Semua Kabar

Its ruling lets the President temporarily revoke birthright citizenship—and enforce other unconstitutional executive orders without fear of being blocked by “rogue judges.”

The courts cannot protect us from PresidentDonald Trump’s unconstitutional overreach. That is the terrifying lesson of Friday’s 6–3 Supreme Court ruling limiting the power of federal judges to issue broad orders blocking Trump’s policies from taking effect while the lawsuits challenging them make their way through the courts. The case,Trump v.CASA, involved one of the most blatantly unconstitutional of Trump’s orders: his bid to revoke, by executive fiat, the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. But the implications of the ruling extend far beyond that single issue. Friday’s decision means that courts are now hobbled from stopping any of the Administration’s actions, no matter how unconstitutional they may be, nor how much damage they will inflict. Once again, the Court’s conservative super-majority abandoned its constitutionally assigned role and dangerously empowered the President. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissent, “its decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”

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This outcome was as unnecessary as it was unwise. Witness the victory lap that President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi took in the White House briefing room after the ruling was released. Trump crowed that the Court had defused a “grave threat to democracy,” in which “a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president.” Bondi, for her part, decried “rogue judges striking down President Trump’s policies” through “lawless injunctions” that let district-court judges act as “emperors.”

It remains unlikely that the Court, when it finally gets around to deciding the merits of the dispute, will uphold Trump’s effort to undo birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship was the rule before it was written into the Fourteenth Amendment. (The departure that necessitated constitutional protection was the Court’s infamous 1857 holding inDred Scott v. Sandford, which held that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.”) And the language of the Amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” (The caveat—“subject to the jurisdiction”—is a carve out for the children of diplomats and other minor exceptions.) That guarantee has been codified in federal law; it was affirmed in an 1898 ruling in the case ofWong Kim Ark, the U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants. “The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States,” the Court said in that case, and subsequent rulings have repeated that conclusion. No surprise, then, that three district-court judges reviewing the executive order had little trouble finding that the edict was probably unconstitutional, and that three appeals courts that reviewed their work left intact their rulings blocking the order from taking effect. Equally telling, the Supreme Court majority said not a word about the legality of the order itself.

But imagine the harms that can ensue in the meantime: parents unable to obtain Social Security numbers for their children; infants denied health coverage or nutrition assistance. Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan andKetanji Brown Jackson, raised the prospect that Trump’s order “may even wrench newborns from the arms of parents lawfully in the United States, for it purports to strip citizenship from the children of parents legally present on a temporary basis.” If this warning sounds overblown, let me introduce you to the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And this gets to why the consequences of Trump v.CASAreverberate beyond birthright citizenship. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor warned. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.” Sotomayor had more hypotheticals in her arsenal. “Suppose an executive order barred women from receiving unemployment benefits or black citizens from voting. Is the Government irreparably harmed, and entitled to emergency relief, by a district court order universally enjoining such policies?” she asked. “The majority, apparently, would say yes.” Those unlikely scenarios underscore the scary implications of the Court’s approach, but the real-world consequences of Friday’s decision are undeniable. They span the landscape ofTrump’s executive ordersand other actions, including efforts to impose more stringent voter-identification requirements, relocate transgender women prisoners to male facilities, and freeze foreign aid.

The majority got the balance dangerously wrong, but there is a legitimate debate over the proper reach of what are called “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions. Democratic and Republican Presidents have chafed at orders from district-court judges, often cherry-picked by plaintiffs for their demonstrated sympathies, that prevent policies from being implemented across the country, sometimes for years. “Look, there are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions,” Kagan said at the oral argument in the birthright case last month, and the dissent acknowledged that “there may be good reasons not to issue universal injunctions in the typical case.” But the birthright citizenship order was particularly ill-suited to serve as a vehicle for curbing such injunctions. The order itself is likely doomed. The government’s argument that the injunctions were causing it irreparable harm is unconvincing; leaving in place what has been the rule for centuries is no hardship. And the government’s proposed alternative—that the injunctions keeping birthright-citizenship protections in place apply only to the individual plaintiffs, not to a broader group of those affected—makes little sense in the context of citizenship, which should be decided on a national basis, not relegated to a haphazard patchwork dictated by circumstances of geography or the capacity to secure a lawyer. As the dissenters put it, “This is not a scenario where granting universal relief will encourage forum shopping or give plaintiffs the upper hand. Quite the opposite: By awarding universal relief below, the District Courts just ordered the Government to do everywhere what any reasonable jurist would order the Government to do anywhere.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, ruled that courts must limit themselves to orders that deal with the disputes immediately before them; they may not rove beyond the case at hand to resolve issues for those who aren’t parties to it. At oral argument, Barrett had seemed to express some exasperation with the government’s position, so it was disappointing to see her in the majority. But Barrett left open the possibility that the states challenging the birthright order could prove they needed the broader relief of a blanket ban, leaving that question to lower courts to determine. She also suggested that those challenging Administration orders had another option: they could file their suits as class actions. This would be more comforting if the Court in recent years had not made it more difficult for plaintiffs to obtain class-action status and if the Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, had not said that the government would probably oppose granting class status, at least in the context of birthright citizenship. Then there is the concurring opinion in Friday’s case by Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas; they warned that “district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors” of its requirements. In other words, don’t count on class actions to rein in Administrations bent on abusing the law.

Given Congress’s abdication of its constitutional role, the courts remain the best immediate vehicle for combatting Trump’s excesses. (Elections are a better solution, but they remain far off.) With Friday’s ruling, though, they are unnecessarily handcuffed. If there is one thing we have learned during the five long months of the second Trump Administration, it is how easy it is to inflict damage on programs and institutions, and how hard that damage is to repair. This is an example of the Court stripping its own branch of power, and at the worst possible moment. ♦

Mario Guevara became a target of the law-enforcement and immigration agencies he covered. Others may be next.

“LaBoca del Lobo,” a 2019Timesshort documentary, follows the work of Mario Guevara, a reporter based in the outskirts of Atlanta who has a large audience among Latino immigrants in the area. In one scene, a woman tells Guevara that her husband, who had just been detained byICEagents, had walked into “la boca del lobo” (“into the wolf’s mouth,” an expression meaning “into the lion’s den”). The immigration-enforcement agency had more than quadrupled noncriminal arrests in Atlanta in the 2017 fiscal year and was causing havoc in Spanish-speaking communities. Guevara, a forty-seven-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, is the only reporter in Atlanta (and possibly in the United States) who has been covering these raids every day for years. “Mr. Guevara’s job, and his obsession, is to stalk the wolf,” Jesse Moss, the director of the video,wrotein an accompanying piece for theTimes.

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Now Guevara himself has been detained byICEagents. On June 14th, he was arrested while live-streaming a No Kings protest near Atlanta, and he is currently being held in an immigration-detention center. His case highlights the particularly vulnerable position of immigrant journalists who report on immigration for immigrant communities. As attacks on press freedom mount, including theintimidation of journalists covering protests, reporters are becoming targets of the law-enforcement and immigration agencies that they cover.

Guevara’s career as a journalist in El Salvador was brief but deeply consequential. When he was in his early twenties, he joined the photojournalism desk atLa Prensa Gráfica, one of the country’s main newspapers. “He was very young and very enthusiastic,” Francisco Campos, a renowned photojournalist who was then his editor, told me. Guevara lived in Apopa, a district north of San Salvador, the capital city, which was by then falling under the control of themaras—gangs that originated in Los Angeles and whose members were deported en masse to El Salvador in the nineteen-nineties—who routinely threatened those who didn’t pay them arenta(protection money). Guevara confided to Campos that he was afraid of them.

In 2003, Campos sent him to cover a mass protest in front of the national-government complex in San Salvador. The organizer was the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), a left-wing guerrilla organization during the civil war that had become a legitimate political party following the 1992 peace accords. Just over a decade had passed since the end of the brutal twelve-year-long conflict, and street protests often ended in violence. As a journalist withLa Prensa Gráfica, Guevara was a target: F.M.L.N. sympathizers saw the paper as a political enemy, because it had supported the military through the war. A group of protesters attacked Guevara, who sought refuge at the nearby Ministry of Justice. He was then driven to a police station, where Campos picked him up later that day. Guevara latertold CNNthat he had received death threats during this period; in the documentary, he reiterates that he had “made some enemies” and was promised “two bullets in the chest.” In early 2004, Guevara, with his wife and young daughter, left El Salvador for the United States, reportedly arriving on a tourist visa. He settled in Atlanta and eventually requested asylum.

Guevara managed to get a job at a local, now defunct newspaper,Atlanta Latino. In 2007, he moved toMundo Hispánico, an outlet owned at the time by Cox Enterprises, which also owns the AtlantaJournal-Constitution.Mundo Hispánicobecame the leading Spanish-language news outlet in Georgia, with numbers rivalling those of English-language outlets: by 2020, it had 4.9 million followers on Facebook, while theJournal-Constitutionhad just 837,000. This growth coincided with a rapid rise in the state’s Latino population; according to the Atlanta Regional Commission, there was a more than thirty per cent increase in the Atlanta metro area between 2010 and 2020.

During the Obama Administration, a federal program that allowsICEto partner with state and local law enforcement expanded across the region, and the number of detentions ballooned. Guevara began covering them as they occurred, to document their personal and communal toll. Shortly before the start of the first Trump Administration, Guevara began noticing abandoned vans on the sides of roads, often with ladders attached to the roof and coffee thermoses left inside, and realized thatICEwas targeting vans carrying migrant construction workers. He began driving around the Atlanta region at dawn, whenICEoperations were most frequent, to catch and live-stream those raids.

