.) He sat us down and said: “You’re as good as your last game, and you’re as bad as your first game.” We were not to get big heads.

In the third game, we scored four in the top of the first, but the other team, the Captains, scored five in the bottom. I misplayed a ball in the outfield and then stepped on it, shooting it into foul territory, where it skidded away across the dirt. I made a base-running error (as a pinch runner) and I twisted myself up underneath a fly ball and felt my back wrench as it dropped behind me.

Then Leslie hit an inside-the-park home run—assisted by two, or possibly four, defensive errors by the other team—and we went wild. But the Captains rallied again in the bottom of the sixth for another five runs and then we were down again, 10–6. My teammates worked a gritty top of the seventh, in our final chance to score. They brought in two runs, making it 10–8. I stared at the lineup card in horror as what was about to happen came together in my mind: I was going to be the last woman up. Two outs, bases loaded. If I hit the ball, we could tie the game—or even win, if there were two, or possibly four, defensive errors.

I swung at the first pitch and missed. I let the second pitch go by—ball. I swung and missed at a third pitch. I could feel humiliation a breath away. Then I nicked a foul ball. I could hardly believe the moment was still happening. Then, on the next pitch, I heard what was not quite a crack but was still the perfect sound of bat on ball. We were playing with wooden bats, not the metal ones they have at batting cages, which sound tinny and awful and jangle your hands. I ran in a dead sprint, made it to first base, and didn’t see the ball anywhere. I was safe!

But then I turned around and saw that the pitcher had fielded the ball, which had been nothing more than an infield roller, and had thrown it to the catcher for the force play at home.

I’d made the last out and the game was over.

In the early ’70s, several Major League teams hosted Hot Pants Days, which offered free admission to women who came to the stadium wearing short-shorts. Also at that time, Little League teams that allowed girls to play could be threatened with revocation of their charters.

Maria Pepe grew up in an apartment complex in Hoboken, New Jersey, that was full of children, mostly boys. Whenever she was done with her homework, she would join them in playing slap ball, stickball, Wiffle ball, and any other variation of baseball they could make work. “From a young age, maybe 7 years old, I just started playing, and I loved it,” she told me. In 1972, she tried out for Little League and made the Young Democrats team. She pitched three games before angry parents reported her team to Little League’s national office; the league threatened to take away the charter that covered all Hoboken teams, so Pepe’s coach came over to her house and took back her uniform. He let her keep her cap.

The National Organization for Women picked up her case in the spring of 1972, filing a complaint with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights. This caused a big to-do, and newspapers and radio followed the case closely, though Pepe’s parents helped her tune a lot of it out. She did vaguely know that a court was hearing arguments regarding the density of her bones as compared with boys’ bones, presented by Creighton J. Hale, Little League’s executive vice president and director of research. (This argument was based on a Japanese study of cadavers and another about skiing accidents, both of which included only adult bones.) Hale also presented a hypothesis that being hit by a ball could cause breast cancer in girls. Little League’s other arguments were impressively circular. One was that there was no sense in allowing girls to play baseball, because they would not have future opportunities to play it professionally. Another was that the Little League national charter, which specified its purpose as developing “qualities of citizenship, sportsmanship, and manhood,” would be contradicted by the inclusion of girls.

Nina Kaplan, a Boca Raton mother of four who had never played baseball before, hustles to first. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

Judge Sylvia Pressler found these arguments uncompelling. “Little League is as American as hot dogs and apple pie,” she wrote in her ruling. There was no good reason why “that piece of public Americana should be withheld from girls.” Little League did not acquiesce easily. The organization filed an appeal, which it lost. But by this time, Pepe was too old to play.

My teammate Bitsy said that Pepe “took the arrows” for her. Bitsy was one of the first sign-ups, and so news of her first game for the Englewood Orioles was printed in papers across the country. She struck out in her first at-bat, but then drew a walk and scored a run. She was described by the Daily News as “all mouth,” challenging the umpires and instructing her teammates on what to do. She jokes that she thinks her fly was open in one of the newspaper photos.

Now easing into retirement, Bitsy plays in two L.A. leagues just for fun. Like many young kids, she fantasized about playing for the New York Yankees. “By the grace of Maria Pepe and the New Jersey Supreme Court,” she told me, “I was able to sustain that fantasy a little longer.” She considers her Little League experience a blessing. She was accepted by her teammates and she had a blast. “I am a very positive, glass-half-full person,” she told me. “I just think my whole outlook in life would have been different if they had said no to me.”

For the past 50 years, Little League hasn’t said no to girls who love baseball, but it has set them up to be a minority. Instead of encouraging girls to play baseball after the court decision, Little League encouraged softball for girls and made that their primary option. This example was followed by high schools and colleges, which offer only softball teams for girls and young women. And even if you’re good enough to play with the boys in high school, how do you stick it out, knowing that you could get a college scholarship for softball if you switched?

“Anybody who knows the two games knows they are not equivalent,” Leslie Heaphy, the historian, told me. Softball has a bigger ball and underhand pitching, as well as a smaller diamond, a closer fence, and a different style of play that is both faster and simpler. Both are great games, but our culture has accepted a false equivalency, she argued. It’s “just a way of never having to address the issue that women want to play baseball [and] should be allowed to. It should be open to anybody.”

Jennifer Ring pointed out that the number of girls playing on boys’ high-school baseball teams hasn’t changed for decades—it hovers between 1,000 and 2,000 out of a total of nearly half a million. In recent years, Little League has held events to honor “Girls With Game,” as they call girls who play baseball or softball. But when I wrote to ask how many girls currently play baseball in Little League International, Kevin Fountain, the organization’s senior director of communications, wrote back to say that the information wasn’t available. He could only say that 32 percent of Little League participants—across baseball and softball—are female.

Thinking it might be a matter of a statistic being difficult to calculate for some reason, I wrote back and asked for a couple of alternatives. Could he tell me how many baseball teams have girls on them? Could he tell me whether any Little League baseball teams are girls-only? He could not.

In an earlier email, he’d sent me a link to an article about the Maria Pepe Little League Baseball Legacy Series, which was played for the first time in 2024, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I noticed that the visiting girls stayed in dorms in the Dr. Creighton J. Hale International Grove—a complex named for the man who’d once argued that they would ruin the sport if they ever picked up a bat. He eventually regretted this position, and when he met Pepe later in life, he told her that his granddaughter had begun playing ball.

Throughout the weekend, I had several conversations with women about a new Women’s Pro Baseball League, which was announced in October and is set to debut in 2026. “If it’s within driving distance, I’m going to every game,” Vicky Leone, a retired 58-year-old mother of two, told me.

Vicky was a regular at the camp—one of its pillars. Her team, the Bombers, which went undefeated over the weekend, was largely made up of women who had been playing together for years. When I ran into her at dinner one night, she was wearing a onesie covered in the face of her team’s coach, the former Yankees second baseman Homer Bush. She told me that in 2017, during her third year at the camp, she’d asked one of the Legends, Orlando Hernández, a former Yankees pitcher otherwise known as El Duque, to throw her a real fastball. She has no idea how fast he threw it, but she somehow made contact, and hit it out of George M. Steinbrenner Field.

“I guess I timed it just right,” Vicky told me. “I didn’t even realize it went over the fence.” A player on the opposing team had to yell at her to stop sprinting as she rounded second, and when she got back to the dugout, her own teammates were losing their minds. A camp employee went and found the ball, and Hernández signed it for her. She still doesn’t know how it happened—“the baseball gods” intervened.

Vicky plays in three different softball leagues all year round, but playing baseball at camp for one weekend a year is important to her. “We’re like a sisterhood,” she said. Her teammates, many of whom are roughly her age, are all part of a generation of women who were snubbed by baseball. She grew up wanting to play and would often be dismissed with an Isn’t that cute? When she got older, she would talk about baseball, and boys would ignore her. When she started coaching baseball, parents didn’t want their sons to be assigned to her team.

The author loosens up before a game. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

Now she sees girls playing in the Little League World Series and has heard about the professional women’s league starting next year. “Sometimes I feel—I wish I was born now and not then, just so I could be a part of that.” But she has more enthusiasm than regret. “I would love to be a coach there, even an assistant coach, keeping book, whatever; I would love to do that,” she told me. “Am I going to? Probably not. But, you know, it’s a dream, and everybody’s got a dream.”

The idea for the Women’s Pro Baseball League was announced with a bare-bones press release. It revealed that the league would start next year with six teams “predominantly in the Northeast,” and that it had been co-founded by a lawyer, Keith Stein, alongside Justine Siegal, a well-known figure in the world of women’s baseball. Siegal grew up playing and then became a coach. She’s best known as the first woman to have pitched a major-league batting practice and for creating the nonprofit Baseball for All, which promotes girls’ participation in the sport.

[Jemele Hill: Women’s college basketball is a worthy investment]

“My whole life has been about getting girls involved in baseball,” Siegal told me when we spoke in December. She is a co-owner of the new league, in charge of baseball operations, and will likely be its first commissioner. She rattled off part of her to-do list: The WPBL will need scouts, tryouts, contracts, stadiums. It will need to create a culture of girls’ baseball from scratch. And so, most important, it will need time and serious backing. Even with the patronage of the NBA, it took decades for the WNBA to reach the levels of interest it has today. The Professional Women’s Hockey League, which also started with six teams just last year, is wholly owned by the chairman of the Dodgers and his wife; they can afford to wait while it finds its footing. A new baseball league will similarly need team owners who are able to front huge costs and are willing to commit to something that might not be profitable for the foreseeable future.

Siegal described her vision for the league by comparing it to Angel City FC, the women’s soccer team in Los Angeles. The fan base isn’t enormous, but it’s big enough. “The place is packed; it’s electric. And the athletes are being treated well, making money. They don’t need a second job. And girls know that it’s possible that they, too, could become a professional player.”

The only real precedent for a women’s baseball league is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the subject of A League of Their Own. The league was created by the Chicago Cubs owner and chewing-gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley in 1943 to keep baseball alive as an entertainment industry while many of its brightest stars went to fight in World War II. He was initially the sole owner of the entire league, which was based in the Midwest and rostered only white women.

The Racine Belles and South Bend Blue Sox, both of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, face off in 1947. (Bettmann / Getty)

The league gave hundreds of women the opportunity to play baseball, and it put on some great games that impressed even seasoned baseball professionals and sportswriters. But there was always a tension, as depicted in the movie, between the gimmick and the game. The league had strict rules about feminine appearance and behavior—players wore skirts, went to charm school, and were taught to scratch at bars of soap to remove the dirt under their fingernails. The league was disbanded in 1954, and the idea was largely forgotten until the release of A League of Their Own.

The movie inspired a very brief period of trial and error. A women’s league based on the West Coast played a season and a half before its owner pulled the plug over low attendance, and the Coors Brewing Company sponsored the Colorado Silver Bullets, a barnstorming team managed by the beloved knuckleball pitcher Phil Niekro. “Give them the time all the men have had in this country to play, and you’re going to find a lot of good baseball players,” Niekro told The New York Times after the team’s first year (they went 6–38). The Bullets put on some great games and improved to a winning record in their fourth year. But marketing stunts are not meant for longevity and the Bullets, too, did not last.

