Your Monday Evening Briefing |
Good evening. Here's the latest. |
 | | Patrick McDermott/Getty Images |
|
1. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the N.C.A.A. cannot ban relatively modest payments to student-athletes. |
The N.C.A.A. has long advanced the notion that students should play sports in exchange for no more than a scholarship, books, room and board, and, more recently, the estimated cost of attending college. |
The case before the Supreme Court did not directly touch on whether athletes may earn money off their names, images and likenesses. Above, the lead plaintiff in the case, Shawne Alston. |
But next week, student-athletes in at least six states are poised to be allowed to make money through endorsements, after state officials grew tired of the industry's decades-long efforts to limit the rights of players. |
 | | Karen E. Segrave for The New York Times |
|
2. Reading inflation tea leaves through the price of lumber. |
Lumber futures surged to new heights over the past year, peaking in early May at more than $1,600 per thousand board feet. But since then, prices are down by more than 45 percent. |
"We don't have that kind of buying frenzy that creates sustained inflation," said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at the investment management firm Invesco. "To me, this is very, very different than the 1970s." |
 | | Keith Srakocic/Associated Press |
|
3. The U.S. economy faces another daunting challenge rooted in the pandemic. |
The mainstream view is that this will be successful. But there is no modern precedent for such huge swings in sums the government is pumping into the economy. A crucial question is whether Americans sitting on a vast pool of savings accumulated during the pandemic will spend enough to drive growth. |
 | | Ting Shen for The New York Times |
|
4. Google executives are seeing problems, despite its success. |
Revenue and profit are charting new highs every three months. Google's parent company, Alphabet, is worth $1.6 trillion. And Google has rooted itself deeper and deeper into the lives of everyday Americans. |
But a restive class of Google executives worry that the company is showing cracks. They say personnel problems are spilling into the public. Decisive leadership and big ideas have given way to risk aversion and incrementalism. And some of those executives are leaving — at least 36 Google vice presidents since last year. |
 | | Hilary Swift for The New York Times |
|
5. Voters head to the polls tomorrow in the biggest U.S. city. |
By nightfall, we should know which candidate is leading among the ballots cast in-person. But in the city's first time using ranked-choice voting, only first-choice votes will be counted right away. Second- and third-choice votes could potentially be decisive. |
 | | Andrew Seng for The New York Times |
|
6. When it comes to big-city elections, Republicans are in the wilderness. |
At the national level, Republicans have largely accepted that trade-off, since the structure of the federal government gives disproportionate power to sparsely populated rural states. |
But the party's growing irrelevance in urban and suburban areas has sidelined conservatives in centers of innovation and economic might, and has turned red states into battlegrounds as their largest metro areas have grown larger and more ethnically mixed. |
 | | The New York Times | Source: Medicaid.gov |
|
7. Medicaid enrollment surpassed 80 million, a record, during the pandemic. |
The increase points to the program's growing role not just as a safety net, but also as a foundation of U.S. health coverage. Fully a quarter of the population gets coverage through it. |
Medicaid, in which states and the federal government share the cost, covers all adults with income up to 138 percent of the poverty level, which would be about $17,420 for an individual to qualify this year. |
 | | Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
|
The decision settles the last major logistical issue facing the organizers of the Games, which have been delayed for a year because of the pandemic. |
Separately, Qatar announced that everyone attending the World Cup there next year must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Up to 1.5 million international fans are expected to descend on the Gulf nation next November for the world's largest soccer tournament. |
 | | Nitashia Johnson for The New York Times |
|
9. Demand for summer air travel dipped. |
Airline ticket sales for destinations within the U.S. fell a little in May after rising steadily in the first four months of the year, suggesting that demand for summer travel might not be quite as strong as airlines had hoped. |
It was not clear whether the trend continued into June. But other indications show the demand for travel is strong. On Sunday, the Transportation Security Administration screened 2.1 million passengers at airport checkpoints, the most in a single day since the pandemic began. |
 | | Gracia Lam |
|
10. And finally, figuring out how to be a super-ager. |
Scientists call these folks "cognitive super-agers," and researchers in the Netherlands are hoping a study of centenarians may help more of us to get to that stage. Many subjects had substantial neuropathology common to people with Alzheimer's disease, but they still remained cognitively healthy for up to four years beyond 100. |
The researchers hope to identify reliable characteristics and develop treatments that will result in healthy cognitive aging — for those of us who can remain physically healthy that long. |
Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern. |
|