Guevara built a huge immigrant audience on social media; he now has more than 1.4 million followers across all platforms, including almost nine hundred thousand on Facebook. He forged a direct relationship with them by answering their messages and by speaking to them, or by driving around their neighborhoods and introducing himself. They often sent him tips, which he pursued and turned into stories. “He had eyes and ears everywhere,” Lautaro Grinspan, a bilingual immigration reporter with the AtlantaJournal-Constitution, told me. When they had “trouble getting an official tally of immigration arrests in the area, the second-best source was Mario.” Grinspan, whoprofiled Guevarain May, just a few weeks before his arrest, added that it is “hard to overstate” his influence in the Spanish-language community. “He was a singular presence in our media ecosystem.” Now “he finds himself in the bowels of the immigration-detention system, experiencing firsthand something he used to write about.”

In “La Boca del Lobo,” Guevara recalls receiving a tip:ICEhad surrounded a building and was knocking on the door. When Guevara arrived at the scene, officers had already cordoned off the area. He began live-streaming and, at one point, realized that the migrant they were after was watching the operation live on his Facebook page. The man contacted Guevara and asked him to mediate with theICEagents so that they wouldn’t shoot him when he left the building. Guevara informed the officers that the man inside was afraid to come out, and they communicated with him—through Guevara—until he surrendered. In the same video, Guevara states that, as a reporter, he doesn’t take sides—he often interviewsICEagents and police officers for their perspective—but he notes that the raids create “a lot of fear and terror. A lot of panic. There are people who won’t go to work nor send their kids to school after a raid in their neighborhood. That fear is not letting them continue with their normal life.” He adds, “I understand that fear. Sometimes I think I’ll be next.”

By then, Guevara’s asylum request had been denied. In June, 2012, a judge had ordered him to leave the country within sixty days, but his lawyers obtained administrative closure, a procedure by which an immigration judge can temporarily pause removal proceedings. Guevara and his wife have two sons born in the U.S., and Guevara applied for a green card as an immediate relative of a citizen. According to one of his lawyers, Giovanni Díaz, he was granted a temporary work permit. His green-card request is still pending. In a recent press conference, Guevara’s daughter mentioned that one of her brothers, who is now twenty-one and is sponsoring his father’s request, had to undergo two surgeries to remove a brain tumor and depends on his father financially and emotionally.

Guevara continued reporting despite his legal vulnerability. He leftMundo Hispánicolast year to launch his own operation, MGNews. On June 14th, wearing a red shirt, a helmet, and a black vest that read “PRESS” in large white letters on the front and back, he went to cover the No Kings protest. A group of local police officers closed in on him, and, while he loudly identified himself as “a member of the media,” they arrested him. He “is very, very well known in the community, even with these jurisdictions and these police officers . . . It’s hard to believe they didn’t know who he was,” Díaz, his lawyer, said during the press conference.

Guevara was taken to the DeKalb County Jail and charged with three misdemeanors: obstruction of law-enforcement officers, unlawful assembly, and pedestrian improperly entering roadway. A few days later, three additional misdemeanor charges were filed in Gwinnett County—for ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving—which stemmed from an incident in May, in which, according to Díaz, Guevara was recording law-enforcement operations. (Dekalb County dropped the charges on June 25th, but the ones filed in Gwinnett County are still pending. Guevara’s lawyers said in a press release that “it is very uncommon for traffic warrants to be sought out after the alleged illegal activity. Nevertheless, we are working to obtain more information about these warrants and find out the reason why they were not brought earlier. Mr. Guevara is innocent until proven guilty.”) On June 18th, the police turned Guevara over toICE, and he was transferred to the FolkstonICEProcessing Center in southeastern Georgia. On Friday, June 20th,ICEannounced that it had initiated deportation proceedings.

Francisco Campos, the photojournalist in El Salvador who was Guevara’s editor, and who has remained in touch with him, saw the news of the arrest on Guevara’s social-media accounts. “In these twenty-some years since he left, Mario has helped several people here,” he told me. About ten years ago, he said, Guevara came to the aid of a campesino in Sensuntepeque, a remote area near the border with Honduras. The man had been forced to mortgage his land after gang members had extorted him, and the bank was about to foreclose. Guevara raised the money, Campos said, which was deposited directly in the bank to cancel the man’s debt and to insure that he maintained the property title. Sending Guevara back to El Salvador “would be a very unfortunate situation,” Campos said. “Newsrooms have laid off about sixty per cent of their staff. Many journalists are unemployed. This is not a country where you can come and launch a successful news channel like the one he has there. For him, it would be personally devastating.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (where I serve as a board member), along with a coalition of civil-society and media organizations, expressed “alarm” at Guevara’s detention in alettertoKristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and demanded his release. “If Guevara’s case proceeds, it would represent a grim erosion of both freedom of the press and the rule of law. Journalists who are not U.S. citizens could be at risk of deportation solely because local law enforcement filed misdemeanor charges against them in retaliation for reporting without those charges ever being tried in court,” the letter reads. (The Press Freedom Tracker has documented the arrest of eleven journalists since Trump’s Inauguration, including Guevara’s, all at anti-ICEprotests, and is working to verify the arrest of four more.) In an X post from June 20th, the Department of Homeland Security denied that Guevara had been detained because of his work and said that he was inICEcustody because he had entered the country illegally in 2004. (Díaz reiterated to NPR that Guevara had entered the U.S. legally on a tourist visa.)

Maritza Félix, the founder and director of the Spanish-language news outletConecta Arizona, based in Phoenix, has known Guevara for years. She told me that news of his arrest compounded what has been a “traumatizing” few months for reporters, especially those who came to the U.S. seeking the freedom that they lacked in their home countries. “Today, it was Mario, but tomorrow it could be any one of us. We used to believe we were in a country where the law and the Constitution were respected.” She said that her team has seen an uptick in hate messages in e-mails and on social media—“Go back to your country,” “Speak English”—and have been forced to adopt safety measures she never imagined would be necessary here.

Paola Jaramillo, the co-founder and executive director ofEnlace Latino NC, a nonprofit Spanish-language digital news outlet covering North Carolina, painted a similar picture. “The xenophobic messages began in the middle of last year, after we posted a video of a state legislative session with Spanish closed captions. They intensified with our coverage of protests and immigration issues—‘Deport them,’ ‘Learn English,’ ” she said. Jaramillo, who knows Guevara and has been following his work for years, noted that his case is “a warning” of what others might face. “Many journalists covering the Latino community have, at some point, found themselves in immigration limbo—and still we go out and report. But we used to be more respected. What we did was valued a little more. The circumstances have changed.”

When Félix watched the video of Guevara’s arrest, she realized that he was doing everything she has been trained to do in preparation for the possibility of being arrested while covering a protest—a type of training more and more journalists are now receiving from news organizations, professional associations, and some journalism schools (including the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where I serve as the dean). “He de-escalates the situation, stays calm, walks, doesn’t resist—and, still, they take him.” When journalists who are U.S. citizens are arrested, Félix continued, they generally are taken to jail, bail is set, and they are released. But for a reporter without solid immigration status the outcome can be deportation. “Even if you’re here with legal permission, being allowed to do the work is considered not a right but a privilege,” she said. Community reporters are often the most (if not the only) trusted source of information for the most vulnerable, and the stakes for both those reporters and the people they serve couldn’t be higher. ♦

Two interrelated fears that have caused mounting public alarm with respect to the Trump Administration involve unchecked executive power and the erosion of the rule of law. These worries have intensified in debates about the legality of President Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities more than a week into Israel’s war against Iran. Members of both houses of Congress had introduced resolutions to try to prevent Trump from taking such military action without its authorization. But the energy that some lawmakers had mustered for a rare attempt to assert Congress’s constitutional power against Trump seemed to dissipate, at least while they expected a ceasefire between Israel and Iran to hold.

One would normally look to Supreme Court precedents to determine the constitutionality of a Presidential action. But no cases provide legal answers about the permissibility of attacks like the one on Iran. The only relevant case from the Court dates to the Civil War. It states that Congress has the sole power to “declare war,” but that, in the event that a foreign nation invades the U.S., congressional authorization is unnecessary and the President’s constitutional power as the Commander-in-Chief is sufficient to take action. The Court noted that the President cannot “initiate the war,” but it has never provided an authoritative definition of “war,” as opposed to armed conflict.

Congress has not formally declared war since the Second World War, but it has sometimes authorized Presidents to use military force in conflicts colloquially known as wars—for example, in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But, when Congress has given no such authorization, Presidents have often turned to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. O.L.C. issues opinions that are not binding law, but which attempt to present legally correct boundaries that the President should respect. Presidents have regularly acted unilaterally to enter significant hostilities on the basis of those opinions, including in the Korean War, in Kosovo, and in Libya.

Congress, in the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (enacted over the veto of President Nixon, who thought it unconstitutional), aimed to check the unilateral Presidential use of force, requiring, among other things, that the President consult Congress before sending armed forces into hostilities and obtain congressional approval to deploy troops in conflicts for more than sixty days. But both Democratic and Republican Presidents have not fully complied, and Congress hasn’t done much about it. In recent weeks, some lawmakers proposed new War Powers Resolutions to prevent Trump from attacking Iran again unless Congress authorizes it, but the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, resisted the idea and declared that the existing War Powers Resolution was an unconstitutional infringement of the President’s power as Commander-in-Chief.

During the past several decades, O.L.C. has produced opinion after opinion that has been staggeringly expansive with respect to that power. Each armed conflict that a President undertook without congressional authorization became a precedent that further enlarged what the executive branch considered constitutionally permissible. That is how we got to a situation in which a President can reasonably claim that it is lawful, without congressional approval or even consultation, to drop bunker-busting bombs on a country that has not attacked the U.S. One might assume that Trump wouldn’t care a whit about precedent, but the telltale way he described the operation in a letter to Congress days after the strikes suggested that he was closely informed by past executive practice. He alluded to key formulations from previous O.L.C. opinions, stating that his strikes “discretely targeted” Iran’s nuclear facilities, were “limited in scope and purpose,” and did not involve ground forces—meaning that the operation fit the criteria of what O.L.C. has said falls short of war, such that congressional authorization was unnecessary.

