Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 69

Tips For Autodidacts And Gamers With Jobs

I don't know if there's anyone else out there whose on the same path as me in terms of learning a language. But if you are on that path, and if you enjoy video games, I'd encourage you to try playing them in a different language. Against my better judgement, I use Steam to purchase most of my games these days. One feature I love is how you can change languages for Steam, and thus all the games that support your language.
Alors maintenant je joue mes jeux videos en français, toujours. 
Last night I booted up Mass Effect, and I only have sliver of an idea of what's going on. Enough to know that Nihlus is awesome--"Je travaille seul." I feel like if I can't get to France just yet, I'll lifehack my way as far into the Atlantic as possible. The effect of changing languages differs with each genre and each game. The language barrier doesn't mean much in strategy. But it means a lot in RPGs.
For me, the feeling of being lost is one of the best things about learning a new language. As someone told me on twitter this weekend--you are left with toddler ears. And that's just it. This is really the only time you get to be a kid again. 

On Being Your Authentic Self

I watched the first half of Season One of Lena Dunham's much discussed series Girls last night and generally found it to be a riot. I think the best thing you can say about a comedy is that it's really, really funny. I'm a little sad that Girls never was allowed to be just that. When the PR people roll out a show they're generally trying to get as much bang as they can, and being dubbed the "voice of your generation" is quite a bang. But as an artist, I doubt that this the sort of weight you want.
Subjectively speaking, it seems like Girls got way more shine than say, Louie, Mad Men, The Wire, Mad Men, or even Sex and the City. The result was that all of those shows were allowed to blossom in the first few episodes away from the critical din, a benefit Girls never enjoyed. I don't know how much should be made of that--again, this sort of impact is exactly what PR people at HBO want.
But it's been good to watch the show away from controversy, and away from the discussion. This clip is the funniest scene I've seen on television in a long, long time. ("I'm going to have the last word in this situation." "It was nice to see you. Your Dad is gay.") Just judge Girls as a show--which is the way it should be judged, PR aside--it is really, really good. 
Circling back to that the most cringe-worthy moments actually come when there are people of color on screen. I won't be watching Season Two for another year or so, and I am hoping that the Donald Glover thing works out. I have never met a black Republican in all my time in New York. And I'm black. So I have trouble believing that Hannah is found that one black dude in Brooklyn who is anti-marriage equality, anti-abortion, pro-guns, and anti-health care. 
It feels like both an answer and a middle-finger to Dunham's critics. I would just prefer she plug her ears and keep moving. We must tell our stories. And others must tell their's.  It may well all be great, but it takes me back to my initial thought that white people who know few, if any, black people should write that way. The first rule is to write what you know. More next year--along with that review of Django.

Growing Up in the Caves of Chaos

I think I was seven when I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, though that feels like too young. I think I started reading Choose Your Own Adventure at six, and D&D was like right behind. It was a natural transition. I learned the game from my brother Malik. Malik works at Dreamworks. (I'm very proud. Can you tell? If you look at this post, Malik is second row, far right.) I work as a writer.  I like to think it helped introduce us both to the powers of imagination. 
At any rate, Malik was always the DM when we played. The video below is from the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary. I had the luxury of being interviewed for this. In fact, the guys invited me to a game, which I hope I can still take them up on once I know out this book.
Anyway, in the video I talk about the first time Malik led me into the Caves of Chaos, a scenario from the awesome Keep on the Borderlands module. Actually, I think I'm talking about the second time. The first time I rolled a magic-user who had one hit point. He was punched to death by the Mad Hermit. Fun times.

Growing Up In The Caves Of Chaos

I think I was seven when I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, though that feels like to young. I think I started reading Choose Your Own Adventure at six, and D&D was like right behind. It was a natural transition. I learned the game from my brother Malik. Malik works at Dreamworks. (I'm very proud. Can you tell? If you look at this post, Malik is second row, far right.) I work as a writer.  I like to think it helped introduce us both to the powers of imagination. 
At any rate, Malik was always the DM when we played. The video belo is from the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary. I had the luxury of being interviewed for this. in fact the guys invited me to a game, which I hope I can still take them up on once I know out this book.
Anyway, in the video I talk about the first time Malik led me into the Caves of Chaos, a scenario from the awesome Keep On The Borderlands module. Actually I think I'm talking about the second time. The first time I rolled a magic-user who had 1 hit point. He was punched to death by the Mad Hermit. Fun times.

