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. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
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. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can’t keep it from sloshing around. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
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. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
The island is named Oooguruk, an Inupiaq word meaning ‘bearded seal,’ an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska’s North Slope. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
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. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
LaGuardia Airport is tiny compared to its sleek modern counterparts, like Atlanta or Denver with their endless parallel runways spread over thousands of acres. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
The new disease was named chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the NFL fervently and repeatedly denied that such a thing had anything to do with the league or its players. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
Coal mines make the news only when they explode, collapse, kill. It’s exciting! Tragedy! Fodder for a cable-news frenzy. Jeanne Marie Laskas Read Quote