The U.S. does have a national women’s baseball team, which was featured in the 2024 documentary See Her Be Her. That team competes every two to three years in a Women’s Baseball World Cup, which the U.S. last won in 2006; Japan, which dominates in women’s baseball, has been the champion in the past seven contests. Americans are far behind.

See Her Be Her, which aired on the MLB Network the week of the World Series, demonstrated the support that women’s baseball has been able to garner among former major-league stars, including Ichiro Suzuki and Cal Ripken Jr. Ripken, whose 21-year playing career with the Baltimore Orioles ended in 2001, is a member of one of the most famous baseball families in American history. During his own Hall of Fame career, he played alongside his brother Billy and was managed by his father, Cal Ripken Sr. His sister, Ellie, never got to play, though he describes her as throwing harder than he did as a child and growing into a massively talented athlete in other sports.

Ripken told me that he and his teammates had watched the Silver Bullets play exhibition games. “I always looked out there and saw my sister and thought, Wouldn’t my sister love to do this? ” I didn’t sense that he was putting on a show—more like it was flatly obvious to someone whose whole life is baseball that everyone should get a chance to enjoy playing it. “I wouldn’t say we were surprised, but our eyes would open, saying, ‘Man, these girls are really good,’ ” he said. “To try to figure out why that didn’t blossom at that time—sometimes they say good ideas, it’s a matter of timing. Maybe this is the right timing now.”

On Saturday morning at baseball camp, my beautiful Pinstripes took the lead quickly in our first game, which we won 6–2; again, I did not contribute a single hit.

My worst fear was realized as my teammates began to notice—or, probably, they had already noticed, and it just became impossible for them to credibly ignore—that I was by far the worst baseball player on our team. This inspired them to acts of kindness, such as high fives when I had done nothing to earn them and vociferous cheering whenever I was at the plate.

In the buffet line at lunch, Ray, our coach, tried to get at the root of my problem, which he diagnosed as mental. I told him about Brett Baty and his many struggles, and though he clearly had no idea who I was talking about or why I was so fixated on him, he seemed to agree that Baty and I had a similar problem, and it was in our brains. “What are you thinking when you’re up there?” he asked me. “I’m thinking, I hope I don’t miss the ball, ” I told him in the spirit of honesty, even though I was already 100 percent sure that this was not the correct thing to be thinking. Ray kindly told me that this was not the correct thing to be thinking.

I never wanted to be a baseball player and my performance at baseball camp doesn’t matter. These games, however, were meaningful to women who, by playing them, were making peace with their childhood fantasies after many, many years. One such person was my teammate Susie McNamara, who at 53 years old was attending her third camp. One evening, she told me that she was doing so this time to mark the end of chemo treatments, which she’d finished two months prior. But the first time she came, in 2011, she’d wanted to prove something.

Susie grew up in a baseball family. Her grandfather played for the Yankees’ farm team the Newark Bears. Her father was a police officer but also owned a baseball-card shop in Lambertville, New Jersey. He convinced everyone that it would be safe for her to start playing T-ball when she was 4 years old, and, later, that she could play Little League baseball with the boys. She was teased in school, she remembered, for wearing a baseball cap all the time (“It wasn’t, like, a fashion statement,” the way it is now) and for dreaming of being a Yankee.

She had to give that up when she was 12, and her primary option was softball. She would go on to play for Mount St. Mary’s, a Division I school in Maryland, but the coaching was terrible and the experience was miserable. Her sophomore year, the team’s record was one win, 31 losses. “I bet that one felt really good, though,” I suggested, but I was wrong. “That one broke my heart,” she said.

When she showed up at camp the first time, she thought of it as her opportunity to demonstrate what she could do. The Legends that year included one of her heroes, Bucky Dent, who stopped and stared theatrically when she made an impressive play at third base. She also remembers Darryl Strawberry standing over her after she made a diving backhanded catch in foul territory and screaming, “That was outstanding!” She thought that weekend was probably the best she’d ever played in her life.

In our final game, against the Bambinos, the Pinstripes were on fire. The other women had perfected the team’s defense over the course of the weekend—it didn’t hurt that I didn’t touch the ball once—and the only thing left for us to accomplish was a hit from me. I was not the only one who felt this way. Others said it, including Leslie, who told me, “I’m committed to you getting a hit.” (And Lainey, who said, “Let’s go, Ottavino!”)

In my first at-bat, I swung on the first pitch and something happened. The ball dribbled up the first-base line and the first baseman scooped it up easily, tagging me as I passed. But a run scored! No hits, but one RBI!

The Pinstripes celebrate a victory in their last game of the weekend. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

After taking the lead in that inning, we were winning for the entire game, so the pressure on me—from that angle—was quite low. In my second at-bat, my team cheered wildly for me on every pitch. I hit the ball just foul down the first-base line, felt a momentary jolt of hope because of the hard contact, and then struck out. In my third and final at-bat, my team cheered wildly for me again, and I struck out again. “Next year!” I announced, in a voice that was supposed to be playful and make everybody feel less awkward, but actually sounded childish and a bit unhinged.

It was ridiculous how upset I was. I was shocked at myself. I hadn’t been expecting it, but the admonition of “no crying in baseball” became suddenly relevant—I had to duck into the tunnel for a few seconds to regain my composure. My teammates, who were geniuses, politely ignored me for five minutes. And then our careers as New York Yankees were over. We had won our final game and went home with a record of three wins and two losses, which you might notice is a .600 winning percentage, higher than that of the actual Yankees last year. We drank Miller Lite in the locker room and swapped phone numbers.

I texted my college roommate from Staten Island that I would mail her all the Yankees merchandise that had been included in the price of admission. I texted my boyfriend that I had a new appreciation for the game and was humbled. I texted my dad, “One RBI!” There’s no crying in baseball, and the other thing they’re always saying is that baseball is a game of failure. If you have a really good batting average, you’re failing about 70 percent of the time. Most women, like most men who try the game of baseball, aren’t up to it. They crumble, like me, and like Brett Baty has in the past, though I am confident he will not do so this year.

At the start of her book, Jennifer Ring mentions the Burns baseball documentary, noting that it is more than 18 hours long but spends just a few minutes on women playing baseball in the 1800s, and then another few on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s and ’50s.

This is particularly strange because the episode about the ’60s and ’70s touches on other issues of the day—Vietnam, civil rights, social unrest—but makes no mention of NOW’s involvement in the Little League legal battle, which would seem to fit in fairly naturally. Baseball  is the definitive story of the game in this country, which is why Ring brings it up. “He’s including it in his history, but he’s giving it the position that he thinks it deserves.”

Baseball is for the fastidious—a game in which everything matters. Reflecting in 1981 on the past 50 years of his life as a fan, Roger Angell wrote: “All of us who have followed the game with intensity have found ourselves transformed into walking memory banks, humming with games won, games lost, batting averages and earned-run averages, games started and games saved, ‘magic numbers,’ final standings, lifetime marks, Series, seasons, decades, epochs.”

Every play is recorded. Every pitch is remembered. It all counts. Every mistake. Every miracle. You can hear the delight and shock in an announcer’s voice when they see something that has somehow never happened before in the history of millions of plays. If you watch enough baseball, you can just feel when something is really something. (Baty’s three-run homer at Tropicana Field, which disappeared into the late, great ceiling and never came down?) In a game in which everything matters, in which we who love it wish to see every possible outcome unfold, how can we stomach the absence of women’s baseball?

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Girls of Summer.”  When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

More than 40 years on, the Bergerac reboot has brought "fabulous" Jersey back into viewers' homes.

Five years ago, the coronavirus pandemic struck a bitterly divided society.

Americans first diverged over how dangerous the disease was: just a flu (as President Donald Trump repeatedly insisted) or something much deadlier.

Then they disputed public-health measures such as lockdowns and masking; a majority complied while a passionate minority fiercely resisted.

Finally, they split—and have remained split—over the value and safety of COVID‑19 vaccines. Anti-vaccine beliefs started on the fringe, but they spread to the point where Ron DeSantis, the governor of the country’s third-most-populous state, launched a campaign for president on an appeal to anti-vaccine ideology.

Five years later, one side has seemingly triumphed. The winner is not the side that initially prevailed, the side of public safety. The winner is the side that minimized the disease, then rejected public-health measures to prevent its spread, and finally refused the vaccines designed to protect against its worst effects.

[David A. Graham: The noisy minority]

Ahead of COVID’s fifth anniversary, Trump, as president-elect, nominated the country’s most outspoken vaccination opponent to head the Department of Health and Human Services. He chose a proponent of the debunked and discredited vaccines-cause-autism claim to lead the CDC. He named a strident critic of COVID‑vaccine mandates to lead the FDA. For surgeon general, he picked a believer in hydroxychloroquine, the disproven COVID‑19 remedy. His pick for director of the National Institutes of Health had advocated for letting COVID spread unchecked to encourage herd immunity. Despite having fast-tracked the development of the vaccines as president, Trump has himself trafficked in many forms of COVID‑19 denial, and has expressed his own suspicions that childhood vaccination against measles and mumps is a cause of autism.

The ascendancy of the anti-vaxxers may ultimately prove fleeting. But if the forces of science and health are to stage a comeback, it’s important to understand why those forces have gone into eclipse.

From March 2020 to February 2022, about 1 million Americans died of COVID-19. Many of those deaths occurred after vaccines became available. If every adult in the United States had received two doses of a COVID vaccine by early 2022, rather than just the 64 percent of adults who had, nearly 320,000 lives would have been saved.

[From the January/February 2021 issue: Ed Yong on how science beat the virus]

Why did so many Americans resist vaccines? Perhaps the biggest reason was that the pandemic coincided with a presidential-election year, and Trump instantly recognized the crisis as a threat to his chances for reelection. He responded by denying the seriousness of the pandemic, promising that the disease would rapidly disappear on its own, and promoting quack cures.

The COVID‑19 vaccines were developed while Trump was president. They could have been advertised as a Trump achievement. But by the time they became widely available, Trump was out of office. His supporters had already made up their minds to distrust the public-health authorities that promoted the vaccines. Now they had an additional incentive: Any benefit from vaccination would redound to Trump’s successor, Joe Biden. Vaccine rejection became a badge of group loyalty, one that ultimately cost many lives.

A summer 2023 study by Yale researchers of voters in Florida and Ohio found that during the early phase of the pandemic, self-identified Republicans died at only a slightly higher rate than self-identified Democrats in the same age range. But once vaccines were introduced, Republicans became much more likely to die than Democrats. In the spring of 2021, the excess-death rate among Florida and Ohio Republicans was 43 percent higher than among Florida and Ohio Democrats in the same age range. By the late winter of 2023, the 300-odd most pro-Trump counties in the country had a COVID‑19 death rate more than two and a half times higher than the 300 or so most anti-Trump counties.

