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My personal foray into college-basketball fandom comes at a transformational time for the sport, as players accept major promotional deals and gambling reshapes the economics of the game.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

A deadly strike in Gaza What the suburb haters don’t understand What’s so bad about asking where humans came from?

More Money at Stake

The other day, something amazing happened to me: I opened my CBS Sports app and saw my March Madness bracket at the top of my pool. The high of victory was fleeting; it seemed that my first-round prowess was a result of pure luck. Even though I soon slid down the rankings, I was totally delighted, and hooked.

I am coming to the sport at a moment of transformation. In recent years, college basketball players and teams have questioned what it means to be a school athlete, and to what extent playing college ball is a career in itself. In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of college athletes in an antitrust case against the NCAA. That same month, the NCAA announced a name, image, and likeness policy that would allow college athletes to make money through social media and marketing deals. And earlier this year, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team formed a union, arguing that they operated as employees of the college (the university disagrees).

As more states legalize sports gambling, the American Gaming Association estimates that $2.7 billion will be wagered legally on the men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments this year—a surge that the NCAA is reportedly not thrilled about. Ratings have been high in March Madness men’s games so far this year, according to the NCAA, but it’s really the women’s games that are exploding in popularity. Last week, the game between the University of Iowa and West Virginia University broke the women’s tournament record for pre–Final Four viewership, with nearly 5 million people tuning in on ESPN. This uptick is buoyed in part by the popularity of Iowa’s star point guard, Caitlin Clark.

Clark’s fame has even reached new fans like me: My pick to win the women’s tournament is Iowa. A record 10 million people watched Iowa’s championship game against Louisiana State University last year, a loss they soundly avenged yesterday. When Clark shattered the NCAA Division I women’s-basketball scoring record earlier this year, Nike released a T-shirt that read: You break it, you own it. When she topped “Pistol” Pete Maravich’s NCAA all-time scoring record just a few weeks later, she joined a short list of women who hold records across both men’s and women’s college basketball. That event cemented her place among the collegiate greats. And, as Jemele Hill wrote in The Atlantic, the attention on Clark, who is white, has also prompted “a wider conversation about how many Black women … have been marginalized in this sport despite their invaluable contributions.”

Clark is the most visible, but far from the only, woman playing at an elite level this year. Angel Reese, who led Louisiana State to the NCAA championship last year, and JuJu Watkins, who was the No. 1 recruit in the nation in 2022 before committing to the University of Southern California, were among the other stars drawing more fans to the games this season.

They’re playing in a different college-sports landscape after the recent league changes—one with more money at stake. Players can now receive compensation beyond just scholarships, and some people estimate that Clark’s major earnings beyond the court are in the range of millions of dollars. Her face is on cereal boxes in Iowa grocery stores, and she’s secured deals with Nike and Gatorade. Her games even reportedly boost local economies when fans dine and book lodgings nearby. As Alex Kirshner wrote in The Atlantic last month, “Clark’s singular level of stardom obscures an even bigger shift taking place in college sports: After decades of treatment as second-class citizens, women are surpassing men in popularity, interest, and financial potential.”

Part of the fun of the tournaments, I have learned, is that wild things can happen. Small teams overtake titans; solid teams are felled by underdogs having a great day. I have found learning even the basics of bracketology rewarding, and I understand why so many other fans are obsessed this time of year. (So obsessed, in fact, that March Madness could cost employers more than $9 billion in lost productivity, according to a career-coaching firm.) Even though my bracket is cooked, I’ve left March with a greater appreciation for the game.

Related:

Caitlin Clark is just the beginning. Sports betting won.

Today’s News

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed yesterday that they have withdrawn from Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, after a 14-day siege. At least 300 bodies were found on the hospital grounds, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed a bill that would have required transgender students to compete on sports teams based on their sex assigned at birth. Last night, Donald Trump posted a $175 million bond, underwritten by the billionaire Don Hankey’s Knight Specialty Insurance Co., in his New York civil fraud case.

Evening Read

Larry Towell / Magnum

A 600-Year-Old Blueprint for Weathering Climate Change

By Kathleen DuVal

Beginning in the 13th century, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a dramatic climatic shift. First came drought, then a period of cold, volatile weather known as the Little Ice Age. In its depths, the annual average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere may have been 5 degrees colder than in the preceding Medieval Warm Period. It snowed in Alabama and South Texas. Famine killed perhaps 1 million people around the world.

