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A quarter-century ago, David Saylor shepherded the epic Harry Potter fantasy series onto U.S. bookshelves. As creative director of childrens publisher Scholastic, he helped design and execute the American editions of the first three novels in the late 1990s. But when the manuscript for J.K. Rowlings fourth book landed on his desk, Saylor sat up straight: It was huge. Bigger, more complex and narratively intricate than virtually any storybook ever aimed at children. I had to really think, he said in a recent interview. How are we going to typeset this book? How are we going to print a million copies? How are we going to get enough paper? Bound and shipped, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire clocked in at a formidable 734 pages2.5 pounds. It was, of course, another in a series of massive hits that collectively spent a decade atop The New York Times Bestseller List, ensnaring both children and adults, including most of Saylors friends. He jokes that until the advent of Potter, mostly no one cared that I worked in children’s books. As excitement for the series grew, friends would ask him when the newest installment was due . . . and what happens next? Suddenly my job became important, he said. But the book and its six co-volumes now serve another purpose: Theyre an eloquent proof point in an ongoing conversation in the publishing world: Are kids still reading books? By the time Potter arrived, Saylor had lived through waves of predictions about the next extinction-level event to doom his industry. First it was TV, then video games. Before that it was radio and comic books, once derisively called the ten-cent plague. I’m only slightly jaded by these reports, said Saylor, 65, only because people are always predicting that kids are going to stop reading, and that the end of publishing is near. This time, it feels different. Even as childrens publishing explodes with new talent and excitement from fans online, new distractions and diversions are precipitously driving down the share of young people who read for fun. Its a long-simmering problem that even the optimist Saylor acknowledges his industry must confront. The reading class Over the course of two generations, from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they never or hardly ever read for fun on their own time has nearly quadrupled, from just 8% to 31%. During that time, the percentage of middle-schoolers who read for fun almost every day has fallen by double digits, according to surveys conducted for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test widely known as the nations report card: In 1984, 35% of middle school kids read for fun almost every day. By 2023, it was just 14%. The phenomenon is part of a larger shift away from reading, research suggests: A new study from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40% among adults over the last two decades, a sustained, steady decline of about 3% per year. [Image: Courtesy The 74] Findings like these have sparked fears that, after more than a century of steadily expanding literacy, reading is devolving into an act relegated to a small group of elites, a reading class that enjoys books while the rest of us see them as, in the words of scholar Wendy Griswold, an increasingly arcane hobby. Its a strange and thorny problem that in some sense seems contradictory: If you followed around a young person for a day, youd likely see that she is reading constantly, but often in tiny fragments. In addition to school assignments, shes taking in a ton of atomized content: alerts, text messages, memes and social media posts. All those bits add up for sureone study found that the typical American reads the equivalent of a slim novel every daybut it isnt the same as sitting down to read a book. For young people, thats having downstream effects, with NAEP reading scores slumping even before the pandemic and college professors increasingly reporting that students are uncomfortable tackling long reading assignments, let alone complete books. Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor who teaches in the Great Books School, a discussion-based classics program at North Central College in Naperville, Ill., recently reported that his students are intimidated by any reading longer than 10 pages. They seemingly emerge from readings of as little as 20 pages, he said, with no real understanding. Adam Kotsko [Photo: Courtesy Adam Kotsko] That has put pressure on professors to design courses with feer readings: I got to a point where I was cutting to the bone so much that there wasn’t even enough to discuss in some class sessions, he said in an interview. It seems like the habits of sustained reading are not being taught in the first place, in some cases, and they’re just being replaced with nothing. While COVID lockdowns took a toll on reading, the problem predates the pandemic. Many observers point to several possible culprits, including schools fraught approaches to reading instruction and two decades of test-driven K-12 school pedagogies, which often de-emphasize fiction in favor of short non-fiction passages. This has all taken place amid the dawn of smartphonesthe iPhone turned 18 in Juneand the rapid, unregulated rise of social media. So Kotsko and his colleagues are careful not to place the blame on students shoulders, but on a schooling and media ecosystem they cant control. We are not complaining about our students, he wrote recently. We are complaining about what has been taken from them. Continuous partial attention Gabriel Baez, 15, said phones