Martin Luther King Makes Everything Better

Even Gun Appreciation Day:

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history," Ward said.

Of course the denial of that right was actually part of what it meant to be slave. The right of gun ownership is wholly connected to the notion of "free men." A slave, by the very American definition of the word, wouldn't generally have the right to bear firearms. 
So I guess it's true that blacks wouldn't have been slaves if they had guns, much like it's true that there blacks wouldn't have been slaves if there was no such thing as American slavery.

An Open Thread

@kalbelgarion Yes.

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisi) January 10, 2013

Toward a Moral Professional Football League

Horde legionnaire David White has offered up some interesting suggestions about how to reform the game. I don't know if any of this is possible. But I think that's also beside the point. Brainstorming is a particular challenge. Making it happen is another. On that note, in addition to critiquing it'd be nice if you guys throw out ideas on your own:

I don't intend to stop watching. I could go into a lot about my thinking, but it essentially comes down to the my belief that these players are making the same Achilles bargin that young men have been making for eons, and I'm comfortable accepting that.
The game will never be "safe," but that doesn't mean that changes can't be made to make the game safer. Some changes I would like to see (some of which may have already been started):
1) Off field changes
-- Move to fully guaranteed contracts and expand rosters. Players would be more willing to sit if they know they won't be cut off/replaced after being injured. And a larger roster would make it easier for a team to keep an injured players on the payroll.
-- Full health coverage for players who played more than 3 years or suffered a career-ending injury.
-- Robust mental therapy program for players transitioning into retirement (possibly make it a requirement for retired players seeking health care coverage).
-- Doctors work for the league, not for the teams. And each doctor has a clear checklist on the sideline that a player must pass if they're suspected of being concussed.
-- Brain function tests at the start and end of every season, which are shared with the players at the start of training camp every year. Make sure their choice is as well-informed as possible.
-- If a player suffers a concussion, they're not allowed to play in the following week. If they suffer a second concussion, they have to skip two games. Any more, they're forced to sit out the rest of the season.
-- Add another bye week to the season, and either end Thursday night games, or schedule them in such a way that teams only play them when coming off of a bye week.
2) On field changes
-- Make every offensive player an eligible receiver. Over the long term, I think this would reduce the size of linemen to TE sized players, and it'd eliminate a lot of the "in the trenches" hit a player takes over his career. It would also make the game more strategically complex, as defenses would have to guess who's going out to receive and who's staying to block. It's a big break from tradition, but ironically, it'd make the sport much more similar to the way that it's played by ordinary people in backyards around the country.
-- Ban the 3-pt and 4-pt stance. Instead of firing into each other in a way where it's impossible to avoid head-to-head contact, make offensive lineman line up in the way they often do already for pass plays, and make defensive linemen line up more like linebackers. There'd still be head to head contact, but it wouldn't be as natural and inevitable.
-- Experiment with different helmet materials. The history of the sport proves that helmets are needed (players regularly died on the field back before helmets were used), but they should experiment with materials that make leading with the head less likely. Maybe something closer to the leather helmets of old, or like the headgear boxers use when sparring.
(To fantasize for a moment about helmet technology: I don't think they'll ever be able to create a helmet to stop concussions, despite what NFL PR tries to tell us. But I'd like to see something that registers the amount of force taken by a player over the course of a game. And once it reaches a certain threshold, a player has to leave the game. Like it slowly turns red the more hits it takes, and once it's glowing red, the player has to leave the game.)
What do you guys think of these ideas? What ideas do you suggest?