Trump’s justifications also reflected O.L.C. precedents maintaining that a President can unilaterally use military force abroad to pursue “national interests” and “collective self-defense.” The office has construed “national interests” very broadly, to include “ensuring the safe delivery of food and medicine in Somalia,” under the first President Bush; “assisting an ally or strategic partner,” Iraq, under President Obama; and deterring “the use and proliferation of chemical weapons,” in Syria, during Trump’s first term. And “collective self-defense” can mean not only repelling an imminent attack but also warding off future attacks and defending allies.

Jack Goldsmith, a foremost expert on war powers and a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote, in October, 2023, that, under the body of O.L.C. opinions, “just about any conceivable circumstance” in which a President “would think it prudent to use force in the Middle East” can be justified. Slowing down Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons would satisfy the “national interests” test as well as the “collective self-defense of our ally, Israel,” as Trump put it. More recently, Goldsmith rued the troubling reality that “there is no constitutional rule that would answer the question” of whether the Iran strikes were unlawful. But some lawmakers may believe that it is time for Congress to rethink the acceptance of past executive-branch practice as a justification for future unilateral military actions. Not least because a leaked preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report suggesting, to Trump’s ire, that his attack had not “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities, if proved correct, may lead him to feel that it is in the “national interest” to try again. (The Administration said that it might now limit the intelligence it shares with Congress.)

The courts largely stay out of war-powers debates because those debates are often deemed to entail policy questions rather than legal ones. So if Congress persists in not checking the President’s use of the military, or even believes that such checks are unconstitutional, his unilateral power will remain nearly unlimited. Before the Iran strikes, concerns about Trump and the military were focussed on his federalization of the California National Guard, which the Administration justified on the theory that violent incidents among those protestingICEin Los Angeles had turned into a “rebellion” against the U.S. The Ninth Circuit found that Trump’s actions were likely consistent with a statute stipulating that the President may take such steps when “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

We are learning that, at home and abroad, the ability to curb the most dangerously consequential uses of Presidential power relies mostly on the self-restraint of the Commander-in-Chief. Law gets us only so far, or, sometimes, nowhere. ♦

With the “Big Beautiful Bill” in flux, and federal funds for gender-affirming care hanging in the balance, protections for trans children and adults continue to be dismantled at the state level.

This weekend, as raucous parties and strident Pride marches take place across New York City, many in the L.G.B.T.Q. community are in a less than celebratory mood. At best, the vibe is ambivalent, withlocal political victoriesovershadowed by ominous national news. Trans people, in particular, are grappling with the painful political disappointments of the past year. The Supreme Court, in its recent ruling in United States v. Skrmetti,upheld a Tennessee state lawbanning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors, and the Trump Administration is attempting to ban all pediatric gender-related care. Older trans individuals, too, are under threat, as the Administration now seeks to block federal funds from supporting trans health care. There are roughly two hundred and seventy-six thousand trans adults currently enrolled in Medicaid; their access to gender-affirming care may soon be stripped away, should Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” pass in the Senate. Hormones and surgery costs could soar beyond most trans people’s means, forcing some to resort to alternative methods, like using underground D.I.Y. networks, or seeking care abroad. Although the Administration, with its proposed changes to programs like Medicaid, may claim that its guiding principle is fiscal conservatism, its true goal is control.

In May, more than a month before the Supreme Court’s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Department of Health and Human Services released a four-hundred-and-nine-page document casting doubt on the safety of gender-affirming care for children. The report attempts to undermine the idea that it is safe for trans children to receive hormone-replacement therapy and puberty blockers, the treatment course established by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), and which is currently endorsed by all major medical associations in the U.S. (Despite conservative fearmongering about young trans people undergoing radical medical procedures, theWPATHguidelines generally recommend that only those above the age of eighteen should receive genital reconstructive surgery.)

According to the H.H.S. report, for the vast majority of people, gender dysphoria is simply a temporary discomfort. Perhaps, with proper care, such as counselling, they would come to terms with the “reality” of their biological gender. The report begins with explanations of various medical maxims: one isPrimum non nocere—“First, do no harm.” But counselling can sometimes be a thinly veiled disguise for conversion therapy, and conversion therapy is harm at the highest level—I know this from experience. The report technically calls for “gender exploratory therapy,” noting that “being labeled a ‘conversion therapist’ ” is a “damaging accusation given the profession’s mistreatment of gay people.” But such a claim fails to acknowledge the possibility that gender-exploratory therapists may be perpetuating the same kind of mistreatment.

The H.H.S. report contradicts a previous assertion from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a subset of H.H.S., which has written that no research has displayed convincing evidence that therapy can alter a patient’s gender or sexual identity. It also contradicts guidance from medical authorities such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the latter of which hascalledthe H.H.S. report “inaccurate.” These authorities stand by the recommended treatment protocols established byWPATH, an organization of physicians, surgeons, and mental-health professionals that emerged from an attempt to standardize care in 1979. Trump has deridedWPATHfor conducting “junk science,” and the organization has been accused of selectively publishing research regarding the effectiveness of pediatric trans care on mental health. But the H.H.S. report, which Trump ordered as a corrective, does not represent a good-faith effort to engage on the question of when and how young people suffering from gender dysphoria should be treated. Rather, in its reliance “on select perspectives and a narrow set of data,” in the words of the American Academy of Pediatrics, it engages in the same kind of cherry-picking thatWPATHhas been accused of. After enacting a ban on pediatric trans care, in 2023, Utah lawmakers commissioned an assessment of the safety of puberty blockers and H.R.T. The study recently found that these treatments are both safe and effective. But, as Chase Strangio, a trans lawyer at the A.C.L.U.,pointed outin an Instagram video, the report got little mainstream-news coverage. The H.H.S., and the political right at large, have instead focussed on detransitioners. If trans people comprise a small community—an estimated 0.6 per cent of the population—then the detrans community is even smaller. Yet the right loves to platform their stories; the H.H.S. report describes these individuals as “brave whistleblowers.”

For trans children caught in these political crosswinds, the stakes are high. “Being called your correct name and pronouns, being on HRT, that can be the difference between life and death,” Zelda, a seventeen-year-old trans boy from Louisiana, recentlytoldtheCut. More than forty per cent of trans adults have attempted suicide, according to the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A. While the H.H.S. report does raise the alarm on trans suicide, at times it suggests the blame is on hormones, more so than a culture rife with violent transphobia. This is despite the fact that numerousreportshave found that those who undergo conversion therapy are far more likely to die by suicide than their peers. In states where anti-trans legislation passed, suicide attempts by trans teens subsequently went up by seventy-two per cent, according to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization focussed on crisis prevention for L.G.B.T.Q. youth. Some have argued that the studies have yet to directly link access to trans health care with lower youth-suicide rates, but medical care is not the only factor influencing mental health—discrimination, job security, stigma, and harassment also play key roles. Still, as Strangio, who represented the plaintiffs in the Skrmetti case, told the Supreme Court during oral arguments, “There are multiple studies, long-term, longitudinal studies that do show that there is a reduction in suicidality, which I think is a positive outcome to this treatment.”

Children are often caught at the center of the moral panic around transness. They are the testing ground for the erosion of trans rights, which conservatives often frame as a defense of parents’ rights. This thinking, too, is reflected in the way that the media often spotlights the voices of parents of trans kids rather than the children themselves. Right-wing stories that aim to whip up panic about an alleged “trans boom” tend to interview parents, infantilizing the kids as unreliable narrators. Even on the left, the voices of parents are often prioritized, ranging from spokesperson or advocate to the central narrator of their trans child’s story, in a way that goes beyond the standard journalistic practice of protecting minors, given that these trans kids are often in their teens. (A rare exception is “Just Kids”—a recent documentary directed by Gianna Toboni about the great lengths that trans kids must go to in order to receive care—which interviews a number of trans children and allows them to speak for themselves about the criminalization of their care.)

It is easy to deprive children of trans rights because our society generally functions as if children don’t have any rights at all. We struggle to believe that these little humans are capable of making their own decisions, much less of telling us who they are. But, although conservatives might focus their public messaging around trans children, it’s naïve to think that trans adults will be any safer from the Administration’s ire. The age at which someone should be “allowed” to transition keeps moving: Trump recently said nineteen; other conservative critics have suggested waiting until people are in their twenties. (Of course, this would mean that no one is allowed access to puberty blockers.) But the White House’s goal isn’t just no new trans kids; it’s no trans people, period. This is the clear takeaway from Trump’sexecutive order“Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which declares that sex is immutable, and withdraws all federal recognition for trans people.

Trans kids are often used as a Trojan horse. An early version of the House Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” proposed eliminating Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care solely for minors; a later version of the bill struck the phrase “for minors.” Curtailing care for trans adults was always part of the larger conservative plan. In addition to stripping away coverage for trans health care, the bill also sets stricter work requirements for Medicaid—another dangerous prospect for trans people, who face significantly higher unemployment rates. When I started transitioning, I was unemployed and reliant on Medicaid coverage. Many trans people have expressed outrage at the proposed bill: “Being covered by Medicaid has given me medical support I never thought possible,” the comedian Marley Gotterer told me. “ ‘Lifesaving’ doesn’t even come close to describing it.” Health care, she continued, “shouldn’t be about luck.”

In her recent book “Aggregated Discontent,” Harron Walker writes about Amida Care, a Medicaid health plan in New York specifically designed to help low-income trans people. “They paid for my hormones during two significant periods of my life when I couldn’t get insurance through work, because no employers with those kinds of jobs would hire me,” Walker told me over the phone. “It’s why so many of us don’t have to stress about paying for hormones every month, much less other bills, and why we’re able to focus on our art, our work, whatever else makes up our life—because we’re not funnelling all of our attention and resources into figuring out how to get health care.”