are a big distraction at his South Florida charter school. As soon as teachers give students even a moment of downtime, the phones come out. Several teachers have begun requiring students to stash them in special pouches during class. No distractionsthat’s the only thing that I think helped a lot of us. A sophomore, Baez said hes excited to read the science fiction thriller Ready Player Onea novel about, of all things, video games. He loved the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie, but said most days hes overscheduled and barely able to find a minute to open a book. Gabriel Baez [Photo: Courtesy Gabriel Baez] Hes in class from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., then does homework until 5 p.m. Dinner is at 6 p.m., then he studies a bit more. From 7 to 8 p.m. its soccer training, then bed so he can wake up early and do it all again. I really don’t have time unless I decide to substitute something. For many young people, school is what gets in the way of books. Julia Goggin, 15, grew up reading books and loving them. She consumed the first few Harry Potter books unassisted in second grade and finished the series by fourth grade. She read a lot in middle school. In high school? Not so much. Like Baez, shes heavily scheduled, running cross country in the fall and track and field in the winter. Shes in her schools theater group, which means after-school rehearsals. Then homework. All of it leaves little time for reading anything aside from school assignments. If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore, she said. Because school isn’t fun. A junior at a private high school in Wilmington, N.C., Goggin enjoys reading, but said her two younger brothers, eighth- and ninth-graders, dont. They never got into reading the same way I did when they were little. Since then, I guess, they’ve just played video games instead. That’s, like, all they do all day. Over the years, she has noticed a change in herself: As a kid, she read for relaxation. But now all I want to do is scroll on TikTok, which is really bad, she said with a laugh. Now I have to be more conscious: Instead of going on my phone, I have to make the decision to read, which is different than before. When I was younger, it was just a default. To be sure, young people in the U.S. are reading wordslots of words. Perhaps more than ever. In her most recent book, the literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf noted that research from as far back as 2009 found that the average American reads what amounts to 34 gigabytes of information, or about 100,500 words, dailyfrom newspapers, magazines, books, games, messages and social media posts. For a bit of perspective, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Harper Lee classic, clocks in at about 100,000 words. While all that grazing certainly adds up, Wolf said, its rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated. Rather, those 34 gigabytes represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another. She said the fact that young people are reading all those words should comfort no one. It means nothing. The inabilityor the unwillingnessto go deeper is whats more important. I think we have, really, a demise of deep reading, which for me is synonymous with critical thinking and empathy and the beauty of the reading act. While the 20th century saw literacy rates in the U.S. climb steadily, technological developments such as movies, radio, TV and the Internet shifted modern culture away from reading and writing and toward visual and oral communication. One unintended result: at least two generations of young people who see books and reading as optional. In the meantime, 65% of 8-to-12-year-olds now have an iPhone or other smartphone, according to a 2024 survey by the market research group YPulseand 92% of 8-to-12-year-olds are on social media, where theyre inundated with memes and short-form videos. Carl Hendrick [Photo: Courtesy Carl Hendrick] Carl Hendrick, a Dublin-born professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam and co-author of the 2024 book How Learning Happens, accuses this generations parents of all but abdicating their responsibilities. He likens smartphones cognitive disruptions to the health effects of cigarettes, recalling that he grew up in Ireland at a time when smoking was ubiquitous. You could smoke on busesyou could smoke on airplanes. You could smoke anywhere. We look back on that now with horror. And I think the same thing will be true of phones. Well go, How did we allow 11-year-olds to go onto social media? Hendrick, who has emerged internationally as a leading advocate for improving classroom instruction via better understanding of learning science, said digital distractions are taking a toll, hijacking kids ability to engage their working memory on difficult texts and problems. That kind of laser-like focus, he said, is rapidly disappearing from our lives due to the weaponized distraction of social media. It’s at an extraordinary level of sophistication to try and grab your attention, he said. In a recent Substack newsletter, he laid down the gauntlet: Solitude, slowness and sustained attention are no longer default states but acts of resistance. And as those conditions erode, so too does the possibility of the moral work that deep reading once quietly performed. While social media sites are the latest offenders, the phenomenon is hardly new. In 1998, the sociologist and computer researcher Linda Stone coined the term continuous partial attention to capture the ways in which the first digital television networks