How much proof do we need about the harmfulness of something before we act?

At a recent public lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Malcolm Gladwell discussed the strange history of how long it took for society to grasp the seriousness of black-lung disease, and looked at the black-lung diseases of today. Watch the video, and click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/15vcIcN

This weekend offered two of the best football games of the year, both of which I watched, though turning on the television for Sunday’s games was slightly harder after reading Dan Le Batard’s account of Jason Taylor’s fifteen painful years in the N.F.L., in the Miami Herald. Among the grotesqueries: Needles in the bottom of the foot, needles in the spine, needles in the buttocks. The near-amputation of a leg is involved. As with most stories of this type, Le Batard’s includes this line: “He isn’t bragging, and he isn’t complaining. He wants to make sure you know that. He feels lucky and blessed to have done what he did.” Well, phew. As we watch a game that we know is dangerous, we soothe ourselves with the idea that these men must be aware of the risks, too; that they are being well compensated to take on those risks; and that, at least when they’re on the field, in front of the cameras, they are living the dream that we all craved as kids, and they’re having fun.

But what we can take from this story, and from the fact that, on the surface, this weekend’s games were filled with such excitement, is the fact that so much of football’s barbarism takes place beyond our vision and behind closed doors…

Reeves Wiedeman on Alabama’s win over Notre Dame in last night’s B.C.S. championship game:

In case you fell asleep, Alabama beat Notre Dame by twenty-eight points in last night’s college-football national championship. Even that score suggests that the game was closer than it was. By the start of the second quarter, Alabama had twenty-one points. Notre Dame had twenty-three yards. By the third, lines were already forming at sporting-goods stores in Alabama to pick up official championship gear. By the end of the fourth, Alabama head coach Nick Saban had pulled his starters, unofficially instituting the mercy rule. When Alabama is on defense, the school’s Million Dollar Band often plays “Look Down,” from “Les Misérables.” Feelings about the movie aside, Alabama would have been kind to heed the song’s opening line: “Look down, look down, and see the beggars at your feet / Look down and show some mercy if you can.”

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VMRdxi

Photograph by Chris O’Meara/AP.

Reeves Wiedeman on Paul Finebaum, a sports talk-radio host in Birmingham whose show has become the voice of college football in Alabama, and throughout much of the South. 

+ Listen to the recordings of some of Finebaum’s most notorious calls: http://nyr.kr/TMOW4m

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

Amy Davidson: Bob Costas was right to bring up Jovan Belcher’s guns. Now can we talk about the role of guns in domestic violence, too? Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/TLLbMD

Photograph by Jamie Squire/Getty.

In this week’s issue, Reeves Wiedeman writes about the Alabama talk-radio host Paul Finebaum, whose football show has made Birmingham’s WJOX the second-highest-rated sports station in the country. We sent the photographer Lauren Lancaster to the epicenter of college-football mania to photograph the man Wiedeman describes as “an unlikely candidate for the voice of the South” at the Iron Bowl last month, where Alabama crushed Auburn, 49 to 0. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/SNiQWM

In today’s Daily Comment, Steve Coll considers what it would take for the N.F.L. to remain something better than professional wrestling… 

it will have to become faster, more acrobatic, more compelling for gamblers, less choppy and interrupted on the screen, and more located in the human mysteries of teamwork and coaching leadership than it is already.

Continue reading.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—G.O.P. Presidential nominee Mitt Romney finally got some good news today as he found himself ahead of President Obama in a poll of N.F.L. replacement referees. Read more.

(Source: newyorker.com)

There is now no reasonable way to defend the quality of the N.F.L.’s replacement referees. 

Reeves Wiedeman on last night’s Packers-Seahawks game, and the NFL’s referees: http://nyr.kr/SPmdcW