Sports Illustrated has been sold for the second time in less than two years. This time, however, the $110 million purchase by Authentic Brands Group places far more importance on the iconic magazine’s reputation than the publication itself — pushing the name further into such ventures as gambling and live events.

The Meredith Corp. acquired Sports Illustrated in January 2018 along with a bunch of other titles as part of its purchase of Time Inc. Meredith moved to unload most Time Inc. magazines that were not focused on its primary audience: female readers. And those moves also reflected the flagging finances of major legacy publications.

So Meredith sold Time magazine to Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne Benioff; it dealt Fortune to a Thai entrepreneur, Chatchaval Jiaravanon, and it killed Money magazine’s print edition.

Sports Illustrated dominated sports journalism for decades, featuring the articles of such powerful writers as Frank Deford, George Plimpton and Gary Smith, and the photojournalism of such photographers as Neil Leifer. The magazine incorporated clear-eyed looks at civil and human rights, politics, power and money through the prism of professional, collegiate and amateur sport. A cover was considered a feat the equal to many accomplishments on the field of play.

Yet the immediacy of sports news, on cable television and online, in particular, from nimble and caustic websites to TV giant ESPN, chipped away at its seeming indispensability. So did larger societal shifts in how people consume information and news.

“Sports Illustrated had so much residual goodwill among its readers and entire audience,” Terry McDonell, the former top editor over the magazine, tells NPR. “Everybody remembered something about sports in relationship to Sports Illustrated. I don’t think that’s gone away. It might have shrunk a bit.”

A Meredith spokeswoman says Sports Illustrated remains profitable with a 27-issue-per-year schedule. Yet the company has now sold Sports Illustrated to Authentic Brands in a deal that hinges on the acquisition of the magazine’s intellectual property. That includes its photo archive, its past sportsman and sportswoman of the year covers, and the annual swimsuit issues, which feature female models in bikinis — including supermodels from Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley in decades past to Tyra Banks.

“As a trailblazer and cultural phenomenon, Sports Illustrated has created moments and experiences for its readers that are unmatched by any other sports brand,” Nick Woodhouse, president and chief marketing officer of Authentic Brands, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Meredith to extend Sports Illustrated’s legacy and connect the brand with new audiences around the world.

Authentic Brands also controls the rights to a wide array of brands, including such pop cultural figures as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley; such sports figures as Julius Erving and Shaquille O’Neill; and such fashion lines as Juicy Couture.

Meredith will continue to publish the magazine and run its website for now — paying Authentic Brands a licensing fee to do so while maintaining editorial independence, according to both companies. Meredith’s president of national media said he would integrate SI‘s print and digital products into Meredith’s operations.

In a memo to staff, Sports Illustrated editor in chief Chris Stone wrote that the magazine would seek to reach greater audiences on other platforms — including in live events, conferences, gambling and video games. He also cited the development of television shows from SI material. And he praised Meredith for striking a deal that honored the magazine’s work.

“This deal only made sense if we continue to generate premium journalism and storytelling,” Stone said. The guarantee that the magazine would continue to publish under Meredith, however, lasts just two years.

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American soil.

Those are two words that are commonly used to stir up patriotic feelings. They are also words that can’t be be taken for granted, because today nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities.

When the stock market tanked during the last recession, foreign investors began buying up big swaths of U.S. farmland. And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign-owned, it’s been left up to individual states to decide on any limitations.

It’s likely that even more American land will end up in foreign hands, especially in states with no restrictions on ownership. With the median age of U.S. farmers at 55, many face retirement with no prospect of family members willing to take over. The National Young Farmers Coalition anticipates that two-thirds of the nation’s farmland will change hands in the next few decades.

“Texas is kind of a free-for-all, so they don’t have a limit on how much land can be owned,” say’s Ohio Farm Bureau’s Ty Higgins, “You look at Iowa and they restrict it — no land in Iowa is owned by a foreign entity.”

Ohio, like Texas, also has no restrictions, and nearly half a million acres of prime farmland are held by foreign-owned entities. In the northwestern corner of the state, below Toledo, companies from the Netherlands alone have purchased 64,000 acres for wind farms.

There are two counties in this region with the highest concentration of foreign-owned farmland — more than 41,000 acres each. One of those is Paulding County, where three wind farms straddle the Ohio-Indiana line.

