THE BOMBER MAFIA:

Mucker Play (Nico Walker, 2/27/25, Granta)

There were reasons for concern. In the wanton day of mass-formation play, of the Princeton V and the flying wedge, football was averaging about fourteen players killed per annum. Chancellors, athletic directors, and boards of overseers were under pressure to ban the sport. Roosevelt wanted to avoid that outcome. Three universities controlled the rules committee of the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA): Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and so Roosevelt summoned representatives from all three to meet with him at the White House on 9 October 1905. Football was on trial, said Roosevelt. To save the game, the IFA would need to reform it. There was only the matter of how.

The forward pass was suggested. At the time, a player could throw the ball backwards or laterally but not upfield. The team on defense could commit all its players to attacking the offense’s backfield, and the offense didn’t have much chance outside of out-bludgeoning the defense. Scoring was rare and far from assured. Apart from the violence, the games were uneventful slogs, melees, devoid of finesse. Some hoped a forward pass would change things – players would be more spread out; the game better balanced, safer, more dynamic. With more field to take into account, teams would not concentrate into mass formations, and defenses would have to commit players to guard the area behind their lines.

The Yale contingent balked at the idea. They suspected Roosevelt had an ulterior motive: helping his alma mater Harvard (their arch rival) gain an advantage over them. Representing Yale was Walter Camp, the (unofficial) director of its football team. Camp was no lightweight: the line of scrimmage; the eleven men on a side (down from fifteen); the safety penalty and it being worth two points; the point system itself – all these and more were his contributions to the genesis of the game. He had been in attendance at the 1873 meeting when the IFA was formed; his name was on the rule book; in 1892 Harper’s Weekly had called him ‘the father of American football’. It would be a great help for Roosevelt’s reform initiative if he could talk Camp into throwing his support behind it.

This seemed within the realm of possibility. Camp’s crowning achievement, the line of scrimmage, had been a player-safety measure. When he took it to the Rules Committee, he brought statistics that showed the greatest number of injuries happened in scrums. If Camp had been for improving player safety then, it stood to reason he could be coaxed to be so again. But the forward pass was anathema to Camp, for whom the essence of the sport was the ground attack. In his game, an edge was sought by forming as many of your players into as fine a point as possible and running it through the adversarial body. Football strategists of the day thought in terms of phalanxes and legions, studied battle formations back to ancient Macedonia in search of an insight, some irresistible spearhead lost to time.

AMUSING THE LAST MAN:

What Moby Dick Still Teaches Us (Andy Owen, 02/26/2025, Merion West)

The Children’s Commissioner for England recently released a report on the July, 2024 riots that followed the horrific murders of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. The riots, which lasted almost a week and included racially-motivated attacks, arson, and looting were the largest incident of social unrest in England since 2011. In a series of interviews, the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, found that children who took part in the riots were primarily driven by curiosity and the “thrill of the moment” rather than far-right ideology and social media misinformation, the initial culprits blamed by the authorities.

De Souza’s report noted that poverty and a lack of opportunity in their communities also contributed to the rioters’ involvement. Human beings need more than the satisfaction of their base desires. They strive for status, belonging, and meaning. They can find these in the service of political parties, religious creeds, non-nation-state groups; in the pursuit of wealth and possessions; in the creation of art, music, and objects of value; in building a family or a network of friends; and in adventure and thrill-seeking. When other opportunities to achieve status, belonging, and meaning are limited, the risk that increasing numbers will turn to the thrill of violence and law breaking will increase. A 2018 study led by psychologist Birga Schumpe supports the report’s insights. While previous research linked people’s search for meaning with their willingness to use violence for a cause, Schumpe’s research suggests that the search for meaning is strongly associated with a need for excitement, which, in turn, was associated with greater support for violence.

I first read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick while working in counterterrorism for the British government. The story of how the narrator Ishmael becomes part of the vengeful hunt for the titular white whale onboard a New England whaling ship, provided more of a window into the minds and motivations of modern-day extremists than any contemporary book I could find.

