Mike McIntire – författare

With little public debate or introspection, our institutions of higher learning have become hostages to the rapacious, smash-mouth entertainment conglomerate known, quaintly, as intercollegiate athletics. In Champions Way, New York Times investigative reporter Mike McIntire chronicles the rise of this growing scandal through the experience of the Florida State Seminoles, one of the most successful teams in NCAA history.A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his Times investigation of college sports, McIntire breaks new ground here, uncovering the workings of a system that enables athletes to violate academic standards and avoid criminal prosecution for actions ranging from shoplifting to drunk driving. At the heart of Champions Way is the untold story of a whistle-blower, Christie Suggs, and her wrenching struggle to hold a corrupt system to account. Together with shocking new details about prominent sports figures, including NFL quarterback Jameis Winston and former FSU coach Bobby Bowden, Champions Way shines a light on the ethical, moral, and legal compromises inherent in the making of a championship sports program.Beyond the story of Florida State, McIntire takes readers on a journey through the history of college football, from its origins as a roughneck pastime coached by nineteenth-century professors to its current incarnation as a gold-plated behemoth that long ago outgrew its scholastic environs. Illuminated in rich and disturbing detail is the hidden financial ecosystem that nourishes hundred-million-dollar teams, from the hustlers who recruit players for schools and the athletic departments controlled by rich boosters to the universities whose academic mission and moral authority have been undermined. More than pointing out flaws, McIntire examines their causes and offers hope to those who would reform college sports.

Three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Mike McIntire delivers the definitive story of the forces that shape gun culture and the American way of violence.Not too long ago, you could still envision a future for America not marked by gun idolatry, blood-stained classrooms, and empty offers of thoughts and prayers. Yet a witches’ brew of politics, money, and ideology has warped gun culture in the United States, hijacking the Second Amendment and allowing fear and insecurity to drive the reckless marketing of powerful weapons. How did our country come to have more guns than people and become one in which just pulling into the wrong driveway can get you shot? In Ricochet, Mike McIntire provides a bold new road map for understanding our fraught relationship with guns and violence in America. McIntire crafts a gripping narrative of how the imperatives of war, slavery, crime, commerce and politics intertwined with the development of ever-more lethal firearms, leaving the country divided and traumatized. He shares explosive new revelations about the NRA’s accumulation of power and turn to radicalism; Wall Street's efforts to turbocharge the market for assault weapons and online gun sales; the gun lobby’s secretive campaign to change public attitudes by indoctrinating children; and how dark money, questionable scholarship, and front groups are being used to knock down gun laws. At once a cautionary tale of unfettered liberty, swagger and free markets contributing to our violent undoing, Ricochet also delivers a prescription for how we might yet save ourselves. A work of deep, revelatory investigative reporting, powerful storytelling, and incisive analysis, Ricochet is in essence a story about America, an excavation of the cultural and political dynamics that are at the root of our contemporary crises.