Higgins says that this kind of consumption of farmland by foreign entities is starting to cause concern. “One of the main reasons that we’re watching this … is because once a foreign entity buys up however many acres they want, Americans might never be able to secure that land again. So, once we lose it, we may lose it for good.”

His other concern is that every acre of productive farmland that is converted over to something other than agriculture, is an acre of land that no longer produces food. That loss is felt from the state level all the way down to rural communities, where one in six Ohioans has ties to agriculture.

Angela Huffman is a 6th-generation farmer in Wyandot County, which, along with Paulding County, has over 41,000 acres of foreign-owned farmland. Her modest, two-story white farmhouse has been in her family for almost 200 years. Her grandfather was the last person to actively farm the land here. When he got out of of farming due to declining markets, none of his five children wanted to take over, and the cropland is now leased.

But Huffman, a young millennial who lives here with her mother, wants to try to keep the farm going and revive her family heritage.

Walking out to the barn, a huge white Great Pyrenees dog watches over a small flock of sheep. Huffman says she’s worried about the effects of foreign land ownership on her rural community — which she describes as similar to Walmart pushing local businesses out of the market.

“Right out my back door here, Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, has recently bought out a couple grain elevators,” Huffman says, pointing across the field behind her house, “basically extracting the wealth out of the community.”

To be fair, U.S. farmers and corporations also invest in overseas agriculture, owning billions of dollars of farmland from Australia to Brazil, but the Smithfield Food buyout has really raised concerns with American farmers. As part of that 2013 sale, a Chinese company now owns 146,000 acres of prime U.S. farmland.

Back in the Huffman farmhouse, Joe Maxwell is typing on a laptop at the kitchen table. Maxwell is a fourth generation farmer from Missouri. He and Huffman are part of the Organization for Competitive Markets, an advocacy group of farmers and ranchers across the nation.

Maxwell points to the Smithfield Foods elevators across the field: “The money that those elevators used to make stayed within the community. Today the money those elevators make, will go into the pocket of someone thousands of thousands of miles away. This is going on across America.”

Maxwell is concerned that, as other states put restrictions on foreign purchases in place, Ohio in particular is being targeted. “So when they’re looking for investments in the U.S. and agriculture,” he says, “Ohio’s a great ag state and you don’t have any restrictions like other states.”

Nationwide, Canadian investors own the most farmland. In Ohio, it’s Germany, with 71,000 acres.

On the southern central part of the state, John Trimmer manages 30,000 acres of corn and soybeans for German investors. He’s been working with German families that have wanted to get into U.S. agriculture since the 1980s. “They started to buy land in Iowa and Minnesota,” Trimmer explains, “but right when they started, [Iowa and Minnesota] passed state laws which restricted foreign ownership.”

“None of them have an interest in the farm.”

Instead, the Germans turned to Ohio.

But, Trimmer says, there is a misconception about about foreign owners — that they aren’t good neighbors or good stewards of the land. What he sees is a growing divide between older family members who still live on the farm, and their children who have no interest in the family business and want to cash out the land.

“The last two farms we bought here, through an owner, her and her brothers and sisters inherited it from their mother, and none of them wanted to farm. None of them have an interest in the farm.” Trimmer explains that his German clients have established a reputation in the community for letting the tenants — often aging parents or grown children — continue to live in the houses on the farms they buy.

Sellers work directly with his German clients — instead of putting the property up on the market, the sale ensures that family members can live out their lives in the family homestead, while still getting cash value for the farmland.

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At 6:30 am, four of five Gordon family members are roaming around their suburban Sacramento house — if you only count the humans. There’s also four dogs, a bunny, a tortoise, chickens, ducks, goats, and a not-so-miniature miniature pig named Squiggy.

Hilary Gordon is discussing the day’s schedule with her husband in the middle of wrapping a breakfast sandwich for their 14-year-old, checking on cereal for their 17-year-old, and staring down their 11-year-old who just realized he forgot to finish today’s math homework.

Having time like this with her family is a major reason why Gordon, 47, works as a shopper for the grocery-delivery app Instacart, in a suburb of Sacramento. “I find it fun. It gives me something to do, I’m not out spending money. And I love the flexibility,” she says.