Native North Americans and Western Europeans responded very differently to the changes … It is true that, in the 1400s, the Indigenous people of what is now the United States and Canada generally lived more sustainably than Europeans, but this was no primitive or natural state. It was a purposeful response to the rapid transformation of their world—one that has implications for how we navigate climate change today.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I will leave you with this delightful exchange between Fran Lebowitz and a reporter, which appeared in a 2023 New York Times article about the widely beloved dancing-elephant mascot at the New York Liberty’s WNBA games:

The author Fran Lebowitz said she was surprised to see the mascot when she and a friend went to see the Liberty … at Barclays Center in Brooklyn this summer.

“I fail to understand what the elephant has to do with Brooklyn,” Ms. Lebowitz said. “Because to me, it’s the Republicans that are symbolized by an elephant.”

Of Ellie’s dance skills, she added: “She did seem to be, I guess, very good for an elephant.”

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Around the year 1300, the Huhugam great chief Siwani ruled over a mighty city near what is now Phoenix, Arizona. His domain included adobe-and-stone pyramids that towered several stories above the desert; an irrigation system that watered 15,000 acres of crops; and a large castle. The O’odham descendants of the Huhugam tell in their oral history that Siwani “reaped very large harvests with his two servants, the Wind and the Storm-cloud.” By Siwani’s time, Huhugam farms and cities had thrived in the Sonoran Desert for nearly 1,000 years. But then the weather refused to cooperate: Drought and flooding destroyed the city, and Siwani lost his awesome power, driven away by an angry mob.

Siwani was one of many leaders across North America in the 13th and 14th centuries who, in part because of climate change, faced destruction of the civilization they ruled. Beginning in the 13th century, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a dramatic climatic shift. First came drought, then a period of cold, volatile weather known as the Little Ice Age. In its depths, the annual average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere may have been 5 degrees colder than in the preceding Medieval Warm Period. It snowed in Alabama and South Texas. Famine killed perhaps 1 million people around the world.

Native North Americans and Western Europeans responded very differently to the changes. Western Europeans doubled down on their preexisting ways of living, whereas Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures to fit the changing climate. A common stereotype of Native Americans is that, before 1492, they were primitive peoples who lived in tune with nature. It is true that, in the 1400s, the Indigenous people of what is now the United States and Canada generally lived more sustainably than Europeans, but this was no primitive or natural state. It was a purposeful response to the rapid transformation of their world—one that has implications for how we navigate climate change today.

Both Native North Americans and Western Europeans had taken advantage of the Medieval Warm Period, which began in the 10th century and ended in the 13th century, by farming more intensively. Compared with the preceding centuries, the era brought relatively predictable weather and a longer growing season that allowed new crops and large-scale agriculture to spread into colder climes: from central Mexico to what is now the United States, and from the Levant and Mesopotamia to Western Europe, Mongolia, and the Sahel region of Africa.

In both North America and Western Europe, agricultural expansion allowed population growth and urbanization. Native Americans built grand cities on the scale of those in Europe. Their ruins still stand across the continent: the stone structures of Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico; the complex irrigation systems of the Huhugam, in Arizona; the great mounds of Cahokia and other Mississippian cities on rivers across the eastern half of the United States. Many groups formed hierarchical class systems and were ruled by powerful leaders who claimed supernatural powers—not unlike kings who ruled by divine right in Europe.

But then the climate reversed itself. In response, Native North American societies developed a deep distrust of the centralization, hierarchy, and inequality of the previous era, which they blamed for the famines and disruptions that had hit cities hard. They turned away from omnipotent leaders and the cities they ruled, and built new, smaller-scale ways of living, probably based in part on how their distant ancestors lived.

[From the May 2021 issue: Return the national parks to the tribes]

The oral histories of many Native nations tell of revolutions against and flights from cities. Cherokee oral history recalls how “the people rose up” and destroyed “a hereditary secret society, since which time, no hereditary privileges have ever been tolerated among the Cherokees.” Descendants of Chaco Canyon narrate how wizards corrupted some leaders, so their people fought against the rulers or simply left to establish more egalitarian societies. O’odham oral tradition tells that after their ancestors revolted, they built smaller settlements and less centralized irrigation systems throughout what today are the Phoenix and Tucson basins.