allowed users to connect and be connected 24/7. She described a kind of early FOMO, or fear of missing out. But it also generated an artificial sense of constant crisis, a dopamine-generated high alert thats hard to extinguish. By contrast, Hendrick said, giving oneself over to reading deeply, whether its literature, philosophy or any complex text, offers something more: a rehearsal for real life, and for the patience we need to deal with one another. It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting, he wrote recently. This is not merely a virtue. It is a survival skill for a pluralistic, tolerant society. Ironically, one of the big drivers of the discredited whole language movement was to foster a love of books and reading. But what educators missed at the time was that not teaching all kids to read proficiently at a young age meant reading became more and more laborious as they got older, since they couldnt handle more complex texts, said Holly Lane, director of the University of Florida Literacy Institute. Nobody likes doing something that they’re not good at, she said. They may love the idea of reading, but they don’t like the act of reading. That, to many observers, is the original sin of the reading problem: the nations uneven commitment to teaching reading in ways we now know are more effective, such as explicit phonics instruction, which systematically teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds. Other, less effective methods, such as whole language instruction, emphasize immersion in texts rather than attention to isolated skills. Like many educators who are pushing schools to embrace scientific approaches to literacy, Lane is hopeful about improvements in states like Mississippi and Louisiana. But she worries that progress at the elementary school level will be wasted if educators cant help students at the secondary level develop the stamina to read longer, more difficult texts. Without that, she said, they wont develop into readers. When they leave high school, even if they can read, they don’t. Others worry that the rush to teach phonics without attention to solid background knowledge will continue to yield disappointing results. Phonics instruction is trendy to care about right now, said Boston Universitys Elena Forzani, but its being enacted in pretty superficial ways that ignore student motivation. We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum, said Forzani, who directs the universitys Literacy Education and Reading Education programs. In order to be able to read deeply, she said, students need many opportunities to enjoy, analyze, discuss and write about a text and the issues or problems it presents. But when she visits classrooms, she sees students reading short, disconnected popcorn passages with new topics every day, sometimes multiple times a day. While more and more kids are getting the explicit phonics instruction they need at an early age, the vast majority are learning to read in a very isolated fashionthe focus is on the skills. And kids don’t care about that. Theyre humans, like the rest of us. You only want to learn a new skill if it’s going to do something for you. Very good readersand voracious readers When he visits schools to sign books, the Japanese-American writer and illustrator Kazu Kibuishi sees this in action. His popular nine-volume Amulet series of graphic adventure novels about siblings who must find their kidnapped mother, finds a rapt audience of dedicated fans. I don’t really buy that kids are not reading anymore, because I see the opposite of that all the time, he said in an interview. I find kids to be very good readersand voracious readers. But state-of-the-art digital entertainment has conditioned them to want more from their media. Their minds are encoded to get information as fast as possible, he said. They have to turn that off when they go to school. An action-packed page from Kazu Kibuishis Amulet graphic novel series. [Image: Courtesy Scholastic Graphix] Kibuishis publisher, Scholastic, has gone all in on graphic novelsSaylor, the creative director, even established an imprint dedicated to the gnre. Teachers and librarians regularly tell him that kids read them voraciously and repeatedly, until they fall apart. Kibuishi said he creates comics that provide high-quality, dense information on every page, with fast-moving, high-stakes plotlines, rich illustrations and heightened emotions from his characters. His inspirations are the classic Marvel comics from the 1950s through the 1980s. Big ideas were baked into small spaces, he said. Creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby put a tremendous amount of life experience into the slim stories, which he compares to little sponge dinosaurs that expand exponentially in water. A self-described average student, Kabuishi found his calling in storytelling after reading Ernest Hemingways The Old Man and the Sea in high school. I read it pretty much in one sitting, he said. And when I was done with the book, I was transformed. The words felt like pictures, and the book was so short, he said. It was the first time reading didnt feel like homework. I felt like I was on a fishing boat. I felt like I had just experienced the rise and fall of this fisherman’s journey with this fish. And it was so poetic. The little book felt so much bigger than any other book than I’d been asked to read in class. The struggle to find such magic books is real, said Kelsey Clodfelter, a veteran English teacher at a Chicago public high school. She teaches students whose skills are often years behind where they should be by 