In his confrontation with the fraught immigration policy, President Biden wants to draw attention to the decision by Republicans in Congress, urged by former President Donald J. Trump, to block a bipartisan deal that would provide a cash injection for border security and the president the opportunity to close the border to asylum seekers.

On the defensive, Republicans have stepped up their years-long effort to tie migrants to heinous crimes.

Both strategies were on full display Thursday night when Mr. Biden delivered his State of the Union address. He claimed that it is Republicans who are now responsible for the problems at the border, while Republicans portrayed his policies as responsible for the death of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student from Georgia who was killed in February. by a Venezuelan migrant.

The momentum has caused Biden, who has signaled a tougher line on immigration heading into the general election campaign, to walk a careful line, as his clash with Republicans on Thursday evening showed. He immediately promised to restore “order” at the border, while also pledging not to attack migrants in the manner of Trump and his allies.

“I will not demonize immigrants by saying they are poison in the blood of our country,” Mr. Biden said in his speech to a joint session of Congress, referring to statements by Mr. Trump that echoes of white supremacy.

“Unlike my predecessor, I know who we are as Americans, and we are the only nation in the world whose heart and soul draws from the old and the new,” Mr. Biden said. “Home to Native Americans whose ancestors have lived here for thousands of years, home to people from every place on earth.”

When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, pressed him about Ms. Riley’s murder, he interrupted his prepared text to respond.

“An innocent young woman murdered by an illegal alien. That’s right,” Mr. Biden told Ms. Greene, using a term criticized as dehumanizing by many Democrats.

But he then claimed that thousands of murders had been committed by what he called “legals,” people who are legally in the United States.

While there has long been a concerted focus on linking immigrants to the increase in crime, Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, said the emphasis was misleading.

“What we found is that the increase in immigration into areas either has no impact on crime, or it causes crime to fall on average,” she said of her research, adding that the Riley case provided an opportunity to “ to politicize the issue, which is already political.”

Nevertheless, the intersection of immigration and crime has long raised fears of a threat from outsiders with malicious intentions.

Mr. Trump, who has called immigrant murderers, rapists and drug traffickers, often focused on the 2015 killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco and the subsequent arrest of an undocumented man in the case. He linked border policy to crime in the country discuss the matter.

“Donald Trump was able to set the agenda and headlines of immigrant crime by repeatedly mentioning Steinle in his speeches, without much reaction from people who opposed him, including Hillary Clinton at the time,” said P. Deep Gulasekaram, professor of immigration . law from the University of Colorado Law School. “It has a lot of salience. It was there in 2015 and 2016, and it is clearly having a salient effect again.”

But the problem does not always progress predictably.

In July 2018, Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old student in Iowa, was murdered by an undocumented man. The case attracted national attention and Mr. Trump called for changes to immigration laws.

In an opinion essay published in The Des Moines Registerher father called on people not to politicize the murder.

“The person accused of taking Mollie’s life is no longer a reflection of the Hispanic community the way white supremacists are of all white people,” he wrote. ‘To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind.”

Tom Jawetz, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security under Mr. Biden, said it appeared the president was trying to accomplish three things: condemn Ms. Riley’s killing as a tragedy; to sympathize with her parents and call out Republicans for linking immigrants to crime.

Mr. Jawetz said it was notable that Mr. Biden, in an indirect way, “made the point that thousands are being murdered by American citizens and are not being demagogued.”

Mr. Jawetz said Mr. Biden should be prepared for the topic to come up again and tighten his message. The president’s reference to the suspect in the case as “illegal” has already drawn significant backlash from immigrant advocates.

Immigration politics show no signs of easing up in intensity, even as Biden, under election-year pressure, has shifted to the right. On Thursday, the House passed legislation named after Ms. Riley.

The measure, which would require migrants who enter the country illegally to be detained if accused of theft, has little chance of making headway in the Democratic-led Senate, but Republicans used it to draw Democrats into an uncomfortable vote. force.

The gamble appears to have worked to some extent: 37 Democrats in the House of Representatives supported the legislation, which challenged the Biden administration’s “open borders” policy.

Andrea Flores, a former Biden administration official, said the president’s ad-lib response to Republicans during his State of the Union address was similar to his working with Republicans on a border deal.

“He can respond to their rhetoric, but ultimately he is the only one who can change conditions on the ground,” she said, noting that action in Congress was extremely unlikely. “There is limited value in making these arguments that Democrats may have avoided until the administration can show voters that they have a better plan,” she said.

On a Thursday evening last October, Ryan Carlos set off the metal detectors at the door of Brooklyn Steel, a popular music venue in Williamsburg. A guard pulled him aside, patted him on the ground and ordered him to take out his pockets.

