Amaya Lee

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

I played two years of D1 soccer before my knee ended it, and here's what employee status would have changed for me: everything after the injury. The school's surgeon did the ACL repair, the rehab was in their facility, and the day I was medically disqualified, the support evaporated. I was 20, limping through campus, paying out of pocket for follow-up PT because the "coverage" ended when my roster spot did. An employee gets workers' compensation. An employee gets continued medical care for a workplace injury. A "student-athlete" gets a thank-you and a highlight reel. Nobody disputes that a warehouse worker who blows out a knee on the job deserves care. The only reason we treat the athlete differently is a label the NCAA invented. My knee doesn't know the difference.

Should movie theaters make phone-free screenings the default?

My phone is a medical device. My continuous glucose monitor sends low-blood-sugar alerts to it, and during a two-hour movie those alerts are the difference between a good night and a medical emergency. Other people rely on phones for captioning apps and assistive listening in theaters whose built-in devices are broken, filthy, or simply missing. A default pouch policy forces disabled and chronically ill customers to out themselves at the door and beg for an exception, every single time. Inclusion should not require a permission slip. Keep phone-free as an option for those who want it, but the default has to assume some of us need our screens to participate safely. Regulators take the alert function seriously: [NICE's technology guidance on Dexcom](https://www.nice.org.uk/advice/mib233/chapter/The-technology) describes urgent-low alerts that cannot be deactivated, because for some users the phone alert is the safety device.

Teacher here, and the politics point is the one nobody says out loud. Whatever unit we design, half the parents will call it indoctrination and the other half will call it censorship.

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