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Are you ready for some football? That’s a rhetorical question. We all know the answer. Live sports have never been more important to the bottom line for media companies, and the NFL has never been a more dominant American league. The NFL is too big to fail. Yes, you are ready for some football. And you were probably ready for this preseason report about the brain-injury risks associated with the sport. We get some version of these stories during most preseasons, and they’re usually punted, passed, and kicked to the curb in time for the opening weekend. “The study, published Tuesday by the British Medical Journal, focused on how common chronic traumatic encephalopathy might be among NFL players. What it found is that of the 878 players who appeared in at least one NFL game and died in that six-year period, at least 25% had CTE.” Players and fans alike are in denial about this risk. There’s fantasy football and then there’s football’s fantasy.
+ “The most notorious form of workplace illness in the United States might be black lung disease. Scientists say that 10 to 20 percent of coal miners who have worked 25 years or more have gotten it. It has long been considered an epidemic. Imagine an American job that is less safe than that, where one in four workers (and maybe far more) ends up with an incurable, degenerative brain disease that withers the mind, sometimes after just a few years of exposure. Imagine the outrage at the working conditions, the demands that something be done to protect the employees, the questions about whether the industry needed to be overhauled, if not abolished. ‘I don’t think that this would be abided in any industry,’ said Doug Parker, the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the Biden administration. Unless that profession was N.F.L. football.” John Branch in the NYT (Gift Article): Many N.F.L. Players Get Brain Disease. Why Hasn’t OSHA Intervened?
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Vanity vs Sanity
Canada has struck back with retaliatory tariffs as the trade war between neighbors continues to escalate. The NYT (Gift Article) has a detailed look back at exactly how the trade talks fell apart. In terms of financial might, the US dominates. The same may not be true in terms of politics. Trump is giving Americans - including GOP politicians - more of what they don’t want, while Mark Carney is fighting in a way that Canadians seem to support. Stephen Marche in the NYT (Gift Article): Canada Said No to America. It Will Reverberate Far Beyond Its Borders. “For Canada, the choice came down to either accepting severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudodemocratic fiscal basket case of a nation whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.”
+ As I wrote yesterday, “Trump surrenders to our enemies and makes enemies of our allies. And his party still falls in line, over and over. So no, Blame Canada is no longer a parody, it’s a national anthem and a call to arms. And it’s even more ridiculous than it was when the South Park cartoon characters first performed it.” Blame Canada!
+ “President Donald Trump announced Tuesday morning that he is giving ‘serious consideration’ to renaming Lake Ontario ‘Lake America.’” (It tells you everything you need to know about Trump’s impact on our country’s brand that it’s now considered a total burn to name something America.)
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Entry Exodus
“For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far.” AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds.
+ Maybe AI will be coming for professorial jobs? Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty. (Sounds good, as long as I can have an A.I. clone of me actually take the course...)
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Darkness Visible
“The grid is perhaps the most complex machine ever built, but it was created without a master plan and made subject to the distortions of greed and local orneriness like every other big project in the United States. As a result, we have not one grid but three: the Western, Eastern and Texas Interconnections. Within each area, thousands of utilities generate and distribute power, and the flow is managed by one of 101 regional balancing authorities across the United States ... ‘If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.’” NYT Mag (Gift Article): What if America Went Completely Dark? (On the bright side, you wouldn’t be able to access the news.)
+ Some Indiana residents have been getting an unwanted preview of what it’s like when things go dark. Gary residents turn to prayer as power outage stretches into third week.
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Extra, Extra
Getting a D in Economics Day: “’The rhetoric was ferocious, but the punch less so,’ said Daniel Fried, a former U.S. diplomat now at the Atlantic Council. ‘Dealing a crippling blow to Iran’s economy would probably require taking on big Chinese firms and banks.” WSJ (Gift Article): U.S. Squeezes Iran but Avoids Targeting Its Biggest Lifeline: China. Meanwhile, “President Trump’s war on Iran has been a welcome revelation for China, which absorbed one of the most severe oil-supply disruptions of the modern era, demonstrating that years of preparation had mitigated a huge vulnerability and potential source of U.S. leverage over Beijing in a geopolitical confrontation.” The Iran War Shows China’s Energy Strategy Is Working.
+ SCOTUS Goes Postal: “The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order. But with a little more than two months until Election Day — and considerably less time before early voting begins in many states — it remains unclear whether the White House’s rules will be in effect for a midterm election in which control of both chambers is at stake. Additional legal action is a near certainty with the plan’s fate not yet final.” Court Allows Trump to Pursue Mail Voting Limits, for Now. (The decision may not be enough to do away with mail-in voting, but it will be enough to create the election chaos and doubt that Trump wants.) Meanwhile, Trump Quietly Asserts Control Over Postal Service Amid Plans to Overhaul Voting.
+ Penn Pain: “Both people were unvaccinated. They are the first such deaths in the U.S. this year, and the first in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 35 years.” Two unvaccinated people die of measles in Pennsylvania outbreak.
+ The Guile High Club: “Even some Qatari leaders were surprised by the president’s gall. But they did what they’ve always done when an American official has asked them for something dubious—politically, ethically, or even legally. They said yes.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Qataris Gave Trump an Airplane. He Crippled Their Country in Return.
+ Take Me to Your Leader: “Not even Mojtaba’s close friends and relatives have seen him. Fewer than five people have met with Mojtaba since his ascent to power, Mohammad Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official and a relative of Mojtaba’s told me, ‘due to security precautions.