He pulled out a box of Narcan — a nasal spray version of the drug naloxone — which can reverse overdoses caused by opioids like fentanyl in seconds.

“He interrupted me abruptly and said, ‘I know what it is. You have to throw it away or you can’t get in,” Mr. Carlos said in an interview.

On social media and online message boards, other partygoers have posted about similar encounters — including aggressive questioning by security guards — at other locations, including Warsaw and Basement, and at the Twilight Harbor festival held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in October.

The locations blame overzealous and poorly trained security guards. But the incidents are at odds with a city initiative known as ‘NARCAN Behind Every Bar,’ which was launched last year to deliver the life-saving antidote to clubs, bars and venues across the city.

“Everyone should have naloxone on them,” says Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “It certainly shouldn’t be taken away from you.”

The incidents highlight the challenges the city faces in addressing a troubling trend: A New Yorker dies from a drug overdose every three hours, according to the Department of Health. In 2022, more than 3,000 people died from drug overdoses in the city. Officials expect 2023 to be even worse.

But these efforts have been fraught: A federal prosecutor recently questioned the legality of the safe injection sites. And law enforcement faces a difficult balance as they try to stop drug distribution in the city without criminalizing users.

Fentanyl – which is 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin – was found in 81 percent of the city’s more than 3,000 drug overdose deaths last year. according to to the Ministry of Health. But because the opioid is often mixed with other drugs, such as cocaine, it can be difficult to recognize, meaning many people who buy drugs on the street end up using it unknowingly.

Because more than 7 percent of deaths in 2022 occurred in “public inside” spaces, including bars and clubs, the city has turned to those places for help. For the most part, Dr. Vasan said, “nightlife has been a great partner,” and he believes cases like Mr. Carlos’s are isolated.

Many bar and club owners said they were happy to help. Some bars also offer fentanyl test strips to customers.

Dennis Dennehy, a spokesman for Bowery Presents, which operates Brooklyn Steel, was notified after seeing the incident Mr. Carlos’s post on the media platform X.

“With Bowery Presents, Narcan can be brought to all locations, and we keep it on site,” he said.

In an email, Tyler Myers, co-founder and executive director of Knockdown Center, which operates Basement, said: “We do not and never have confiscated Narcan.” The statement said the location is holding Narcan throughout the facility and has been holding training for staff. Operators of Warsaw and the Twilight Harbor festival did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

Other location owners speculated that a lack of awareness could be behind the decisions to confiscate Narcan.

“If security takes customers away, it’s probably because they’re misinformed,” says Jon Corbett, owner of Eris, a Brooklyn location that stocks Narcan on site.

To become a registered security guard, one must complete hours of training provided by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. But Janine Kava, a spokeswoman for the agency, confirmed that no training on opioid overdose prevention was required as part of the two courses people must take to obtain a license, although it was offered as an optional ‘ refresher course’.

John Barclay, the owner of the popular dance clubs Paragon and Bossa Nova Civic Club, thinks security guards may also assume that people carrying Narcan intend to use illegal drugs.

“Probably half of the people who carry it aren’t doing drugs at all,” he said. “They’re just good Samaritans.”

Brooklyn Steel’s owners noted that security was handled by a third-party company, 5280 Group, which also operates in six other locations in New York.

In a statement, the company said the security guard who confronted Mr. Carlos had recently been hired and was “overzealous,” adding that “the incident was a teachable moment.” Since that evening, the company said it has incorporated reminders of its Narcan policy into the nightly meeting that security guards attend before each shift begins.

For some of us, Thanksgiving dinner can include a plethora of intrusive, inappropriate, and frightening comments from loved ones. (“No plus one this year, huh?” “Wow, your hair has turned completely gray!” “Are you still unemployed?”)

These comments can feel more powerful when everyone is together, says Mala Matacin, co-chair of the psychology department at the University of Hartford. Several generations may be looking for common ground. Expectations are high. Some people only see each other once a year.

We can also fall into our old family roles, she said. And sometimes, when we get unsolicited advice from people who have known us all our lives, we backslide.

“I know this to be true for me,” said Dr. Matacin. “I’m an adult; I’ve had a career.” But once back in the family circle, she says she thinks: Oh my God, am I five?

How do you keep the peace then? I asked experts for advice.

Make sure you have some responses ready.

If someone starts ranting at the table, I find it helpful to have short answers to draw the line. Here are some favorites I’ve heard from friends: “I’m not your target audience”; “I’m not sure how to respond to that,” and “Hey, you might want to turn on your filter.”

