Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is America reacts to the Planned Parenthood attack:
Some students are fighting against having to financially support sports:
In 2014, students at 32 schools paid a combined $125.5 million in athletic fees, according to a Washington Post examination of financial records at 52 public universities in the “Power Five,” the five wealthiest conferences in college sports. [...]
To advocates fighting to keep college affordable, however, athletic departments that continue to charge mandatory student fees as their income rises are making America’s student debt problem worse.
50 years ago, before "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," a young fellow named Arlo got into a bit of trouble.
Greg Fisk, just-elected Juneau mayor, found dead in his home: No cause of death has been announced and, as is standard procedure when a person dies unattended, an autopsy will be performed.
Football—America’s game is a fun-house mirror for our national character:
I began working for the NFL in the late summer of 2004, less than a year before Nigerian-born pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu published his controversial paper in the journal Neurosurgery on the brain of Mike Webster, the Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs, who died in 2002. Omalu is the subject of both a recent book and film that share the same blunt title: Concussion. The book, by Jeanne Marie Laskas, expands on her reporting in the 2009 GQ exposé “Game Brain.” (The film, which stars Will Smith as Omalu, will be released by Sony Pictures this Christmas.) Omalu’s article described in detail his discovery that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an impact-based head trauma, was killing football players and other athletes who suffered repeated blows to the head. Three doctors with the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee wrote a letter to the editors ofNeuroscience alleging Omalu had misunderstood his own findings. But even as the NFL tried to bury his breakthrough, the doctor continued to accumulate data on what head trauma did to the brains of athletes until a former neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers who had known Webster called Omalu to tell him he believed him. As Laskas wrote in GQ, “It was the first time anyone who ever had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu’s work.”
In Concussion, Laskas tells the story thoroughly, though not completely, of an immigrant who suddenly found himself in a unique position to tell America about itself. Omalu’s life, as well as his discovery, is at the center of Concussion, and rightfully so—his story allows us to understand that American football is both a sport and a mirror, one which reflects both glorious and grotesque truths about our national character.
When a woman got the Monty Hall question right, she caught a barrage of objections, many saturated with sexism.
The future of polling may depend on how well Donald Trump does:
In previous years, most analysts and reporters probably would have put considerably more weight on the live-interview polls, or just ignored the automated and Internet polls altogether. That’s because most (though not all) analysts thought live-interview polls, in which each member of the electorate with a landline phone has an equal chance of being selected, were more accurate than Internet polls, most of which rely — at least somewhat — on volunteer respondents who might not be fully representative of the population, and automated polls, which cannot reach cellphones.
But this year, it’s considerably more difficult to ignore non-live-interview polls.
“Racing Extinction” debuts Wednesday, December 2, on the Discovery channel: The film by Academy Award-winning director Louis Psihoyos exposes the two worlds that are driving global species extinction—the international wildlife trade and the fossil fuel industry.
Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Nation sues New Jersey over withdrawal of tribal recognition: Unlike 566 tribes of American Indians and Alaskan Natives, the Lenni-Lenape tribe has no federal recognition. But in 1982 it received state recognition from New Jersey, just as other non-federal tribes have done there and in other states. Now, however, the state has withdrawn that recognition. Consequently, the tribe has sued the State of New Jersey, alleging that the Chris Christie administration is denying its members civil rights.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin gives us the run-down on the 2016 Gop race for the crazy base, and of the exposure of the network of professional climate deniers. “Magical thinking” about ISIS, and how clueless politicians in multiple countries seem doomed to repeat every mistake every made in dealing with them.
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