In 2016, Trump had boasted that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. In 2021 and 2022, his most fervent supporters risked death to prove their loyalty to Trump and his cause.

Why did political fidelity express itself in such self-harming ways?

The onset of the pandemic was an unusually confusing and disorienting event. Some people who got COVID died. Others lived. Some suffered only mild symptoms. Others spent weeks on ventilators, or emerged with long COVID and never fully recovered. Some lost businesses built over a lifetime. Others refinanced their homes with 2 percent interest rates and banked the savings.

We live in an impersonal universe, indifferent to our hopes and wishes, subject to extreme randomness. We don’t like this at all. We crave satisfying explanations. We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it’s somebody we don’t like. At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people. This is the eternal appeal of conspiracy theories. How did this happen? Somebody must have done it—but who? And why?

Compounding the disorientation, the coronavirus outbreak was a rapidly changing story. The scientists who researched COVID‑19 knew more in April 2020 than they did in February; more in August than in April; more in 2021 than in 2020; more in 2022 than in 2021. The official advice kept changing: Stay inside—no, go outside. Wash your hands—no, mask your face. Some Americans appreciated and accepted that knowledge improves over time, that more will be known about a new disease in month two than in month one. But not all Americans saw the world that way. They mistrusted the idea of knowledge as a developing process. Such Americans wondered: Were they lying before? Or are they lying now?

In a different era, Americans might have deferred more to medical authority. The internet has upended old ideas of what should count as authority and who possesses it.

The pandemic reduced normal human interactions. Severed from one another, Americans deepened their parasocial attachment to social-media platforms, which foment alienation and rage. Hundreds of thousands of people plunged into an alternate mental universe during COVID‑19 lockdowns. When their doors reopened, the mania did not recede. Conspiracies and mistrust of the establishment—never strangers to the American mind—had been nourished, and they grew.

The experts themselves contributed to this loss of trust.

It’s now agreed that we had little to fear from going outside in dispersed groups. But that was not the state of knowledge in the spring of 2020. At the time, medical experts insisted that any kind of mass outdoor event must be sacrificed to the imperatives of the emergency. In mid-March 2020, federal public-health authorities shut down some of Florida’s beaches. In California, surfers faced heavy fines for venturing into the ocean. Even the COVID‑skeptical Trump White House reluctantly canceled the April 2020 Easter-egg roll.

And then the experts abruptly reversed themselves. When George Floyd was choked to death by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, hundreds of thousands of Americans left their homes to protest, defying three months of urgings to avoid large gatherings of all kinds, outdoor as well as indoor.

On May 29, the American Public Health Association issued a statement that proclaimed racism a public-health crisis while conspicuously refusing to condemn the sudden defiance of public-safety rules.

The next few weeks saw the largest mass protests in recent U.S. history. Approximately 15 million to 26 million people attended outdoor Black Lives Matter events in June 2020, according to a series of reputable polls. Few, if any, scientists or doctors scolded the attendees—and many politicians joined the protests, including future Vice President Kamala Harris. It all raised a suspicion: Maybe the authorities were making the rules based on politics, not science.

The politicization of health advice became even more consequential as the summer of 2020 ended. Most American public schools had closed in March. “At their peak,” Education Week reported, “the closures affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 U.S. public and private schools.” By September, it was already apparent that COVID‑19 posed relatively little risk to children and teenagers, and that remote learning did not work. At the same time, returning to the classroom before vaccines were available could pose some risk to teachers’ health—and possibly also to the health of the adults to whom the children returned after school.

[David Frum: I moved to Canada during the pandemic]

How to balance these concerns given the imperfect information? Liberal states decided in favor of the teachers. In California, the majority of students did not return to in-person learning until the fall of 2021. New Jersey kept many of its public schools closed until then as well. Similar things happened in many other states: Illinois, Maryland, New York, and so on, through the states that voted Democratic in November 2020.

Florida, by contrast, reopened most schools in the fall of 2020. Texas soon followed, as did most other Republican-governed states. The COVID risk for students, it turned out, was minimal: According to a 2021 CDC study, less than 1 percent of Florida students contracted COVID-19 in school settings from August to December 2020 after their state restarted in-person learning. Over the 2020–21 school year, students in states that voted for Trump in the 2020 election got an average of almost twice as much in-person instruction as students in states that voted for Biden.

Any risks to teachers and school staff could have been mitigated by the universal vaccination of those groups. But deep into the fall of 2021, thousands of blue-state teachers and staff resisted vaccine mandates—including more than 5,000 in Chicago alone. By then, another school year had been interrupted by closures.

By disparaging public-health methods and discrediting vaccines, the COVID‑19 minimizers cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. By keeping schools closed longer than absolutely necessary, the COVID maximizers hazarded the futures of young Americans.

Students from poor and troubled families, in particular, will continue to pay the cost of these learning losses for years to come. Even in liberal states, many private schools reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020. The affluent and the connected could buy their children a continuing education unavailable to those who depended on public schools. Many lower-income students did not return to the classroom: Throughout the 2022–23 school year, poorer school districts reported much higher absenteeism rates than were seen before the pandemic.

Teens absent from school typically get into trouble in ways that are even more damaging than the loss of math or reading skills. New York City arrested 25 percent more minors for serious crimes in 2024 than in 2018. The national trend was similar, if less stark. The FBI reports that although crime in general declined in 2023 compared with 2022, crimes by minors rose by nearly 10 percent.

People who finish schooling during a recession tend to do worse even into middle age than those who finish in times of prosperity. They are less likely to marry, less likely to have children, and more likely to die early. The disparity between those who finish in lucky years and those who finish in unlucky years is greatest for people with the least formal education.

Will the harms of COVID prove equally enduring? We won’t know for some time. But if past experience holds, the COVID‑19 years will mark their most vulnerable victims for decades.

The story of COVID can be told as one of shocks and disturbances that wrecked two presidencies. In 2020 and 2024, incumbent administrations lost elections back-to-back, something that hadn’t happened since the deep economic depression of the late 1880s and early 1890s. The pandemic caused a recession as steep as any in U.S. history. The aftermath saw the worst inflation in half a century.

In the three years from January 2020 through December 2022, Trump and Biden both signed a series of major bills to revive and rebuild the U.S. economy. Altogether, they swelled the gross public debt from about $20 billion in January 2017 to nearly $36 billion today. The weight of that debt helped drive interest rates and mortgage rates higher. The burden of the pandemic debt, like learning losses, is likely to be with us for quite a long time.

Yet even while acknowledging all that went wrong, respecting all the lives lost or ruined, reckoning with all the lasting harms of the crisis, we do a dangerous injustice if we remember the story of COVID solely as a story of American failure. In truth, the story is one of strength and resilience.

Scientists did deliver vaccines to prevent the disease and treatments to recover from it. Economic policy did avert a global depression and did rapidly restore economic growth. Government assistance kept households afloat when the world shut down—and new remote-work practices enabled new patterns of freedom and happiness after the pandemic ended.

The virus was first detected in December 2019. Its genome was sequenced within days by scientists collaborating across international borders. Clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine began in April 2020, and the vaccine was authorized for emergency use by the FDA in December. Additional vaccines rapidly followed, and were universally available by the spring of 2021. The weekly death toll fell by more than 90 percent from January 2021 to midsummer of that year.

The U.S. economy roared back with a strength and power that stunned the world. The initial spike of inflation has subsided. Wages are again rising faster than prices. Growth in the United States in 2023 and 2024 was faster and broader than in any peer economy.

Even more startling, the U.S. recovery outpaced China’s. That nation’s bounceback from COVID‑19 has been slow and faltering. America’s economic lead over China, once thought to be narrowing, has suddenly widened; the gap between the two countries’ GDPs grew from $5 trillion in 2021 to nearly $10 trillion in 2023. The U.S. share of world economic output is now slightly higher than it was in 1980, before China began any of its economic reforms. As he did in 2016, Trump inherits a strong and healthy economy, to which his own reckless policies—notably, his trade protectionism—are the only visible threat.

In public affairs, our bias is usually to pay most attention to disappointments and mistakes. In the pandemic, there were many errors: the partisan dogma of the COVID minimizers; the capitulation of states and municipalities to favored interest groups; the hypochondria and neuroticism of some COVID maximizers. Errors need to be studied and the lessons heeded if we are to do better next time. But if we fail to acknowledge America’s successes—even partial and imperfect successes—we not only do an injustice to the American people. We also defeat in advance their confidence to collectively meet the crises of tomorrow.

Perhaps it’s time for some national self-forgiveness here. Perhaps it’s time to accept that despite all that went wrong, despite how much there was to learn about the disease and how little time there was to learn it, and despite polarized politics and an unruly national character—despite all of that—Americans collectively met the COVID‑19 emergency about as well as could reasonably have been hoped.

The wrong people have profited from the immediate aftermath. But if we remember the pandemic accurately, the future will belong to those who rose to the crisis when their country needed them.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Why the COVID Deniers Won.”

Maybe we need new emotions. The human experience has changed a lot lately: Creativity can be outsourced to AI, culture lives in flickering fragments on screens, and we social animals are spending tons of time alone. Perhaps the words we use to describe basic, primordial feelings—joy, sadness, anger, and those other names for Inside Out characters—no longer suffice. Perhaps that’s why we’ve been bombarded with so many neologisms to describe mind states, like brain rot, or Eusexua.

What, you haven’t heard of Eusexua? It’s a Zoolanderian term coined by the art-pop singer FKA Twigs, and the title of her fantastic new album. It, as part of the marketing campaign, has been spammed across TikTok, spray-painted on New York City sidewalks, and used to refer to a $10.50 matcha latte at a fast-casual chain. Eusexua, the official materials say, is “the pinnacle of Human Experience.” More helpfully, Twigs has explained it to be an ecstatic flow state, the feeling you get when dancing or making a really good cup of tea. It’s perfect present-ness. It’s not thinking about the internet.

This is a rich idea for her to explore, given that, for more than a decade, Twigs has modeled how deliberately made, intellectually challenging music can connect in the digital era. Delving into her art can feel like putting together a puzzle, revealing a scene that’s shadowy, beautiful, and disturbing. Her voice channels the athletic excess of opera and the serene disassociation of an ASMR video. She and her producers like to pair soft, feathery sounds with harsh, arrhythmic beats; her excellent videography heightens the sense of mystique, showing off her talents for ballet, voguing, and swordfighting.

Eusexua, her third studio album, is all about immediacy. It was inspired by a stint in Prague, where she got really into raving. As is typical for new ravers, the high was epiphanic: Twigs came away wondering why we couldn’t try to feel that way—egoless, embodied, in the moment—all of the time. She came up with a system of 11 movements to keep herself in touch with the physical world (for example: rubbing her hands together in a pancaking motion to resist the impulse to look at her phone). And she made an album of dance-pop music.