If politics is a controversial topic in your family, Matt Abrahams, a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and author of “Think Faster, Talk Smarter,” suggests the following joke: “Let’s keep the spiciness in the food and not in the conversation. ”

It’s best to avoid any dialogue about people’s bodies in general, said Dr. Matacin. But if someone is sharing unwanted comments about your weight, I like these two comebacks from Kami Orange, a TikTok creator whose “borderlines” gone viral: “I don’t currently take feedback about my body” and “I only discuss that with my doctor.”

Suppress questions in advance.

Joy Harden Bradford, a psychologist and author of “Sisterhood Heals,” said that before she got married, she found herself involved in unwanted discussions about her love life during the holidays.

“Most of the time it was my uncles who were the offending parties,” said Dr. Harden Bradford. “Finally I said to my mother, ‘I’m really worried about this. Can you talk to them before I get home to tell them I don’t want that kind of conversation?’ And it really worked.”

If you’re anticipating awkward questions — about work, dating, or anything else — have someone ask the inquisitor to stop on your behalf, Dr. Harden Bradford suggested.

If the perpetrator remains at the Thanksgiving table, you can try to think of a few responses in advance. Dr. Harden Bradford said, “You can say, ‘Oh, I haven’t met the right person yet, but you’ll be the right person.’ first to know. ”

Answer a pushy question with another question.

If someone asks you something unpleasant, respond (politely) with a question of your own, Dr. Matacin said.

“In a sincere, curious way you can say, ‘Why are you asking me that?’” said Dr. Matacin. Putting it back on the person requires an explanation, she said, and it can spark an honest conversation.

You can also change the subject by saying, ‘Oh, thanks so much for asking, but there’s so much more I want to talk to you about,'” said Dr. Matacin.

Do a cost-benefit analysis before starting a fight.

If your Aunt Suzie makes her usual snide comment about your kids always being on their phones, weigh the pros and cons before saying anything, Dr. Harden Bradford advised.

“Is Aunt Suzie really hurting anyone?” she asked. “Is it going to make things more awkward because you hired Suzie when you really could have let that go?”

There may be comments that cannot be dismissed. Boundaries are necessary so that everyone has a good time. But we all have an Aunt Suzie, and maybe we can give her some grace this Thanksgiving, said Dr. Harden Bradford.

Is exposure to radiation a risk when using smartphones? Experts explain.

All cell phones, including smartphones, emit radiation, but experts say you don’t have to throw your phone away. Caroline Hopkins delves into the research.

Read the article: Should I worry about smartphone radiation?

What is the difference between influenza A and influenza B (and how do you treat them)?

Influenza viruses cause millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths each year in the United States, and each flu season there are two players: influenza type A and type B. Here are the details of both.

Read the article: What you need to know about the flu virus

The week in Well

Here are some stories you won’t want to miss:

Let’s keep the conversation going. Follow closely Instagram, or write to us at well_newsletter@nytimes.com. And check out last week’s newsletter about why it’s so annoying to be interrupted.

For more than 20 years, fans of college sports like softball, baseball, women’s basketball and more than two dozen others have known just where to find NCAA Championships – on ESPN’s spectrum of channels.

The arrangement has worked well for both sides: The NCAA ensured its top athletes perform on a national stage, and ESPN added hundreds of hours of live programming to a college sports portfolio anchored by college football and men’s basketball games.

A sign of how comfortable the NCAA and ESPN were with their partnership came in 2011, when they agreed to a 13-year, $500 million extension without the NCAA ever taking the rights to the market.

But with that deal set to expire in a year’s time, it’s increasingly likely that the next media rights deal for those 31 championships will look very different from the current one, which has been widely criticized as undervalued – especially due to the big event. , the Division I women’s basketball tournament.

Charlie Baker, who took office as the NCAA’s new president in March, spoke of the upcoming negotiations, emphatically acknowledging at a college sports symposium last week that “we’re dramatically underperforming a slew of other monetization opportunities.”

The increased interest in women’s basketball has increased pressure on the NCAA to sell those tournament rights themselves rather than with other championships. According to one analyst, this could bring in about $100 million annually. However, such unbundling could risk leaving other sports on lesser-known platforms.

And while the women’s basketball tournament, with record attendance and ratings, hits the market at a seemingly opportune time, the industry is in turmoil as broadcasters make a transition from cable, which continues to bleed subscribers, to streaming. platforms, which still have a much smaller audience.

There’s a lot for the NCAA to consider. Have interests changed at ESPN, whose parent company Disney is in the process of cutting 7,000 jobs? What about other networks, such as CBS and NBC, which have fewer cable networks but have fledgling streaming platforms? And can streaming-only companies such as Apple, Amazon and YouTube, which have started selectively acquiring sports rights, be players?