10th or 11th grade. When reading is hard for you, when it is literally difficult for you to decode words at the age of 16 or 17, reading is a very painful experience, she said. It’s also really embarrassing. Kelsey Clodfelter [Image: Courtesy Kelsey Clodfelter] Clodfelter, 35, who has a large TikTok following as “Mrs. C,” said Common Core reforms of the past decade essentially replaced book-length readings with short non-fiction texts designed to prepare students for the kind of reading theyll do in the real world. While it didnt prohibit longer reading assignments, it may have made it harder for many teachers to assign appropriate books. And COVID, she said, really did a number on us in terms of the transactional nature of school, sending students the clear message that grades mattered more than learning, that standards in general were lowerand that nearly any effort was satisfactory. The upshot, she said, is that shes working harder all the time to get kids through reading assignments: She often swaps classic texts for contemporary memoirs, such as I’m Glad My Mom Died by actress Jeanette McCurdy. She invites students to read silently in class for 20-minute stretches. She creates book groups, and even sits with them and reads passages aloud. Students still won’t read the book, she said. Nobody can learn this much These days, even the most elite students are rebelling against reading. Daniel Willingham, a longtime University of Virginia professor, said he has noticed lately that his studentssome of the most successful that the system producesnot only complain about long readings but about being asked to learn as much as I ask them to learn. Like Clodfelter, Willingham believes the pandemic scaled back expectations that have yet to be restored. Each year since 1985, he has taught an introduction to cognitive psychology course that has changed little in 40 years. Students read about a chapter a week, averaging 30 pages or so. A careful reading, he said, would require about four hours of work. This is the first year since the pandemic [that] I’ve been hearing from students, This is an unreasonable expectation. Nobody can learn this much. A leading authority on cognitive science in the classroom, Willingham suggests to his students that they consider different study strategies. Long an advocate for the importance of broad background knowledge in reading instruction, Willingham said hes actually cheered and optimistic that more educators are realizing the importance of a rich curriculum. But he worries about the time young people spend onlinerecent research suggests that they now spend most of their waking hours in front of screens, he said. That may be the biggest irony embedded in this dilemma: The Internet has seemingly decimated young peoples desire to read books, offering them endless distractions and opportunities to do somethinganythingelse. But dig a little deeper and youll find it is also doing a lot of heavy lifting, making it easier than ever for young people to find great books and connect to likeminded people who want desperately to talk about them. Daphne LaPlante, 25, a video editor in Austin, Texas, posts videos to TikTok, Instagram and elsewhere proclaiming her love of books. She got her start on the app in 2021, in her final year of college. Daphne LaPlante [Photo: Courtesy Daphne LaPlante] Scrolling on the popular video app, she realized that other young people were also hungry for conversations about books. One of her favorites, the fantasy novel Six of Crows, was being made into a TV show, she recalled and I had nobody to talk to about it. So she turned on her phones camera and hit record. Soon her videos began detailing what shed read eac month, and before long she was recommending books. After a while, publishers took note and started sending her advance copies of new titles. LaPlante now has more than 40,000 followers on TikTok and over 30,000 on Instagram, and jokes that she has become a micro-influencer in the corner of the social media site known as BookTok. Born during the pandemic, it has become so influential that it has both crowned new hits and turned a few backlist books into best-sellers. One industry analysis suggests that BookTok has changed behaviors: In 2021, the year it started gaining momentum, book sales rose in the U.S. by 9%, to 825.7 million copies, the most since the research company NPD BookScan began tracking sales data in 2004. I think a big part of getting people into reading is community, she said. For the past year-and-a-half, LaPlante and a friend have also recorded a podcast called Rereading the Revolution, about their love for 2010s-era young-adult dystopian fiction, epitomized by The Hunger Games and similar titles. There are a lot of people, like me, who read those and were obsessed with them as a kid, she said. I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad If hed had a mobile phone 25 years ago, Hendrick, the Irish educator, might well have been on BookTok, forcefully recommending his favorite literature, history and philosophy books. He recalled getting lost as a young man in The Great Gatsby, reading it cover-to-cover in two days. He has since read and taught it many times, but wonders: If he was 16 now, what incentive would he have to read such a book, given all the social forces in teens lives? With so much easily attained dopamine via social media, video games, movies and elsewhere, why would anyone go through the effort? He thinks about what books must look like to his six-year-old daughter. She can read, he volunteered. She’s really clever, but she just doesn’t want to