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markfrankel18

Malcolm Gladwell: Do Genetic Advantages Make Sports Unfair? : The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "Eyesight can be improved-in some cases dramatically-through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete's body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self. But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball-like most sports-draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that-like testosterone-is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world."
Lawrence Hrubes

Is It Wrong to Watch Football? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Is It Wrong to Watch Football?
  • His body wrecked at 36, Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing in the National Football League. After he died of an overdose of pain medication at 27, Tyler Sash was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Concussion diagnoses have increased by about a third since the league let independent medical officials assess players. And it seems that with each N.F.L. veteran’s death, another diagnosis of C.T.E. is revealed. How can fans enjoy watching a game that helps ruin players’ lives?
Lawrence Hrubes

Caster Semenya and the Logic of Olympic Competition - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • I’ve been astonished at how many people fail to appreciate the athletic significance of this. Remember, this is a competitive issue, not a human-rights issue. No one is saying that Semenya isn’t a woman, a human being, and an individual deserving of our full respect.
  • Semenya is equipped with an extraordinary and anomalous genetic advantage.
  • That premise hopefully agreed, we then see that the presence of the Y chromosome is the single greatest genetic “advantage” a person can have. That doesn’t mean that all men outperform all women, but it means that for élite-sport discussion, that Y chromosome, and specifically the SRY gene on it, which directs the formation of testes and the production of testosterone, is a key criterion on which to separate people into categories.
Lawrence Hrubes

Canada's Forced Schooling of Aboriginal Children Was 'Cultural Genocide,' Report Finds ... - 0 views

  • Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”
  • The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches, were in operation for more than a century, from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998.The commission found that 3,201 students died while attending the schools, many of them because of mistreatment or neglect — the first comprehensive tally of such deaths.
  • Some of the former students the commission interviewed cited school sports, music and arts programs as bright spots in their lives. But those programs were not generally part of the system, and most former students, even those who were not physically or sexually harmed or neglected, told the commission that their daily lives were heavily regimented and lacked privacy and dignity. At many of the schools, students were addressed and referred to by number as if they were prisoners.“In the school, I didn’t have a name,” Lydia Ross, a former student, told the commission. “I had No. 51, No. 44, No. 32, No. 16, No. 11 and then finally No. 1, when I was just coming to high school.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Meet Dan Barber: America's next foodie-in-chief - Salon.com - 0 views

  • As the unofficial spokespeople for our organic-eating, Food Network-watching ways, when chefs talk, Americans tend to listen. And Dan Barber — the farm-to-table icon behind restaurants Blue Hill in New York City and Blue Hill Stone Barns in Tarrytown — isn’t wasting his platform.Barber has given a wildly popular TED talk, been counted among TIME’s 100 most influential people, been appointed to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition and, as of last week, authored a nearly 500-page book laying out a radical new vision for the future of food.So when Barber came out last weekend with a New York Times op-ed detailing the shortcomings of the farm-to-table movement he had previously helped promote, people paid attention. While we like to pat ourselves on the back for eating seasonally and locally, Barber’s contentious argument went, the foodie fad that grew to become the face of sustainable eating has failed to bring about the promised revolution. Industrial agriculture still rules, Barber argued. And as it keeps growing, more and more small farms and native prairie disappear under Big Ag’s plow.If we really care about changing our food system (as anyone who hopes to feed our growing world should), Barber believes we’re going to need a true revolution. And “The Third Plate“ is his thesis, over a decade in the works, for what that change must look like.Among other things, change means thinking holistically, embracing diversity in ingredient choice and cuisine, and shifting meat over from its vaulted place at the center of the dinner plate. But while the solutions Barber describes are frighteningly extensive, they also, in his telling, sound delicious. That, more than any warning about the consequences of continuing along with the status quo, could be thing that ends up making a difference.
Lawrence Hrubes

Want to Ace That Test? Get the Right Kind of Sleep - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Sleep. Parents crave it, but children and especially teenagers, need it. When educators and policymakers debate the relationship between sleep schedules and school performance and — given the constraints of buses, sports and everything else that seem so much more important — what they should do about it, they miss an intimate biological fact: Sleep is learning, of a very specific kind. Scientists now argue that a primary purpose of sleep is learning consolidation, separating the signal from the noise and flagging what is most valuable. School schedules change slowly, if at all, and the burden of helping teenagers get the sleep they need is squarely on parents. Can we help our children learn to exploit sleep as a learning tool (while getting enough of it)? Absolutely. There is research suggesting that different kinds of sleep can aid different kinds of learning, and by teaching “sleep study skills,” we can let our teenagers enjoy the sense that they’re gaming the system.
markfrankel18

Stunted: The White Flags on the Brooklyn Bridge - The New Yorker - 1 views

  • Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer was the switch of flags on the Brooklyn Bridge, by two German artists, from the Stars and Stripes to all-white versions of the same. Others include a Canadian artist’s scrawls, partly in blood, on a wall in the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum and, in Moscow, the painting of a star ornament atop a Stalin-era tower, in Ukrainian national colors. Internationally, the British midnight muralist Banksy continues his waggish depredations, rivalled of late by a female upstart called Bambi, who likewise stencils images, only with a sexy-feminist spin. The over-all phenomenon could use a name—I propose Stunt art—and some analysis, starting with distinctions.
  • As a category of volunteer art, Stunt art borders the genres of spray-can graffiti and spectacular illegal sport, such as scaling or parachuting from tall buildings.
  • Stuntism is to art as weeds are to horticulture: plants in the wrong place. Authorities, social or botanical, define the wrongness, which becomes more arbitrary the more you think about it. Some weeds are as lovely as tulips. A superb gardener I know welcomes the sceptered majesty of common mullein (distinct from the mannerly hybrid varieties) wherever it opts to sprout. So may it be with Stunt art, in a time given to fanatical constraints on human-natural cussedness.
Lawrence Hrubes

What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees? - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The air of machine precision casts doubt on what our eyes—or the eyes of referees—can process. As viewers, they argue, our instinct is to assume that all forms of assistance are equally effective, or that they do what they claim in the first place. But what we see on television is usually just a representation, or a calculated guess, based on thermal imaging, sound, or the work of cameras tracking an object’s velocity through air.
Lawrence Hrubes

Colin Kaepernick and a Landmark Supreme Court Case | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia.
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