The NCAA declined to make Baker or any other official available for an interview, saying in a statement it is “open to all new and creative ideas — including potentially standalone contracts — to raise revenue to keep student-athletes and all sports running. growing, including women’s basketball.”

The NCAA has hired Endeavor, a global sports media company, to help develop its strategy for negotiations, which have not yet begun. Baker has said he expects a rights deal to be finalized around the end of the year.

“The NCAA is a very political organization and you live in a different political world than you did 10, 15, 20 years ago when these deals were made,” said Chris Bevilacqua, a sports media analyst who previously advised the NCAA. about media rights. “There are 500,000 NCAA student-athletes, and half are women, so there will be a lot of political pressure to design something consistent with that narrative of investing in women’s sports.”

That pressure stems from a 2021 NCAA basketball gender equality review, which was conducted after widespread differences were identified between the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments during the pandemic.

In the report, Ed Desser, a sports media analyst, estimated that had the rights to the women’s tournament alone been sold, they could have raised between $81 million and $112 million for the 2025 tournament.

ESPN paid nearly $50 million for the 31 championships this year, including the women’s basketball title game, which drew a record 9.9 million viewers on ABC.

“The value has only increased” since his assessment two years ago, Desser said in an interview. He cited not only the increased focus on the women’s tournament, but also the increasing interest in women’s professional basketball and soccer leagues.

Still, the surge in interest in women’s sports hasn’t necessarily translated into an explosion in rights fees. In football, for example, FIFA President Gianni Infantino threatened blackouts in several European countries from matches of this summer’s Women’s World Cup. before a deal was closed this week. Broadcasters were hesitant to meet FIFA’s asking price for the games, which were sold as standalone properties for the first time. Previously, they were bundled with the rights to the men’s World Cup.

The history of women’s basketball over the past 30 years is littered with peaks and plateaus. Connecticut’s emergence as a Tennessee counterpart tied in with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where the United States raced to the gold medal, a dominant run that helped start the NBA-backed WNBA a year later.

By 2012, interest in the college sport had stagnated to the point that the NCAA commissioned Val Ackerman, the first president of the WNBA, to investigate ways to boost interest in the game.

During the pandemic, when many sports were shut down, the murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of social activism in the United States. The WNBA and women’s college basketball leaned on that, questioning many differences from the men’s versions of their sports, including the unjust weight rooms (and coronavirus testing) at the 2021 NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments. there was another cause: the detention of WNBA star Brittney Griner in Russia.

This all happened amid the relaxation of NCAA rules prohibiting athletes from signing endorsement agreements. That cemented the personalities of the college’s top female players, who, unlike the men, don’t get into the WNBA until they turn 22 (in their draft year) or graduate from college. In recent years, players such as Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers, Aliyah Boston and Caitlin Clark have become nationally known.

“We said it might take a generation” to gain a foothold, Ackerman said of the start of the WNBA. “Now the question for me is whether this atmosphere can be exploited commercially? Will there be more tickets at higher prices? Will sponsors pay higher rights fees? That’s the test here. That’s what gets marketed.”

However, this is a complicated time to go to market.

While cable subscriptions continue to decline and emerging streaming platforms continue to build subscribers, cable viewers continue to outnumber streaming viewers. (ESN is in 72.5 million homes this month, according to Nielsen; ESPN+ has 25.3 million subscribers, a spokesperson said.)

Such uncertainty is likely to shorten NCAA deals.

Mike Aresco, the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference and former executive of CBS and ESPN, said media companies generally preferred ten-year or longer contracts so they could focus on building the broadcasts rather than rebuilding them. negotiate the rights.

But long-term deals have left the Pac-12 and Atlantic Coast conferences far behind the Big Ten, whose 2017 decision to renew its media rights for just six years netted a nearly $7 billion seven-year deal starting this football season. . . It’s also hard to predict what the streaming and cable world will look like in five years, let alone ten.

“Everyone is reconsidering how far we will go,” Aresco said. “It’s not an exact science. In fact, it’s probably more art than science.”

Even if the money ends up in the same place — eventually flowing back into the college coffers — media rights deals at conferences are fundamentally different from what the NCAA will sell. A conference deal extends over a season, while the NCAA sells playoffs or championship events, which are condensed into a matter of days or weeks.

The women’s basketball tournament has another compelling selling point: It runs for three weeks in March and early April, a window when most broadcasters crave content. There’s little else between the Super Bowl in mid-February and the Masters golf tournament and the start of the pro basketball and hockey playoffs in mid-April other than the basketball tournaments. The rights for the men’s tournament are owned by CBS and Turner.

“The women’s basketball tournament is the top-rated event on ESPN between mid-February and mid-April,” said Desser. “That is important, especially in a world where monthly subscriptions are becoming increasingly popular. People didn’t decouple from month to month, but now you have to have something competitive to stay in decision making.