Toward A Moral Professional Football League

Horde legionnaire David White has offered up some interesting suggestions about how to reform the game. I don't know if any of this is possible. But I think that's also beside the point. Brainstorming is a particular challenge. Making it happen is another. On that note, in addition to critiquing it'd be nice if you guys throw out ideas on your own:

I don't intend to stop watching. I could go into a lot about my thinking, but it essentially comes down to the my belief that these players are making the same Achilles bargin that young men have been making for eons, and I'm comfortable accepting that.
The game will never be "safe," but that doesn't mean that changes can't be made to make the game safer. Some changes I would like to see (some of which may have already been started):
1) Off field changes
-- Move to fully guaranteed contracts and expand rosters. Players would be more willing to sit if they know they won't be cut off/replaced after being injured. And a larger roster would make it easier for a team to keep an injured players on the payroll.
-- Full health coverage for players who played more than 3 years or suffered a career-ending injury.
-- Robust mental therapy program for players transitioning into retirement (possibly make it a requirement for retired players seeking health care coverage).
-- Doctors work for the league, not for the teams. And each doctor has a clear checklist on the sideline that a player must pass if they're suspected of being concussed.
-- Brain function tests at the start and end of every season, which are shared with the players at the start of training camp every year. Make sure their choice is as well-informed as possible.
-- If a player suffers a concussion, they're not allowed to play in the following week. If they suffer a second concussion, they have to skip two games. Any more, they're forced to sit out the rest of the season.
-- Add another bye week to the season, and either end Thursday night games, or schedule them in such a way that teams only play them when coming off of a bye week.
2) On field changes
-- Make every offensive player an eligible receiver. Over the long term, I think this would reduce the size of linemen to TE sized players, and it'd eliminate a lot of the "in the trenches" hit a player takes over his career. It would also make the game more strategically complex, as defenses would have to guess who's going out to receive and who's staying to block. It's a big break from tradition, but ironically, it'd make the sport much more similar to the way that it's played by ordinary people in backyards around the country.
-- Ban the 3-pt and 4-pt stance. Instead of firing into each other in a way where it's impossible to avoid head-to-head contact, make offensive lineman line up in the way they often do already for pass plays, and make defensive linemen line up more like linebackers. There'd still be head to head contact, but it wouldn't be as natural and inevitable.
-- Experiment with different helmet materials. The history of the sport proves that helmets are needed (players regularly died on the field back before helmets were used), but they should experiment with materials that make leading with the head less likely. Maybe something closer to the leather helmets of old, or like the headgear boxers use when sparring.
(To fantasize for a moment about helmet technology: I don't think they'll ever be able to create a helmet to stop concussions, despite what NFL PR tries to tell us. But I'd like to see something that registers the amount of force taken by a player over the course of a game. And once it reaches a certain threshold, a player has to leave the game. Like it slowly turns red the more hits it takes, and once it's glowing red, the player has to leave the game.)
What do you guys think of these ideas? What ideas do you suggest?

The Ethics of Letting RGIII Play

Somewhat related, Bill Barnwell has a good piece in Grantland looking at RGII's injury from both an ethical and a practical standpoint. He concludes that it was wrong to let RGIII play in the moment for practical reasons (hampered by injury) and wrong when you look at the entirety of the situation. The most damning piece of evidence isn't what happened in the game, but what happened weeks before:

Sunday broke with the news that Dr. James Andrews hadn't cleared Robert Griffin to come back into the Week 14 game against the Ravens after suffering the initial knee injury, despite Mike Shanahan claiming otherwise as part of the justification for pushing RG3 back in for four plays. Shanahan pretended that there was a conversation with Andrews offering his consent for the move when Andrews noted that he had been shielded from evaluating Griffin by the head coach.  
The medical staff -- including Andrews -- evaluated Griffin on Sunday after his injury and said that he was, according to the untrustworthy Shanahan, "fine to play," suggesting that the team had checked with the doctors to "ask them their opinion if we would be hampering his LCL ... or was he in good enough shape to go into the game and play at the level we need for him to win." It seems like an impossible argument to win. Griffin didn't have an MRI during the game or miss time until suffering his second knee injury of the day. He had a gigantic brace on his knee built specifically to support his LCL, so it's not a surprise that the doctors would suggest that LCL wouldn't be hampered. Even if Griffin was healthy enough to step back onto the field, the dramatic dip in his performance should have been enough to tip off a coach who's been around football for his entire life that something was wrong.

