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But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.
In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting.
One thing Jim McGreevey wants the world to know: Leading a double life as a gay man trying to appear straight was easy for him to pull off. He was 'good' at it. Not only that - it helped him become a better politician.
I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.
In 2003, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a year later, a national ethics committee in France, said that face transplantation would be going too far. The risk of complication would far outweigh the benefits.
Football is in a guy's DNA. A primal thing. You should play it so you can talk about the glory days when you get older and drink Bud with the guys from the office. Get it done when you're young, while you have the chance.
Mike Webster's death was significant. Iron Mike. The best center in the NFL. Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. Four Super Bowl rings. He had played in more games - 220 of them - than any other player in Steelers history.
The LeBron 11, for $200, has hyperposite construction - a combination of Foamposite material and performance synthetics - and a new layer of Lunarlon cushioning; and anyway, Nike generates about $300 million off the sneakers.
On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.
Mike Webster lost all his money or, maybe, gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon, Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.
You plant a garden one flower at a time. ... You write a book one word at a time, clean a closet one shelf at a time, run a marathon one step at a time. If you feel defeated by some large task, get your spade and dig the first hole.
In the Dobbsian view of America, the mainstream media isn't evil because it's liberal but because it's lazy. And Washington is utterly corrupt, has sold out, Democrats and Republicans alike. And corporate America is an insatiable pig.
Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them midflight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool.
Buzz was, of course, the second man to walk on the moon. Buzz made a rap video, 'Rocket Experience,' with Snoop Dogg. He did the cha-cha and the fox-trot and was eliminated in the second round of season ten of 'Dancing with the Stars'.
'Bad Boys', which Bay made when he was just twenty-eight, having never made a movie before, having done a string of commercials and music videos with artists ranging from Donny Osmond to Meat Loaf, grossed more than $140 million worldwide.
Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet except the beating of your heart.
People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska's North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho.
Bob Dole. He's like the neighbors' Labrador retriever your dad used to curse for all that barking, all that darn digging in your mom's tulip bed, and now look, you live next door to a godforsaken pack of teeth-baring rabid Pomeranians, and, good golly, Bob Dole!
In the early 16th century the Italian physician Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, a pioneer in the science of anatomy, came up with the idea that perhaps 'brain commotion' was caused by the thrust of the soft structure of the brain against the solid case of the skull.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 was an attempt to impose order. It set up the Federal Firearms License (FFL) system; gun stores would have to become licensed, and they would have to follow certain rules. Felons, illegal immigrants, and crazy people would be prohibited from buying guns.
Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.
Contrary to popular mythology, not all NFL cheerleaders are bimbos or strippers or bored pretty girls looking to get rich. The Ben-Gals offer proof. Neither a bimbo nor a stripper nor a bored pretty girl would survive the rigorous life of a Ben-Gal. The Ben-Gals all have jobs or school or both.
I wanted to go to a place where I could think, really sink into my own imagination, or ride it, or drift along it, as in a balloon. The kind of place that probably all writers crave. The kind of place where the outside world is still and quiet and you get a chance to listen, to peer, to go inward
Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.
It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.
If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can't fully protect the head from damaging impact.
There's no telling how many guns we have in America - and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated.
People assume NFL cheerleaders are within some vague sniffing distance of the good life, but a Ben-Gal is paid seventy-five bucks per game. That is correct: seventy-five bucks for each of ten home games. The grand cash total per season does not keep most of them flush in hair spray, let alone gas money to and from practice.
When he emerged Lou Dobbs the populist, he was so hard to peg. A mishmash of contradictions: anti-outsourcing, anti-globalization, pro-international-trade, pro-free-enterprise, anti-corporatism, pro-choice, pro-Second Amendment, pro-gay-marriage, pro-gays-serving-openly-in-the-military, pro-military, anti-war-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.
For centuries, native Eskimos cut blocks of oil-soaked tundra from natural seeps to use as fuel. In the 1920s, explorers arrived and began poking holes. In 1968, they discovered Prudhoe Bay State No. 1, the largest oil field in North America and one of the largest in the world, and a year later the adjacent Kuparuk field, the second-largest.
This is one of the take-home messages for me: we just walk around with this narrative in America that everybody wants to be rich and famous. That that’s why people do what they do. And you know, all through these pages you learn over and over again no, actually not even NFL cheerleaders are doing it for fame and fortune. There’s another motivation going on that is so pure and human. That to me was an eye-opener in a really wonderful way.