The upcoming negotiations will be unlike those of a professional sports league, despite the increasingly professional nature of college sports.

For example, the NFL can be expected to get every last dollar out of a deal. The NCAA, even as Baker insists the governing body needs to get better at raising revenue, will have other considerations.

“It’s a principled conversation,” said Julie Roe Lach, the Commissioner of the Horizon League and a member of the NCAA’s Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee. “It can’t just be monetary. It can’t be as simple as which network is going to give the most money. There must be a genuine commitment to growing the game.

In an era where athletes can monetize endorsements, she added, such growth could hinder a broadcaster from helping athletes reach wider audiences through media other than television.

Roe Lach is among those who believe that disconnecting from women’s basketball offers opportunities for other sports to grow on their own.

Perhaps the College Baseball World Series appeals to the MLB Network, or another network could get behind a niche sport, as the SEC Network has done with its Friday night gymnastics broadcasts that helped boost the sport’s popularity in the South.

Julie Cromer, Ohio University’s athletic director and co-chair of the committee that rewrote the NCAA’s bylaws last year, believes Olympic sports are natural candidates for raising their profile. She pointed to her time in Arkansas, where the university’s indoor track and field team drew several thousand fans for their home games, prompting the university to live stream its events.

The NCAA, she said, could act as an incubator.

Many of these sports have a dedicated fan base, and getting the product to that fan base doesn’t always have to be achieved through linear broadcasts,” said Cromer.

One of those sports would be lacrosse. Far down the sporting food chain, it has an anchor in the Northeast, but a decades-long push westward has been slow. When ESPN broadcast the men’s and women’s championships back-to-back on Memorial Day, it gave the event a grand appearance.

“Lacrosse has been looking for that for a long time,” said Joe Spallina, the women’s coach at Stony Brook University whose regular-season game with top-ranked Syracuse was featured on ESPNU. “That’s one of the problems with growing sports: everyone wants to get to the top right away.”

For more than 20 years, fans of college sports like softball, baseball, women’s basketball and more than two dozen others have known just where to find NCAA Championships – on ESPN’s spectrum of channels.

The arrangement has worked well for both sides: The NCAA ensured its top athletes perform on a national stage, and ESPN added hundreds of hours of live programming to a college sports portfolio anchored by college football and men’s basketball games.

A sign of how comfortable the NCAA and ESPN were with their partnership came in 2011, when they agreed to a 13-year, $500 million extension without the NCAA ever taking the rights to the market.

But with that deal set to expire in a year’s time, it’s increasingly likely that the next media rights deal for those 31 championships will look very different from the current one, which has been widely criticized as undervalued – especially due to the big event. , the Division I women’s basketball tournament.

Charlie Baker, who took office as the NCAA’s new president in March, spoke of the upcoming negotiations, emphatically acknowledging at a college sports symposium last week that “we’re dramatically underperforming a slew of other monetization opportunities.”

The increased interest in women’s basketball has increased pressure on the NCAA to sell those tournament rights themselves rather than with other championships. According to one analyst, this could bring in about $100 million annually. However, such unbundling could risk leaving other sports on lesser-known platforms.

And while the women’s basketball tournament, with record attendance and ratings, hits the market at a seemingly opportune time, the industry is in turmoil as broadcasters make a transition from cable, which continues to bleed subscribers, to streaming. platforms, which still have a much smaller audience.

There’s a lot for the NCAA to consider. Have interests changed at ESPN, whose parent company Disney is in the process of cutting 7,000 jobs? What about other networks, such as CBS and NBC, which have fewer cable networks but have fledgling streaming platforms? And can streaming-only companies such as Apple, Amazon and YouTube, which have started selectively acquiring sports rights, be players?

The NCAA declined to make Baker or any other official available for an interview, saying in a statement it is “open to all new and creative ideas — including potentially standalone contracts — to raise revenue to keep student-athletes and all sports running. growing, including women’s basketball.”

The NCAA has hired Endeavor, a global sports media company, to help develop its strategy for negotiations, which have not yet begun. Baker has said he expects a rights deal to be finalized around the end of the year.

“The NCAA is a very political organization and you live in a different political world than you did 10, 15, 20 years ago when these deals were made,” said Chris Bevilacqua, a sports media analyst who previously advised the NCAA. about media rights. “There are 500,000 NCAA student-athletes, and half are women, so there will be a lot of political pressure to design something consistent with that narrative of investing in women’s sports.”

That pressure stems from a 2021 NCAA basketball gender equality review, which was conducted after widespread differences were identified between the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments during the pandemic.