The Trump Administration is “using every mechanism at their disposal to try to decrease access,” Strangio, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, has said. He has suggested that, in order to build a “trans liberatory project,” the left must embrace a “politics of solidarity.” This is more than just a catchy slogan; the idea is a coalition focussed on securing material rights for the various groups struggling to safeguard bodily autonomy in our current moment—immigrants, women seeking abortions, disabled people. (As part of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” Republicans have also been seeking to deny Medicaid coverage for abortion and forDACArecipients.) Thesame executive ordermeant to strip government protections from trans people has recently been applied by the Department of Veterans Affairs in a way that affects a broad swath of cisgender individuals as well, owing to the removal of language that explicitly prohibits doctors from discriminating against patients for their marital status or political beliefs. “Under Trump’s new rules, veterans can be blocked from getting care, and doctors can be barred from working at V.A. hospitals for the sole reason that they may be unmarried, belong to a union, are registered Democrats, or identify as gay or trans,” Senator Patty Murray, the former chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, wrote in a statement.

“I want people to fight for others and others will fight for us,” Strangio said. Still, it is easy to feel pessimistic. While there are occasional victories—a federal district judge recently ruled against the Trump’s Administration’s anti-trans passport policies—it is hard to know whether the White House will comply, even when it loses in court. The “Big Beautiful Bill” may still be in flux, with federally funded trans health care hanging in the balance, but protections continue to be dismantled at the state level; there are two bills in Texas, for instance, that seek to prohibit trans health care and insurance protections, and which are already under way. Democrats, meanwhile, seem all too willing to compromise, having turned their attention to less “controversial” battles. Zohran Mamdani and Tim Walz are some of the rare politicians who have continued to champion gender-affirming care, whereas many other prominent members of their party, such as Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, have backed down on their previous support of trans issues. Trans participation in sports is often a particular point of contention on the left. Last year, Massachusetts representative Seth Moulton told theTimes: “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” By shifting the conversation to sports, Democrats obscure larger issues like the assault on trans health care. Trans people are not just a cultural war issue. They deserve material rights.

I tried to talk myself out of transitioning. For years, I sat in an armchair across from a Christian counsellor to discuss “my situation.” It took a long time to undo the psychic damage, to learn how to inhabit my body, to not dissociate long enough to realize I wanted to change my sex. If we enforce the idea that changing gender is unthinkable, it soon begins to seem impossible. But we have the capacity to think such audacity into being. All change is dangerous, but to remain impermeable to new identities, and to new bodies, is a brittle way to live. We don’t need freedom from change, but freedomtochange.

Last September, I “got” a vaginoplasty. Though it was before Trump was reëlected, I was not the only one to joke that perhaps my procedure was among the last that this country would offer. What’s perhaps more noteworthy is how few of these surgeries occur, even in an environment that’s not openly hostile to trans people. In 2020, just over nine hundred vaginoplasties were performed in the U.S.,accordingto theJournal of the American Medical Association. The worldwide figure is around three thousand annually. (Phalloplasties are even rarer; only about three per cent of trans men have received such a surgery.) For the past few years, right-wing politicians and pundits have written about trans surgeries as if they are offered for free at drive-ins. The numbers tell a different story.

A larger number of trans people utilize hormones, which are life-altering but not as drastic as surgical intervention. When I go to get my hormone-replacement-therapy (H.R.T.) prescription, I sit in a waiting room next to post-menopausal women seeking the same medication. Many cis women also take spironolactone, the foul-smelling little pills that I once took as a part of H.R.T., in order to get rid of their acne. Trans people, often forced to do their own research, are more likely to understand the risks, side effects, and joys of estrogen and testosterone. Cis people, on the other hand, usually trust their doctors implicitly in regard to these medications because they’ve typically been able to.

The regret rate for kids who transition is far lower than Republican lawmakers would like us to believe, not even rising above one per cent, according to a 2021 collection of studies published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open. Kristina Olson, the lead author of a 2024 JAMA Pediatrics study, told NPR that only four per cent of participants expressed regret with some aspect of their care: “Often the regrets they were expressing had to do with [wishing] they hadn’t done blockers and they’d gone straight to hormones, or they maybe had a negative side effect related to the blockers,” such as an implant getting irritated. Regret is a phantom frequently leveraged against trans people, especially children.

Republicans claim they are protecting children, in particular, from making choices that the kids will later wish they could undo, the kind that will scar them and limit their ability to have fulfilling, reproductively healthy lives. It’s a modern twist on an age-old fear. In his book “Kids These Days” (2017), Malcolm Harris chronicles parents’ growing intolerance for risk, often because they see their children as an economic investment. Harris cites an article in theAmerican Journal of Playby Peter Gray, about adolescents’ declining ability to self-direct their leisure time:

Even casual observations of children playing outdoors confirm that these youngsters, like other young mammals, deliberately put themselves into moderately fear-inducing conditions in play. . . . If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose, which is why all such play must be self-directed and self-controlled.

The task, for all of us, is to become autonomous, capable of managing our own lives—understanding work and play, danger and reward, fantasy and reality. Trans people are all too aware of such dichotomies. Happiness is never far from risk. But some things are perhaps worth doing even if they do not come with a guarantee. ♦

The year my sister Amy was invited to play Mrs. Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the same year Hugh had his hip replaced.

“It somehow makes sense that these two things are happening within a week of each other,” I said.

“Except I’m not doing it,” Amy told me.

It was nearly midnight, and we were in my apartment in New York, gathered in the living room. The view from the window looked like the backdrop of a talk show—a jumble of tall buildings with thousands of lit windows, some of them winking. “How can younotplay Mrs. Claus?” I asked.

Amy ticked the reasons off on her fingers. “One: they want me there at 3a.m.Two: it’s supposed to rain. And three: they’re not paying me anything.”

“Macy’s doesn’t pay Mrs. Claus?” I asked, surprised in the same way I’d be if I’d learned that she—Mrs. Claus—had been married before, maybe to another woman, like, “What? That can’t be true!”

With us in the living room were two Frenchmen whom Hugh and I know from Normandy: Olivier, who owns a donkey and had been teaching himself English with Duolingo, and David, who also has a donkey but spoke no English whatsoever. Still, he could understand by my tone that something outrageous was happening.

“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” he asked.

“The department store that calls itself the House of Macy will not give money to the bride of Father Christmas,” I said in French. “For us, this is unacceptable!”

Olivier and David had arrived a week earlier and were staying with us until the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was their first trip to New York, and they were overwhelmed by how loud and crowded the city was. My sister Gretchen, who lives in North Carolina, was also staying with us, and while I was happy to see her and our French friends, I’d just returned from a long tour and had not had any time alone—or alone with just Hugh—since mid-September. We have a good deal of room in our New York apartment. It’s not like anyone was sleeping on a sofa or hanging wet towels off the doorknobs. I just resented having to adjust my schedule. House guests meant less time at my desk, both in the morning and in the evening, when, mainly because of Gretchen, we had to eat dinner earlier than usual. I can put up with a lot, but when my work schedule is interrupted I get antsy. It didn’t help that just four days after Gretchen was due to leave, Hugh would be checking into the hospital for hip surgery. “And don’t think I’m not going to need you,” he said over Thanksgiving dinner.

A whiz in the kitchen, Hugh makes all our meals, and when I suggested that he could probably still manage—“I’m sure other people have. Can’t you cook, like, from a wheelchair or something?”—he said, “No,you’regoing to do it. Three times a day and for as long as I need you to.” He poured himself a glass of wine. “I could be out of commission for months!”

“Yes, but you don’t know that for a fact,” I reminded him. “I’m sure there are people who recover from a hip replacement in a matter of days. You just don’t hear about them.”

David asked what we were talking about, and I said, in French, “After the hospital, he wants to make a strike!”

However difficult Hugh’s operation would be, I doubted that it could be worse than the year and a half leading up to it. There was no one day he started complaining about his pain—he’s always done that to some degree. Rather, it shifted from his back or his sciatica to his hip, then stayed there and intensified.

“Ow!” he’d cry, wincing as he sat down at the lunch or dinner table, as he bent before the oven or even looked at a stepladder. Hugh never says anything so simple as “I have a headache,” or “My finger hurts.” Instead, he describes his pain in detail, the way he might to a doctor who’d just said, “Tell me everything, and I want you to be as specific as possible.”

I know when Hugh is on the phone with his mother because all his talk will be about his sore wrist, his swollen joint, the cut on his foot. When I offer to get him an ice pack, an ibuprofen, a Band-Aid, he’ll say in a voice that is weak but also bitter, “That’s O.K. I’ll get it myself later if I need to.”

“They don’t hand out medals for needless suffering,” I’ll remind him.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he’ll tell me.

I know all about kidney stones and gum surgery. I know about broken ribs and urinary-tract infections. When it came to hip pain, though, he had me.

His groaning would sometimes wake me in the middle of the night.

“Listen,” I’d tell him, “if I could take your pain and suffer it myself, I would, if only to get a decent night’s sleep.”

This went on day after day, until I could no longer remember its absence.

Hugh became a non-stop grouse. Ghosts in movies moaned less than he did. Still, it took a lot to get him to see a specialist. “The doctor said it’s bone on bone,” he reported after returning from his appointment. “Do you have the slightest idea of what that feels like?”

Two months after Thanksgiving, Hugh would turn sixty-five and be eligible for Medicare, but even that was too long to wait. Luckily, we have health insurance, and it appeared that our plan would cover the brunt of the cost. And so, in what seemed like very little time, he was scheduled for surgery at one of the hospitals within a short walking distance of our apartment. There are a number of them, so many that when our friend Tracy was looking for a place on the Upper East Side, and we suggested our part of it, she instead chose to get something thirty blocks north. “All the Google Street Views I looked at in your neighborhood showed people who were crying,” she told us.

It’s something I hadn’t noticed until she said it. Then I thought,She’s right!If our sidewalks are clean, it’s likely due to a steady downpour of tears, mostly in the vicinity of Memorial Sloan Kettering.

The place Hugh went to was called the Hospital for Special Surgery. “It’s the best,” his doctor said, as did many of the retired residents in our building who’d had their hips and knees and shoulders replaced there. “If you need a walker or a wheelchair, just ask,” any one of them would tell us. “I’ve got one in the basement!”

