Search Results for: Concussions

What helmets can’t fix when it comes to concussions and high school football:

Because of its national reputation — and extremely well-funded athletic department — Mater Dei has been on the leading edge of concussion prevention and treatment for high school football players. The coaches are vigilant; the equipment is top of the line; the latest medical recommendations are exactingly followed.

And yet, even when a football program does everything right, it’s still not clear if it’s enough. This uncertainty haunts the Mater Dei coaching staff, who struggle on a daily basis to effectively manage the risk of concussions among their players. The new research on concussions has allowed them to prevent many of the worst injuries, but it has also made them increasingly aware of the ubiquity of injury. They know better than anyone that if an elite program like Mater Dei can’t solve the problem of head trauma, it seems unlikely the problem can be solved. The sport may simply be too dangerous for teenagers.

“The Fragile Teenage Brain.” — Jonah Lehrer, Grantland

See also: “The Teenage Brain.” — David Dobbs, National Geographic, Sept. 16, 2011

The Fragile Teenage Brain

Longreads Pick

What helmets can’t fix when it comes to concussions and high school football:

“Because of its national reputation — and extremely well-funded athletic department — Mater Dei has been on the leading edge of concussion prevention and treatment for high school football players. The coaches are vigilant; the equipment is top of the line; the latest medical recommendations are exactingly followed.

“And yet, even when a football program does everything right, it’s still not clear if it’s enough. This uncertainty haunts the Mater Dei coaching staff, who struggle on a daily basis to effectively manage the risk of concussions among their players. The new research on concussions has allowed them to prevent many of the worst injuries, but it has also made them increasingly aware of the ubiquity of injury. They know better than anyone that if an elite program like Mater Dei can’t solve the problem of head trauma, it seems unlikely the problem can be solved. The sport may simply be too dangerous for teenagers.”

Source: Grantland
Published: Jan 10, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,899 words)

Kevin Purdy: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Kevin Purdy is a freelance writer, and a frequent Longreader. Check out his site here.

Not all written in 2011, but brought to my attention and saved in 2011:

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Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Outside's Joe Spring: My Top 5 Longreads of the Year

Joe Spring is the online editor for Outside Magazine.

This was a big year for longform journalism. Byliner came out with blockbuster stories, like Jon Krakuer’s Three Cups of Deceit. The Atavist put out consistently strong features with solid multimedia. At Outside, our editors and writers contributed excellent investigative online exclusives (“Blood in the Water,” “Crashing Down”). Thanks to Longreads, Longform, Sportsfeat, The Browser, and other longform-loving sites, I found more great stories online then ever before. Every time I read something that made me think, I printed it out and taped it to the wall above my desk. Here are five of the articles published in 2011 that hang over my workspace.

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Dr. Don, By Peter Hessler, The New Yorker

A big look at the American West, told through the story of a small town pharmacist

Punched Out, By John Branch, The New York Times

How do you talk about the effects of concussions in sports in a new way? By profiling an individual’s life in exquisite detail, from start to after the finish. The multimedia is first rate as well. (This one took up the biggest chunk of wall space.)

Robert Krulwich, Commencement Speech at the University of Berkeley School of Journalism, Posted on Not Exactly Rocket Science

An argument for going after the things you want.

Frank’s Story, By John Brant, Runner’s World

Frank Shorter was the most famous marathoner of his day, yet few people knew about the disturbing behavior of his father—a supposedly perfect small town doctor.

The Fracturing of Pennsylvania, By Eliza Griswold, The New York Times Magazine

There were stories about hydrofracking with more statistical analysis and stories that explained the overall process and its effects in more detail, but no story was told better. Here’s how fracking in rural Pennsylvania affected the Haney family.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Nieman Storyboard's Andrea Pitzer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the founder of Nieman Storyboard. She is also writing what she hopes will be a very surprising book about Vladimir Nabokov.