In the report, Ed Desser, a sports media analyst, estimated that had the rights to the women’s tournament alone been sold, they could have raised between $81 million and $112 million for the 2025 tournament.

ESPN paid nearly $50 million for the 31 championships this year, including the women’s basketball title game, which drew a record 9.9 million viewers on ABC.

“The value has only increased” since his assessment two years ago, Desser said in an interview. He cited not only the increased focus on the women’s tournament, but also the increasing interest in women’s professional basketball and soccer leagues.

Still, the surge in interest in women’s sports hasn’t necessarily translated into an explosion in rights fees. In football, for example, FIFA President Gianni Infantino threatened blackouts in several European countries from matches of this summer’s Women’s World Cup. before a deal was closed this week. Broadcasters were hesitant to meet FIFA’s asking price for the games, which were sold as standalone properties for the first time. Previously, they were bundled with the rights to the men’s World Cup.

The history of women’s basketball over the past 30 years is littered with peaks and plateaus. Connecticut’s emergence as a Tennessee counterpart tied in with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where the United States raced to the gold medal, a dominant run that helped start the NBA-backed WNBA a year later.

By 2012, interest in the college sport had stagnated to the point that the NCAA commissioned Val Ackerman, the first president of the WNBA, to investigate ways to boost interest in the game.

During the pandemic, when many sports were shut down, the murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of social activism in the United States. The WNBA and women’s college basketball leaned on that, questioning many differences from the men’s versions of their sports, including the unjust weight rooms (and coronavirus testing) at the 2021 NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments. there was another cause: the detention of WNBA star Brittney Griner in Russia.

This all happened amid the relaxation of NCAA rules prohibiting athletes from signing endorsement agreements. That cemented the personalities of the college’s top female players, who, unlike the men, don’t get into the WNBA until they turn 22 (in their draft year) or graduate from college. In recent years, players such as Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers, Aliyah Boston and Caitlin Clark have become nationally known.

“We said it might take a generation” to gain a foothold, Ackerman said of the start of the WNBA. “Now the question for me is whether this atmosphere can be exploited commercially? Will there be more tickets at higher prices? Will sponsors pay higher rights fees? That’s the test here. That’s what gets marketed.”

However, this is a complicated time to go to market.

While cable subscriptions continue to decline and emerging streaming platforms continue to build subscribers, cable viewers continue to outnumber streaming viewers. (ESN is in 72.5 million homes this month, according to Nielsen; ESPN+ has 25.3 million subscribers, a spokesperson said.)

Such uncertainty is likely to shorten NCAA deals.

Mike Aresco, the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference and former executive of CBS and ESPN, said media companies generally preferred ten-year or longer contracts so they could focus on building the broadcasts rather than rebuilding them. negotiate the rights.

But long-term deals have left the Pac-12 and Atlantic Coast conferences far behind the Big Ten, whose 2017 decision to renew its media rights for just six years netted a nearly $7 billion seven-year deal starting this football season. . . It’s also hard to predict what the streaming and cable world will look like in five years, let alone ten.

“Everyone is reconsidering how far we will go,” Aresco said. “It’s not an exact science. In fact, it’s probably more art than science.”

Even if the money ends up in the same place — eventually flowing back into the college coffers — media rights deals at conferences are fundamentally different from what the NCAA will sell. A conference deal extends over a season, while the NCAA sells playoffs or championship events, which are condensed into a matter of days or weeks.

The women’s basketball tournament has another compelling selling point: It runs for three weeks in March and early April, a window when most broadcasters crave content. There’s little else between the Super Bowl in mid-February and the Masters golf tournament and the start of the pro basketball and hockey playoffs in mid-April other than the basketball tournaments. The rights for the men’s tournament are owned by CBS and Turner.

“The women’s basketball tournament is the top-rated event on ESPN between mid-February and mid-April,” said Desser. “That is important, especially in a world where monthly subscriptions are becoming increasingly popular. People didn’t decouple from month to month, but now you have to have something competitive to stay in decision making.

The upcoming negotiations will be unlike those of a professional sports league, despite the increasingly professional nature of college sports.

For example, the NFL can be expected to get every last dollar out of a deal. The NCAA, even as Baker insists the governing body needs to get better at raising revenue, will have other considerations.

“It’s a principled conversation,” said Julie Roe Lach, the Commissioner of the Horizon League and a member of the NCAA’s Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee. “It can’t just be monetary. It can’t be as simple as which network is going to give the most money. There must be a genuine commitment to growing the game.

In an era where athletes can monetize endorsements, she added, such growth could hinder a broadcaster from helping athletes reach wider audiences through media other than television.

Roe Lach is among those who believe that disconnecting from women’s basketball offers opportunities for other sports to grow on their own.