A neighbor said that she still had some painkillers left. Another offered to loan us her comfort-height toilet seat. Hugh passed, but wound up buying his own. “The doctor says I’ll need it,” he told me.

The sight of the puffy, foot-tall toilet seat in our home was too much for me, a spectre of death no less chilling than the Grim Reaper himself. I said, “Next, bring in a coffin, why don’t you.”

The day before his surgery, Hugh talked to his older brother John in Washington State, then limped into my office to recap their conversation. “He said he really wished he was here to help take care of me.”

I looked up from my laptop. “Call him back.”

“I don’t know that he reallymeantit,” Hugh said.

I handed him my phone. “Sure he did, call him. Do it now.”

“John can’t afford a last-minute ticket across the country,” Hugh told me. “And I know for a fact that he won’t want to drive three hours from his house to the Seattle airport.”

“He won’t have to,” I said. “Call him.”

That was at 3p.m.New York time. By five, a hired car was heading to Port Angeles to collect Hugh’s brother, and by midnight John was in a first-class seat to J.F.K., where another car would be waiting to deliver him to our apartment.

I said to Amy, “It’s worth every penny.”

I like all of Hugh’s siblings. Each is creative in his or her own way. John, for instance, can make a sculpture out of anything. Hand him an empty sardine tin, three chopsticks, and a broken calculator, and he’ll turn them into something remarkable. He’s a wonderful writer as well, and a huge reader. John is warm and inquisitive. He’s bighearted and energetic, and I’d always looked forward to his visits, especially now. “He can cook, right?” I asked.

“Well, sure,” Hugh said, “but it’s just regular stuff he makes for his grandkids. Pork chops, macaroni and cheese, that kind of thing.”

“That’ll do,” I told him. “At least until you can stand on your feet long enough to pan-fry scallops.”

John hadn’t yet arrived when I collected Hugh’s overnight bag and accompanied him to the hospital for his operation. For years, I’d heard horror stories about American health care, but this place was first-rate. After checking in, we were led to a small, spotless room with curtains for walls. There was an examining table set up, and, once Hugh had changed into a medical gown, we were visited by six staff members, starting with a nurse who inserted an I.V. into the back of his hand and cleaned out his nose with iodine. An aide shaved and then washed the hip that needed replacing. Then came another nurse, who took a vial of Hugh’s blood and asked a series of questions, including “When did you last have a bowel movement?”

I put my fingers in my ears and made the noise of a hundred thousand bees.

“Are you O.K.?” the young woman asked.

“We don’t do things like that,” I told her, rocking back and forth, my fingers still in my ears.

“We don’t have bowel movements,” I explained. “The bathrooms at our house are for soaking in the tub and brushing our teeth—that’s it. Nothing else has ever happened there.”

I know couples who sit on the toilet with the door open, who merrily pass gas in front of each other and discuss their evacuations in graphic detail. But Hugh and I are not those people. Hearing his answer to the nurse’s question could have possibly destroyed me, and so I kept my fingers in my ears until she left and the anesthesiologist arrived. Then came another nurse and, finally, the surgeon—Dr. Reif—who, we learned, had just amputated a leg.

Sitting in the curtained-off room, listening as patients to the left and right of us were asked about their bowel movements, too, I realized that I had never seen Hugh frightened before. “You’ll be fine,” I told him, patting his hand and noticing for the first time that it had age spots on it.

At 11a.m., right on schedule, a gurney pulled up. Hugh was outfitted with a bonnet, and, after he was wheeled away, I went home to meet John, who has visited us in France and England but, like Olivier and David, had never before been to New York. All the Hamrick brothers are handsome, though in slightly different ways, like dogs born in different litters to the same purebred parents. John’s jaw is squarer than Hugh’s and Sam’s, and his thick hair, even as he turns seventy, has hardly any gray in it. His gait is looser, and he’s more affectionate, always ready to lay a hand on your shoulder, and perhaps surprise you with a kiss on the cheek.

“Ick,” I said, when we greeted each other. “Get off me!”

Walking from my apartment to the Morgan Library, where we would have lunch, took three times as long as it normally would because John kept stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to look up: “Wow. Did you see the detail on that building?”

A woman slammed into his back, the way I myself have done a thousand times when a tourist, oblivious to the people around him, quits moving in order to gawk and point.

“You could at least apologize!” John shouted after her once she’d skittered around him, muttering.

We were eating when the surgeon called to say that he had finished, and that there had been no complications.

It hadn’t occurred to me that anything might have gone wrong, though I suppose it easily could have. Eight years earlier, John’s wife—a woman he’d been with since he was fourteen, the mother of his child—died of a blood clot after breaking her leg. Totally unexpected, and his entire life was derailed. I’m still not sure how he makes it from one day to the next, and in such good humor. Time helps, I imagine, as do all the philosophy books he reads. For a while, he saw a therapist. Now he dates a woman who lives down the street from him and makes her own greeting cards.

It’s amazing how quickly doctors can get hip-replacement patients back on their feet. The morning after the operation, John and I entered the hospital and found Hugh shuffling down a hallway. He had a physical therapist by his side and was using a walker—but still!

Getting him home a short time later involved a thick cushion and a car with plenty of legroom. “Ow!” he said whenever I tried to help. “You’re making everything worse!”

In the apartment, he steered his walker toward the bed. “I’m going to need you to take my shoes off,” he said to me, adding, as I began to do so, “Slowly! Now put my slippers on—not like that!! Get me my shoehorn!”

He needed a blanket, his phone, a glass of water. “Notthat muchwater!” he complained when I handed it to him. There were prescriptions to be picked up, and sickroom equipment—for instance, an adjustable stool he’d need when getting in and out of bed. I went to four different places looking for one. At CVS, I came upon a well-dressed white-haired woman who had in her shopping cart a pack of wet wipes and eight quart-size cartons of half-and-half.

“God, that’s a lot of half-and-half,” I said to her. “Who on earth needs that much?”

“I’m having guests,” she snapped, and I scurried away.

That evening, I went with Amy to our friend Mike’s for dinner.

“I can’t believe you’re abandoning me,” Hugh said as I dressed to leave.

I reminded him that it had been on the calendar for months. “And I’m notabandoningyou—John is here.”

It was nice to get away, if only for a few hours. To have someone bringmebowls of nuts and glasses of water. At the table, I mentioned the lady who’d growled at me at CVS. Then Mike told us about a woman who’d spotted Ted Koppel carrying a basketful of avocados at a farm stand in Maryland.

“None of your goddam business,” he reportedly answered.

I recapped the evening for Hugh the following morning, saying that there were plenty more parties coming up. “Hopefully, you can come with me to Antonio’s Christmas lunch in two weeks. We had so much fun last year, remember?”

“Two weeks!” Hugh gestured toward his outstretched leg. “Look at me! Are you out of your mind?”

John, who had gone that morning to buy a juicer, set a glass of something that poured like wet cement in front of his brother and raised his voice, which was unlike him. “My God, David. He’s just had major surgery!”

I raised my voice in return. “Well, excuse me! I thought that eventually hemight get better!”

By outsourcing Hugh’s care, I had shut myself out of his recovery. Now I wanted back in, but it was too late. After saying, “Whatever you do, don’t give him a bell,” Amy brought Hugh an empty can she’d put a few quarters in.

Clang,clang,clang, I’d hear while sitting at my desk.Clang, clang.

“How can I help?” I’d ask, racing into the bedroom.

“John is downstairs,” Hugh would say. “Go get him and tell him I need to put my socks on.”

I’d roll up my sleeves. “I can do that for you.”

The two were inseparable, and would convene each morning to dissect their dreams. “So I’m back in Port Angeles under a pitch-black sky, frying—get this—pennies in a skillet,” I caught John saying a week after his arrival, as he sat on the edge of the bed, massaging oil into Hugh’s feet. “I might be wrong, but I’m interpreting this to mean I could use more copper and iron in my diet.”

At meals, the brothers would reflect on their childhoods in Africa. “Remember that C.I.A. agent who had a crush on Mom in Djibouti?” “What was the name of that Belgian nun in Ethiopia who we gave our monkey to?”

It made it hard to join the conversation. This as opposed to when Amy would visit. Shortly after Hugh’s operation, she had her elderly rabbit, Tina, put to sleep. A few days later, nose stuffed up and with puffy eyes, she came to dinner.

“Actually,” Amy said, “I think I’m allergic to Tina’s ghost.”

Hugh has a sister named Ann, and one morning I walked into the dining room and found him talking with her on speakerphone. “Do you have comfortable enough chairs?” she asked.

The answer would normally be yes, but, on account of his hip, he had to be raised up while sitting. “There are a few that are O.K. if I put a cushion on them,” Hugh told her, gesturing for me to refill his coffee cup. “At my doctor’s office yesterday, I saw one that would be perfect, but there’s no way David would allow it into the apartment. It’s too ugly.”

“Well, screw him,” I heard Ann say. “We’re talking about your health here!”

The next morning, she sent a text that read “Is David any help to you?”

Before Hugh could answer, I picked up his phone and typed, “None at all,” adding an emoji—my first time ever—of a skunk.

I expected her to respond with “You’re kidding,” or “I don’t believe that for one second.”

Instead, she wrote, “That sort of angers me. But then, he’s so self-involved.”

Rather than texting her back, I returned to my office and resumed writing in my diary.Self-involved,indeed, I thought. Hugh hadn’t shown me the chair he was talking to Ann about, but, if it was truly that ugly, I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted it, either. Why was I the villain here?

Hugh went off his painkillers after the third day. After the eighth, he cast aside his walker and was able to get around using a cane. He made it to the lobby, slowly, then all the way to the corner. Now that he didn’t need quite as much attention, I started taking John to see a bit of the city. One afternoon, on the C train, we came upon a man who had peed on himself—and had likely been doing so for quite a while. The stench of old urine was so intense that it had emptied half the subway car. Neither awake nor asleep, he sat slumped beside a dribbling vodka bottle, muttering.