Instacart is one of a slew of similar apps — DoorDash, Postmates, Shipt — paying tens of thousands of workers like Gordon to deliver packages, food or groceries to strangers. Similar to those who drive for rideshare apps Uber and Lyft, delivery workers can choose when to work. But they don’t have to invite strangers into their cars.

This draws women — often in their 40s and 50s — who now make up more than half of the contractors working for major food delivery apps.

Instacart told NPR more than 50% of people who shop for the app are women. DoorDash said women make up more than 50% of its “dashers” in rural and suburban areas, and more than 60% in urban areas. Target’s Shipt declined to share this statistic. Postmates said an April survey of its workers showed 48% were female, and 38% had a child at home.

Gordon and a half-dozen other women shared details of working for delivery apps to NPR, which paint a picture of the epitome of gig work: Accessible but high-intensity, with pay that’s quick but unpredictable and hours that are flexible but unreliable.

“I tell people, it’s a great thing to have, if you’re looking for extra money but you don’t really need it,” said Christina Lewkowitz, 50, who works for Instacart, DoorDash, Shipt, Deliv and a vineyard in Sacramento.

‘I will not work for free’

After splitting up school drop-offs with her husband, Hilary Gordon parks her Subaru SUV in a grocery store parking lot. Her Instacart shift today is 8 am to 6 pm. She’s got her shopping sneakers on and a fully charged phone — watching the screen for incoming grocery orders, which she will both shop and deliver.

The first “batch,” as they call it, is a bust: $8 with no tip, for seven items, to be taken 4 miles. But the store is 8 miles away. Instacart says it pays 60 cents per mile for delivery to the customer, but doesn’t pay for the drive to the store in the first place. The company explains that it can’t be sure that the worker, for example, isn’t doing a non-Instacart gig until they begin shopping.

Logging miles is a big cost of the job. Some days Gordon might drive a hundred miles, filling up the tank at least once a day. For every order, she does quick math to calculate the gas expense. This $8 order doesn’t cut it. Gordon picks one of her canned responses to Instacart: “Pay too low. I will not work for free!”

“It’s really hard to say yes to that, because you feel like, then they’re thinking, ‘Oh, well, see, they’ll work for that’ — and I don’t want to work for that,” Gordon says.

But you can’t skip too many orders — the app will think you stopped working. Gordon gets a good one: eight items, for $9.87 plus a promise of a $6 tip. But most importantly, it’s only 1.5 miles of driving. She can knock it out in about 20 minutes.

Shopping for other people is a bit like a scavenger hunt, except the app is timing you. You rush through the whole store, scanning every item that goes in the basket and messaging the customer with updates.

Gordon checks each bell pepper for blemishes, throws a hail-mary on the ripeness of avocados, tells Instacart that “organic celery” is out of stock. The app suggests she grab “spring water” instead. Gordon laughs out loud.

After almost a year and a half with Instacart, Gordon says she still loves grocery shopping. And she especially loves meeting new people — chatting up store workers for help and playing with friendly pets she meets at customers’ homes.

‘Hopefully tomorrow is better’

Like a lot of gig workers, this is not a career Gordon pictured for herself. She has two master’s degrees — in counseling and family therapy.

She worked as a therapist in other states, but a move to California required more classes and exams, right as her oldest was born. Gordon became a social worker, until she made the calculation familiar to many working women: Her job took up mornings and evenings, with a not-so-great salary.

“When you’re going to pay the majority of it to let someone else raise your kids? Just didn’t make any sense,” Gordon says.

A few years later, the recession hit. Her husband lost his job in finance. Their house value dropped. They’re still paying down the debt that stacked up. But now, there’s also soccer, swim team, lacrosse, broken cleats, a junior prom dress, trips to look at colleges, AP exams, SAT tests and summer camp.

This rhythm is all-too familiar for women doing app work. Gigs help cover some expenses of child and health care — an opportunity for side-income on top of a steadier job, either the deliverer’s or their partner’s. Workers who do app-based jobs to supplement income is a growing cohort within the gig economy, says Shelly Steward of the Future of Work Initiative at the Aspen Institute.

Gig workers are often “independent contractors” who don’t get benefits like health insurance or sick leave. And when families piece together multiple jobs and gigs to make a living, “the system of workplace benefits that’s been in place does not adequately cover nearly as many workers,” Steward says.