Perhaps the College Baseball World Series appeals to the MLB Network, or another network could get behind a niche sport, as the SEC Network has done with its Friday night gymnastics broadcasts that helped boost the sport’s popularity in the South.

Julie Cromer, Ohio University’s athletic director and co-chair of the committee that rewrote the NCAA’s bylaws last year, believes Olympic sports are natural candidates for raising their profile. She pointed to her time in Arkansas, where the university’s indoor track and field team drew several thousand fans for their home games, prompting the university to live stream its events.

The NCAA, she said, could act as an incubator.

Many of these sports have a dedicated fan base, and getting the product to that fan base doesn’t always have to be achieved through linear broadcasts,” said Cromer.

One of those sports would be lacrosse. Far down the sporting food chain, it has an anchor in the Northeast, but a decades-long push westward has been slow. When ESPN broadcast the men’s and women’s championships back-to-back on Memorial Day, it gave the event a grand appearance.

“Lacrosse has been looking for that for a long time,” said Joe Spallina, the women’s coach at Stony Brook University whose regular-season game with top-ranked Syracuse was featured on ESPNU. “That’s one of the problems with growing sports: everyone wants to get to the top right away.”

Andrei Medvedev sipped a $12 beer in one of the world’s wealthiest capitals and pondered the question that has haunted him ever since he left the battlefields of Ukraine: Is he a hero or a war criminal?

He claims to have deserted from Russia’s infamous Wagnerian mercenary during the monumental battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and later fled his native Russia by running across a frozen Arctic river. Now in Norway, Mr Medvedev, 26, is seeking asylum while providing information about Wagner to Norwegian authorities.

Since his arrival in the country in January, Mr Medvedev has voluntarily participated in a dozen interviews with Norwegian police officers investigating war crimes in Ukraine, including his possible role therein. Mr Medvedev has described killing Ukrainians in fighting and witnessing summary executions of comrades accused of cowardice. He claims that he did not participate in or witness war crimes such as the killing of prisoners of war and civilians.

“Yes, I have killed, I have seen comrades die. It was war,” he said in an interview in a bar in Oslo. “I have nothing to hide.”

His improbable journey has made Mr. Medvedev one of the few publicly known Russian fighters to seek protection in Europe after taking part in the invasion. His asylum request now forces Norway to make a decision on a case that pits the country’s humanitarian stance against an increasingly assertive national security policy and solidarity with Ukraine.

To his lawyer, the credible threat of revenge Mr Medvedev faces should he be sent home qualifies him for asylum. And some Norwegian politicians have said that encouraging soldiers like Mr Medvedev to defect would weaken the Russian army and hasten the end of the war.

But as Norway evaluates its claim, it has come under pressure from activists in Ukraine and Western Europe, who say giving Russian fighters, especially mercenaries like Mr Medvedev, a safe haven in Europe fails to hold Russians accountable. hold for the invasion. And the former combatant may have made his own request more difficult with bar fights and detentions in Norway, and by briefly posting a video on YouTube suggesting he wanted to return to Russia.

More broadly, Mr Medvedev’s case highlights a policy dilemma that European governments have largely avoided grappling with in public: how should the region deal with Russian deserters and Russia’s hundreds of thousands of fighters? war in Ukraine, in general?

“It touches the core of who we are in Europe,” said Cecilie Hellestveit, an expert in armed conflict law affiliated with Norway’s human rights watchdog and a former member of the country’s asylum commission. “It forces us to reevaluate our approach to human rights in a way we have been unwilling to do until now.”

The European Union and member states such as Norway have previously had to strike a balance between humanitarian needs and accountability for war crimes, most recently when processing immigration claims from people who fought in the civil wars in the Balkans and in Syria.

But the scale of the war in Ukraine, its proximity to the European Union and the participation of two conventional armies means that the Russian invasion poses a much greater challenge to the region’s asylum system, Ms Hellestveit said.

Four months after Mr Medvedev applied for asylum, his application remains pending. Norway’s immigration service said all asylum applications filed by Russians who fled to avoid military service have been suspended while they analyze the country’s human rights record. The agency said it could not comment on individual applications for privacy reasons.

Some humanitarian law experts in Norway say Mr Medvedev’s unresolved request reflects the government’s unwillingness to draw further attention to a matter that could divide the public, to prejudge the policies of other European states and relations with Kiev. Norway is a staunch supporter of the Ukrainian cause, pledging $7.5 billion in economic and military aid and has taken in about 40,000 Ukrainian refugees.

“This case has a lot of conflicting rights, a lot of conflicting obligations and a lot of conflicting politics,” said Paal Nesse, the head of the Norwegian Organization for Asylum Seekers, a non-profit organization that provides legal aid to asylum seekers.