IKE’S ONE UNFORGIVABLE SIN:

Exit 13 and the Town It Destroyed: Deep Dive on Lewiston, Vt.: One writer investigates Lewiston, Vt. — a town across the Connecticut River demolished in 1967 — and the buildings that remain today (Allison Burg, February 26, 2025, The Dartmouth)

Lewiston had a long history before its 1967 destruction. Four years older than the College, the village was founded in 1765 on the Vermont-New Hampshire border — where present-day River Road, Foley Park and some of VT-10A are now located.

At the time, the hamlet served as a main entry point into the College. According to Norwich Historical Society director Sarah Rooker, the Connecticut River used to be narrower, allowing for foot crossings from Lewiston to Hanover during periods of low rainfall. During the wet season, travelers still had to cross through Lewiston to reach Hanover by boat — the town’s location at one of the narrowest points on the Connecticut River made Lewiston a natural spot for a rope ferry and, later, a toll bridge. The village’s prime river real estate, in turn, led to revenue, as Lewiston charged tolls on river crossings until the mid-1800s.

In 1848, the town’s revenue was further bolstered by the construction of the Passumpsic and Connecticut Railroad. The first railroad line to serve the area, the station built a freight depot in Lewiston and increased the town’s importance, according to Dartmo, a website documenting Dartmouth architecture.

The College used the railroad line to transport its coal supply from 1898 through the late 1920s, when Dartmouth switched from coal to oil. Many Dartmouth students also relied on the station to travel to campus after 1848. Even United States presidents used the railroad — President Ulysses S. Grant stopped in Lewiston in 1869 and President Rutherford B. Hayes made a whistle stop in 1887.

The popularity of the station increased the town’s prosperity, according to The Norwich Times. During the 1930s, Lewiston was bustling, housing dairy farms, a brothel, mills, a general store and a speakeasy, among other businesses, the paper reported.

The town’s fate changed, however, in the middle of the 20th century. First, Lewis Road, which connected Lewiston to Norwich, was nearly impossible to traverse by horse-drawn wagon during the mud season, which further isolated the village from Norwich at this time.

In addition, the construction of Wilder Dam, which began in 1947, “flooded the lower portions of old Lewiston,” including buildings at the river’s edge, according to anthropology professor Jesse Casana. The flooding inundated low-lying farmland and forced some Lewiston citizens to move, Casana said.

The diminishing economy of the 1930s, a decline in passenger train travel and these natural challenges ultimately contributed to the town’s demise — so much that the post office closed in 1954 and the town’s rail station closed in 1959, according to The Norwich Times.

However, the true end of Lewiston came in the 1960s, when construction on I-91 required the destruction of Lewiston’s nine remaining buildings.

OUT-AMERICANING THEIR OPPONENTS:

The Truth of a Love Supreme (Justin Giboney, Feb. 25th, 2025, Christianity Today)

Civil Rights was a movement that lived out the truth of the Negro spirituals that activists sang, an unabashedly Christian endeavor in philosophy and practice alike. The love that Christians in the Civil Rights Movement sought to embody was not self-interested or limited to affirmation. It was a love they hadn’t received from this nation but one they knew to be necessary and real. They knew a love truly supreme was possible in Christ because the Bible said so.

The Bible told them to love their enemies (Matt. 5:43–48), and they obeyed. That is the Christian love imperative. It’s possibly the most counterintuitive, otherworldly, and pride-shattering component of the gospel.

In a sense, it’s not complicated, but it’s hard. What I mean is the concept isn’t astrophysics, but in practice we find it extraordinarily difficult. It runs counter to our broken psychological and emotional reflexes: Why in the world would I love my enemy? By definition, this is someone who is worthy of my contempt. This is someone who doesn’t have my best interest in mind.

