In a wide-ranging interview with Emily Chang, best-selling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell continued his long-standing crusade against football with a harsh indictment. “Football is a moral abomination,” he said and predicted that the sport — currently far and away the most popular and lucrative in America — would eventually “wither on the vine.”
The NFL recently revealed that nearly a third of retired players develop long-term cognitive issues much earlier than the general population. “We’re not just talking about people limping at the age of 50. We’re talking about brain injuries that are causing horrible, protracted, premature death,” Gladwell told Chang, picking up a theme he first explored in a 2009 article for The New Yorker which likened football to dogfighting. “This…is appalling. Can you point to another industry in America which, in the course of doing business, maims a third of its employees?”
Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, Jimmy Dore, and John Iadarola of The Young Turks discuss. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-13/malcolm-gladwell-football-is-a-moral-abomination-.html
Comments
Purely masculine bonding rituals such as contact sports are a necessity to society, as to remove them from our culture would push that excess energy to more dangerous outlets, and violent crime would likely spike … http://sportbc.com/sport-and-crime-reduction/
Love football, they just need to make the helmet and shoulder pads 1 piece. This will absorb the shock better, and you can actually install shock absorbers in the helmet that runs down the neck area. This will also reduce / eliminate neck injuries. Only if I had money, what i could do…lol.