A hard-hitting examination of the many ways college football has been transformed into a money-making spectacle that is hurting higher education In the spring of 2013 a study showed that despite huge economic problems, twenty-seven states were awarding their highest salaries to college football coaches. College football has doubled in size in the last decade, thanks to generous tax breaks, lavish TV deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. In one recent year the ten biggest programs took in $800 million from football, with profit margins far surpassing those of Fortune 500 companies. Little of this money goes to academics. Instead, it sustains a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, tutors, and a growing cadre of athletic department bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. In The Department of Football, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a surprising, incendiary examination of how college football has come to dominate some of our best, most prestigious universities, reframing campus values, distorting academic missions, and transforming athletic departments into astonishingly rich entertainment factories.

This program includes an introduction and epilogue read by the author.

This century has seen the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history–but who bears the brunt of these monster storms?

Consider this: Five of the most expensive hurricanes in history have made landfall since 2005: Katrina ($160 billion), Ike ($40 billion), Sandy ($72 billion), Harvey ($125 billion), and Maria ($90 billion). With more property than ever in harm’s way, and the planet and oceans warming dangerously, it won’t be long before we see a $250 billion hurricane. Why? Because Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some of the riskiest places on earth: barrier islands and coastal floodplains. And they have been encouraged to do so by what Gilbert M. Gaul reveals in The Geography of Risk to be a confounding array of federal subsidies, tax breaks, low-interest loans, grants, and government flood insurance that shift the risk of life at the beach from private investors to public taxpayers, radically distorting common notions of risk.

These federal incentives, Gaul argues, have resulted in one of the worst planning failures in American history, and the costs to taxpayers are reaching unsustainable levels. We have become responsible for a shocking array of coastal amenities: new roads, bridges, buildings, streetlights, tennis courts, marinas, gazebos, and even spoiled food after hurricanes. The Geography of Risk will forever change the way you think about the coasts, from the clash between economic interests and nature, to the heated politics of regulators and developers.