Your first month is free in The New York Times app. Download now →
Good morning. There’s a grim new study about the National Football League I want to tell you about. But first, some news from the Supreme Court that could affect the midterms. A new voting restriction
The Constitution gives the White House no power over elections, and Congress has declined to pass a voter I.D. measure that President Trump wants. This past spring, he found a workaround: He told the government to build a nationwide list of eligible voters that the Postal Service could use to prevent noncitizens from voting by mail. Yesterday, the Supreme Court said the president can restrict mail-in voting — at least for now, while the courts hear arguments for and against it. Feasibility. The Department of Homeland Security is supposed to create “state citizenship lists” of people who will be 18 or older on Election Day. Those names go to state election officials, who administer the vote, purportedly so they can purge anyone who is not a citizen from voter rolls. Then postal workers block ballot requests from anybody not on the lists. It’s a complex endeavor, considering the midterm elections are two months away and the Supreme Court justices may still hear full arguments. Critics point out that voter fraud is exceptionally rare, and that the new system is more likely to disqualify legitimate voters than impede foreign cheaters. Legality. Several states have sued, saying the effort could disenfranchise voters and cause chaos in the midterms. But in an unsigned emergency order, the Supreme Court said that those states could not demonstrate they were sufficiently harmed by voting rules that had not yet taken effect. For more: Here’s how Trump quietly asserted control over the Postal Service.
American gladiatorsThe degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. stalks professional football players. We’ve seen it in the headlines for years, usually attached to a famous name. Hall of Famers like Junior Seau and Frank Gifford had C.T.E. So did the convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, who killed himself in prison. Repeated hits to the head can cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and it can be diagnosed only by examining the brain after death. An alarming study released today suggests that C.T.E. is not just lurking at the margins, an outlier outcome for the most risk-prone players — in fact, at least 25 percent of N.F.L. players might expect to have it. John Branch, a reporter for The Times, wrote about the study. He has covered C.T.E. in professional sports for nearly 15 years. Researchers, he tells us, looked at the 878 former N.F.L. players who died from 2016 to 2021. They were able to test the brains of 235 of them for C.T.E. Of those, 215 had the disease. That’s 24.5 percent of the total. “The actual prevalence could be far higher,” John writes. “The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.” John then applied the statistics to today’s N.F.L. players. When the regular season starts in a couple of weeks, there will be 1,696 people on the league’s 32 active rosters. (That’s not including hundreds on practice squads or out for injuries.) At least 400 of them, John reports, will develop C.T.E., if the rate continues. That’s a terrifying number. Symptoms of the disease include memory loss and confusion, as well as dramatic mood swings. Executive functioning decreases. Erratic behavior increases, as does addiction. Suicides happen. (Other studies have shown that the rate of C.T.E. in people who haven’t gotten hit in the head a lot is nearly zero.)
John’s sentences about all this are spare, relentless. Here he is on the San Diego Chargers’ 2009 roster, which included at least three players who were diagnosed posthumously with C.T.E.: One was Vincent Jackson, a three-time Pro Bowl receiver who died in a hotel room of alcohol poisoning at 38. Another was Kevin Ellison, a defensive back who died at 31 when he was struck by a car after wandering onto a California freeway. The other was defensive back Paul Oliver, who was 29 in 2013 when he shot himself on the stairs of his family home in front of his wife, Chelsea, and their two young sons. Where’s OSHA?Imagine having a job like that, where 25 percent of your colleagues end up with a debilitating disease that will kill them, but not before making their lives and the lives of their loved ones miserable. You’d probably be safer as a commercial fisherman, or a coal miner. One scientist told John that Russian roulette has better odds. “We never see things that are this dire,” he said. Wouldn’t the existence of such a job trigger outrage and calls for change from, among others, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration? John wrote about that, too, today. His answer: Not if your job is playing professional football. The agency told him: “In most cases, OSHA does not take enforcement action with regard to professional athletes.” The N.F.L. is simply too big and too popular for people in government to want to change its rules or abolish the sport. In 2024, its revenues were more than $23 billion, and 35 of the top 50 U.S. telecasts last year were N.F.L. games. Dangerous as it is, football is our culture. And there’s also this, which John told me yesterday. “C.T.E. is one of those things that most people take seriously only when it directly affects them, like gun violence or climate change,” he said. “Until then, it can feel like someone else’s problem.” Speaking of which, do read John’s advice to parents of football players. And click the video to learn more about the study.
We’ve made these links free for you. ‘The House That Pinterest Built’: Diane Keaton’s former home in Los Angeles just sold for $18 million. See inside. Survivor: A woman lived through 9/11 and got cancer. She now gives tours of the site. Your pick: The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about a French tourist who died after his car got stuck in Death Valley.
Global Economy
Midterm Elections
More on Politics
Around the World
Other Big Stories
Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, are returning to Britain. They’ll need to reckon once more with who they are, Roxane Gay writes. Canada said no to Trump on tariffs. Its defiance is proof that another world order is possible, Stephen Marche writes. Access five locked games. Save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossplay, the Crossword and more. Plus, enjoy past puzzles, play without ads in the app and use our bots to improve your skills.
9.39— That is how many seconds it took a Chinese humanoid robot to run the 100-meter dash over the weekend, 0.19 seconds faster than Usain Bolt’s world record, set in 2009. “The robot ended its sprint by slamming full speed into a padded wall, falling down and being carried away by human assistants,” The Times reported. Bolt did not respond to a request for comment. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