because everything else is so . After considering it for a second, he finally said, She’s in McDonald’s and I’m telling her to eat the salad, and she’s going, I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad. There’s all these chicken nuggets. Why would I do that? To bring back reading, he said, schools may very well have to do more than just improve instruction and reading stamina and find a few tasty books. Theyll have to get mobile phones out of classrooms, he saidactually, buying a phone for a 10-year-old should be outlawed, he said. Many states and schools, to their credit, are getting the message and banning phones for much of the school day. But they may also have to consider a back-to-basics approach that treats reading as an indicator of public health. With cars, we mandated seat belts, he said. We mandated speed limits. It may be the case that we need to say, ‘Kids have just got to read for an hour in silence on their own. That’s just itin the same way you’ve got to eat certain vegetables. In 20 years, Hendrick predicted, well likely discover that reading and, more broadly, deep cognitive focus, offer the same kinds of benefits as exercising or a balanced diet. We’ll look back on this decade, he said, with its easily attained dopamine, its endless mental chicken nuggets and distractions, and realize, We were weaponizing mental health problems. A quarter-century ago, Hendrick recalled, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the novelist Norman Mailer was unequivocal when asked about their significance. He said, It’s going to take us 10 years to figure this out. Call in the novelists. His thing was, we need to get the writers in to make sense of this. People, in other words, need books. No matter how advanced our digital media have become, nothing can replace the depth of understanding they afford. For me, when I read Shakespeare or The Sound and the Fury or [James] Joyce, I was finding out what it meant to be alive, said Hendrick. My struggles were the struggles of other people. And I was learning about ethics and morality. Where are we going to end up without that? This article was also published at The74Million.org, a nonprofit education news site.
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The C-suite executive’s dilemma has never been clearer: there is an analysis gap between recognizing that creativity is an essential skill versus designing space and time for individuals and teams to to build a creative capacity. While 2023 research from Visier demonstrated that 83% of workers admit to “productivity theater”performing busy work that creates the appearance of output without meaningful resultsthat same year, the World Economic Forum declared creativity to be the second most critical skill for our workforce by 2027. The collision of these realities signals a fundamental shift that smart organizations can no longer ignore. We’re entering what I call the “Imagination Era,” and the companies that thrive will be those bold enough to redesign work around human flourishing rather than industrial-age metrics. The Hidden Costs of Our Productivity Obsession The numbers tell a stark story. With 71% of knowledge workers experiencing burnout and job stress (according to the Anatomy of Work Index) costing U.S. industries over $300 billion annually in absenteeism and turnover (American Institute of Stress), our current productivity models aren’t just failingthey’re actively destroying value. While executives worry about quarterly targets, they’re hemorrhaging their most valuable asset: the creative capacity of their people. The irony is profound. At the very moment when artificial intelligence can handle routine tasks, freeing humans to do what we do bestimagine, connect, and innovatemost organizations are doubling down on mechanical approaches that treat people like sophisticated machines. This isn’t just shortsighted; it’s economically destructive. From Extraction to Cultivation: A New Operating System I propose a radical reframe: Instead of asking “How can we be more productive?” what if teams ask “What might we cultivate this year?” This shift from a mechanical, extractive mindset to one that embraces complexity and ambiguity isn’t philosophical luxuryit’s strategic necessity. The difference is profound. Productivity thinking operates in linear equations: 1+1=2. Cultivation thinking embraces “both-and” complexity, leaving room for the kind of metamorphosis that creates breakthrough innovation. According to 2024 research from Thrive My Way, when trained groups engage in creative problem-solving sessions, they generate 350% more ideas that are 415% more original than traditional approaches. The New Scorecard: New KPIs for the Imagination Era We can develop new key performance indicators organized around “Minimum Viable Experiences” rather than traditional output metrics. These aren’t soft measuresthey’re strategic investments in the capabilities that will drive future competitiveness: Human-Centered Metrics include measuring employee connection to meaningful work, minutes per week dedicated to deep reflection, and value creation through idea generation rather than widget production. Teams can track experimentation through small-scale prototypes and measure both organizational and community-impact audacious ideas. Well-being and Rest Metrics recognize that innovation requires renewal. Forward-thinking companies could measure sabbaticals taken and their impact on team creativity, time spent in nature per week, and the productivity boost following movement breaks. Tracking stress reduction through wellness