Pushkin.

It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here?

Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn.

In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history.

So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on theHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

From Pushkin Industries, this is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.

I'm Noah Feldman. As we've explored a wide range of aspects of power this season on deep background, we have not yet had the opportunity to talk about one of the areas of power that I'm most interested in at a personal level, and that is the deployment of power in professional sports. Today we get the chance to take that question on directly.

We're joined by Michelle Roberts, who is the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association,

that is, the NBA Players Union.

She's the first woman to hold that job, and indeed the first woman to head a major professional sports union in North America.

Michelle came to this job through a rather unusual pathway.

She began her career as a lawyer as a public defender in the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she was mentored by the great Charles Ogletree, who himself went on to become a famous and influential

professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School. As a litigator, Michelle was known as fearsome

and powerful, and she moved ultimately from the public defender's office to working as a

litigator at major Washington, D.C. law firms, in which role

she was widely noted as one of the most experienced and successful and frightening litigators

anywhere in the United States. From there, Michelle went straight to the NBA Players Association,

and her tenure has been marked by some remarkable historical transformations in the role and identity of players, not

to mention by the particularities of COVID, including the bubble experience and more recently

the efforts of the league to come to terms with vaccination.

In short, Michelle is ideally placed to bring us behind the scenes

and explain to us a little bit about how power operates in professional sports in general

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