Give the basketball to such diverse talents as Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walt Frazier, Rick Barry, George McGinnis, Dave Bing, or Bob McAdoo, to name a tiny fraction, and you get dramatically distinctive styles of dribbling, passing, shooting, and defensive play. There is great room in basketball for demonstrable physical artistry that often can be compared to serious dance.

So there I was in 1967 leafing through the sports section of a newspaper one day (I still read that section first) when I came across the name Earl Monroe. I had never heard of Monroe, knew nothing of his daily rookie brilliance nor ever heard of his astounding feats at Winston-Salem. I just liked the name, free-floating, three syllables, and euphonious to me. Earl Monroe. The name worked. (Years later, when I did a film called Sleeper, I named myself Miles Monroe. On me it was kind of a funny name.) I came across Monroe’s name again every few days as I glanced over the basketball box scores in a casual, disinterested way and noticed that he invariably led the scoring column.

Monroe 34, Monroe 36, Monroe 24, Monroe 28, Monroe 40! I was impressed by the consistent high numbers and repeated his name every now and then like it was a mantra. It still sounded musical. Earl Monroe. I think I even recall seeing a picture of him on the cover of Sports Illustrated that year and thinking he was very interesting looking. I was, and I don’t know why, aware of Monroe in some special way. Although I didn’t follow his sport much then, if someone had awakened me in the middle of the night and said, “Quick, name your favorite basketball player,” I’d have snapped back: “Earl Monroe.” This was probably his first working of magic on me, though I had no real idea of what Baltimore Bullet fans were witnessing and feeling each night when they saw him play and referred to him as the Pearl or Black Jesus.

The first time I saw Monroe, an actor friend said, “Come with me to the Garden tonight. I want you to see this guy. You’ll like his style. It’s real herky-jerky.” That was in 1968. By then I was more interested in basketball and had begun following the Knicks a little. They had made the playoffs and had captured the imagination of New York. I went and saw Monroe score 32 points against Walt Frazier. This is Walt Frazier, mind you, who played the guard position as perfectly as it has ever been played and who was to be voted on the all-defensive team seven years running. Thirty-two points and Frazier said, “I had my hand in his face all night. He shoots without looking.”

I went the next night too and while the Knicks double-teamed Monroe at every turn, he tore the place up with a buzzer beater that he flipped in as he ran across the midcourt line at halftime, and he kept running right into the locker room.

My impressions of Monroe then? I immediately ranked him with Willie Mays and Sugar Ray Robinson as athletes who went beyond the level of sports and sport to the realm of sports as art.

So is the effort of sampling inner experiences a game worth the candle? The half century Hurlburt has spent collecting samples of conscious experience has yielded some interesting and important findings. The first finding, to which I can personally attest, is just how little most of us know about the characteristics of our own inner experiences. “That’s probably the most important finding that I’ve got,” Hurlburt said.

Inner speech, which many of us – including many philosophers and neuroscientists – believe is the common currency of consciousness, may actually not be all that common. Hurlburt estimates that only a minority of us are “inner speakers”. So why do we think we talk to ourselves all the time? Perhaps because we have little choice but to resort to language when asked to express what we are thinking. As a result, we’re “likely to assume that’s the medium for inner thought”. We’ve also read so much about the importance of words to thinking – words written by philosophers and scientists (not to mention novelists) for whom it may well be true.

But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of “unsymbolised” thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images.

The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of descriptive experience sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar – not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognise the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word – thinking – and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.

The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).

…than that no one is in control of events. Free will forces personal accountability.

In your book, you say that one of the most significant developments emerging in pain treatment is the fact that the brain is at the center of any pain experience. Can you tell us more about why that matters?

What I think has become clear — and I’m not the first person to say this — is the idea that if the brain doesn’t decide you have pain, then you don’t have pain.

The brain can also create pain where it seems like it wouldn’t exist.