But what Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount was establish a deliberately indiscriminate love that is not conditioned upon shared identity, shared interests, or even peaceful cohabitation. This love extends to those who’ve done nothing to deserve it—in fact, to those who’ve done everything to make themselves ineligible for it.

COMETH THE MOMENT, COMETH THE USMNT?:

How the next 18 months could reshape soccer in the U.S. forever (Henry Bushnell, Feb 13, 2025, Yahoo! Sports)

The next 18 months aren’t just an exciting time for the sport; they could reshape it at all ages and levels, for all genders, in a variety of ways across the United States. They’ll conclude with a men’s World Cup right here, at home, but it’s not just that; it’s the Club World Cup, and a bid for the 2031 Women’s World Cup; it’s the dwindling days of Lionel Messi in Miami, and a pivotal period in the still-early days of the NWSL. It’s ongoing talks of overhauls in MLS and college soccer. It’s the opening of a national training center, and the implementation of the “U.S. Way,” U.S. Soccer’s new nationwide player development strategy. It’s the USL, an organization of lower-tier clubs that has ambitious plans to expand — and start a new top-tier men’s league.

It’s possibilities, but also pressure. It’s consequential decisions, and a moment that no American soccer stakeholder wants to miss.

And most of it, of course, is centered around 2026.

The women’s league, in particular, should do anything it has to in order to be more accessible.

MET ONE IDEOLOGUE…:

Were the Nazis Left-Wing?: The parallels between Nazism and communism complicate the standard left–right divide. (Gerfried Ambrosch, 24 Feb 2025, Quillette)

Hitler himself, however, did consider Nazism a form of socialism. In a 1923 interview, he stated,

Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us, state and race are one.

In other words, Hitler considered Marxian communism a socialist heresy. Yet his description of National Socialism as “socialism in evolution, a socialism in everlasting change” echoes the Marxist view of history as a process of dialectical change.

Although Hitler’s version of socialism did not, as he put it, “repudiate private property,” it shared with communism a strong emphasis on collectivism over individualism, with the state not only enforcing the supposed interests of the collective but claiming identity with it. In this regard, the two movements were less ideological enemies than competitors—with liberal democracy as their common enemy. To quote F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, “The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic.”

This also helps explain the strikingly similar iconographies that emerged in the totalitarian regimes the Nazis and communists went on to establish. Both these popular movements conceived of history as being propelled by “revolutionary struggle” and sought to remake man in the image of their respective ideologies. Hitler commented, “There is more that unites us with than divides us from bolshevism … above all the genuine revolutionary mentality. I was always aware of this and I have given the order that one should admit former communists to the party immediately.” According to Hitler, “all these new means of the political struggle used by us are Marxist in origin.”

And the parallels run deeper than means and mentality alone.

HONESTY OFFENSIVE:

‘It allowed us to survive, to not go mad’: the CIA book smuggling operation that helped bring down communism (Charlie English, 22 Feb 2025, The Guardian)

Years later, in 1976, when Bogucka joined the emerging Polish opposition movement, she decided to create a library of books that had bypassed the state censor, and donated her own small collection, including this Nineteen Eighty-Four. The SB security service, Poland’s KGB, kept continual watch on her, eavesdropping on her conversations, arresting her and searching her apartment, so she asked neighbours to store the forbidden books. Much of the time, though, they would be circulating among readers, since this would be a “Flying Library”, which rarely touched the ground.

Bogucka’s system of covert lending ran through a network of coordinators, each of whom was responsible for their own tight group of readers. She sorted the books into categories – politics, economics, history, literature – and divided them into packages of 10, before allocating each coordinator a particular day to pick up their parcel, which they carried away in a rucksack. The coordinator would drop the books back the following month at a different address, before picking up a new set.

The demand for Bogucka’s books was such that soon she needed more, and these could only come from the west. Activist friends passed word to London, where émigré publishers arranged shipments of 30 or 40 volumes at a time, smuggling them through the iron curtain aboard the sleeper trains that shuttled back and forth between Paris and Moscow, stopping in Poland along the way. By 1978, Teresa Bogucka’s Flying Library had a stock of 500 prohibited titles.

