Steve Baldwin, the controlling owner and CEO of the Washington Spirit women’s soccer team, resigned yesterday as a sexual harassment scandal deepened across the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), the top women’s pro soccer league in the US.

Baldwin was facing pressure to step down after Spirit coach Richie Burke was fired when a Washington Post report revealed he verbally and emotionally abused players.

And he was the second NWSL coach to get fired last week. The North Carolina Courage sacked Paul Riley following a report by The Athletic, which spoke to more than a dozen athletes who played under Riley and accused him of sexual coercion.

Last Friday, the league’s commissioner, Lisa Baird, resigned and multiple games were canceled over the weekend.

On the surface, the NWSL had never been more successful

It was the first US pro sports league to return from a pandemic hiatus in June 2020, and it found a much bigger audience: Viewership surged nearly 300% last season thanks to partnerships with CBS Sports and Twitch.

At the same time, the NWSL went Hollywood. An expansion team based in Los Angeles, Angel City FC, is owned by A-listers including Serena Williams, Natalie Portman, and Mia Hamm. Tennis star Naomi Osaka bought a stake in the NWSL team North Carolina Courage. The league locked in sponsorship deals with Verizon, Procter & Gamble, and Google.

Players had a different experience. On the Today show yesterday, women’s soccer legend Alex Morgan criticized the NWSL’s (lack of) response to sexual harassment complaints, calling it a “systemic failure.” And the players are still negotiating for fair pay—the league’s basic structure pays players $22,000–$52,500 this season. They’ve said their financially precarious situation has made it more challenging to speak out against abuse, the WSJ wrote.

Looking ahead...the NWSL plans to resume games today, but under a storm of investigations from the likes of FIFA and the US Soccer Federation.—NF

After leaking a Song of Ice and Fire-sized tome of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and the SEC, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen challenged the platform’s Silicon Throne in Senate testimony yesterday.

Problem: According to Haugen, Facebook knowingly harms teens via its algorithm’s curation. She placed the blame for that squarely on CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “Mark has built an organization that is very metrics-driven. ...The metrics make the decision. Unfortunately that itself is a decision,” she said.

Solution: Haugen wants Facebook to start by sharing more internal data with outsiders. “As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows and hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable,” she said. As it stands, ”Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what is happening inside.”

• Haugen also suggested legislators rework Section 230—an infamous snippet of the Communications Decency Act that protects platforms from being legally liable for what their users post.

Facebook’s response? In a statement, Facebook a) said that it disagreed with Haugen’s characterization of the topics she testified about and b) attempted to discredit Haugen for not working with those topics directly during her <2 years at the company.

Zoom out: Haugen's testimony may turn up the volume on calls to regulate the social media giant, which is still recovering from its 6-hour outage Monday.—JW

Good news for anyone with a teen in their life: We’ve got some conversation material to switch things up from Billie Eilish and Berries and Cream TikTok. The fall teen survey from investment bank Piper Sandler just dropped, revealing the attitudes and buying habits of 10,000 US teens.

Tech:

• iPhone ownership is at 87%.
• Snapchat is the top social network (35% share), followed by TikTok (30%).
• 22% of teens have heard of NFTs, and 10% of those who’ve heard of them have purchased one.

Entertainment and fashion:

• Nike is the top teen brand, holding its spot for the eleventh straight year.
• Adam Sandler is their favorite celebrity (Hubie Halloween season is upon us, after all), followed by Ryan Reynolds.
• Crocs are on the rise. They’re teens’ sixth-most preferred footwear brand, up from ninth place last year.

Politics:

• 54% of teens consider their carbon footprint when making a purchase.
• The most important social/political issue to them is the environment, followed by racial equality.

—MK

Stat: Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, has been in lockdown for 247 days since March 2020, roughly 45% of the duration of the pandemic. It recently passed Buenos Aires as the city that’s spent the most time cumulatively under stay-at-home orders. This lockdown, the sixth, will lift once at least 80% of adults in the state of Victoria are fully vaccinated.

Quote: “I’m opposed to it and I don’t think we should consider it seriously. It’s really a gimmick.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is not on board with the proposal to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to bypass the debt ceiling crisis. She did say it was “utterly essential” for Congress to suspend the debt limit to avoid a recession.

Read: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet. (Cloudflare)

The first feature film shot in space is officially rolling, and somehow Tom Cruise wasn’t hiding in the glove compartment. A Russian film crew of two docked with the ISS on Tuesday, ahead of a 12-day shooting schedule aboard the space station.

Russian actress Yulia Peresild, director Klim Shipenko, and their guide, veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, made their way into the ISS around 11am ET Tuesday morning. They’ll be filming scenes for a Russian film called Challenge, about a surgeon who has to operate on a sick cosmonaut in space.

Hollywood’s space race: The Russian film was announced in November 2020, putting it head-to-head at the time with a planned $200 million Tom Cruise space film directed by Doug Liman (who directed Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow). The Cruise project, in partnership with SpaceX and NASA, was reportedly going to shoot aboard the ISS in October 2021, though no official date was announced.

Still uncharted shooting territory for bold filmmakers:

• In an active volcano
• Inside a live whale
• On the sun

—MK

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How long until Thanksgiving? Keep track of all upcoming important dates here.

The climate crisis is here. And the world is looking for solutions. New from Marketplace is How We Survive, a podcast that explores the technology that could provide those solutions, the business behind them, and the way people will need to change their thinking. Listen here.

Top of the top: Here are the finalists for the 2021 National Book Awards. And here are the world’s 50 best restaurants.

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Word Search: Who doesn't love vintage postcards? See if you can identify the cities featured on postcards in today's puzzle.

Correct the Timeline

The following historical events happened on October 6. Can you put them in the correct chronological order?

1. The Yom Kippur War begins.
2. Michael Jordan announces his (first) retirement from the NBA.
3. Jason Lewis becomes the first person to circumnavigate the globe using only human-powered modes of transportation.
4. George Michael releases the song “Faith.”
5. The Yankees beat the Dodgers for their 11th World Series win.

Morning Brew was founded in a dorm at the University of Michigan, so college athletics have a special place in our hearts (Go Blue). That's why when the NCAA ruled that athletes could finally capitalize on their name, image, and likeness, launching our College Athlete Program was a no-brainer.

We wanted to take a moment to shout out some of our amazing student-athletes, including:

• Sae-Vheon Alcorn: University of Kansas, Track & Field, @saevheon
• Porter Wilson: Duke University, Football, @porter_wilson
• Christian Avila Neres: Franklin & Marshall College, Soccer, @_chrisavilaa_

Interested in being a Morning Brew Athlete? Apply here.