Still, even if May 24, 2006, was unremarkable on the baseball diamond, something Hall of Fame-worthy did happen on that day. At 10 a.m. ET, XM Satellite Radio broadcast the fourth episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour.” The show first aired a few weeks earlier, and, from the outset, it featured a peculiar format: After a noir-ish introduction, beginning with the smoky, sultry lines of a female narrator (“It’s nighttime in the big city”), a series of roughly 15 songs followed. These songs were not gathered according to genre, nor were they sequenced in chronological order. Rather, they were put together thematically. For example, “Theme Time Radio Hour’s” inaugural episode was titled simply “Weather.” Its first song was “Blow Wind Blow” (1953) by Muddy Waters, and its final track was “Keep on the Sunny Side” (1928) by The Carter Family. In between, songs by guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and R&B pioneer Stevie Wonder also appeared, though, despite their respective greatness, Hendrix and Wonder weren’t the biggest stars of the show. That honor would belong to none other than the DJ himself — American singer, songwriter, poet, actor, author, and all-around cultural icon Bob Dylan.

“Theme Time Radio Hour’s” second episode centered on the theme of “Mother,” its third on “Drinking.” But Episode 4, which aired just a few hours before Sabathia’s dominant start in Minneapolis, was dubbed “Baseball.” For those who know Dylan’s work, it’s hardly surprising that he would dedicate an episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour” to the national pastime. Perhaps most famously, he and stage director Jacques Levy (1935-2004) wrote the song “Catfish” in honor of Hall of Fame pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter (1946-99), who retired in 1979 as an eight-time All-Star and five-time World Series champion. Dylan recorded the song in July 1975, right in the middle of Hunter’s first year with the Yankees — a forgettable season for the Bronx Bombers but another stellar one for Hunter, who led MLB in wins for the second time in his career. Dylan’s song, however, is less about Hunter’s on-field accomplishments than his path from small-town North Carolina to the bright lights of Yankee Stadium. Over a bluesy acoustic guitar and harmonica, Dylan juxtaposes Hunter’s rustic love of the outdoors with his newfound status as the highest-paid pitcher in MLB history. Yet, the gravelly insouciance of Dylan’s voice suggests that Hunter is worth every penny. As he sings in the chorus, “Catfish, million-dollar man / Nobody can throw the ball like Catfish can.”

MORE:
Theme Time Radio Hour: The Annotated “Baseball” Episode (Fred Bals, Nov 18, 2025, Medium)

Then go back to Stranger Things. El is not a Christ-figure. She is not even an angelic figure. She is a superhero, which is an entirely different trope. Superheroes are simply power-endowed human beings. What they do with that power is the hinge on which everything turns. El extracts herself from her compromising situation in a very different way from Judas. She surrenders the power to harm. My gut feeling is that this motive does not actually endorse suicide. It simply endorses sacrifice: of known security, known life. Beyond that, we do not get to follow her.

Back to The Chosen. The point about Jesus is that while both human and divine, he is precisely not a superhero. He will not, as Judas believes, slay his enemies at the last moment: that has never been his MO. Judas’s main flaw is a failure of the imagination, which you could characterize as, simply, bad theology. This is the scandal of Christianity. The author of life, in some way, must die. The Christ will descend, voluntarily, into the valley of bones, through the agony of the Passion. The agony of defeat: of real, absolute, undeniable death. Already in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him being mentally tortured by what is coming, and by the sleepiness and fearfulness of his followers. Nicodemus caught in his ivory tower trying to belatedly join the dots. Peter and James and John bewildered and afraid. The apostles clutching a few primitive weapons as a ten-ton-truck hurtles down the infested freeway of hell.

No one is on point. No one is going to win. Jesus knows all this. His human body is racked with fear and troubled to the point of collapse. But he goes to meet his betrayer anyway. What follows is the cry of the innocent the world over and through to our time, this time, this terrible moment in history. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

God had to experience the Fall in order to fully comprehend us, and, thereby, forgive us.

Was it a pep talk or a provocation? Allen’s response, in October, to the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” had elements of both.

The proffered “compact” marked a grim phase in the Trump administration’s dealings with elite universities. The letter from the U.S. Department of Education, sent to nine leading universities, offered a leg up in federal funding to universities willing to accept a broad range of conditions — including “abolishing institutional units” that “belittle” conservative ideas, defining “male” and “female” “according to reproductive function and biological processes,” and ensuring that foreign students “are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values.” Such demands left many on campus feeling a bleaker-than-usual sense of persecution. In one characteristic opinion essay, Lisa Fazio and Brendan Nyhan, professors at Vanderbilt University and Dartmouth College, respectively, called the deal a “devil’s bargain,” warning that “any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would give up its legal rights and forever be subservient to the whims of the government.”