Check, I thought, since that’s something every visitor to New York needs to see. After looking at this man for a moment or two, John remarked not on the smell or on the ridiculous Santa hat the man wore but on his hands. “Did you notice how beautiful they are?” he asked.

I took him to lunch at a deli in Carnegie Hill. Just as our orders arrived, I heard someone ask, “Can we get a picture?”

Must I? I thought, looking to my right and realizing that the person was talking not to me but to Kevin Spacey.

“Hasn’t he been cancelled?” John asked much more loudly than he needed to.

“It still counts as a star sighting,” I told him, thinking,Check!

We went to the Met andMoMA, then to the most garish of souvenir shops so that John could buy sweatshirts for his grandsons. In Times Square, he stood stock still and took photos of billboards as people who work in that neighborhood cursed the pair of us. I said to Hugh when we got home, “I even took him to see the tree at Rockefeller Center.”

That was huge, as no one in their right mind goes anywhere near Rockefeller Center from Thanksgiving to mid-January or so.

“What do you want, a medal?” Hugh asked.

I tried to remember that he was still in pain, and that, trapped inside for all but thirty minutes a day, he was going a little stir-crazy. It was hard for both of us, but became surprisingly easier when, shortly before Christmas, John returned to Washington State. On that morning, I accompanied Hugh to his surgeon’s office for a follow-up appointment.

“Any questions?” Dr. Reif asked after removing Hugh’s bandage to examine the wound.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you see any reason why he can’t cook Christmas dinner? We have nine guests coming, and he’s threatening to have it catered.”

The doctor replaced the bandage. “Oh, I think he’s up to it. That said, you might want to take a few shortcuts, use Stove Top stuffing rather than homemade, that sort of thing.”

“Stuffingfrom a box?” I said when we were back on the street. “Stuffing,period? As if we’d have turkey on Christmas Day! That man didnotknow who he was talking to, did he?”

“No, he did not,” Hugh sniffed, raising his cane to hail a cab. And, with that, he was back. Christmas nearly killed him, but no shortcuts were taken. He made a second entrée for the vegetarians and two desserts. Given a few more days, he might have even churned his own butter.

I left New York in early January to go back on tour, and when I saw Hugh again, six weeks later, he was fully recovered. Walking, swimming, going up and down stairs. “It’s a miracle!” he said.

I once met a young man who’d discovered by accident that one of his kidneys was dead inside him. Doctors removed it, and when I asked what happened to the cavity he said that his other organs had shifted slightly to occupy it. That’s what happened to the space Hugh had filled with his pain. It’s not like we now devote it exclusively to politics or art appreciation, though both subjects grew larger, as did talk of our families, and our friends. As he became his old self again, the pleasantness of our life together just sort of swelled, crowding out everything but half a bottle of OxyContin and a really tall toilet seat now gathering cobwebs beside an aluminum walker in our building’s dank, uninviting basement. ♦

American sports come with implied narratives. The story of baseball is fundamentally nostalgic, connecting us to childhood and to the country’s pastoral beginnings. Football tells a story of manly grit, with echoes of the battlefield. Basketball is the city game, as the sportswriter Pete Axthelm called it half a century ago, and its chief narrative, for decades, was about escaping the ghetto. Religious metaphors run hotter in basketball than in other sports: when Spike Lee set out to make an ode to New York City hoops, he named his protagonist Jesus Shuttlesworth, for the N.B.A. Hall of Famer Earl (Jesus) Monroe; LeBron James appeared on the cover ofSports Illustratedat the age of seventeen as “The Chosen One.” Every tall and prodigiously skilled teen-ager feels like an act of God. And no sport, perhaps other than soccer, with itspibesandcraques—the impoverished dribbling and juggling machines who hope to become the next Maradona or Pelé—so deeply mythologizes the search for talent. The savior of your N.B.A. franchise might be getting left off his high-school team in Wilmington, North Carolina, or he might be selling sunglasses on the streets of Athens, Greece, to help his Nigerian immigrant parents make ends meet, or he might be living with his mother in a one-bedroom apartment in Akron, Ohio. You just have to find him.

At least, that was the story. On a recent episode of “Mind the Game,” the podcast that LeBron James hosts with the coach and former point guard Steve Nash, James spoke with the young N.B.A. superstar Luka Dončić about how different James’s hoops upbringing had been from that of kids today. On the playgrounds of Akron, James said, he would play 21, in which the person with the ball tries to score against everyone else. Such games taught him how to improvise, how to get around multiple defenders and create scoring opportunities out of nothing. James is a father of two sons, who mostly learned how to play basketball “indoors,” in a “programmed” environment, he said. They were taught the game by a fleet of coaches and other professionals. “I didn’t have a basketball trainer until second, third, maybe fourth year in the N.B.A.,” James went on. “My basketball training was just being on the court.” Last year, Dončić founded a nonprofit that focusses on youth basketball; in December, the organization published a report arguing that, as youth sports have professionalized, they have become more exclusive, sucking the “joy” out of the game.

A video clip of the podcast was posted on TikTok, and the top comment beneath it reads, “Lebron will be one of the last superstars that’s from the ghetto, basketballs like golf now it’s a tutelage sport.” That might not be entirely true; if a seven-foot-two teen-age Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were walking around any neighborhood in New York today, he wouldn’t get far without a wannabe agent stopping him in the street. But, putting aside such once-in-a-generation talents, the landscape of the league has subtly changed. James and his older son, LeBron (Bronny) James, Jr., made N.B.A. history last year by suiting up as teammates, for the Los Angeles Lakers. And, while that was a first, being a second-generation N.B.A. player is becoming almost unremarkable. In 2009, ten players in the league had fathers who’d played for N.B.A. teams; this past season, there were thirty-five. The future promises even more hoop legacies. The likely No. 2 pick in the upcoming draft is Dylan Harper, whose father, Ron, played with Michael Jordan on the Chicago Bulls. Lists of top high-school recruits include the names Anthony, as in Carmelo, and Arenas, as in Gilbert. James’s younger son, Bryce, has committed to play for the University of Arizona and could also reach the N.B.A. soon.

Genetics is the most obvious explanation: if your dad is six feet eight and your mom is six feet two, you stand a better chance of guarding Kevin Durant—or Durant’s kids—than my children will ever have. But the N.B.A. has been around for almost eighty years, and the number of roster spots in the league has barely changed since the mid-nineties. If all that mattered were good genes, the influx of second-generation players would have shown up thirty years ago. Why the spike now?

To answer that question, one N.B.A. executive told me, you probably have to look at the economy of basketball development. The children of pros are generally wealthy and well connected; they have access to “better training, coaching, and the right people who can put them on the right lists,” the executive said. “Those early edges accumulate.” Increasingly, players are made as much as they are born, and making those players costs money. A star prospect requires a set of physical gifts that might as well be divine in origin. But, to compete now, he will also likely need the kinds of resources that you have to buy, and a small industry has arisen to sell them.

“It’s getting too expensive for some kids to even play, and the pressure to be perfect takes away the love for the game,” Dončić told me. “I think about my daughter and wonder what sports will feel like for her one day.” Jay Williams, a basketball analyst at ESPN who was the second pick in the 2002 N.B.A. draft, said to me, “When I came into the league in the early two-thousands, player development was mostly raw talent, repetition, and survival.” Now, he said, “development starts younger, it’s more specialized, and it’s driven by business.” Jermaine O’Neal, a six-time N.B.A. All-Star who recently founded a basketball-centered prep school, told me, “The cost of everything has changed.” O’Neal, like James, grew up with a single mother in a working-class area of a small city. Sports in general, O’Neal said, are “pricing out a percentage of athletes raised in communities like mine.”

The professionalization of youth sports has changed not only who reaches the N.B.A. but how the game is played when they get there. Watching the post-season this year, I found the level of play to be possibly higher than ever. But I felt little emotional connection to the game. Like many fans, I complain about the number of three-point shots that teams are taking, which turns so many games into an almost cynical exercise in playing the odds. Today’s style is also more rehearsed, more optimized. This, I believe, can be traced to the way that the players are learning the game from an early age—to the difference between a childhood spent outdoors with your friends, competing against grown men, and one spent as a customer, with a cadre of coaches who push you only in the ways that you or, in most cases, your parents approve of.

“What used to be driven by someone’s hunger to improve, to figure it out and work to get better, becomes a job for a lot of these kids so early,” Steve Nash told me. This, he added, meant “essentially trading their enjoyment and motivation for a calculated approach that may be more suitable to young adults than young kids.”

Does this shift also help explain why the N.B.A. has struggled to find its next superstars, successors to James, Steph Curry, and others of their generation? Perhaps. It’s true that a number of today’s best players—Dončić, Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo—are from other countries, and many Americans crave homegrown heroes. But the leading players in this year’s finals, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, of the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Tyrese Haliburton, of the Indiana Pacers, are North American. (Gilgeous-Alexander is from Canada.) The former plays a throwback game that involves a lot of slithering through tight spaces; the latter makes surprising, lightning-quick passes and fires his jump shots with an awkward motion that resembles an old man pushing his grandchild on a swing. Yet neither player has caught the public imagination in the manner of a James or a Curry or a Durant. When fans argue about the next face of the league, they usually bring up Anthony Edwards, the charismatic guard on the Minnesota Timberwolves, or Ja Morant, of the Memphis Grizzlies, who floats through the air like his bones are hollow before exploding into some of the most violent dunks the league has ever seen. They are the basketball equivalents of James Brown: undeniably virtuosic, always on point, but with so much confidence and brio that they feel unpredictable and capable of anything. The new N.B.A. archetype, in contrast, feels more like an “American Idol” singing machine—technically flawless and with unlimited range, but ultimately forgettable for everyone except the vocal coaches on YouTube.

