Thanks for sharing, Carl

I edited the first few but I now have a team helping me

Thank you for watching and sharing!

Gambling addiction is a public health crisis, but it's not treated that way yet.

What will it take for it to get there?

One day, it will be and people will ask: how did things get so bad?

I've watched friends spiral into gambling debt.

I've seen how quickly betting replaces joy.
And I've watched it hollow out how people connect to sports, replacing community with isolation and shame.

Our culture can't tell real stories about sports without talking about addiction, mental health, and what this industry is doing to people.

But most media can't tell that story honestly because they're in business with the very companies fueling the crisis.

Sports media helped normalize this.

Not just by promoting gambling, but by failing to ask real questions.

What does it mean when joy in sports is replaced by odds?

Does "fan engagement" just mean keeping people watching bad games and keeping ratings up as cable collapses?

There's a casino in your pocket.

So much of sports media is framed around gambling language.

The losses are invisible until it's too late.

And when someone spirals, whether it's a fan, a coach, or a player, we act like they're uniquely broken instead of asking how we got here.

When someone gets suspended for gambling, the public reaction is often moralizing.

"How could they be so stupid?"
"What an idiot."

But this isn't just about choices. This is what addiction looks like when it's been rebranded as content.

The Red Sox have been dysfunctional as Craig Breslow has boxed out longtime voices from the Theo Epstein era.

Breslow recently fired scouting supervisor Craig Moesche after he said "Thanks, Bres, you f--king stiff" on a Zoom hot mic. sports.yahoo.com/mlb/article/...

Will have more reporting and sourcing on the state of the Red Sox, but this is the big takeaway.

There's blame to go around with everyone: Devers, Cora, Breslow, but this is emblematic of bigger than just one dramatic situation of a player not wanting to move to a new position.