Roll your eyes if you must. After all, dance pop’s supposedly liberating power has often been hijacked over the years for cynical ends, such as Target commercials and Katy Perry albums. What’s more, Eusexua isn’t afraid of cliché. Twigs and her lead producer, Koreless, tap into 1990s and early-2000s techno-futurism. Listeners will be reminded of the bright-eyed mood of Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger”; the glassy synths of Björk and Radiohead; even the chanted sass of the Spice Girls. A lot of the lyrics are bumper-sticker fare: “You’ve one life to live / do it freely.”

[Read: The problem with saying oontz oontz]

Luckily, Twigs is still too strange to go generic. These songs hide surprises everywhere: interludes of mechanical scraping; yodels and chants; North West (daughter of Kanye) rapping in Japanese for some reason. Twigs’s vocals mutate between guttural and lithe, and her melodies tend to cut against the insistent grooves of the production. On the title track, a bleeping beat encircles the listener like the walls of a downward-spiraling tunnel, while Twigs seems to sing from miles above, somewhere in the sky. “Drums of Death” builds a battering-ram thump out of chopped-up bits of singing and talking. When something resembling a chorus finally enters the song, it’s like a movie star walking into a crowded café, dampening the noise but intensifying the mood.

Is she really expressing a new feeling? Maybe, kinda, but only when the tempo slackens for the album’s final two ballads. “24r Dog” conjures a musical moonscape, desolate and stark, from which Twigs delivers electronically filtered howls of desire into the void. “Wanderlust” blends hip-hop cadences and pensive guitar as Twigs sings about sitting alone in her bed, bitterly criticizing the world, while dreaming of escape. Both tracks move unsteadily between numbed exhaustion and transcendence in a way that feels fresh—and specific to now.

Really, though, Eusexua is just a new word for an old rush. She seems to acknowledge this when “Striptease” suddenly warps the listener to the early ’90s: a drum-and-bass beat erupts, and Twigs wails in the style of the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. Just as suddenly, the song then zooms to the 2020s by featuring the clicking, pumping “Jersey club” beat that’s in vogue today. The juxtaposition of styles is provocative, but also intuitive. With her own individual flair, Twigs is drawing a connection between party music past and present. The trancelike feeling she’s celebrating may well be music’s evolutionary purpose, and is in particular need lately.

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Addiction comes in many forms and a lot of them are perfectly legal.

Daily, I fight the urge to scroll—for hours—on various social-media apps, yet I can go months without drinking alcohol and not even think about it.

The question of whether to ban harmful behaviors or substances is one laden with competing priorities: How intrusive is the government intervention? How harmful is the substance? Would banning it even work to curb the behavior? What about the economic impact of a ban? What sorts of revenues can be gained from taxation instead?

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the journalist Danny Funt, who has been reporting for years on a behavior that’s come under much scrutiny lately: sports betting. Renewed debate over bans on sports betting erupted into public view nearly seven years ago in a pivotal Supreme Court case. The decision opened the door to a variety of new state legalization schemes and the outcomes have been mixed, at best. Although states may have stumbled onto a new source of revenue (albeit weaker than some were expecting), it has come at a cost to gamblers’ financial and mental health. The results have turned even vocal proponents into skeptics.

“I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022, and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet,” Funt recalled. “It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, ‘I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas.’”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: The Super Bowl is coming up, and so today we’re talking about the most important part of sports: gambling.

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting that spurred four years of nonstop ads enticing me and you and everyone I know to spend all our discretionary income on FanDuel or DraftKings. At the time, advocates believed that the revenue streams that could come from sports betting were too good to pass up. After the Great Recession, states were cash-strapped and hungry for new sources of money.

States have unevenly legalized, meaning in some places, you can log onto your phone to place a bet, and in others, you might still need to go to a physical location. The Court left open other pathways for the federal government to curb or ban sports betting, and as many of the negative impacts of gambling have metastasized, more policy makers are questioning whether legalization is worth the revenue.

My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Danny Funt, a journalist who has tracked the rise of sports betting for The Washington Post and is now working on a wide-ranging book on the topic.

[Music]

Demsas: Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Funt: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So I have actually never bet on sports. I grew up in a Christian household—I am Christian—and it’s just not a thing that my parents ever allowed. We couldn’t even make dollar bets at home. Like, it was just not allowed. And I feel like I knew later on that I had kind of an addictive personality. So I was like, I’m not going to do this. I’m just never going to get into betting or gambling. Have you bet on sports? Is this something that you do?

Funt: Oh yeah. I’m trying to be more honest about that. I used to be like, Well, if you were a restaurant reporter, you’d have to eat out. You’d sort of be obligated to see what the culinary scene is like. So I do the same with sports betting. But truthfully, I was betting on sports long before I ever wrote about it.

I will say that the more you learn about how significant the house’s upper hand is, it definitely gets in the back of your head, and I do a lot less now just knowing I don’t stand a chance.

Demsas: How significant is it?

Funt: It depends on what you’re betting. The standard is actually pretty low. They’ll win $5 for every $100 you bet. But nowadays, that’s getting jacked up. So you might have heard of things like parlays. The parlay hold percentage, which is like the house revenue or the house edge, can be as high as 20 percent. So you’re getting beat pretty bad if you bet a lot of parlays.

Demsas: So sports betting, I feel like, I really did not hear a lot about, other than just when the World Cup is on, and your friend might bet you 20 bucks about the outcome or something like that. And now I feel like it’s everywhere. I feel like I’m seeing ads everywhere. I feel like every time I look over on the Metro, like, there’s some 17-year-old guy on DraftKings—well, let’s hope he’s 19, not 17. But it feels like it came out of nowhere. What happened?

Funt: It really did. That’s really what got my attention: It just felt like, overnight this went from something that we had all been taught was this existential threat to sports, that the professional leagues and the NCAA would never support—there were basically a century’s worth of scandals involving gambling that motivated that concern—and then, suddenly, there was a Supreme Court decision in 2018 that struck down a federal ban on bookmaking outside of Nevada.

And that really was a starting gun for all of these states to say, Hey. This is a way we can raise money and cash in on this opportunity. And it was incredible how night and day it was, where what I described as this existential evil was suddenly repackaged as this wholesome way of enjoying sports that every sports fan ought to consider.

Demsas: So take us back to 1992, where that federal ban was enacted. It’s called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. What led to that effort? Who was pushing for it, and why did they think it was necessary?

Funt: Yeah, I was surprised to learn that it was the professional sports leagues, mainly the NFL, that went to Congress and said, Hey—we need this. So a lot of states back then were facing severe budget deficits. You know, it’s the tail end of the Reagan era; there’s a lot of resistance to tax hikes.

And naturally, when you need to raise money, but you don’t want to raise taxes, states will look at gambling. And there was sort of a groundswell of loosening the laws around tribal casinos and state lotteries. And a lot of states began looking at, basically, a version of state-sanctioned sports betting, where a state lottery is giving people the chance to wager on sporting events.

And the sports league said, We hate this idea. We’ve allowed it in Nevada because it’s been there forever, but we don’t want this to be the way that our fans engage with our product.

Demsas: Why? Why were they opposed?

Funt: For one, the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal, where, famously, the team rigged the World Series in cahoots with gamblers—that is front and center still. Pete Rose had just been banned for life for betting on baseball as a player and as a coach. Really every decade, if you look back in the history books, there’s a major scandal involving college sports or professional sports or whatever. Beyond that, they just thought, We like the idea of fans liking the games for the games’ sake, and if they’re looking at it through this cynical gambling lens, it’ll kind of cheapen their relationship with sports and diminish our product.

Demsas: That’s very altruistic, right? I mean, I would imagine these sports leagues are just like, What can make us money? You know what I mean?

Funt: Definitely. At the same time, that does make them a lot of money. Think of all the jerseys and pennants and other merch that people buy because they’re lifelong sports fans. It fuels a lot of irrational, obsessive behavior. And then again, so does gambling.

So you can understand why it was very tempting, over time, for the leagues to flip-flop and come around on that. But the Senate and the House held these really robust hearings to evaluate the threat of gambling, the benefit that state-sanctioned gambling might pose. And it was just so striking, to me, that they laid it all out on the table in the early ’90s, and then fast-forward: 25 years later, there was really none of that. It was just, Okay, let’s cash in.

Demsas: So Nevada, you mentioned, has always been exempt from PASPA. What has been their experience?

Funt: Around the ’50s, when casinos were taking off in Nevada, sports betting was sort of an amenity, kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet, you know? It’s just one more thing to draw people in so that they go to the table games and the slot machines that really make money. So in a lot of ways, sports betting was an afterthought.

And yet, many of us thought, If we ever wanted to bet legally on sports, that’s the place to do it. So people would schedule March Madness trips to bet on college basketball, or they’d go during the Super Bowl to bet on that. So it was a pretty big draw, but it was also very marginal in terms of the bottom line for Nevada gambling operators.

But gambling on sports still existed well beyond Nevada in the U.S., because there’s this thriving black market. And one of the big arguments for legalization, just like with cannabis, was, People are going to find a way to do it, so let’s bring it above board, tax it, implement consumer protections. And at least that was a pretty convincing argument in favor.

Demsas: You mentioned the Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. NCAA. That’s the Supreme Court decision that basically strikes down this federal ban. What was the legal argument at issue there? Why did the Supreme Court find that the federal government cannot ban sports betting?

Funt: So crucially, they very explicitly said they can ban sports betting—they had just gone about doing it with a defective bill. So naturally, Supreme Court decisions tend to get oversimplified in the public conscience, but this one is so crucial because sports betting’s advocates took the decision and said, Aha! The Supreme Court has given the green light for sports betting or okayed sports betting.

Really, the case turned on a fairly obscure Tenth Amendment concept about states’ rights. And sports betting was the focus, but it was also kind of beside the point. So New Jersey said that what the federal government has done, in essence, is said, We want to ban sports betting, but we don’t want to regulate it. So we’re going to commandeer the states to do the federal government’s bidding. If they had legalized sports betting before 1992, that’s grandfathered in; it can remain on the books. If they hadn’t, they’re prohibited from changing their mind and legalizing it.

So this argument before the Court wasn’t, Should the federal government be allowed to ban sports betting? It was, Should they be able to tell the states that if they have an existing law, they can’t change it? And, you know, it sounds like the most thrilling Supreme Court oral argument. It was actually pretty dry because it’s so obscure in that way. But the effect was to overturn this ban that had been on the books for a quarter century.

Demsas: What was the state interest in legalization? This is Murphy v. NCAA. That’s Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat. Why was he so hell-bent on taking this on?

Funt: The funny thing is: It was really Chris Christie, his predecessor, who was hell-bent on taking it on, and it really annoys Christie, who views bringing sports betting to New Jersey as one of his crowning achievements. It pains him to this day that the title of that case was updated to reflect Murphy because he took office before the decision came out.

But they had this long-standing economy, mainly in Atlantic City, that was really struggling. They looked at Nevada and were quite envious that sports betting brings people to the state around these major sporting events, year after year, and they said this would be a way to revitalize Atlantic City.