Stacie Ballard, 43, pieces together work for at least seven apps while building her own business in Atlanta. She keeps a stack of t-shirts in her trunk — green for Instacart, green and white to walk dogs for Wag, green and grey to deliver packages for Shipt — changing between gigs as she earns extra cash for her teenager’s graduation and other expenses.

“If you’re a mom or a caregiver or something, it’s really flexible,” Ballard said. “It can be frustrating when you know you have certain bills that are coming up, and you’re like, ‘Ok, I need to make this much money. Hopefully tomorrow is better,’ But so far it’s always worked out.”

All the things to consider

Ballard, like many women in the gig economy, works for apps part time. For one, hustling full-time is exhausting. But also, hours can be hard to get.

On Instacart, available hour-long shifts get claimed within seconds, workers said. Part-time workers like Ballard and Lewkowitz often stalk the app all day, hoping to grab some.

Gordon is one of the Instacart regulars who gets “early access” to a full week’s worth of shifts so she can get hours predictable and long enough to make the work worth it for her. But to qualify, she commits to doing this “gig” full-time, because “early access” requires working at least 90 hours in three weeks or 25 hours in three weekends.

Instacart says it’s announced a pilot of a new way to qualify, which would encourage good customer ratings instead of long hours.

Even for full-timers like Gordon, signing up for shifts is “anxiety-inducing.” She describes frantic clicking on Sunday mornings, when the schedule opens, selecting all the hour-slots before they get claimed, within minutes.

And after all that, as any gig worker knows, having more hours doesn’t assure a huge paycheck bump. It might be a slow day, or long distances might make orders not worth the cost of gas. Workers also consider less obvious cost of these jobs. Is the order too complicated and time consuming? Too heavy?

Once, Gordon accidentally accepted a Costco batch with 81 cases of water. She says Instacart told her she could do multiple trips, but she refused and had to return — and ultimately give up — the whole order. So today, Gordon is eagle-eyed, spotting 13 cases of water in an otherwise appealing $32 batch.

One final thing she always checks is whether she knows the delivery address. Many delivery workers keep a mental track of locations that require climbing stairs, like apartments without elevators. On Gordon’s mental list are also a house with the guy who greeted her in a robe, and an older man who pressured her into bringing his groceries inside and said he’d been tracking her.

And then there’s the matter of tipping. Orders from businesses are notorious for being large and lacking tips. Workers say they wish the apps more aggressively encouraged their users to tip. Instacart recently changed its tipping system and retroactively compensated workers after workers and labor advocates fought a policy that counted tips toward base payments that Instacart promised for deliveries — sometimes offsetting what Instacart paid out of its own pocket.

Today, Gordon delivered eight orders in 10 hours, and made $133, before extra bumps for heavy orders and good reviews. Today was okay. There was one day when she made $50 in six hours. That wasn’t worth it. Gordon’s best day’s haul was $255 — when she worked almost 12 hours.

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More than 130 people in the U.S. die of an opioid overdose every day. One of the most effective ways to save lives is to get those struggling with addiction treated with medication to stop their cravings. But a loophole in federal law might block at least one new opioid-addiction drug from coming to market for years.

Many patients have to try several medications before finding one that works for them and that they can stick with.

“It’s important to have multiple different treatment options for different patients, different circumstances,” says Carolyn Bogdon, a family nurse practitioner who oversees outpatient medication-assisted treatment programs at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C.

Some use methadone, which they get every day. Others use Vivitrol, which can be injected once a month. And many use buprenorphine, which comes in tablets and a dissolvable film that people take once or twice a day. Buprenorphine is an opiate, but it blocks the cravings associated with addiction without giving people the same high.

A handful of patients at the university’s clinics have moved to a form of buprenorphine called Sublocade that’s injected just once a month.

And if the company that makes Sublocade gets its way, the drug will be the only long-acting buprenorphine on the market for five more years.

FDA and ‘orphan drugs’

That’s because a quirk in federal law may prevent a competing drug called Brixadi from going on sale until 2024. “It’s ready for market now,” says Mike Derkacz, CEO of Braeburn, which makes Brixadi. “We are deemed safe and effective by FDA, but we are unable to make the product available to patients during this crisis.”

