Over the past few months, college sports have seen conferences shift, rules change, and a 13–0 team get left out of the playoffs. But a potentially larger shake-up is now in the works.

On Tuesday, NCAA President Charlie Baker proposed a plan to create a new tier within Division I college athletics. The groundbreaking proposal gives participating schools autonomy over name, image, and likeness (NIL) decisions and initiates a “long-overdue conversation” about the existing framework for compensating student-athletes.

• Schools would be required to invest a minimum of $30,000/year per athlete for at least half of all eligible student-athletes into an “enhanced educational trust fund,” which by most accounts seems like a regular trust fund.
• Student-athletes would be allowed to enter NIL deals directly with their schools rather than a third party.

What it means for the future of college sports

Baker’s proposed new tier pertains to “the highest-resourced colleges and universities,” understood to mean the Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and ACC, which contain the largest and wealthiest athletic programs in the US. A new subdivision just for those schools could alleviate headaches around transfer limits, scholarships, and, most importantly, NIL rules.

But…some observers say the proposal still doesn’t address the core issue: employment. The NCAA has lobbied for years to prevent college athletes from being named “employees,” but sports law experts see it as a necessary next step in order to give young athletes a share of the revenue they generate.

The NCAA is going through it. It’s embroiled in multiple legal disputes, including an antitrust lawsuit that could require it to pay billions in damages to student-athletes. There are also talks within the industry of a looming Great Split, in which the Power Five conferences (soon to be Power Four) would secede from the NCAA to form their own organization.—CC

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CVS is overhauling how it prices prescription drugs. In an announcement, the company promised that its new model would be more transparent than the current setup, which prices drugs based on complex reimbursement formulas that can make the costs of prescriptions confusing for consumers. The new model, called CVS CostVantage, is based on a simple equation: Drugs will cost what CVS paid for them, plus a limited markup and a flat fee to cover the services of fulfilling the prescriptions. That’s similar to a plan proposed by billionaire Mark Cuban, founder of Cost Plus Drugs, to bring accountability to drug pricing in the US.

US job openings hit a two-year low. In another sign of a cooling labor market, available positions in the US dropped to 8.7 million in October, the lowest since 2021 and well below estimates for the month. That was music to the ears of the Fed, which wants to see the labor market soften alongside easing inflation before it considers cutting interest rates. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate remained near historic lows, though it climbed to 3.9% last month—its highest level since January 2022.

The US will deny visas to violent Israeli settlers. The Biden administration on Tuesday said it will impose travel bans on Israeli settlers and Palestinians who have committed violence in the West Bank. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the new policy will target “individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security, or stability” in the West Bank, where violence has spiked during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. In October, President Biden said Israeli settlers were “attacking Palestinians in places that they’re entitled to be” and has reportedly pressured Israeli officials to take more action against settlers.

As several new takes on the classic monster stagger across our screens, we are officially in the golden age of entertainment for people who kept reptiles as pets growing up.

The latest awakening of the king of the monsters hit US theaters this past weekend: Godzilla Minus One, a Japanese film, is being hailed as one of the best Godzilla movies ever with A1 reviews and a third-place, roar-worthy box-office performance.

The new movie…

• Had the biggest US debut ever for a Japanese live-action film and the second-biggest debut of any foreign-language live-action movie, according to Collider.
• Has already grossed $35 million worldwide, more than doubling its $15 million budget even before its UK premiere.

Big week to be a huge lizard. On Sunday, Warner Bros. released the trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. It’s the fifth installment in Hollywood’s ~$2 billion MonsterVerse, which expanded to television last month with an Apple TV+ series.

Why can’t we get enough Godzilla? Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki told The Verge that the iconic Brobdingnagian monster traditionally represents a crisis humanity is facing at that moment, like bureaucratic failings or the fear of nuclear war. And there are a lot of those to go around right now.—ML

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Children can be a perpetual source of joy, but they also eat their own boogers and are a bottomless pit of financial commitment. That may explain why more American couples are going child-free, opting for the double-income-no-kids (DINK) lifestyle and evangelizing it all over TikTok.

US birthrates took a steep dip during the Great Recession and have fallen since. In a Pew survey from October 2021, 44% of nonparents ages 18–49 said they were unlikely ever to have kids, compared with 37% in 2018. The 17% who cited money reasons may not be wrong: DINKhood does seem to be the financial sweet spot…

• Child-free couples living together earn an average of $138,000/year, which is $9,000+ more than couples with kids, per Federal Reserve data analyzed by Rocket Mortgage.
• Fed findings also show that DINKs’ median net worth of $399k is bigger than that of couples with children ($251k) or adults with any other family status.

Why else might couples forgo the wonders of rearing children? Experts blame economic uncertainty, lack of paid maternity leave, the punishing costs of childcare, and climate anxiety.

It could also be “millennial mom dread”…a cultural phenomenon Vox recently described as a mix of conflicting social pressures and overwhelming expectations that makes modern motherhood seem less attractive or achievable.—SK

Stat: Adults are supposed to have their homework days behind them. But if you’ve applied to a job recently, it may have conjured up memories of pulling an all-nighter to write an Animal Behavior essay after you skipped class all semester. According to data from Glassdoor, interview reviews mentioning take-home assignments increased 86% in Q3 compared to the same period in 2019. And those reviews are getting harsh: More than half (56%) now report a negative interview experience, compared to 37% four years ago. While pre-hire assignments aren’t new, Bloomberg reported that they’ve expanded in recent years to many more industries and roles, thanks to improvements in technology and the rise of remote work.

Quote: “This experience has been so humbling.”

Trevor Jacob now has six months to do nothing but ponder the pitfalls of internet clout-chasing. The YouTuber from California was sentenced to half a year in prison this week for deliberately crashing a plane in 2021 as part of a sponsorship with a wallet company—and then lying to federal investigators about it, telling them the plane lost power. The video, titled “I Crashed My Plane,” had nearly 3 million views before it was removed from YouTube. In a statement to the BBC, the thoroughly humbled Jacob admitted his six-month sentence was the “right decision.”

Read: Krampus isn’t coming to town. He’s already here. (Washington Post)

Feast: Recipes for several unique holiday cookies, like saffron and ginger macaroons.

Reminisce: Ten minutes of sounds that every ’90s kid will remember.

Sleep tight: The Calm app now offers a bedtime story in the AI-generated voice of Jimmy Stewart, who died in 1997.

Hi, Barbie!: The most popular Barbies of all time, according to Mattel.

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