What happened? Once, a serious basketball prospect might simply play on his local high-school team and then head off to college. Nowadays, he will likely attend multiple schools, seeking exposure, playing time, and competition. The trend began slowly, in the nineteen-eighties, when secondary schools with big-time basketball programs—notably, Oak Hill Academy, in rural Virginia, the alma mater of Rod Strickland, Anthony, and Durant—began recruiting the country’s best players. Soon, explicitly sports-centered schools emerged. The talent agency IMG purchased the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, in Florida, and expanded it to include other sports, adding basketball in 2001. Five years later, Cliff Findlay, a Las Vegas businessman who had made his money in car dealerships, opened Findlay Prep, which was, arguably, just a basketball team—a dozen or so boys from all over the world who played games around the country and took classes at a private school a few minutes away from the gym where they practiced. Findlay Prep won three national high-school titles in four years and produced eighteen N.B.A. players. It closed down, in 2019, when the nearby private school ended the partnership. Suddenly, Findlay’s students had nowhere to go to class.

This spring, I flew to Dallas to visit Dynamic Prep, the school that Jermaine O’Neal founded in 2022. It has eleven students, all of them Division I basketball prospects. Monday through Friday, the students gather at a twenty-four-thousand-square-foot training facility just north of the city. In the morning, they sit in a classroom and take an N.C.A.A.-approved curriculum of online courses. Then they head to the gym for strength training and conditioning, before basketball practice in the afternoon.

When I arrived, Dynamic’s student body was on the court. The team had recently been ranked tenth in the country by ESPN, helping it qualify as a late addition to the Chipotle Nationals, an annual tournament that unofficially crowns the country’s high-school champions. But Dynamic would face long odds against more established programs, including IMG Academy and Montverde Academy, another Florida school that consistently produces N.B.A. draft picks. And practice wasn’t going well. O’Neal, who is the head coach of the team in addition to being the school’s founder, stood on the sidelines, his arms crossed. He is nearly seven feet tall, with a high forehead and a dimpled chin; he still appears to be more or less in playing shape. The team had been running half-court sets for nearly thirty minutes, but nobody was where he was supposed to be—not even Jermaine O’Neal, Jr., the team’s small forward. O’Neal, Sr., had spent the first half of practice quietly simmering; then one player missed a defensive rotation and asked his flummoxed coach what was wrong. “Your demeanor!” O’Neal yelled, before ordering the player off the court. Another kid replaced him, and the ball was passed back to the top of the key. The drill began again.

O’Neal grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and counts thirty-two siblings among his relatives. His mother taught him almost everything; he didn’t meet his father until he was thirty years old. At seventeen, just a few years after growing about nine inches in three months, he became one of the youngest players ever to reach the N.B.A. when he was drafted in the first round by the Portland Trail Blazers. He was part of a generation who skipped college entirely; the sports media was largely skeptical of kids who turned down college scholarships in favor of N.B.A. dollars, and these teen-agers often found themselves competing for playing time against men more than a decade older. O’Neal rode the bench for four years. But veterans on the team made sure that he understood his place on the roster and how to act like a professional. When he was traded to the Indiana Pacers, after his fourth season, he flourished.

O’Neal credits the playgrounds of his childhood with giving him instincts on the court and helping instill the resilience to endure what felt like an ignoble start to his career. He knows that the kids he coaches aren’t getting that kind of real-world instruction, and so he looks for ways to simulate it. “I’m taking a little bit of the hardship mind-set of how I grew up, and I’m bringing it to this new-school mind-set and mixing it,” he told me. The team’s intense practices and his focus on defense are partly meant to create an experience of adversity. He believes that his job is not only to prepare his players for what comes after Dynamic in college or in the pros but also to protect them from it. “Your coaches won’t love you—you’re just getting them closer to another win,” he yelled at one point during practice. “Once you get on campus, your parents will never be able to help you.”

In O’Neal’s view, a school like Dynamic is more sensitive to the needs of young athletes than traditional options are. Before founding the school, he created Drive Nation, a home for youth basketball and volleyball teams which was headquartered next to the car-rental center at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. Drive Nation’s teams were affiliated with the Amateur Athletic Union, or A.A.U., an umbrella organization for club teams which, in the past twenty-five years, has become a major part of youth sports. At the time, O’Neal’s daughter, Asjia, was one of the top high-school volleyball players in the country. But, during her junior year, she told her parents that she was burned out: full-time school followed by practice and training—plus the travel and stress that came with playing for a club team and the United States youth program—had been too much. O’Neal began reading about other approaches to youth sports, and he talked to coaches in Europe. He learned about the Continent’s academy system, which plucks promising athletes at an early age and gives them a more specialized path, organizing their lives largely around their sport. Dynamic is his attempt to bring that system to the U.S.

Most of the kids at Dynamic won’t make the N.B.A., but all of them could play for major college programs—and big-time college basketball is a lucrative endeavor in itself. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that N.C.A.A. restrictions on the payment of student athletes were a violation of antitrust law; now student athletes can make money by selling their name, image, and likeness. Bronny James reportedly earned nearly six million dollars from such N.I.L. deals—with Nike, Beats by Dre, and other companies—before he left college. And you don’t have to be LeBron James’s son, or even a top N.B.A. prospect, to do well. R. J. Davis, a talented but undersized guard, spent five seasons at the University of North Carolina, becoming the second-highest scorer in the program’s history; he may not get an N.B.A. paycheck anytime soon, but he racked up at least twenty-five N.I.L. deals last year, which paid him more than two and a half million dollars. Players like him are staying in college longer than before, and many of them move around to pursue the best and most profitable opportunities by registering with the N.C.A.A.’s transfer portal, which notifies coaches at other colleges about the players who are newly available for recruiting. The day I visited Dynamic, the transfer portal had just opened up, and O’Neal informed his kids, early in practice, how many players had entered it. This, he was suggesting, is what they were up against: hundreds of young men vying for a limited number of spots that could be worth millions of dollars.

After practice, he gathered the team around him. “What do you all want?” he asked. The players hung their heads. “I’m going to be real with you,” he said. “Today was not good enough.” If the team hoped to succeed at the Chipotle Nationals, they would have to put in more effort. O’Neal pointed out that the number of players in the transfer portal had gone up since that morning. “Seven hundred in the portal now,” he said. “It’s a record. Every year, it’s a fucking record.” Then he repeated his question. “What is it you want?”

It’s an old complaint, but it’s still true: kids who have been given everything may end up lacking motivation. “I wish I’d had the access my kids have—the trainers, the recovery tools, the mental-health support,” Jay Williams told me. “It’s a smarter system now, but what I want to pass down to them is the hunger, the grit.” O’Neal made more than a hundred and sixty-seven million dollars in his playing career, and he has struggled to impart the lessons he learned in his childhood to Jermaine, Jr. “I had this thing where I’d say to him, ‘Man, you don’t understand how good you got it,’ ” he told me. “ ‘The only thing you’re missing is hardship. You fly on private jets. You drive a Range Rover. You’ve had a chef your entire life.’ I have literally missed meals. I’ve literally had one pair of shoes that were my school shoes, my basketball shoes, and, if I went to church, they were my church shoes.”

“I never wanted my kids to live like that, and I didn’t want to live like that,” he went on. “So I would ask Jermaine, Jr., ‘What are you starving for?’ And he couldn’t answer the question.” Eventually, Jermaine, Jr., came up with a response: he needed an emotional break from living in the shadow of both his dad and his coach. O’Neal has been trying to give him one.

Youth basketball is not an outlier in its trend toward professionalization. You can see the same story in countless aspects of American life. Fierce competition breeds cottage industries that promise advantages to the children of parents who can afford them. Those children crowd out their peers, and the path to upward mobility narrows. The kids playing sports at big-time college programs are examples of this trend, but so are many of the straight-A students who attend classes at those same colleges, whose parents may have paid for private tutors and consultants to help secure admission. Children from poorer families have to be extraordinary or they will fall behind.

The most highly touted prospect at Dynamic Prep, according to ESPN, is not Jermaine O’Neal, Jr.—the twenty-second-ranked small forward in the country—but another child of professional athletes. Marcus Spears, Jr., is the son of a retired N.F.L. defensive lineman and a former W.N.B.A. player, Aiysha Spears. June, as his parents call him, is six feet eight, with long arms and the lankiness of a teen-ager who is still growing. He can shoot from outside, defend at the rim, and trigger a fast break after a rebound. If he grows a few more inches, he’ll be the same height as Durant, one of his favorite players; his loping but graceful gait calls to mind a young Antetokounmpo. It may be ludicrous to invoke such superstars when discussing a kid who just turned sixteen, but scouting is an exercise in imagination, one in which the most salient inputs are limitations—if a prospect has T. rex arms or shoots like he’s angry at the ball, his spectrum of possibility shrinks. June was averaging fewer than seven points a game, but he has uncapped potential: you can map his body, skills, and movements onto many of the best players in the N.B.A. He’s currently the third-ranked high-school sophomore in the country, at any position in the game.

He’s also, for now, younger and skinnier than most of his teammates. At practice, I watched him get pushed around while his father paced the sidelines. Marcus Spears, Sr., was a football star at Louisiana State University before playing eight seasons for the Dallas Cowboys and another for the Baltimore Ravens. He’s now one of ESPN’s premier football analysts. On TV, he is self-deprecating and exceedingly likable, but on the sidelines he was like every other anxious basketball dad: muttering to himself when June didn’t rotate fast enough on defense, staring morosely at the floor when June took a spill onto the hardwood. When June declined to shoot an open jumper, he yelled, “Take the shot!”

Later that day, I visited Marcus and Aiysha Spears at their seven-thousand-square-foot house in a gated community near where the Cowboys practice. Aiysha grew up in Detroit—“the city,” she told me, “not the surrounding areas”—and was reared, in her early years, by a mother who wanted her to become a swimmer. Her mother died when Aiysha was thirteen, and she decided to take up basketball, mostly playing for her local school teams, with some A.A.U., too. “I was travelling by myself to tournaments,” she told me. “My mother passed away, my father wasn’t in my life, and my grandparents didn’t know what to do, so they trusted my coaches to handle it and make sure that I was O.K. I would be in Indiana or Chicago, and they definitely couldn’t pay to come watch me play in a tournament. The hundred and fifty dollars or whatever it would cost to see me, that was our electricity bill.”