So the argument they brought to the Court wasn’t, Let’s have online sports betting across the country. It was, Let’s have in-person sports betting in these casinos in Atlantic City to jumpstart this ailing economy. As you can imagine, after that, all these states said, Hey—we also could use a lot of tax revenue and jumpstart our economies. Especially during COVID, when so many states were facing pretty dire budget deficits, they said, This is a fairly easy way to snap our fingers and have access to this influx of cash.

And that tends to happen a lot with gambling—is you’re facing some sort of economic or state budgetary issue, and this is a quick fix. So once New Jersey did it, and Delaware and Pennsylvania and a number of other early adopters, there was this ripple effect, where states look to their neighbors and say, Hey—they’re making money off this. We feel like chumps because we’re not. Let’s get on board. And the bandwagon really got off and running.

Demsas: So one thing that’s interesting is that—I’m confused why there’s been such a big focus or why sports betting has been so central to this story, when it feels like all types of online gambling are legal in lots of places now. So can you help me understand why that’s been so front and center?

Funt: I mean there’s so many video games or phone-based apps where it’s like, Hey—do you want to buy some tokens with real money? And then you’re playing with tokens, and then you convert the tokens back to real money, so it’s very sly.

There’s this whole phenomenon of what are branded as sweepstakes, where it’s essentially a loophole to allow people of all ages to risk money on sports, but it’s not called gambling. And you might remember: There’s a long history of things finding loopholes to offer gambling by a different name, most notably the whole daily-fantasy-sports boom that paved the way for sports betting.

So you’re right. It is part of a wider phenomenon. It’s interesting that true online casino gambling, like slots and roulette and poker, was predicted to follow from legal sports gambling. That was what a lot of these companies were banking on. And although about a half dozen states have legalized it, it hasn’t caught on quite as quickly as some of their investors’ hopes, and we could get into that.

Demsas: Yeah, why not?

Funt: The main reason is that the brick-and-mortar casinos think it’ll cannibalize their business, that if people can bet on those games on their phones, they’re not going to bother to make the trek to a retail casino to do the same thing. So I still think that’s going to be in the headlines a lot in the coming years, as states look for more ways to bring in tax revenue.

But to your question about why sports betting seems so dominant, part of it is just: The advertising is unbelievable. These companies are spending billions of dollars every year to get it in front of potential customers in as many ways as possible. As you were saying, you see it on the train. Same here in North Carolina. Billboards, signs downtown—everywhere you look there’s an appeal to get you to start betting on sports, not to mention all the TV ads. So the marketing is just overwhelming.

And then beyond that, it is startling, in that this was seen as something that was done in the shadows, and now it’s so mainstream and really being rammed down people’s throats in a way that a lot of people are quite concerned about.

Demsas: So what is the landscape now, right? Like, after Murphy, states had to pass their own legalization schemes. Right now, D.C. and 27 states allow online sports gambling, and there’s some regional concentration here that I thought was interesting—basically, the entire Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, as well as the Midwest. But lots of the South hasn’t. The Pacific Northwest hasn’t. California and Texas haven’t. What kind of explains this regional variation?

Funt: I think in the Northeast, state lotteries are so deeply rooted. Massachusetts, for example, has the highest-grossing state lottery per capita. So I think it’s easier to transition people into a new form of gambling. In a lot of parts of the country, like California and Texas, tribal interests are so powerful—they’re resisting anything that would threaten their business. In parts of the South, there’s a strong conservative Christian aversion to gambling still, although I think that’s dissipated a lot from one of the main reasons why the country didn’t adopt more gambling sooner. So yeah, it’s a lot of cultural and political reasons.

Demsas: One story of yours really kind of shows how haphazard the legalization process has been. Can you tell us about the Abunai gambler in D.C.?

Funt: Yes, so as you mentioned, D.C. is one of the places that legalized sports betting. Like many places, they did it quite hurriedly and sort of made things up as they go. And one interesting decision the D.C. government made was to have a city-sponsored sports-betting operation, as opposed to letting these companies like FanDuel and DraftKings run the show. So you could bet through those companies at stadiums and arenas, but if you are out and about on your phone or at a lot of these betting terminals in cafés and restaurants and bars, you are betting with a city-sponsored sportsbook called Gambet[DC].

And these terminals—they sort of look like ATM machines. They popped up all over the place, including at this tiny poke shop called Abunai. And one of the interesting things about betting terminals that professional gamblers were quick to pick up on is: Unlike if you’re going to a brick-and-mortar sportsbook, where you give your ID and they pay close attention to who it is betting, you bet anonymously through these terminals. So if you’ve sort of cracked the code and figured out an edge, you can bet anonymously, basically limitlessly, through these terminals and make a killing.

And this one guy found deficiencies in the odds in this poorly run city-sponsored sportsbook. It’s kind of incredible how bad the odds were compared to the rest of the market. Like, it didn’t take a genius to pick off vulnerable games to bet on. So he just finds a list of places in the city that have these betting terminals. Abunai was the first alphabetically on the list. So he says, Okay, great. They have a nice owner and staff, who didn’t mind him basically turning it into his home office.

And day after day, he would just dump cash in this machine and bet as much as he could—so much so that it swung the entire city’s betting numbers so that an overwhelming amount of money was being bet through this one store. He was winning so much that the entire city-run sportsbook was net negative for an entire month, which is unheard of. We all know the house always wins. D.C.’s sportsbook was run so poorly the house lost, in a month.

Demsas: How does that happen? Like, what is going on there?

Funt: So basically, sports-betting odds are often like efficient markets. So just like it’s really hard to beat the stock market, it’s really hard to beat who’s gonna win, you know, a football game or a basketball game, over the long haul, because, basically, the world’s collective wisdom is informing the spreads and the odds on these games.

But the people who are running Gambet[DC], this D.C. sportsbook, were very slow to update the odds. Sometimes, they would just have errors in how they input the information, so they just clearly have the equivalent of a typo in inputting the odds. Just not a lot of oversight. Even though it’s a pretty airtight business, you still need a lot of smart people running it and automation to manage it.

So this guy just picked off all these bad lines and bad odds. And statistically, he gained the upper hand, because if Gambet[DC]’s odds are way out of sync with the rest of the market, chances are the rest of the market’s right.

Demsas: So you literally just have to look at what the market is telling you, what the odds are in other places, and then just go sit down at Abunai Poke and just say like, All right, looking at my phone, what’s going on, on DraftKings or whatever, and then just do that.

Funt: Precisely. He was betting on sports that he didn’t follow at all. He had no expert insights into them. It was just, A respected sportsbook has the odds at this number. Gambet[DC]’s are off in this way. I’m gonna err on the side of the respected sportsbook and bet against Gambet[DC]. And it was hugely profitable, at least as long as he got away with it.

Demsas: Do you know how much money he made?

Funt: Yes, so thanks to some public records that were turned over, only over the course of three months, he profited more than $400,000—pretty unheard of, even for an incredibly successful bettor. That rate of return is just remarkable.

Demsas: Wow. So I went down a rabbit hole, when I was researching for this episode, about American history on sports gambling. And I did not know the role of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy—the OG Bobby Kennedy—his crusade against sports gambling. And learning that, kind of in the middle of the 20th century—you touch on this a little bit, but—that the real focus on outlawing sports gambling was about combating organized-crime syndicates.

Bobby Kennedy wrote an article in The Atlantic in April 1962 about this issue. And just quoting from it:

As I sit down today to write this article, a business executive with an industrial firm on the Eastern seaboard is telephoning a bookmaker to place a fifty-dollar bet on a horse race; a factory worker in a Midwestern town is standing at a lunch counter filling out a basketball parlay card on which he will wager two dollars; a housewife in a West Coast suburb is handing a dime to a policy writer who operates a newsstand as a front near the supermarket where she shops.

These people, and millions like them who follow similar routines every day, see nothing wrong in what they are doing. Many of them can afford the luxury of this type of gambling. They look upon it simply as taking a chance.

He continues:

But they are taking a chance which the nation and its economy cannot afford. They are pouring dimes and dollars day by day into a vast stream of cash which finances most illegal underworld activities. The housewife, the factory worker, and the businessman will tell you that they are against such things as narcotics, bootlegging, prostitution, gang murders, the corruption of public officials and police, and the bribery of college athletes. And yet this is where their money goes.

So I did not have a sense that this was a big part of the modern conversation around sports gambling. Is this kind of resolved, or are we still worried about gambling, kind of, going to these underworld activities?

Funt: Yeah, first of all, it’s a great article you turned up. I’m excited to find it myself and read it. That was definitely one of the arguments for legalizing sports betting around 2018, after that Supreme Court decision, because a huge amount of money was being bet through offshore sportsbooks that operated illegally online, taking tens of billions of dollars in wagers from Americans. And there was some evidence that the criminal syndicates that were operating those sportsbooks did a bunch of other criminal activity.

So just as RFK was saying, you’re, in effect, patronizing those sorts of criminal activities. That’s not always the case. Some of them were just Americans who were bookmakers in the U.S. and got tired of getting arrested, so they went to Latin America and set up websites where they could take bets. It wasn’t quite as sinister as that. But at least as the argument went, it was a real boogeyman, that you’re funding criminal organizations, and, Why not fund taxed, legitimate companies by making this legal? So yes, that was definitely a significant argument.

And I think as far as that kind of conscious capitalism goes, well, the sportsbooks that operate today definitely aren’t, you know, also selling drugs and prostitution and all those things. There definitely is some hand-wringing among people of, Does gambling exploit vulnerable people? Do we know that this is making problem gambling more prevalent? And by betting safely, are you still, in effect, funding companies that take advantage of people? So it’s not quite as potent as the argument RFK laid out, but it’s definitely still relevant.

Demsas: And what has the impact been on legalization? Has legalization reduced off-book gambling. Can we even really measure that?

Funt: So you’re right. It’s impossible to know exactly how much gambling is going on under the table. It always has been. I think some of the estimates were inflated to make the argument seem more convincing, but it by no means has eliminated it or even put the dent in it that a lot of the advocates for legalization promised.

Again, in 1992, they looked at all these different types of cause-and-effect things to think about, and one of them was: If you legalize an illegal activity, do you snuff out the black market, or do you just grow the pool of people doing it and, in fact, actually convert some people who might not have been doing it, who are then going to look to the black market, for a variety of reasons? So when it comes to sports betting, yes—there are definitely those offshore, illegal sportsbooks that are hurting because of this.

But there are also people who took up sports betting because they saw ads everywhere and all these generous new-customer offers and started legally, and then they said, Hey. There’s a bunch of different reasons why betting illegally might be advantageous. Maybe I don’t want it showing up on my bank statement. Maybe I don’t want my winnings taxed. Maybe I want to be able to bet much more illegally than you’re able to do so legally, if I’m a winning bettor. So yeah, in some respects, it’s put the offshore business on the ropes, and in other respects, it’s sort of created a funnel of new customers for them.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: what’s gained and what’s lost in states where online sports betting is legal.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to delve into the welfare harms of people who are engaging in sports gambling. But before I do that, I think because of your articles and a lot of other arguments being made and research coming out, there’s a growing narrative about the potential mistake that this was in legalizing gambling. But I think that can be helpful to go back and think in the minds of states who were interested in legalizing gambling. What was going on with them? Like, how much money are they actually making off of this? And what sorts of things is it going to?