The cities that Native Americans left behind during the Little Ice Age—ruins such as those at Chaco Canyon and Cahokia—led European explorers and modern archaeologists alike to imagine societal collapse and the tragic loss of a golden age. But oral histories from the generations that followed the cities’ demise generally described what came later as better. Smaller communities allowed for more sustainable economies. Determined not to depend on one source of sustenance, people supplemented their farming with increased hunting, fishing, and gathering. They expanded existing networks of trade, carrying large amounts of goods all across the continent in dugout canoes and on trading roads; these routes provided a variety of products in good times and a safety net when drought or other disasters stressed supplies. They developed societies that encouraged balance and consensus, in part to mitigate the problems caused by their changing climate.

To support their new economies, Native North Americans instituted decentralized governing structures with a variety of political checks and balances to prevent dictatorial leaders from taking power and to ensure that all members of a society had a say. Power and prestige lay not in amassing wealth but in assuring that wealth was shared wisely, and leaders earned support in part by being good providers and wise distributors. Many polities established councils of elders and balanced power by pairing leaders, such as the war chief and the peace chief; setting up male and female councils; and operating under family-based clans that had members in multiple towns. In the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, for example, female clan leaders chose male representatives to the Confederacy Council and could replace them if they didn’t do right by the people. In most societies across North America, all of the people—women as well as men—had some say in important decisions such as choosing a new leader, going to war, or making peace. As the Anishinaabe historian Cary Miller wrote in her book Ogimaag: Anishinaabeg Leadership, 1760–1845, Native American nonhierarchical political systems “were neither weak nor random but highly organized and deliberate.”

Underlying the structural changes was an ideological shift toward reciprocity, an ideal of sharing and balance that undergirded economics, politics, and religion across much of the continent. The Sonoran Desert–living O’odham, for example, developed a himdag, or “way of life,” that taught that people are supposed to share with one another according to what they have, especially the necessities of food, water, and shelter. Reciprocity is not merely generosity; giving away a surplus is an investment, insurance that others will help in your own time of need. “Connection to others improved the chances of overcoming some calamity or disaster that might befall the individual or group,” the Lumbee legal scholar Robert A. Williams Jr. wrote in his book Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600–1800.

By the late 1400s, the civilizations of what today is the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico were more different from Western Europe than one would have predicted during the Medieval Warm Period. From Russia to England, Europe moved in the opposite direction in response to the changing climate. When the period of droughts and then the Little Ice Age hit, hundreds of thousands of Europeans starved to death, and the famines left people more susceptible to the Black Death, which hit especially hard in the cities. Western Europeans, like North Americans, searched for a ruling system that could best keep the people fed and safe, but they opted for the opposite approach.

In general, as Western Europe recovered from the devastation of the Black Death and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, it became more centralized under the rule of hereditary absolute monarchs. Rulers in Europe amassed military power at home and abroad, building large armies and investing in new military technologies, including firearms. Militarization decreased the status of women’s labor, and unlike the complementary gender structures that developed in Native North America, patriarchy was the basis of power in Western Europe, from the pope and kings to lords and priests, down to husbands within households. Through mercantilism and colonization, Europeans sought natural resources abroad in order to increase their power at home. That impulse brought them into contact with Native North Americans, whose history of adaptation they could not see. Nor could they see how intentionally Native Americans had decentralized their systems of governance.

[From the March 2002 issue: 1491]

Native Americans who visited European cities or even colonial towns were shocked at the inequality and lack of freedom. The Muscogee Creek headman Tomochichi, for example, visited London in 1734 and expressed surprise that the British king lived in a palace with an unnecessarily large number of rooms. An Englishman recorded that Tomochichi observed that the English “knew many things his Country men did not” but “live worse than they.” In turn, there were Europeans who wondered how North American societies could exist with dramatically fewer strictures—and have less poverty—than their own. They generally labeled Native American societies primitive rather than recognizing them as complicated adaptations. Yet human choices had created these striking contrasts in reaction to the same changed climate.

The descendants of North America’s great cities came to see value in the very act of trying to get along better. What if, instead of doubling down on the ways we have been living, we were to do what 13th- and 14th-century Native North Americans did, and develop more balanced and inclusive economic, social, and political systems to fit our changing climate? What if we put our highest priority on spreading prosperity and distributing decision making more broadly? It sounds unprecedented, but it has happened before.

This article has been adapted from Kathleen DuVal’s upcoming book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.