How many people read her copy of Orwell’s book in those crucial cold war years? Hundreds, probably thousands. And this was just one of millions of titles that arrived illegally in Poland at that time. As well as via trains, books arrived by every possible conveyance: aboard yachts; in secret compartments built into vans and trucks; by balloon; in the post. Mini-editions were slipped into the sheet music of touring musicians, or packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy.

What some in the east suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation, known in Washington as the “CIA book program”, designed, in the words of the programme’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an “offensive of free, honest thinking”. Minden believed that “truth is contagious”, and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet zone, it was certain to have an effect.

PATIENT, HEAL THYSELF:

“Honest” placebos: Sugar pills can work even when you know they’re fake (Rich Haridy, February 22, 2025, New Atlas)

A fascinating study published in 2018 found patients suffering from cancer-related fatigue displayed significant improvement in their symptoms after being given an inert placebo. All the subjects were told at the beginning of the trial that the pills they were given contained no active pharmacological ingredients, yet a notable placebo effect was still detected. The research was just one piece of evidence in a compelling body of work suggesting “honest” placebos could play a role in certain kinds of clinical treatments.

It’s all in your head…

HARSHING THE SINOPHOBE MELLOW:

What sparked the COVID pandemic? Mounting evidence points to raccoon dogs (Smriti Mallapaty, 2/21/25, Nature)

One of the reasons raccoon dogs were suggested as a prime candidate early on is because they were probably involved in passing another, related, virus to people. In 2003, researchers isolated close matches of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in several civets and a raccoon dog at a live-animal market in Guangdong, China.

This finding prompted researchers in Germany to investigate these animals’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-21.

They found that raccoon dogs can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, and — despite not getting that sick themselves — can pass on the infection to other animals.

Studies by Holmes and his colleagues have also shown that farmed and wild raccoon dogs in China are often infected with many viruses that can jump between species. “Raccoon dogs are very common viral hosts,” says Holmes.

Many of the first cases of COVID-19 involved the Huanan market, suggesting it was the location of the viral spillover. SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the first infected people, in late December 2019 and early January 2020, along with geolocation and epidemiological data, support this2.

During the outbreak, the market was shut down by the authorities, but researchers know that raccoon dogs were being sold there, for their fur and as food. In June 2021, a study described the results of monthly surveys of live wild animals sold across four markets in Wuhan between May 2017 and November 2019, including seven stalls at Huanan3. Every month, an average of 38 raccoon dogs were sold at these markets. The most-sold species was the Amur hedgehog (Erinaceus amurensis) at an average 332 individuals a month. Masked palm civet (Paguma larvata), hog badgers (Arctonyx albogularis), Chinese bamboo rats (Rhizomys sinensis), and Malayan porcupines (Hystrix brachyura) were also regularly sold.

December 2019 sales records from the Huanan market also list trading of live animals or products from bamboo rats, porcupines and hedgehogs, among others.

Further evidence to support the raccoon-dog theory came in 2023. Chinese researchers published genomic data of swabs taken at the Huanan market in January 2020, after it was shut down, including of stalls, rubbish bins and sewage4. Studies found mitochondrial DNA of raccoon dogs in several swabs, including those that also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Raccoon dogs and hoary bamboo rats (Rhizomys pruinosus) were the most common mammalian wildlife species detected in the mitochondrial DNA; material from civets and hog badgers was also found but not in many samples5. The findings don’t prove that the animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2, but had they been infected, this is the type of evidence you would expect to find, says Andersen.

…and Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.

THE GRAVEDIGGER THEORY OF JOURNALISM:

It’s an Honor (Jimmy Breslin, November 26, 1963, New York Herald Tribune)

Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m. in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Nettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting.

It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.”

Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him.

“Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday,” Metzler said. “Oh, don’t say that,” Pollard said. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.”