Funt: Yeah, that was definitely the No. 1 argument, was, Hey. Let’s just bring in more revenue without taxing people—always, you know, a strong selling point for at least some people.

So whether tax revenue has exceeded or failed to meet expectations varies state by state. In total, since that Supreme Court decision and all these states started legalizing, a little more than $7 billion has been raised in taxes from sports betting for state governments. It’s important to note that $2.6 billion of that has gone to New York State alone, the largest legal sports-betting state, which also has the largest tax rate, so they’re just getting an epic windfall compared to the rest of the country.

Many states simply send the money to their general fund. Some states, like Colorado, specifically earmarked it—in Colorado’s case, for water-conservation issues. But you know, tax revenue is definitely a worthwhile thing to look at, but it’s not the whole picture. I think it’s appropriate to look at a more holistic view of, Sure, states are generating this money, but it’s not like loose change they’re finding in their couch cushions. This is coming from somewhere. It’s coming from their constituents.

We know gambling is, in many respects, kind of a regressive tax in that it, you know, pulls money from a lot of vulnerable people, as opposed to a more progressive tax that proportionately takes from people who can afford to lose. And that’s why some states, like Washington State, have been much more restrictive in the way that, yes, they’ve legalized sports betting, but you can only do it on the grounds at tribal reservations. So their idea was, Let’s give a boost to tribal economies, but we don’t want to depend on revenue from gambling to fund our state’s growing needs. We’d rather do that through progressive taxes, more sustainable, healthier for our society, something that definitely not all states have taken into account.

Demsas: I have seen a lot of that research around the regressivity of these sorts of tax revenues, but I was surprised with sports betting. And there was a Pew poll looking at the demographics of people who engage in sports betting. And they don’t really find any significant differences in educational attainment or household income. They see that men are more likely than women to say they have bet on sports, and adults under the age of 50 (when compared to those over 50), and Black Americans and Hispanic adults are more likely than white and Asian American adults. But I’m surprised that there’s not more of a difference in household income here.

Funt: You’re right. In some respects, I think sports bettors skew a little bit more middle class and well-educated, compared to other forms of gambling. But when we think about the regressivity of it or just whether it’s the healthiest way for society to generate money, it’s not just that the poor are the ones doing the gambling. It’s also—think about that people with gambling problems are, in many respects, these companies’ best customers. They’re losing such a disproportionate amount of money, compared to the rest of the clientele.

Are we comfortable generating money on the backs of people who just find this ruinous, in a lot of ways beyond financially? So that, I think, should give people pause. But you’re right—for a lot of cultural reasons, the people who bet on sports tend to be much more middle class than the people who, say, do scratch-offs or play the lottery.

Demsas: So I want to now turn to all of the harms that have now become evident over the past several years. Can you walk us through the financial impacts of gambling? What are we finding about the legalization of sports gambling on the impact on households’ financial well-being?

Funt: Yes. So last year, I’d say two of the most-buzzed-about studies that came out on that topic—one of them found a direct correlation between states that had legalized sports betting and a demonstrable impact on credit scores and other measures of financial health. A similar study, also last year, found that household savings go down in places where sports betting is legal. So you are seeing a demonstrable impact on people’s financial well-being as a result of the availability of sports betting.

Part of what I find, honestly, quite frustrating about the way this has played out in the U.S. is it’s been treated like this experiment where, We’re entering an uncharted territory. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll discover things. Like, Does this hurt people financially, or does this create a public-health problem that we didn’t anticipate? There’s a whole bunch of countries that are far ahead of the U.S. in terms of legalizing, and there’s a vast body of research that looks at the consequences. This didn’t have to be this shot in the dark for the U.S. We could have looked at Europe and Australia and Latin America and Asia and a lot of other places that are farther along and have had to reconcile the consequences of making gambling so accessible.

So in the U.K., for example, where online gambling was legalized in 2005, one study recently found that Brits lose about £5.5 billion every year betting online, which results in lost economic activity of £1.3 billion. The government estimates conservatively that gambling-related health consequences cost the population more than a billion pounds every year. And again, the people who did that study said: If you actually look at the second- and third-degree consequences, on a mental-health level and all the family trauma that it causes, it’s probably much bigger than a billion pounds, but we can safely say that.

So yes, again, the evidence is starting to trickle out in the U.S., but it’s been there overseas, and I think it’s pretty irresponsible that the states that were establishing regulations didn’t heed those warnings before getting this off and running.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I want to underscore this. I can imagine someone going like, All right, someone is going to, you know, buy some bad fast food out there rather than cook, or they might gamble on some sports. These are all just consumption, and they’re different levels of bad, but is it really that big of a deal?

You know, one of the studies you referenced, a Northwestern University study by Scott Baker and his co-authors—they’re finding that it’s not just displacing other gambling and consumption. People are falling into debt over this. So for every dollar spent on betting, households are putting a dollar less into investment accounts. You’re more at risk of overdrafting your bank account, maxing out credit cards.

And these effects are strongest among households that are already kind of financially precarious. Charles Lehman actually wrote a great article about this for us in The Atlantic. And this is not a situation, I think, where it’s, you know, We’re just getting money reallocated from other places. People are experiencing a lot more debt delinquency over this.

The other study that you referenced, the economist Brett Hollenbeck at UCLA and his co-authors also find, similarly, that the increase of the risk that a household goes bankrupt [goes up] by 25 to 30 percent. I mean, these are really big numbers that we’re seeing here. And can you just walk us through this kind of gambling addiction? Is this a situation where it’s a very small number of people who are getting addicted, and that’s what’s driving these stats? Or are large shares of Americans experiencing financial precarity here? What do you think?

Funt: Right. So the rate of problem gambling is definitely increasing. So for a long time, it was perceived that about 1 to 2 percent of the population is prone to problem gambling. In states that have had legal sports betting and other legal online gambling for a while, they’re seeing that rate closer to 6 or even 8 percent, and it’s even higher among young men, who are often the target audience for sports betting.

But I think it’s important to look beyond problem gambling. Even though those numbers are quite alarming, it can sort of make it seem like a marginal issue. Like, As long as I’m not in that sliver of the population, I’m good. I think that those sorts of consequences that you were describing go beyond people who have diagnosable problems.

So I find quite striking or even alarming the explosion of gambling among college students. And there was a survey recently that found that one in five college students who bet on sports dips into their tuition funds to fund their betting. So obviously, fewer than 20 percent of college students have gambling problems, but you’re still seeing people affect themselves financially because of their betting. So it’s a vast problem, and it’s an under-researched area.

It’s also something that is a developing story. So you’re not going to get a full picture out the gates. Gambling disorder, unlike some addictions where you might experience something once and become hooked on it—that can happen with gambling, but—it’s often a progressive disorder, so it can take several years or even longer to develop a problem. So if you think about it, we’re really in the early innings of this. And that sort of data and that sort of picture of how this is affecting society as a whole is still going to be emerging in the coming years.

Demsas: And, I mean, you talked a little about the mental-health impacts of gambling addiction here, but there was a paper that came out recently—it’s actually what spurred me to want to do this episode with you—about domestic violence. Can you talk to us about what that found?

Funt: Yes, it’s one of those things that’s terrible but, honestly, not totally surprising—that, again, you can see a correlation between the states that have legalized sports betting and those that haven’t, and when people lose bets, they’re more prone to commit acts of domestic violence.

There’s, similarly, a correlation, in that same respect, where sports betting is legal and higher rates of binge drinking. So you can think about it either fueling or just coinciding with a lot of other problematic activity. And it’s why, to really take stock of what this means for society, you’ve got to look at the bigger picture, not just some of these raw numbers that are thrown in our faces all the time.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think that most people have probably heard there’s an older study that’s not about sports betting, but it’s just about, you know, an NFL home team’s upset loss can cause a 10 percent increase in the rate of at-home violence. This is a famous David Card study.

And the thing that I think is really interesting about the Card-Dahl study is that when we’re talking about upset losses—these are, like, unexpected losses, when the home team was predicted to win, and then they lose—you would think, Oh well, maybe in the states where there was an upset win, when the home team was predicted to lose and they actually win, maybe you see a decline in domestic violence, but that doesn’t happen. There’s basically an asymmetry here—

Funt: Oh gosh.

Demsas: —in the gain-loss utility function. So it’s like: You’re actually just gonna get more domestic violence. You’re not gonna even it out or something like that. And that, I think, becomes a really big problem when you are thinking about this paternalism issue here, because I can imagine people hearing this episode are just like, Yeah, this sounds really bad, but do I think the government should be in charge of banning something just because people are making bad decisions?

The downstream effects here are what I think are really convincing. You know, no one consents to having domestic violence happen to them, obviously, ever. But that that might increase as a result of someone else choosing to bet on sports seems, you know, even beyond the pale.

Funt: Yeah, absolutely. I think this debate often gets reduced to, Should this be outlawed, or should it be legal with hardly any restrictions? And I think it oversimplifies the argument, and it—we’re really past that. I don’t know how many states that have legalized it are going to go ahead and say, This was a mistake. Let’s outlaw it.

But there’s such a spectrum within that dichotomy, of: Should there be restrictions on advertising? Should there be restrictions on the enticements for customers? Should we require affordability checks to make sure people are betting at least vaguely within their means? All these different regulations that ought to be debated instead of, Should we ban this? which, of course—you’re right—is going to get a bad reaction from a lot of people who don’t like the government overstepping in the decisions we make.

I think consumer protections were the main argument for legalization. So whether we’re living up to that promise and delivering actual protections that protect the people who were betting illegally, and now we’ve said this is a safer way to do things—that, I hope, is where the conversation goes.

Demsas: I actually was surprised. I was trying to look up what people actually want to happen with legalization here, and I was shocked. Only 8 percent of people—there’s a Pew poll about this—only 8 percent of people thought it was good for the country that sports betting was legal. And 34 percent said it was a bad thing. The rest said they thought it was neither good nor bad. I would not have expected that. Is that what you find when you’re reporting, that people are saying that they think it’s bad that we’re allowing this?

Funt: Yeah, I try not to put too much stock in the anecdotal. Even though I’ve interviewed so many hundreds of people for my work, I’d rather rely on an academic who’s doing a proper study.

That said, yeah, I find it interesting, not only how many average people feel that way, but how many professional bettors, who you’d think would be the biggest evangelists for legalization and defending the way they make their livelihood—a lot of them are some of the most vocal about, This has gotten out of control. It’s crazy that there aren’t more guardrails to protect ordinary people.

