The W.N.B.A. is in the heat of the postseason, and arenas are packed with passionate fans. Many of them are women and girls, of course. But most of them are male. And among boys, that fandom is quickly growing.
I first noticed this not as a reporter, but as a mom. My 12-year-old son is obsessed with the Golden State Warriors. It seems as if half his wardrobe has Stephen Curry’s face on it. He wanted to paint his entire bedroom Warriors blue (I convinced him that one accent wall would be a more soothing choice).
When the W.N.B.A. introduced a new team in San Francisco this year — the Golden State Valkyries, which I recently profiled — I bought us tickets for the first game. I hoped he would become a casual fan.
Before long, though, he developed full-on Valkyries fever. Suddenly, he was sporting a violet cap and a Tiffany Hayes jersey, studying the roster and memorizing statistics. The real eye-opener for me came one Saturday morning when I saw that he was playing his NBA 2K video game not as the Warriors, but as the Valkyries.
It turns out my son is in very good company. Boys and young men are helping to fuel the surge in interest in women’s basketball.
This season, the W.N.B.A.’s fan base was 57 percent male and 43 percent female, according to statistics provided by the league. Men have actually made up more than half of viewership for years, but they were mostly middle-aged before. Now they’re skewing younger. The number of boys under 18 who watch W.N.B.A. games has grown by 130 percent over the past four years.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke with league officials, Valkyries executives and fans to understand the reasons behind the explosion in popularity.
Bigger stars
Seemingly every boy in America knows about Steph Curry and LeBron James. Now they know about Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers, too. (I got these names from my son, who proclaimed them “generational talents.”)
Clark in particular has drawn new fans to the league. During her first year as a professional player last season, with the Indiana Fever, the W.N.B.A. saw a groundswell of interest in its televised games.
More than a dozen games topped one million viewers — a number the league had not reached in the previous 16 years. Clark’s debut also coincided with a 34 percent increase in boys watching the games, the league said.
Better play
It’s no coincidence that a crop of superstars has recently entered the league. Over the years, there have been more opportunities for young girls to play basketball, and that investment is paying off.
“The quality of the players has definitely gotten better,” said Joe Lacob, the billionaire who owns both the Valkyries and the Warriors. He said 55 percent of ticket holders at the women’s games in San Francisco were male.
The women are gritty and fierce, playing fast and sinking more 3-pointers than ever before.
Lacob sits courtside for most Valkyries games, and his guy friends are constantly asking him for tickets, he said. At one recent game, I spotted several heavily tattooed football players for the 49ers sitting beside him.
“People are not dumb,” Lacob said. “They see that it’s better. It just clicked.”
Cooler vibes
The Valkyries managed to become the first W.N.B.A. team to sell out all their home games, helping to propel the league to record attendance numbers. When you’re in their arena, the Chase Center, it feels like one big party.
Several male fans told me that Warriors games had started to feel like overpriced networking opportunities, while the Valkyries games were more affordable and more fun.
Nathaniel Berhanu, 10, has season tickets with his mom, Marina Cervantes, and persuaded her to buy him a Valkyries hat after a recent game.
“Anytime I’m here I’m overjoyed!” he said. “I’m hyped.”
It’s hard not to be when there are flames shooting up behind the backboards, D.J.s blasting music and entertainers like the rapper E-40 performing.
My son has started putting the full-court press on me for season tickets next year. Not for the men’s games — for the women’s.
THE LATEST NEWS
Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk’s memorial service will be held at an N.F.L. stadium just outside Phoenix. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend. Here’s what to know.
President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller and others are expected to speak at the event, which is also meant to galvanize a political movement in Kirk’s name.
Tucker Carlson, another planned speaker, is one of the few on the right who has cautioned against the crackdown on speech that has followed the assassination.
Erika Kirk: She said in an interview with The Times that she had heard her husband imply that his life could be cut short and had asked him to wear a bulletproof vest, but still saw divine work in his death.
Immigration
Tom Homan accepted a bag with $50,000 in cash in an undercover F.B.I. investigation before he was named Trump’s border czar. The case was later shut down by Trump administration officials.
Wall Street and the tech industry are scrambling to make sense of a $100,000 fee that Trump plans to charge for visas granted to skilled foreign workers.
Some people who come to the U.S. on J-1 visas, meant to foster cultural exchange, were abused and mistreated. Here are four takeaways from our investigation into the program.
International
The Trump administration’s international aid cuts have threatened maternal care for the women fleeing Sudan’s war. Many patients have endured sexual violence and are not pregnant by choice.
Trump officials say they are trying to stop drug smuggling in the Caribbean Sea. Others say the real goal may be to drive Venezuela’s president from power.
Successful Ukrainian counterattacks could help challenge Russia’s narrative that its advances are unstoppable and that Kyiv should settle for a peace deal now.
Wars, a budget crisis and questions of relevancy will hang over the United Nations General Assembly this week.
THE SUNDAY DEBATE
Should Democrats allow the government to shut down?
Yes. Voters are unlikely to blame Democrats for shutting down the government over health care funding, which is in line with voters’ priorities. “Being the health care party isn’t a bad thing,” Bloomberg’s Nia-Malika Henderson writes.