Allen’s reply went against the prevailing mood. In an essay titled “Why I’m Excited About the White House’s Proposal for a Higher Ed Compact,” published on her Substack before appearing in these pages, she framed the compact as an opportunity for universities to work in concert to develop a package of higher-ed reforms. While urging university leaders to reject the compact as written, she insisted that universities needed “to talk to each other” to arrive at some deal that would address the sector’s problems. (Rules intended to prevent collusion on tuition, she told me, have hampered cross-institutional collaboration.)

“By allowing civic education to erode, by abandoning a commitment to pluralism that includes viewpoint diversity, and by failing to achieve approaches to admissions and credentialing that are broadly experienced as fair,” she wrote, “universities have failed to contribute as they might” to the health of American democracy.

In staking out this position, Allen was elaborating upon an essay she’d published some months before in The Atlantic. That essay proposed several concrete reforms through which universities might begin to establish “a new social contract” with the American people. Elite institutions, Allen argued, should move toward lottery admissions so that students who clear a certain merit threshold are selected by geographic or socioeconomic criteria. (In addition to fostering “cultural cohesion,” she told me, a lottery would curb the “meritocratic arrogance that is a feature of our current system.”) Selective universities, she suggested, should increase the size of their undergraduate-student bodies. They should experiment with three-year degrees as a way of controlling tuition costs. And they should support “viewpoint diversity” through faculty recruitment and perhaps by establishing two-year visiting professorships for scholars in right-leaning think tanks.

For decades, higher-ed policy has, via investments in STEM education, focused on national security and economic productivity. We have, Allen warned, neglected the university’s deeper purpose, which is the maintenance and fortification of civic strength.

To many observers of higher education, such ideas seem reasonable and overdue. Aspects of Allen’s agenda, however, might seem to align suspiciously well with emerging trends that many scholars view as noxious. In recent years, a spate of civics institutes and Great Books programs has arisen across the nation. Many of these programs are conspicuously conservative. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican of Tennessee, announced a $6-million civics institute at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville as a way of fighting “anti-American thought”; the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education was conceived, by a shadowy nonprofit called the Council on Public University Reform, as a countermove against “cancel culture and uniformity of opinion on campus.” Tens of millions of dollars in grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in January, went to support professorships in programs in civic leadership and Western civilization — programs some faculty regard as affirmative action for right-leaning scholars at a time when jobs in the humanities are punishingly scarce.

Allen believes, Ober told me, that the new civics institutes, even those mandated by legislators with an “ideological agenda,” could play a role in strengthening democracy. “Danielle is saying, let’s work and try to make them part of the solution rather than marginalizing them and saying they’re impure.” (Ober is a co-director of the Stanford Civics Initiative.)

While Allen singled out UT-Knoxville’s civics program for praise, she was cautiously measured in describing the curricular battles that have engulfed the humanities. “Some of the critiques that conservatives have made about college curricula are sound,” she told me. “We haven’t taught enough bread-and-butter basics of U.S. history, constitutionalism, and the like. Some of the critiques from Black studies, which require us to expand our horizon of what voices matter, are also sound.”

Is this fairmindedness simply — centrism? For some of Allen’s collaborators and admirers, the appeal of her higher-ed reformism lies in its promise to reorient academic discourse around the center. Paul Carrese, director of Arizona State University’s Center for American Civics, sees Allen’s project as “rebuilding a broad middle” in higher education. He hopes that Allen-style civic education might help alleviate the angry polarization that characterizes contemporary American political life. “More critical, radical views farther to the left, farther to the right — in a way, these views might be too prominent right now,” Carrese told me. “The focus should be on expanding the center and a healthy culture of Socratic dialogue across center-left and center-right.”