I even hear plenty of people who work in the industry say, States and even perhaps the federal government could be doing more to protect customers. So it’s not just casual people who see all the ads and say, Gee, this has run amok. It’s people who are right in the middle of it who feel that way.

Demsas: So you mentioned that other countries have had experiences with this as well. Are there regulations you would copy from other places that maybe can improve our situation?

Funt: Yeah, and I try not to be, you know, a public-policy advocate as a reporter, but I will just say things that a lot of people, whether they’re health experts or player-safety advocates, are encouraging to at least be debated.

So one of them is: Countries that have banned advertisements that use expressions like free or risk-free or no sweat or bonus deceptively—so they’re basically making it sound like a can’t-lose proposition, when either you can lose the money you’re betting on the bonus, this offer, or you might get a little money through the bonus, but you’re obviously going to lose money over time—some countries have tried to weed that out.

There have been a lot of countries that have restricted when and how you can advertise, to try to minimize the number of young people that are seeing gambling ads day after day. So they might say you can’t advertise during sporting events or during certain hours of the day when kids are more likely to be watching TV.

Affordability checks are a polarizing one because that does tend to feel quite paternalistic, but in a lot of the places that have imposed those, the thresholds are sky-high. They’re not telling you, You should spend your money here or there. They’re saying, If someone’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars within a day of signing up, maybe you ought to check in and see if they can afford to be doing that—things that are a lot more palatable than you might think when you hear a phrase like affordability check.

So there’s so many different reforms. Another one that is getting a lot of buzz at the federal level is this idea of a national self-exclusion list. So one thing that’s quite helpful for people with problems is they say, I’d like to cut myself off from gambling, to remove that temptation. But currently, let’s say I live in New Jersey—I can do that in New Jersey, but if I drive 15 minutes into New York or Pennsylvania, that exclusion doesn’t apply in those states. So it’s enormously tempting to do that. It might make sense to have a national self-exclusion list. So operators that are functioning across state lines have to honor exclusion, no matter where you are.

Things like that, again, it’s not about, Should we outlaw this? or, Should we backpedal on the decision to legalize? There’s this whole host of consumer protections that might be worth considering.

Demsas: Yeah, one thing I’d heard talked about is also not allowing people to make bets with credit cards, such that you have to have the money, so you can’t run up these large bills that you literally cannot pay back. And it seems like something about allowing it everywhere you are is a problem, right?

There’s a level to which I don’t know that we’re putting the genie back in the bottle on online betting, but the idea that you can pull out your phone at any point when you’re stressed out, that you don’t have to go somewhere, seems like a problem. And maybe creating some sort of temporal bounds, like maybe you can’t do it on college campuses or something like that—you can’t do it in schools in general, or you can’t do it at bars or something—you know, that might create some backlash here, but it indicates that, you know, there are ways to reduce the problem here.

Funt: You’re right that you have to use geolocation when you use these apps so that they can tell that you’re in a legal betting state, and it’s extraordinarily precise and effective. So if you’re in D.C. and you go into a federal building, suddenly your sports-betting app no longer works. It literally, like, works if I’m in a yard within the okay zone versus the not-okay zone. It’ll pick up on that.

There’s a state delegate in Maryland named Pam Queen, who’s also a professor at Morgan State University, who had the idea of: We could use this to either ban sports betting on college campuses or do something even more modest, like ban it in classrooms or in underage dorms or dorms during certain hours. The possibilities, as you were saying, are limitless, and it doesn’t have to be as severe as, you know, You can’t bet at a stadium or at a bar. It could be things that I think most people would agree sound appropriate, like, You shouldn’t bet in a freshman dorm or, you know, during class.

So yeah, that is a really potent tool that hasn’t caught on anywhere, but I think she and other people are going to be pushing for that.

Demsas: I then also want to ask you about your experiences interviewing legislators. So there are a lot of legislators who are involved in this effort, a lot of governors who have signed bills to allow sports betting or to allow online betting in their states. Have you talked to anyone who’s exhibited any kind of concern with how things have gone?

Funt: Buyer’s remorse, in some cases. Most notably, I’d say: I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022 and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet.

It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas. As you were saying, it’s pretty commonsense that if you can bet from literally anywhere at any time of day, that’s gonna be quite a different situation than if you have to go to a casino, or even go to Las Vegas, in order to bet—or hunt down a bookie and find ways to bet through crypto or other sort of sketchy things that a lot of people are uncomfortable doing.

The idea that you can swipe to deposit money on your phone and then tap a couple of times and bet limitless amounts at any time of day is such a game changer. He was saying, We didn’t really process what a difference that would make, and I wish we had. So yes, he’s maybe the most forthcoming about that, but there are a lot of lawmakers who are seeing the fallout, in a lot of different respects, and saying, Maybe we need to re-regulate, as a lot of the rest of the world has decided is appropriate.

Demsas: Well, Danny, always our last and final question. This has been an episode chock-full of ideas that were good on paper. But what is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Funt: All right, so I was living in New York after college. I had a tiny balcony. I went and bought seeds to grow. I think it was, like, cucumbers and basil. And I was getting breakfast with my buddy Brian, and I was like, Dude, you will not believe how cheap these seeds are. We could totally grow vegetables and herbs and whatever else and sell it, and the margins would be crazy, and we’d make a killing. And he was like, So your business idea is farming? And I was like, Touché, Brian. You’re right. This is maybe not the most groundbreaking business idea. So he set me straight on that one.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, you didn’t live out—I actually, so my first house when I moved out of college was this group house, and we had the idea to farm some vegetables for the house, and it was successful in that we had some kale and sweet potatoes. But I have never in my life been like, I am never getting my food from my own labor. Like, this is just never happening again.

Funt: Oh, yeah.

Demsas: It’s a lot of work, and I feel like it caused so much strife in our household, too, because people were like, Who’s gonna harvest? What do we do with all this, like, extra kale now that no one wants to eat, because we have 20,000 bushels of kale. And you’re just, like, giving it away. But I’m glad that you did not actually have to execute your good on paper idea. You just figured it out beforehand.

Funt: I liked it, the basil I grew, but it wasn’t scalable. Brian was right.

Demsas: Danny, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Funt: My pleasure. Thanks again for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.x

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Ever wonder what would happen if the police just stopped enforcing traffic laws? New Jersey State Police ran a sort of experiment along those lines, beginning in summer 2023—about a week after the release of a report documenting racial disparities in traffic enforcement. From July of that year to March 2024, the number of tickets issued by troopers for speeding, drunk driving, and other serious violations fell by 61 percent. The drop, The New York Times reported last month, “coincided with an almost immediate uptick in crashes on the state’s two main highways.” During 2024 as a whole, roadway fatalities in New Jersey jumped 14 percent even as they dropped slightly nationwide. The obvious conclusion: The withdrawal of enforcement in the Garden State led some motorists to drive more recklessly. For better or worse, law enforcement is necessary for traffic safety.

In the past decade, though, an ideological faction within the road-safety movement has downplayed the role of law enforcement in preventing vehicular crashes. This coalition of urbanist wonks, transportation planners, academics, and nonprofit activist professionals has instead fixated on passive measures to improve drivers’ vigilance and conscientiousness: narrower lanes that encourage drivers to slow down, curb “bumpouts” that widen sidewalks and shorten crosswalks, and other physical changes meant to calm vehicular traffic.

For good reason, progressives have been alarmed by racial inequities in law enforcement, and New Jersey’s experience to some degree validates those concerns: Troopers eased up on writing tickets because they apparently were unhappy about outside scrutiny of discriminatory practices. But the episode is also a forceful demonstration of the value of enforcement as a public service. If you take coercive measures off the table, you must agree to share the road with people driving under the influence or at double the speed limit.

[M. Nolan Gray: L.A.’s twin crises finally seem fixable]

In many communities, the effort to promote safer driving through the physical redesign of streets comes under the banner of Vision Zero, a movement whose goal is to eliminate all traffic fatalities. But the design-first approach has become a substitute for individual responsibility rather than a complement.

Historically, design was only one ingredient in Vision Zero; in practice today, it is just about the only one. Enforcement is expressly denigrated by even mainstream organizations. In 2022, when launching an initiative called “Dismantling Law Enforcement’s Role in Traffic Safety: A Roadmap for Massachusetts,” the nonprofit LivableStreets Alliance claimed that “traffic stops do not meaningfully reduce serious and fatal crashes.” (Some grieving families in New Jersey might disagree.) The umbrella group Vision Zero Network, another nonprofit, asserted in November that “despite some achievements” associated with law enforcement, “there is ample historical and current evidence showing the harms and inequities of some types of enforcement, particularly traffic stops.” (This is clear and troubling; the question is what conclusion to draw.) Some activists even criticize automated speed cameras—which require no intervention by potentially biased officers—because of the financial burden on low-income drivers.  

Shrugging off driver misconduct is the wrong prescription for racial and economic inequities. People in disinvested communities disproportionately become victims of reckless driving. Black pedestrians face a mortality rate more than double that of white pedestrians. More than anyone, vulnerable people need the vigorous protection of the law, not an abdication of that paramount public service.

The U.S. has the deadliest roads in the rich world. About 40,000 Americans a year now die in traffic, and a growing proportion of them are pedestrians and cyclists who don’t even benefit from our car-first paradigm. I understand why safety advocates favor solutions beyond writing tickets. As I have previously argued, driving is both cheap and a prerequisite for daily life in most of the country; vehicles are large, heavy, and underregulated; laws against their misuse are inadequate; and roads are wide, conducive to speeding, and unsafe to cross on foot. Transportation planners and legislators have gone too far in reshaping our landscapes and our laws to accommodate the automobile, with damaging consequences for racial equity and other priorities.

[Gregory H. Shill: Americans shouldn’t have to drive, but the law insists on it.]

Yet the growth in vehicle deaths is difficult to explain simply in structural terms. For starters, nearly all of the surge in U.S. pedestrian fatalities since 2010 comes from collisions at night. Changes to street design simply do not address the leading causes of crash deaths: failure to wear a seatbelt, drunk driving, and speeding.

Today’s Vision Zero incorporates some useful insights about design’s power to influence behavior. The goal of reconfiguring streets is to “nudge” people toward better driving, much as calorie counts on menus are supposed to promote healthier eating. These ideas, seemingly everywhere in the early 2000s, draw on a pop version of Nobel Prize–winning behavior-economics research. With the benefit of additional evidence, we now know that their effectiveness is easier to show in a TED Talk than in real life.

In the case of traffic safety, the overemphasis on nudging has warped our thinking. For example, street-design essentialism presumes that the most dangerous driving behaviors are unconscious, when we know that many drivers actively choose to be reckless. No country that has improved its safety record—including Sweden, where Vision Zero was born in the 1990s—has made it infeasible to drive a car dangerously if you want to. What our peer countries have done is pair targeted design improvements with targeted and even intensified enforcement campaigns.

