Throwing a flag on youth sports

Talk about a brush-back pitch out of nowhere.

Time tells us we should take kiddie games seriously. In fact, its cover story reports on a $15 billion youth sports industry with all the crazy pressure and iniquities that come with it.

The industry is booming even as participation in relatively cheap Little League teams has fallen 20 percent from its peak 17 years ago.

“For better or worse, youth sports is being privatized,” said one investor. The parents interviewed here somehow act like these decisions are out of their hands, and they must succumb to their kids’ desire.

“This sports lifestyle is crazy,” one said. “But they’re your kids. You do anything for them.” Anything? Maybe that, right there, is the root of the problem.

Elsewhere, reporter Katy Steinmetz contemplates Trump’s review of 27 national monuments, which could eliminate or shrink the protected federal lands. Steinmetz points out that what locals have slurred as a “land grab” is further protecting parcels that the feds already own — a fact that anti-monument activists like Ammon Bundy have conveniently forgotten.

The chances that the landlord-in-chief will give a hoot? Probably not that high.

The New Yorker’s first television issue is anchored by Emily Nussbaum’s lighttouch profile of Jenji Kohan, creator of “Weeds,” “Orange is the New Black,” and the new Netflix show “GLOW.”

Nussbaum has boosted Kohan for years, and the piece makes a case for her influence in bringing diverse people on screen and to the writer’s room, even though her output has been spotty at best.