assessments and creating dedicated time for play, measuring new connections generated through structured “recess” time, are practical and novel concepts. Innovation and Learning Metrics focus on interdisciplinary learning opportunities, innovation sprints, and curiosity-driven projects not tied to immediate business needs. What if you tracked the number of walking meetings, recognizing that physical movement often unlocks mental breakthroughs? Organizations ready to make this transition can start with my three-pronged approach: First, conduct a “Cultivation Audit” to identify productivity metrics that may be limiting innovation while developing measures for long-term human development. Second, implement “Seasonal Planning” that aligns organizational rhythms with natural cycles of activity, reflection, and renewal. Third, launch a “Space Design Revolution” that creates environments supporting both individual cultivation and collective creativity. The Competitive Advantage of Creativity The business case is simple: in an age where AI handles routine tasks, the uniquely human capacities cultivated through intentional movement, thought, and rest become the primary drivers of creativity and organizational value. Companies embracing this approach will foster breakthrough innovation through activated default mode networks, reduce costly burnout and turnover, develop essential creativity skills, create sustainable growth patterns, and build stronger collaborative communities. The goal isn’t abandoning productivity measures but expanding our understanding of meaningful work and impact. Organizations that make this shift will define the Imagination Era. The question isn’t whether this transformation will happen, but whether your organization will lead it or be left behind by those brave enough to cultivate human potential in service of extraordinary results.
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E-Commerce
In the summer of 2009, the NFL was bracing for war. The owners had walked away from a collective bargaining deal they had signed just two years earlier, demanding pay cuts, slashed pensions, and two extra games for free. They had stockpiled a $4 billion lockout fund and were ready to shut the game down for a year if that is what it took. On the other side stood a union reeling from the sudden death of its legendary leader, Gene Upshaw. Into that void stepped an outsidera trial lawyer from Washington, D.C., named DeMaurice Smithwhom ESPN called the man with the toughest job in sports. The players had less than $300 million, a string of failed strikes behind them, and the very real prospect of being steamrolled. On top of everything, the players desperately needed to end the owners’ unilateral right under the old deal to add as many games to the regular season as they wished. [Photo: Penguin Random House] But this time, the fight would not be linear. The new leader pushed his players to battle on every frontpublic opinion, Congress, and most of all, in the one place owners thought they couldnt be touched: their money. Out of that fight came one of the most unlikely weapons in sports labor historyan insurance policy against a lockout. It was the first, and only, of its kind. And if the players could pull it off, it might just prevent them from being at the mercy of thirty-one billionaires who saw an opportunity for the greatest power and money grab in the history of professional sports.Excerpted from Smith’s book, “Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game,” this is the story of how how that deal went down. AN ACE IN THE HOLE With negotiations tabled, I did what I do when Im overwhelmed: I escape, and I drink. An old law partner buddy, David Barrett, and I went to Palm Springs, California, and pounded cocktails. Owners had been openly bragging about their $4 billion rainy-day fundenough to survive a months-long pausefor years, even before the dust had settled following the Great Recession. Banks werent in a position to lend so much money, and after meeting so many owners, I couldnt imagine that some of those overgrown man-babies had the discipline to save roughly $130 million apiece. Would the TV networks give it to them? Dave asked. The league has leverage, he continued, because of how much the networks want the broadcast rights. The day after Dave and I hit the bars, I authorized the hiring of a former network executive to advise us on television contracts. I lobbed what felt like a stupid question to the former executive: Could there be a clause in a broadcast rights contract that would pay owners even if games werent played? Every contract, this executive explained, includes language about make goods. Say you run a doughnut shop and advertise it on Google. If, for instance, Alphabets servers get hacked and all of its sites go dark, this is the clause that requires Google to make good on the agreement and publish the ad later. Using similar logic, networks could agree to a deal in which they paid a certain amount of money in the event that games werent played, in exchange for a discount on future payments. If our theory was correct, it was as if the league had taken out an insurance policy from the networks. If they had, it would have been for less moneya potential violation of the leagues obligations to players under the collective bargaining agreement. All of this got me thinking that it sure would be amazing if there were such a thing as lockout insurance. It was a disaster wed known was coming, and it wasnt as if we were causing the lockout. In fact, our players were trying like hell to avoid missing work, so the