Receipts in hand, a longtime NFL players’ rep candidly recounts his battles with the league.
The contact sport of labor negotiations.
Smith, executive director of the NFL players’ union from 2009 to 2023, depicts an industry awash in bad blood. Players have “visceral disgust” for Commissioner Roger Goodell, the highly paid “Prince Valiant” for “narcissistic” team owners, who “hate one another” and view neither players nor “the general public as human” but as “commodities” and “customers.” Smith took the job in what looked like a hopeful new era epitomized by Barack Obama’s presidency, but his “idealism” was destroyed by his dealings with the powerful men who run the game. Smith, who is Black, says a team owner called him “uppity.” A coach used racist language to mock him. The ensuing controversy over the latter, following George Floyd’s murder, “broke me,” writes Smith, recounting his awakening from “lifelong denial” about the scope of racial discrimination. In response, he’s “finished holding my tongue.” Indeed, Smith divulges that "a prominent owner confessed to me that the league had broken federal anti-trust laws by coming to a secret handshake agreement that, two years earlier, had denied players millions of dollars they were contractually entitled to.” Smith’s tenure included relative labor peace, thanks to his negotiation of a long-term collective bargaining agreement and breakthroughs on player safety, salary guarantees, and licensing revenue. Adding a game to each team’s schedule proved less popular with players, some of whom “turned on me.” Smith includes memorable glimpses of star players. He’d rather “run into traffic” than talk on the phone with Aaron Rodgers. When Smith visited Tom Brady’s house, he was offered his pick from a selection of Ugg slippers. Smith also shares fascinating anecdotes about the intrigue surrounding union votes and how some influential players are increasingly susceptible to “the misinformation virus.”
Receipts in hand, a longtime NFL players’ rep candidly recounts his battles with the league.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9780593729427
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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