In a working paper published this week, a team of researchers surveyed economists about their outlook over the next five and 25 years. Most expect the economy to grow a bit more quickly as A.I. improves, but not to diverge substantially from historical patterns. If the technology improves rapidly — a possibility they consider unlikely but plausible — they envision a far more drastic scenario with faster growth but also greater inequality and the disappearance of millions of jobs.

“Economists are certainly taking A.I. seriously,” said Ezra Karger, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who was one of the study’s authors.

Our saga begins with a chart in a paper I wrote and ends with a sentence in a new American Compass report citing me. In late 2022, I wrote Bringing Home the Bacon, which examined whether the evolution of young men’s earnings could explain the sharp decline in sole-breadwinner families or the dramatic increase in single motherhood. Many populists argue that a deterioration in men’s economic standing has led to these changes. My report showed that real median annual compensation among young men was essentially the same in 2019 as in 1969 and that by various “marriageability” thresholds, young men were “at, near, or above historic highs.” That ruled out declining male earnings an explanation for the striking changes in the family that occurred over this period.

In my paper, I made a number of conservative methodological choices because I wanted to show that male marriageability had not declined even using methods that worked against that result. Nevertheless, in public events, podcasts, and even the inaugural post for his “Understanding America” Substack, Cass highlighted that young men’s earnings were lower or no higher than “50 years ago.” He did so again during our 2024 debate on the state of the economy.

After the latter, I took to X to share some updated results that I didn’t get a chance to mention in the debate. I indicated that, using an improved price index that I had developed earlier that month, young men’s real median post-tax compensation rose 20 percent from 1973 to 2019, or $7,200, and rose 24 percent ($8,500) from 1989 to 2019. Optimistically, I wrote, regarding whether young men’s earnings have stagnated over 50 years, “I’ll trust my chart doesn’t get cited anymore in support of that claim!” I also stated unambiguously that, “In case it’s not clear, the chart [showing stagnant earnings] was what I considered the best evidence then, but it is not the best evidence now. You [Cass] can still cite it, obviously, but you should either say why you think it is still the best evidence or clarify that you don’t care.”

It pleases Welch when songs prove to be malleable in meaning. “I love that Dave and I kill ourselves working to make things just so,” she says, “and then we put them out there into the world and they can do anything and mean anything to anybody. That’s why we work so hard on them.” But there is one way of interpreting the spirit of their music that bothers her: “If someone were to think that our songs are maudlin or pessimistic, I would be shocked. Because I hear them as strong, quiet. I think if you really digest those narratives, there’s an incredible undercurrent of perseverance. When we’re singing those songs, we think the people are going to make it through.” Lange had a similar perspective on the people she photographed weathering the cruel deprivations of the Depression. “I many times encountered courage,” she told a Smithsonian archivist. “Real courage. Undeniable courage.”

There’s another point upon which Welch is insistent: she and Rawlings haven’t walled their material off in the past by depicting characters in the throes of displacement, hardship, and economic precarity. She throws out hypothetical questions: “Do people not still have children who die tragic early deaths? Of course they do. Do people not still take narcotics to try to ease the pain for a moment? Of course they do.” “One More Dollar,” her song about the inner turmoil of a migrant worker caught between the necessity of toiling for meager but essential pay and a longing to be back with the people they love, has powerful resonance at a time when when ICE raids — blatantly driven by racial profiling and often targeting businesses staffed by immigrants — have created life and death stakes nationwide.

Welch’s singing, initially squarely in the austere Appalachian tradition, has developed a miraculous blend of leanness and litheness over the years. Her recordings of “Dark Turn of Mind,” on 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest, and “Here Stands a Woman,” on 2024’s Woodland, are fine examples; she applies her reedy instrument to supple slides, bluesy bends, and insinuating phrasing. What comes through in Welch’s vocals is a sense of bearing up beneath the weight of the world.

When I describe this quality, she confirms that she feels it too, and points to the influence of Jerry Garcia’s singing. Recently, she tried to turn a friend on to the Dead, and received a disappointing reaction. “They just sound really tired to me,” the friend commented dismissively. That left Welch feeling at least partially justified: “I said, ‘Well, yes, of course they’re tired. They’re touring musicians. They’re exhausted. But don’t you hear that [Garcia’s] constantly pushing up against that incredible weight?’”