Marcus, whose extensive array of barbecuing equipment sat on the back patio, grew up in a blue-collar family in Baton Rouge. His mother was a telephone operator for Bell South, and his father worked as an electrician before getting a job at the Georgia-Pacific paper mill. Spears echoed the other former pros I talked to when he described how he learned to play sports: “outside,” mostly in pickup games with older boys. Now he’s trying to teach toughness to his son. “I was super hard on June when he was young,” he told me. “I was looking at it from a prism of knowing what he was going to actually be. Like, ‘Your mom is six foot two, bro, and I’m a pro football player. She’s a pro basketball player. You’re going to be the one per cent of the one per cent of what you’re doing.’ ” He prodded his son to work harder, even cursing at him the way he knew June’s coaches someday would. “But I probably started a little too early with him, at seven or eight years old,” he said. “I still have to check myself at times now and realize he’s still fifteen years old, because when I was fifteen I wasn’t even close to what he is doing now.” Spears wants his son to succeed, and he knows that college sports have changed. “When I got to L.S.U., I was developing as a player,” he said. “Kids can’t sit on the bench and learn how to play anymore. They need to produce immediately or they’re gone.”

Kids who are serious about sports now don’t just spend hours practicing; they also spend hours building their brands. Today, just about every notable college prospect has dozens of tightly edited YouTube highlight reels and tens of thousands of Instagram followers. Top prospects used to meet one another at camps or at the annual McDonald’s All-American Game; they might have scanned one another’s names in the infrequent updates of high-school player rankings. Now those same players meet through social media and the booming youth-sports content business.

This is true across all kinds of activities. If you’re the best twelve-year-old chess player in a big city, you’ve probably competed in hundreds of online games against the other top twelve-year-olds across the world—you might even live-stream your matches and feed some of that content into the algorithms of TikTok and Instagram. Yogi Roth, an analyst at the Big Ten Network, has tracked the development of N.F.L. prospects for the past twenty-five years, and he believes that social media has fundamentally changed the experience of learning to play football. Roth played in college and coached for several years before going into television; in 2009, he became a producer and the host of “Elite 11,” which has been likened to “American Idol,” but for high-school quarterbacks. The show has featured sixteen future Heisman Trophy winners and was once a rare opportunity for players at that level to meet one another and compete. Now those connections are made online. “They find one another early,” Roth said. “And then they all get on the same club team, which draws even more connections.”

There are benefits to this hypervisibility—scholarship offers, attention from skilled trainers and coaches. But it also attracts predatory figures and creates additional pressure. Cautionary tales abound. The canonical basketball example is Julian Newman, whose highlight reels went viral when he was a fifth grader and not yet four and a half feet tall. He was written up in theTimesand featured on “Good Morning America”; an online marketing machine was built around him, much of it orchestrated by his father. But Newman was just five feet seven when he finished high school, and no big-time college program wants a tiny shoot-first point guard who might arrive with a long list of demands. He spent the next five years as a fading YouTube celebrity, challenging other content creators to one-on-one battles.

Marcus Spears, Jr., does not have a large social-media following, nor does he spend much time with influencers—relative to other top prospects, he has little online presence, which is mostly by design. “I’m not going to monetize my fifteen-year-old,” his father told me. “I’m not interested in him having three hundred thousand followers.” But he and Aiysha understand that this is a privilege: parents who need the sponsorship money will understandably want to turn the hype around their talented children into funds, and some may even view it as the best choice for their kids. Spears said that he and his wife can see the downsides of that attention because of their experiences as pro athletes. “Also, if I need to fly to L.A. because the best knee doctor is out there, I can do it,” he added. “But, if I wasn’t in this position, and monetization on Instagram was going to allow my kid to go to the best doctor, then I would do that for them.”

All the former pros I talked to were frustrated by the intensity of youth sports as it exists now, but they still participated in the system because, well, what good parents wouldn’t do the same to insure that their children kept up with other talented kids? If I had a child who could potentially play basketball in college or the pros, I would pay for all the trainers everyone else was paying for—and then, if I could, I would send them to play at Dynamic for Coach O’Neal. Most people probably would. As O’Neal put it to me, “Wherever there’s kids, there’s parents. Wherever parents and kids go, they’re going to spend money.”

Not everyone at Dynamic, or at the programs it competes against, has money. The established schools offer scholarships; Dynamic is in an “incubator” phase, O’Neal told me, and so, for now, is not charging tuition. But the student athletes at these schools have all learned to play ball through careful instruction. In early April, a couple of weeks before the N.B.A. playoffs, the Chipotle Nationals began. The kids in these games had a long way to go, but they already played a facsimile of the pro game. Big guys shot threes, guards drove the lane and kicked the ball out for more threes. Gone are the days of novel high-school offensive sets or, at least on this level, wild invention.

More than a decade ago, I travelled to Oak Hill Academy to watch some practices. Most of the kids I saw went on to play big-time college hoops; the school drew a level of talent similar to Dynamic’s today. But, watching Dynamic practice, I was struck immediately by how fast they moved; I felt almost as if I were watching a different stage of evolution. “The game has become faster, more positionless, and more physically demanding,” Bill Duffy, a former N.B.A. draft pick and one of the top agents in the league, told me. “Players are training at a high level from a much younger age, and that’s changed not only how they move but how they think about the game. The style of play has evolved to match the speed and specialization that comes with early development.”

All that training has also led to a uniformity of play. “I absolutely hate it,” Marcus Spears, Sr., told me. That sameness comes from learning the game in a controlled environment, he said. “I think that’s why so many players from overseas are the top names in the N.B.A. now, because not only do they learn the technical side—they play the game with the old-school principle of playing against people who are older than you.” At the turn of the century, there were thirty-six foreign-born players in the N.B.A. Last year, there were a hundred and twenty-five. The top European teens play in pro leagues, against veterans. “You develop instincts in those situations,” Spears went on. American kids, no longer learning on the playground, were losing theirs, he believed. “You hear N.B.A. players that have been in the league a while say these young players suck. It’s not that they suck—it’s just they can’t do anything if you don’t tell them to. You need to make reads in the game, you need to deviate away from the play because it didn’t work. Now everybody just looks around, like, ‘What do I do now?’ ” One coach told the authors of the report published by Luka Dončić’s foundation, “Players don’t know how to anticipate where the ball will fall because they’re so used to their trainers getting their rebounds.”

Steve Nash told me that his effort “to be creative and imaginative” as a player was driven in large part by what he didn’t know—and that, as much as he envied some of the tools that young prospects now have, constant training likely would have altered that. O’Neal, too, saw this as a problem with the way basketball is now taught. “They are literally training these kids like robots, and the players don’t have any feel anymore,” he said. “That’s why all the players look alike now. Hell, half these kids don’t even watch basketball—they watch YouTube.”

At the Chipotle Nationals, O’Neal’s focus on defense, at least, seemed to pay off. Dynamic’s first game was against the vaunted Montverde, and his squad jumped out to an early 12–2 lead, largely owing to the players’ defensive effort. June, who came off the bench, was conspicuously the tallest person on the floor and also conspicuously among the youngest. He finished the game with respectable numbers—five points, five rebounds, and a block in sixteen minutes—and Dynamic managed an upset. The next day, Dynamic blew out Link Academy, the second-ranked team in the country. (The most recognizable name on Link’s roster is Andre Iguodala, Jr., whose father is a four-time N.B.A. champion.) Dynamic won again in Round Three, reaching the finals against Christopher Columbus High School, a Catholic prep school in Miami. Columbus was led by Cameron and Cayden Boozer, the twin sons of the two-time N.B.A. All-Star Carlos Boozer. In the title game, Cayden scored twenty-seven points, Cameron chipped in eleven with eight rebounds, and Columbus got another twelve rebounds from Jaxon Richardson, whose father, Jason, played fourteen seasons in the N.B.A. Columbus won by eighteen points, ending Dynamic’s unlikely run.

There’s no inherent reason that silver-spoon players have to produce an inferior product on the court. And a certain kind of basketball purist—the sort who hates any talk of narrative and is interested only in what happens between the lines on the floor—would roll his eyes at questions about where the handful of players who make the N.B.A. come from.

Still, let’s indulge in one last metaphor. Basketball is like jazz in so many ways that the analogy has become a cliché. As Wynton Marsalis once wrote, “Both reward improvisation and split-second decision making against the pressure of time.” Both are also Black art forms that require incredible discipline and a lifetime of study but which, when performed at their highest levels, encourage a freedom of expression that can take the audience into an ecstatic state. Every hoops fan can think of at least one such moment. For me, it was watching LeBron try to single-handedly beat the Golden State Warriors in the 2015 N.B.A. Finals after his two most talented teammates went down with injuries. James broke from the established tempo of the game and birthed a moment of ugly genius, walking the ball up the court, ordering his overmatched teammates around like a conductor, and almost breaking the spirit of their opponents, one of the best teams of all time.

Maybe this is nostalgia on my part. Perhaps athletes trained in state-of-the-art gyms can bring as much drama and charisma to the court as those who learned to play by trying to score against older guys on a run-down playground. But I’m not sure that basketball can survive as a major sport if it loses all connection to the narrative that has woven it so deeply into American culture. Basketball’s past may not be as virtuosic or as technically sound as its future, but part of why we watch the game is to witness the come-up—the pain of losing followed by the moment when years of work produce an instant of ingenuity that finally gets the superstar to the top. And, because we are sentimental, we want to know that the journey started on the blacktops of Akron, or in some dusty church gym in Indiana, or on the playgrounds of Coney Island. Every great American story is sentimental in the same way: instincts born out of struggle, the triumph of the schoolyard over the classroom, uncommon creativity driven by necessity. ♦