Norway and EU countries are struggling to find a common approach to asylum applications submitted by Russians who have fled the country to avoid military service, a much larger group of asylum seekers than men involved in combat, such as Mr Medvedev .

The European Union Agency for Asylum said in a written response to questions that it is up to member states to decide who deserves protection.

Pavel Filatiev, a former Russian paratrooper who applied for asylum in France after fighting in Ukraine, said he was waiting for a decision eight months after submitting his application. A third publicly known Russian deserter in Europe, a former army mechanic named Nikita Chibrinhas been processing an asylum application in Spain since November.

The legal uncertainty, financial problems and social isolation are hard to bear, Mr Filatiev said in a telephone interview, but added that he considered himself lucky and grateful to his French hosts.

“I understand that my decision to leave will always haunt me,” he said.

Mr. Medvedev has a difficult history of antisocial behavior. He has already been detained twice in Norway for being involved in fights in bars and once in Sweden for entering the country illegally. (He was sent back to Norway.) In Russia, he spent four years in prison for robbery and brawling, according to court documents.

People who know him have said those actions could be the result of a lifetime of trauma: in a violent family home, a Siberian orphanage and Russian prisons, and on Ukrainian battlefields.

In addition to his run-ins with the law, Mr Medvedev said he had also repeatedly clashed with Ukrainians in Oslo, most recently while visiting a local Soviet military memorial on Victory Day.

Such confrontations have highlighted tensions between the Russian defectors and Ukrainian refugees across Europe. Natalia Lutsyk, the head of the Ukrainian Association in Norway, said the lack of international cooperation prevented Norway and other countries from thoroughly investigating war crimes in Ukraine.

“In this way, Medvedev and his companions go unpunished,” she added.

The New York Times spent several weeks interviewing Mr Medvedev and researching his personal history since he left the front in November and went into hiding in Russia. His account of his military service contained contradictory or unverifiable claims. However, some basic facts of his life have been confirmed by public records and interviews with acquaintances.

The weight of this evidence shows that Mr. Medvedev joined Wagner in July 2022, two days after serving his last prison sentence.

Wagner founder Yevgeny V. Prigozhin in April called Mr. Medvedev a “bastard who spent two days in Wagner, whom no one can identify”. After his escape to Norway, Mr. Prigozhin called him dangerous. He has not publicly threatened Mr. Medvedev.

In an interview in Oslo, Mr. Medvedev’s new living conditions, largely provided by the Norwegian state. According to him, this includes a home, home visits by a Norwegian teacher, an integration assistant, ski and mountain bike tours and “Taco Saturdays” with a personal safety detail.

He also claims to be the subject of a bidding war between filmmakers, a claim that could not be verified.

But days after the interview, Mr. Medvedev stated that he had contacted the Russian embassy to get help on his return home.

“I hope that I can find peace and tranquility here, that I can leave politics, war, the army behind,” he said. a video published on YouTube. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

He later deleted the videos and again refused to speak when contacted by phone.

His lawyer, Brynjulf ​​Risnes, said his public comments should not affect the asylum application, which was decided on humanitarian grounds. But Mr Medvedev’s violent past and controversial behavior, which has made him a minor local celebrity, has confused and alienated many Norwegians, undermining sympathy for Russian defectors.

Under Norwegian law, a refusal to fight in an illegal war can give a right to asylum. However, this right does not apply to war criminals and local prosecutors can charge people they believe have committed war crimes elsewhere.

A spokesman for Norway’s criminal police said Mr Medvedev was a witness, not a suspect, in her investigation into war crimes in Ukraine, and that to date officers have “found no grounds for charges”.

Mr Medvedev said his cooperation had helped investigators locate Wagner facilities in Ukraine and Russia and map out the structure of the group.

The case is also being followed by Ukrainian officials, who are conducting their own investigation into Mr Medvedev. Shortly after his arrival in Norway, Ambassador of Ukraine in Oslo told local news media that her government could ask for his extradition.

Such a request would place Norway in another dilemma, forcing it to choose between showing support for an ally or upholding the basic principle of its asylum law. This law states that an asylum seeker may not be sent to a country where he may not receive a fair trial.

Ukraine’s attorney general’s office said in a written response to questions that it has screened all Russian military personnel arriving abroad for possible participation in war crimes, and has requested Norway’s legal assistance in investigating the Mr. Medvedev.

Mr Medvedev said he had refused to see Ukrainian investigators who wanted to meet him in Norway.

“They’re always after me,” he said. “I’m helping them end this war.”

Constant Meheut contributed reporting from Paris, Alina Lobzina from London and Natalia Yermak from Kyiv, Ukraine.