No. Even if Democrats won extensions to current health care policy, no one would notice, and the small relief they give to voters would help Republicans in power. “By shutting down the government, Democrats would hand Republicans a political club that they could use to beat them,” MSNBC’s Michael Cohen writes.
FROM OPINION
It’s premature to speak of Charlie Kirk’s killer as if he were a left-wing militant when so much of his message seems designed to obscure meaning rather than convey it, Matthew Walther argues.
The problem with taking away vaccine mandates isn’t just that people will refuse inoculation. It can also make it harder for people who want vaccines to get them, Daniela Lamas writes.
Here are columns by Jessica Grose on vaccine skepticism and Carlos Lozada on Kamala Harris’s memoir.
MORNING READS
On the field: Immigration raids have ripped through California’s winemaking region. Some workers are finding solace on a baseball diamond in a vineyard, even though their teams are now sometimes short on players.
Intervision: Russia has been boxed out of Eurovision. So it hosted its own international song contest against friendlier foes, like Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked story yesterday was about one family’s search for a New England home.
Vows: He never got over his middle school crush. She didn’t really either.
A hunger for life: Marian Burros, who wrote recipes and reported on consumer protection and food safety, died at 92. She developed one of the most beloved Times recipes: the original plum torte. Make it in her honor.
SPORTS
N.H.L.: The Chicago Blackhawks settled a lawsuit with a former player who sued the club over failing to act when informed of sexual assault accusations against a former video coach.
Tennis: The U.S. is headed to its first Billie Jean King Cup final since 2018.
M.L.B.: The league has confirmed to The Athletic that “bad actors” had been able to steal and resell fans’ digital tickets from the Ballpark app, a platform used by all 30 teams, and warned customers to change their passwords.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai: If a novel can be described as “generous,” the word applies to Kiran Desai’s long-awaited follow-up to her 2006 Booker Prize-winner, “The Inheritance of Loss.” Almost 20 years in the making, this 688-page odyssey follows two aspiring writers as they disentangle themselves from their all-consuming families and make their way from India to the United States and back again, edging ever-closer to one another. “One of the many miracles of Desai’s writing,” our reviewer wrote, “is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters — far too many to detail here, and not all animate. Beyond the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ of 19th-century fiction, yet with comparable heft, she ventures into the floorboards, up into the trees and across time zones.” The book, which comes out on Tuesday, has already been longlisted for the Booker Prize.
More books
Sports and sex make for a knockout pairing in romance novels. Here’s where to start.
Here are kid-approved suggestions for books like Captain Underpants, Dog Man and other titles by Dav Pilkey.
THE INTERVIEW
This week’s subject for The Interview is the actor and producer Reese Witherspoon, who got her first big role at 14. In the decades since, she has starred in several successful movies — like “Election,” “Legally Blonde” and “Walk the Line,” for which she won an Oscar — and TV shows, including “The Morning Show,” which just released its fourth season. She has also become a force behind the camera with her production company, Hello Sunshine. We talked about those two sides of her career, how she’s navigating the turbulent entertainment industry and her early days in Hollywood as a young mother.
You end up in these big films in your early 20s — “Election,” “Cruel Intentions” — and, of course, getting married and having children. Ryan Phillippe was your husband back then. It was unusual, I think, in Hollywood to have kids in your early 20s.
You think? [Laughs.] There are parts of it that are private and personal that I don’t really want to talk about, but I will talk about having kids at a young age. There was so much I didn’t know. And maybe that naïveté was good, because it’s like, “Oh, I’ll just do that and have a career.” And I did have a few people say to me, “This is going to be really hard on your career.” There were roles I couldn’t take. I had to have this immediate balance of family and career, being a mom and being a working actress. That’s why it was also scary when “Legally Blonde” became such a big hit. I wasn’t going to beg for parts; parts were coming to me. And that almost made it scarier, because I wasn’t picking and choosing what I would reach and strive for. It was more like, what will I not do?
Was it difficult to be in a different part of life than your peers?
You know what the most ironic part was? I was always being told by people in the industry: “Don’t play a mom. It’ll make you seem old.” And I was like, “But, I am a mom.” There was so much about our business that desexualized you, so you couldn’t be a movie star if you played a mom. And thank goodness, that’s sort of going by the wayside. But that was a big part of when I was in my 20s and 30s: Don’t play a mom. No men will desire you, or nobody will want to go see that movie because nobody wants to see a movie about a mom.
Read more of the interview here, or watch a longer version on our YouTube channel.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Read this week’s magazine.
THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …
Watch “The Summer Book,” an adaptation of a Finnish novel about a grieving family.
Catch up on this year in music.
Make up after a fight.
MEAL PLAN
Emily Weinstein hates throwing away food. So she always has frozen shrimp in the house. They are the key to her first idea for five meals to cook for dinner this week: Melissa Clark’s sheet-pan coconut shrimp and sweet potatoes.
For vegetarian options, try zucchini butter pasta or masala chickpeas with tofu. And for your shrimp fix, here are 19 ideas for fast bites.
NOW TIME TO PLAY
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was analyzed.
Can you put eight historical events — including the translation of the Rosetta Stone, Butch Cassidy’s downfall and the first 26.2-mile marathon — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.
And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.
Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.
Amelia Nierenberg contributed to this newsletter.