From USA Today:

Andrews, however, told USA TODAY Sports on Saturday that he never cleared Griffin to go back into the game, because he never even examined him. 
 "(Griffin) didn't even let us look at him," Andrews said. "He came off the field, walked through the sidelines, circled back through the players and took off back to the field. It wasn't our opinion.
"We didn't even get to touch him or talk to him. Scared the hell out of me." 
Yet when asked by news reporters, Shanahan described a conversation with Andrews this way: 
"He's on the sidelines with Dr. Andrews. He had a chance to look at him and he said he could go back in," Shanahan said Dec. 10. 
"(I said) 'Hey, Dr. Andrews, can Robert go back in?' 
'Yeah, he can go back in.' 
 'Robert, go back in.' 
"That was it," Shanahan said.

I think it's worth recognizing that circumventing medical opinion is an old tradition in football. Barnwell makes the point that Shanahan has been around the game for his entire life. But that is actually the problem. Football is premised on the hazy morality of "playing through pain." And it isn't hazy simply because of what football is, but because of what people are--which is to say very different from each other. 
Even by those standards, it's still dishonorable to conjure medical cover for a questionable decision. In a league where coaches are cycled in and out every two or three years, and players are disposable, the incentive toward conjuring cover is obvious.

Junior Seau Had CTE

Junior Seau's death prompted me to stop watching football. It wasn't clear to me, at the time, that Seau actually had CTE. But thinking about it (the way I now think about Jovan Belcher) made it really hard to be entertained by the sport. With good reason:

"I think it's important for everyone to know that Junior did indeed suffer from CTE," Gina Seau said. "It's important that we take steps to help these players. We certainly don't want to see anything like this happen again to any of our athletes." She said the family was told that Seau's disease resulted from "a lot of head-to-head collisions over the course of 20 years of playing in the NFL. And that it gradually, you know, developed the deterioration of his brain and his ability to think logically." 
CTE is a progressive disease associated with repeated head trauma. Although long known to occur in boxers, it was not discovered in football players until 2005. Researchers at Boston University recently confirmed 50 cases of CTE in former football players, including 33 who played in the NFL. 
Seau shot himself in the heart May 2. His death stunned not only the football world but also his hometown, San Diego, where he played the first 13 years of his 20-year career. Seau led the Chargers to their first and only Super Bowl appearance and became a beloved figure in the community.

I am listening to Herman Edwards talk about how this information can help other players. But the information can only lead to the end of football as we know it. You can't fix this by getting rid of big hits. You can't fix this by focusing on concussions. Junior Seau never had such a diagnosis, and even if he did, it is the repeated "minor" hits that cause CTE. The enemy is the game itself. And it is killing men.
At the time of Seau's death it was said that we should not jump to conclusions. I generally think prudence is a good idea. Except that an astonishing number of football players keep shooting themselves. 
A rather stunned Mike Greenberg just put it well: "You can't live with a business when one of the results can be Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. It's a hard word to even pronounce. it's a brain disease." 
Here is Tyler Seau on his father's death:

Tyler said he was holding tightly to his memories of getting up at 5 in the morning to lift weights with his father before heading to the beach for a workout and surfing. And while the diagnosis helps, he said, it can't compensate for his loss. 
"I guess it makes it more real," he said. "It makes me realize that he wasn't invincible, because I always thought of him as being that guy. Like a lot of sons do when they look up to their dad. You know? You try to be like that man in your life. You try to mimic the things that he does. Play the game the way he did. Work the way he did. And, you know, now you look at it in a little bit different view." 
Tyler added: "Is it worth it? I'm not sure. But it's not worth it for me to not have a dad. So to me it's not worth it."