risk wasnt even ours to transfer. Still, I wondered, could there be such an insurance policy? It was a question worth asking. I got permission to pursue this as a potential nuclear option in our arsenal. Its ultimate value wasnt the payout. It was the leverage it would create. Because if the policy did pay out, our side could withstand a work stoppage for far longer than the owners believed. Their $4 billion had to cover keeping stadiums and team facilities online, administrative staffs paid, and front-end costs guaranteed. Factoring in players salaries, this amount suggested they were prepared to miss half the 2011 season as they waited on players to cave. But if we sprang this insurance policy on owners at the right time, I explained, owners would realize their eight-game strategy was doomed. The insurance payout was $850 million, set to be distributed after two missed regular-season games. It was enough for players to sit out the entire year, and while it might not pay for their full salary, bonuses, and benefits, it was enough to pay each player $200,000 per weekenough that players wouldnt beg me to sign whatever proposal the league put forth. Now, here was the tricky part: The premium would cost $47 million. Players murmured, knowing the union had only $200 million in its coffers. It was a huge gamble. I believed that the insurance payout would be enough to protect our men and give them financial security for an entire missed season. For now, we had to keep it quiet. Secrecy was our most important component. We had an ace in the hole, and I had known for months who I wanted to deal the cards ‘Maybe its time we all put our guns away’ My phone rang. It was Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. He asked I was up for one more meeting. Look, he said, this isnt a time to be hiding stuff. If you guys have more resources, we need to be transparent with each other. Lets just say I took steps to protect our players, I said. Nobody is going to crumble early. In my legal career, I had worked for men like these. Gone against them. Theyre not the type to congratulate you on a successful gambit and just accept defeat with a warm handshake. These guys are used to winning, and on the rare occasions they dont win, their response is to change the rules and punish the opposing side for making them sweat. As we waited outside the meeting room, I mostly felt dread. My brain had produced three possible scenarios, two of them bad. Owners could storm out or call our bluff, effectively a challenge to see who broke first. Players are taught to feel comfort in certainty, so either of those possibilities would break us. The third was that Kraft realized that a civil war was good for no one, that the NFLs business model was impervious to inflation, elections, and geopolitical conflict, invincible to almost everything except greed. The door finally opened, and we were invited into an initial meeting with just a few participats. On our side, NFL Players Association President Kevin Mawae picked Domonique Foxworth, Jeff Saturday, and me. I made eye contact with everyone in the holding room, more than fifty guys, and tried to convey confidence and conceal my anxiety. Theres no such thing as a fearless leader, and if there were, I cant imagine following them. Any conflict requires self-awareness and the acknowledgment that all of your planning, strategizing, and overthinking could fail. Against some of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world, I was well aware of the odds. We returned to the conference room door, and I lowered the handle. There sat NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, the Coboys’ owner Jerry Jones, and Kraft at a round table. To me, every group is a jury, and I try to read their shoulders and eyes. Richardson was fuming; Jones calmer than ice water. We took our seats, and Kraft began the meeting. In the same tone of voice I used for closing arguments in a murder trial, I told everyone about the insurance policy and its details. I paused, allowing the information to sink in. Nobody said a word. Im sure you thought there would be a resolution by week four, I said, because players would collapse. But were content to sit out the entire season. Im not sure Ive ever seen a hatred in someones eyes like that of Jerry Richardson. Roger turned bright red, the vein in his neck pulsing. Kraft remained silent. Jerry Jones seemed to realize that, in a single sentence, we had destabilized years of planning and maneuvering by the league. So lets just wait a minute, he said. Maybe its time that we all put our guns away. Kraft and Richardson looked at him. We can just sliiiide em back into the holster, Jones continued. The moment of truth In a negotiation, this is whats called the deal pointthe moment of truth. Jones recognized it before anyone else, acknowledging that owners were cornered. There would be no player collapse, and thered be no eight- or ten-game season. Why havent I been told about this? Roger said. De, you have to understand that Ive set up some things to protect the owners. Things I havent even told them about. Thats when I knew. It was checkmate. Ah, Puddin, I remember thinking. I got you, didnt I? Kraft took a long breath and said that wed given the league some things to discuss. He looked at me and issued the faintest smile, an acknowledgment, finally, that I might actually be worthy of respect.From the book TURF WARS by DeMaurice Smith 2025 by DeMaurice Smith. Published on August 5, 2025, by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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