So many folk and country songs pine for the idealized and unchanging old home place and the saintly, nurturing mother figure who waits there. But there’s an equally long tradition of ballads of the rambling, rootless, implicitly male troubadour. The Dead served as colorful embodiments of the latter role, and Nevins, Welch’s college buddy, could see her migrating toward it before she’d formally chosen music as her vocation.

When I was in graduate school, I remember reading an essay in which Jacques Derrida purports to “write as a woman.” I was in a gender studies program in a highly secular context, and we had a lively seminar on Derrida’s essay, eventually reaching the consensus that no, Jacques, you can’t simply step into a woman’s identity like you might step into a set of trousers. This was the mid-2000s, a different era, when the word “woman” still had some fleeting connection, however tenuous, to female embodiment.

Now, fifteen years later, we have reached a juncture where appropriating the identity of women is considered laudatory, liberating, the next frontier of civil rights—and raising cautions or questions is blasphemous. Increasingly, defining a woman as an adult human female is considered hate speech.

The principle predates the Constitution. Our colonial history brought the tradition over from the British, who recognized that birth on a nation’s soil carried citizenship. Later, after the shameful Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied citizenship to Black Americans, the nation fought a Civil War and corrected that injustice for all future Americans with the 14th Amendment. Designed to reflect America’s diverse identity, it codified birthright citizenship and placed citizenship beyond the whims of any one politician.

The law on birthright citizenship is clear, and a majority of Americans support it. But Mr. Trump refuses to accept limits on his ethnic gatekeeping and his attempts to bend the Constitution to his will. And he fails to recognize that birthright citizenship is American culture.

Our country’s cuisine shows it. I regularly work with chefs who blend their ancestral recipes with local staples to bring us meals that forge a culture for all of us. In the United States, we savor flavors from around the world precisely because birthright citizenship has been the law of the land for generations. I’ve visited the Nigerian American community in Houston, where the suya spice brought me back to the masala of my own childhood. I’ve eaten the cuisine of Cambodian refugees, as well as their children and grandchildren, in Lowell, Mass. And I’ve slurped delicious ceviche with Peruvian chefs in hipster Brooklyn.

America is interesting and strong because of the contributions of immigrants and their children, mixing with the ingredients of other cultures and evolving over time, creating both a blend of the world’s cuisines and our own unique food culture all at once.

The U.S. middle class is shrinking, but not because more Americans are poorer. Instead, more households are climbing into the echelons of the upper middle class due to income gains in recent decades, according to research from the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute.

About 31% of U.S. households earn enough to be considered upper middle class, a roughly threefold increase since 1979, making it the nation’s largest economic group, the research found. Meanwhile, the share of Americans in the “core” and “low” middle class segments has declined over that time, primarily because more households in those income groups have jumped ahead economically, AEI found.

Was Carl Brigham a racist? The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, and his racism led him to twist his own data to arrive at faulty—and bigoted—conclusions.

During World War I, Brigham was tasked with developing psychological tests to measure the cognitive abilities of newly drafted soldiers representing a cross-section of American military-aged men. It was a golden opportunity to gather data, and the tests Brigham developed were the ancestors of the modern SAT exam.

During the early 20th century, there was also a eugenics movement sweeping the country, and like many white Americans of the era, Brigham bought into the notion that some races were superior to others. While he viewed Blacks as inferior to whites, this wasn’t his primary concern. Instead, he was focused on the influx of “inferior” white immigrants coming into the country.

Brigham and other eugenicists of the day split white people into three groups: Nordic, from Northern Europe; Alpine, from Central and Eastern Europe; and Mediterranean, from Southern Europe. Based on his testing, Brigham came to the conclusion that the Nordics had the highest intelligence, followed by the Alpines, with the Mediterraneans scoring the lowest. Because of this, he warned that the waves of newly arriving Alpine and Mediterranean immigrants threatened to lower our collective national intelligence level.

Never “just trust the science.”

This story might have faded into history. But a few years ago an elderly, unhoused man named Charles McDowell walked into the Philadelphia record store Brewerytown Beats, looking for a copy of the “From The Inside…” He revealed to the store’s owner, Max Ochester, that he had played bass in the band. McDowell later passed away, but Ochester tracked down the former lead singer, Ron Aikens, singing street karaoke for tips outside of Philadelphia City Hall.