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I’m contrary by nature. So when I sat down to pick my Longreads for 2011, I reviewed the lists that Mark had published to date and decided not to include a single story that had already been chosen. Which meant some obvious candidates were off the table from the beginning: no Lawrence Wright on Scientology, no Keith Gessen on Kazakhstan. No Allie Broshie. No John Jeremiah Sullivan. But see for yourself—the following pieces shine just as brightly.

The People v. Football” by Jeanne Marie Laskas for GQ

Autopsies on the brains of hockey and football players have been making big news lately. But here, Laskas checks in on the life of a former NFL linebacker to see what it’s like for mentally-impaired players who are still alive. Welcome to Dementia—it’s a funny, terrifying place.

Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man” by Barry Bearak for the New York Times

A vigilante murder launches this story, and the reporter’s investigation of it spirals into a tale of cowardice and cruelty. “He was a wayward teenager, a bad boy wanting to become a worse boy,” Bearak writes of one character, plunging into everything that follows. Race, xenophobia, money, and history make themselves felt in a way that never dulls the humanity—beautiful or horrifying—of the people Bearak portrays.

“Taste Has Never Met Shame: I Love You, Conor Oberst!” by Ben Dolnick for the Awl

One of the biggest joys of running a music store in Washington, DC, during my college years was that my co-workers were gloriously unembarrassed. Want to groove to Pet Shop Boys and Black Flag? No problem. Asking for that promo copy of A Tribe Called Quest to take home with the k.d. lang you bought today? Go for it. I had a saying then: “You love what you love,” which is insipid. But this article is what I meant. So short it has to stand on tiptoe to be a Longreads, Dolnick’s piece contains perhaps the most honest sentence ever written by a critic: “Taste doesn’t work for reason; reason is a skinny underpaid clerk in the office of taste.”

“It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…Some Dude?!” by Jon Ronson for GQ

Ronson motors along, encouraging you to snicker at a cavalcade of real-world wannabe superheroes headed up by Seattle’s Phoenix Jones. Then the story takes a hairpin turn, and you can’t imagine what happens next.

A Brevard Woman Disappeared But Never Left Home” by Michael Kruse for the St. Petersburg Times

What if you died alone and miserable, and no one even noticed?

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Writer Jessica Lussenhop: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages. See her stories on her Longreads page or find her on Twitter. 

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The ones I couldn’t stop thinking about.

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• Jon Ronson , “Robots Say the Damndest Things,” GQ, March 2011

Besides the fact that Ronson is such a consistently fascinating writer, now when people ask me what kind of journalist I’d like to be, ultimately, I can now say, “You know that piece where Jon Ronson gets to fly all over the world and meet all the robots? That kind.”

• Joe Eskenazi, “The Art of the Steal,” San Francisco Weekly, March 2011

 A fascinating portrait of a very uncool and very successful art thief. Also, orchid club crasher. Definitely one of the most memorable characters of 2011.

• Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “My Ex-Gay Friend,” New York Times Magazine, June 2011

Really haunting, and in large part because of this turn: “I told Michael about a recent conversation I had with our former boss … who surprised me by wondering aloud if Michael was ever truly gay.”

• Tim Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory,” Rolling Stone, May 2011

Masterful storytelling and as someone who never really knew a world without Fox News, this one just really took me to school.

• Jeanne Marie Laskas, “The People V. Football,” GQ, March 2011

MVP Longread: This year was the year of chronic traumatic encephalopathy stories (rounded out by the amazing New York Times series on hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard), but Laskas’s skill elevates former Viking Fred McNeill and his struggle with early onset Alzheimer’s far beyond poster-child-dom. I ran around recommending this to just about everyone I know after reading it.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

The Man of the Hour

Longreads Pick

Roger Goodell, sandy-haired and fit at 51, is the steward of the multibillion-dollar NFL juggernaut, having attained the job he dreamed about back in college. Over the first 4½ years of his tenure, he’s had to address numerous crises: Spygate; player discipline, most notably in the Michael Vick case; an epidemic of concussions; and the problem of how to keep players from maiming each other on the field. All the while, one thing has loomed very large over the commissioner: the shaky labor deal he inherited.

Author: Peter King
Published: Feb 4, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,858 words)