American street-safety activists used to demand better enforcement. Now, rather than focus on curbing dangerous conduct by individuals, many of them cast about for bigger villains, placing the blame for high roadway mortality on indifferent state highway departments and greedy automakers who profit from oversize SUVs. In this view, individuals are merely passive users of the transportation system, hostage to invisible forces. Coupled with activists’ obsession with street design, this approach frequently leads to a weird 21st-century form of progressive patronage: commissioning like-minded nonprofits and consultancies to produce reams of reports and unrealistic renderings; holding interminable, democratically unrepresentative listening sessions; and minting white-elephant projects that defy parody.

Street redesigns have their own pitfalls. For starters, they are far easier to plan than to execute. Changes to the built environment must run the NIMBY gantlet twice: first to get built, and then a second time to withstand the post-installation backlash. All of that became clear in the 2010s, when conditions were uniquely favorable to infrastructure building. Today, borrowing costs are several times higher, and the construction industry is short about a third of the workforce that it had before the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, input materials have skyrocketed in price. The combination has doubled roadbuilding costs in some cases. New tariffs, if implemented, would exacerbate these problems.

[M. Nolan Gray: City planning’s greatest innovation makes a comeback]

Beyond street design, what should communities focus on to improve safety? Half of vehicle occupants killed by crashes were not wearing their seatbelt. Drunk driving is a factor in nearly one-third of crash fatalities. The same is true of speeding. Not all speeding is the same, though; going 55 miles an hour in a 50 zone generally isn’t the problem. Super speeders—motorists driving, say, double the limit—are likely overrepresented in traffic deaths. Street design, which seeks to make the average driver more conscientious, does nothing to target the anti-social behavior of outliers.

Rather than justifying a permissive approach to reckless driving, social justice demands a more focused campaign. Just who is helped by letting reckless drivers (many of them affluent suburbanites) speed through working-class neighborhoods? Speed cameras can’t do everything—they may not deter super speeders, for example, and they’re useless against stolen cars and counterfeit plates—but where they are effective, they can remove bias from enforcement. There is no contradiction in saying that neither dangerous driving by private citizens nor abuses of police power will be tolerated. Road-safety activists should redirect some of their energy away from promoting the design-industrial complex and toward targeting the deadliest behaviors.

Design is only a tool. Just as a beautiful office renovation cannot boost morale at a failing company, many grave transportation-safety problems cannot be solved through design. Let’s start a new era of safety by ticketing unbelted motorists, talking more about super speeders (and seizing their car and license), and renewing the decades-long push against driving while intoxicated. America’s enormous traffic-death rate is a complex problem. As New Jersey has recently reminded us, enforcement must be part of the solution.

Only one historic site bears the name of America’s 22nd and 24th president—and it’s no Monticello.

The Grover Cleveland Presidential Library and Museum occupies a one-story building in Caldwell, New Jersey, behind the house where its namesake spent the first few years of his life. The museum is the size of a small living room. A Dunkin’ sits across the street.

The site befits Cleveland’s legacy. He was a large man but not larger than life; his two terms in the White House were most remarkable for the four years that separated them.

Until November 5, Cleveland held the distinction of being the only U.S. president to regain the office after voters turned him out: He won the White House in 1884, lost his reelection bid in 1888, and then won again in 1892. Donald Trump matched Cleveland’s achievement by winning last year’s presidential election, robbing him of his exclusive claim to history but also renewing interest in a president whom time has largely forgotten. The two men share little else in common. Cleveland curtailed government corruption, adhered to a restrictive view of presidential authority, and opposed expansionism; Trump flouts ethical norms left and right, chafes at limits to his power, and wants to buy Greenland. Yet their new bond could reshape Cleveland’s legacy.

A grandson of the former president, George Cleveland, has been fielding calls from reporters and history buffs for months. “Anything that shines a light on a dimmer part of history is a good thing,” he told me. “It’s a Grover Cleveland renaissance!” joked Louis Picone, a historian who sits on the board of the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Memorial Association.

One rainy evening last month, the association gathered in Caldwell—a small town about 20 miles west of New York City—for its annual meeting. The event doubled as a ribbon-cutting for a newly renovated room in the museum that the group is trying to expand. At the moment, the exhibit isn’t much: some photographs, a desk, a chair Cleveland used in the White House.

The event drew a couple dozen people, who listened to Picone deliver a talk on “extraordinary” presidential elections. But he didn’t discuss any of the past three, which weren’t exactly ordinary. Picone mentioned Trump only glancingly and ignored his new connection to Cleveland.

[From the March 1897 issue: Mr. Cleveland as president]

Indeed, Trump is a touchy topic for the keepers of the Cleveland flame, not all of whom are happy to see their guy joined forever in history alongside the 45th and soon-to-be-47th president of the United States. Paul Maloney, the association’s president, politely declined to answer when I asked him how he felt about Cleveland losing his unique distinction. “We have a political figure that I’m trying to keep the politics out of. I know how odd that is,” Maloney told me. “I don’t want anyone to infer any point of view that our organization might have.”

The group’s vice president, Bunny Jenkins, wasn’t as diplomatic: “It had to be Trump?!”

Besides their comeback connection, Cleveland and Trump are about as different from each other as any two presidents. Trump was born into New York wealth; Cleveland was a minister’s son who helped provide for his family after his father’s early death. He was a hard worker and, at times, a hard drinker; Trump abstains from both long hours and alcohol.

Both Cleveland and Trump campaigned as anti-corruption populists, but Cleveland followed through on his commitment to clean government. (His dedication was literal at times: As mayor of Buffalo, New York, he helped construct a modern sewer system for the foul-smelling city.) A Democratic reformer, Cleveland fought Tammany Hall as governor of New York. After he won the presidency in 1884, he insisted on paying his own train fare to Washington, according to a 2022 biography by Troy Senik. He once refused to accept a dog that a supporter sent him as a gift, deeming it inappropriate.

As president, Cleveland developed such a reputation for public integrity that he earned the nickname “Grover the Good.” He curbed the spoils and patronage system that pervaded politics at the time—and that Trump has begun to re-create.

Whereas Trump has repeatedly stretched the bounds of presidential power, Cleveland respected them. He interpreted the president’s constitutional responsibilities narrowly and did not try to whip votes for his agenda in Congress. But within his authority, Cleveland acted aggressively: He vetoed 414 bills during his first term, more than all 21 of his predecessors combined.

Few of the political controversies that Cleveland confronted as president are relevant anymore; the pensions of Civil War veterans and the gold standard were major flashpoints in the late 19th century. But one major fiscal debate has lingered—tariffs—and he and Trump took opposite sides. Cleveland pushed for lower tariffs even though they were popular, a stance that likely cost him his first attempt at winning a second term.

Despite his reputation for good governance, President Cleveland had significant flaws, including ones that much of his 19th-century electorate would have overlooked. He opposed women’s suffrage, and he made virtually no effort to protect Black people in the South from the terror and disenfranchisement of Jim Crow.

Accusations of misconduct in his personal life nearly derailed his first bid for the presidency. A Buffalo newspaper reported that he had fathered a child out of wedlock years earlier with a widow named Maria Halpin. The story alleged that Cleveland hired detectives to abduct Halpin, take the baby, and force Halpin into a mental institution. A few months later, and just before Election Day, the allegations became far worse. According to Senik, Halpin signed an affidavit attesting that Cleveland had “accomplished my ruin by the use of force and violence and without my consent.” Days later, however, Halpin denied her own charges and said she had signed the document without reading it. Cleveland won the election, and his opponents did not bring up the allegations in subsequent campaigns.

Whether or not he assaulted Halpin remains unclear. “The only two people who know are dead,” Picone told me. But historians, including Senik, have generally “given Grover Cleveland the benefit of the doubt” because of his reputation for honesty, Picone said. “It was so out of character,” he said of the allegations. Cleveland did acknowledge, though, that he had been romantically involved with Halpin, and he never denied that he was the father of her child. In 2020, the historian Susan Wise Bauer wrote in The Atlantic that Cleveland had managed to present himself as “the upstanding, hapless victim” in the whole affair, creating a new playbook for politicians accused of sexual misconduct.

[Read: The lessons of 1884]

The Republican Benjamin Harrison beat Cleveland in 1888 thanks in part to Cleveland’s aggressive push to lower tariffs, a position that united the GOP in opposition and divided his own party. “What is the use of being elected or reelected unless you stand for something?” he asked a staffer, according to Senik’s book. Cleveland took his ouster much more gracefully than Trump would more than a century later when he tried to overturn an election. Asked why he lost, Cleveland replied simply, “It was mainly because the other party had the most votes.” Whereas Trump skipped his opponent’s inauguration, Cleveland held an umbrella over Harrison’s head to protect him from the rain as he took the oath of office.

Trump began considering a comeback bid almost as soon as he left the White House in 2021. Cleveland did not, but his wife, Frances Cleveland, had an inkling he might return. As the Clevelands were preparing to leave the White House in early 1889, she told a staffer, “I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.” The confused aide asked when she planned on visiting. “We are coming back just four years from today,” she replied with a smile.

Cleveland’s second inauguration (Library of Congress)

Trump was the first former president in decades to try to return to the White House. But comeback attempts were more common in the 19th century. Cleveland was motivated to run again in part because Harrison had abandoned fiscal constraint, presiding alongside what became known as “the Billion Dollar Congress.” Cleveland won a campaign that drew relatively little interest from the public, but the mark he set—a second, nonconsecutive presidential term—would stand for 132 years.

The Grover Cleveland Birthplace Memorial Association has been trying to build a proper library and museum for decades. New Jersey, which owns the historic site, has agreed to foot most of the bill, but red tape has caused delays. The Cleveland home is still undergoing refurbishments, and the museum won’t fully open to the public for at least another few months. “We’re breaking our backs trying to get this place open,” Dave Cowell, the association’s 86-year-old secretary of the board and former president, told me.

Over the past three decades, visitors to the Cleveland birthplace have grown from about 300 annually to roughly 9,000 a couple years ago, he said. That still pales in comparison to the expansive presidential museums dedicated to Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, which draw hundreds of thousands of people every year. But Cleveland is gaining on second-tier presidential rivals such as Martin Van Buren, America’s eighth president, whose historic site in New York receives about 13,000 people a year, Cowell said.

The association is planning a grand opening for the museum later this year. Trump will be invited, Picone said. But the group won’t try to leverage the Trump connection for extra attention. No exhibitions examining their new link in history are in the works. It’s just too soon, Paul Maloney told me. “Now, 10 years down the road? Fifteen years down the road? We might think differently.”

As Cleveland’s fans are quick to note, his presidential comeback is just one part of his legacy. His story has receded from national memory largely because his presidency did not coincide with momentous events; the country was not at war, and he did not die in office. Maloney, a retired social-studies teacher, admitted that Cleveland didn’t even make it into his U.S. history curriculum. But, Picone argued, “he was an excellent president.”

That Cleveland’s most famous achievement has now been matched, his grandson George conceded, is a loss. “Nothing lasts forever,” he told me. But he took solace in the thought that Trump’s return to the White House won’t completely erase his grandfather’s record comeback. After all, George said, “he’s still the first.”