Aikens told me in an interview that the band had been allowed to spend entire nights away from the prison attending industry parties, wearing free-world clothes. When they returned, he recalled, other prisoners called them “idiots” for not using the opportunity to escape.

At least one member took the bait. At the Stevie Wonder gig, Aikens recalls McDowell, the bass player, fled the venue and remained on the lam for a few months until he was caught. But even with the occasional scandal, the band was good PR for the state: “We were ambassadors for the prison system,” Aikens said. “If something was going wrong, they’d roll us out to show what wonderful things they were doing.”

The most important of Chabad’s ideas lie in the deep insights of the Jewish mystical tradition into the nature of God’s creation. In the language of the 16th century Tsefat school of Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, before there was a creation, before there was time, before there was a “before,” there was only the Infinite Light of God. No boundaries or delimitations existed, no definitions, as nothing was defined, as there was no finitude, only the infinite.

How could a world of individuation come to exist when there could be no boundaries? Every particular thing would be overwhelmed by infinity.

But limitlessness means as well that there was no boundary to stop God from choosing to limit Himself in order to make a world that could endure and enter into a relation with God blessed by Him with a consciousness and an identity.

These are the preconditions of love. The world was created by God choosing to make love possible by making space to bring the beloved into being.

It is this world that God loves. He sees it as He creates it and calls it good, again and again. He sustains it by choosing again and again to make the space for His beloved creatures to know themselves and then to know Him. God becomes greater in this way than any being trapped in stasis, imprisoned in infinity.

God informs us in His word that we humans are created in His image and that He has put the world within us, enabling us both to work it and preserve it. We can become deputized creators, created in His image, making the world become better and preserving its ancient good, the way it has always been in God’s mind, which sees through to the end from the beginning.

We learn that we become great through making room for others — not by compulsion, for God is uncompelled — but by choice. We become greater through submitting to love, through choosing to limit our fixation with the infinite realm of our private self to willingly love our fellows and make space for them in every meaningful way, even to the last full measure of devotion.

The Democrats’ consolidation of left-wing liberalism is one piece of a broader backlash to Trumpism that shows up in the polling data right now. Another notable finding this week is from a new CNN/SSRS survey that found that about one-quarter of the public holds an unfavorable view of both parties. These are the so-called “double haters.” This group prefers Democrats on the 2025 generic ballot by 31 points.

This is a big deal for two reasons. First, that’s a massive shift; Double haters broke for Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. Now they’re swinging hard the other way.

Like Franklin’s polling, the CNN report also finds that Democrats’ gains are driven largely by opposition to the GOP, not enthusiasm for Democrats themselves. When asked what they dislike about Democrats, 22% of double haters called the party “do-nothing” and 11% said they aren’t standing up enough to Trump and the GOP, while 10% said they’re too liberal.

In addition to that, Schirmer says the previous ownership had run a strategy where they would buy relatively costly players to try to challenge for the league. They also found Lille had a high number of fees still to pay on transfers.

“If you run a football club, your ideal world is that you have more receivables than payables (on transfers),” Schirmer says. “But what we saw in 2020 was a huge number of payables for all these expensive players they had brought. So you had external debts and you had payables. And then to round up the picture, you had a significant salary bill. It just wasn’t sustainable.” […]

Lille’s new owners also set about revamping the club’s academy, one that has produced Eden Hazard, Benjamin Pavard and Yohan Cabaye. In the years before their takeover, very few players had graduated from the academy to the first team.

Schirmer says it was key to their vision as it helped forge a strong identity, developing players who had an attachment to the club and city, as well as a production line of talent.

She says the academy at the club’s Domaine de Luchin training centre, 20 miles east of Lille and close to the Belgian border, is home to players from the age of 15. Lille have around 70 children there, with 35 living on site and attending the private school.

In the younger age groups, there are around 50 children — from under-eights to under-11s — who train at partner clubs. For the under-11s to under-15s, also around 50 children, Lille work with a public school that offers a sports focus. The children go to school there while training with the club. They have the same set-up for the girls’ teams.