Sublocade was approved for sale in 2017 and, like any new drug, was granted three years of exclusive access to U.S. markets. That time is up next year. But in December, the Food and Drug Administration told Braeburn it might have to wait four more years because Sublocade was designated an “orphan drug,” which gives it seven years of exclusive access.

Sublocade, which is made by Indivior, isn’t an orphan drug in the traditional sense. Normally, these are medications that treat illnesses affecting fewer than 200,000 people a year.

Opioid addiction is not a rare disease.

In 2017, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about 2.3 million people in the U.S. were addicted to prescription opioids or illicit opiates such as heroin, and 47,000 people died of an overdose.

The Trump administration declared opioid addiction a public health emergency that same year — just a month before Sublocade hit the market — and made helping people get medication-assisted treatment a priority.

That’s why the makers of Brixadi were shocked when the FDA gave their product only tentative approval in December. Derkacz says it doesn’t make sense, in the middle of what many call an epidemic, to treat buprenorphine drugs as if they treat a rare disease.

“There have been studies that show a reduction in mortality by 40% with buprenorphine,” Braeburn’s CEO says. “That keeps people alive. That gives people a chance to get back to their lives and recover fully.”

A back-door approach

So why is Sublocade considered an orphan drug? Like many things related to prescription drugs, the reasons are wonky and sort of irrational.

Indivior created its first buprenorphine-based drug, called Subutex, in the 1990s. At the time, treating addiction with other drugs wasn’t mainstream. There were methadone clinics in some U.S. cities, but they were heavily regulated by law.

The company asked the FDA to give it orphan drug status — but instead of saying there weren’t many potential patients, Indivior said it had little hope of earning back its investment in Subutex and needed extra time with no competition. Few drugs have ever received orphan status this way. But at the time, it made sense to the FDA.

The orphan designation was granted, and Subutex hit the market in 2002.

Since then, Indivior has made billions in revenue from sales of the drug and its successors, Suboxone and Sublocade, partly because the orphan designation is automatically attached to every new formulation of buprenorphine the company makes.

Indivior’s executives declined to be interviewed for this story. But in response to written questions, the company says, “Indivior stands by FDA’s decision, which was supported by both the law and the facts at that time.”

Derkacz says Braeburn has asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke Sublocade’s orphan status. And an FDA spokeswoman says the agency is actively considering that request.

The right drug ‘can save their life’

Long-acting, injectable treatments for addiction have some advantages over tablets and dissolvable films. Patients don’t have to remember to take medication each day, and they can avoid the drugstore.

“It provides a little bit more anonymity for patients that don’t want to disclose that they have an opiate use disorder,” says Michelle Lofwall, a psychiatrist and medical director at two University of Kentucky clinics that treat patients struggling with opioid addiction.

“Some patients have felt stigmatized when going to the pharmacy, like they don’t feel like they’re necessarily treated all that well once they show their prescription,” she says.

Lofwall participated in Brixadi’s clinical trial, so she’s one of the few health care providers who has used both medications. She says they’re slightly different and that she’d like to have the choice to offer her patients.

“From a public health perspective, and just as a provider physician trying to treat patients, they need to have all the options,” Lofwall says. Being on the right drug “literally can save their life.”

“As a clinician, it’s always important for me to have more tools,” Andrea Barthwell, an addiction treatment specialist, wrote in public comments on Braeburn’s FDA petition. “Moreover, there are gaps in care from the current buprenorphine treatment options that Brixadi may fill.”

Brixadi can be used weekly as well as monthly, allowing doctors to see their patients more frequently and monitor them more closely at the start of treatment, according to several comments.

Another issue is cost.

Sublocade costs about $1,580 per month, according to marketing materials from Indivior, and some insurance companies won’t pay for it. “In Kentucky,” Lofwall says, “we haven’t been able to get it for patients who are on several different Medicaid managed-care programs.”

By contrast, a generic version of the buprenorphine film costs about $140 a month, according to the website GoodRX.com.

Daniel Smith, who leads the medication-assisted treatment program at Mary’s Center in Washington, D.C., says he doesn’t know any doctors who use Sublocade now.

“Long-acting buprenorphine is definitely advantageous over short-acting for many reasons, but cost and availability have been the challenge,” he says.

But if a competitor drug came on the market, Smith says the price of Sublocade might fall, and he might then be willing to prescribe it to his patients.

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