Things That Are Good

Murder was the case that they gave them

The Killing, Sundays, AMC. The show follows the two detectives (pictured) as they investigate the murder and the increasingly strange and complex life of high-school senior Rosie Larsen. Each episode runs an hour, and follows four main threads: the police investigation, the victim's family's aftermath, a mayoral election campaign, and the lead detective's personal life woes. The show is hugely compelling, well acted, and beautifully written. It's the best new show on television.

EDIT: My bad. This show is a waste of your time. The first few episodes were promising, but Veena Sud has run this shit into the fucking ground. Light this show on fire.

Bang!

Justified, Wednesdays, FX. Our hero, Raylan Givens, is a federal marshal who gets shipped back home to Kentucky after getting into trouble down in Miami. Long story short, he investigates crimes, bangs his old girlfriends, shoots people, and generally finds ways to get into trouble. I don't really need to pimp this one as much as others, because you'll be on board after you watch one episode.

Yuuuuup

Game of Thrones, Sundays, HBO. This show is so impossibly awesome that I can barely believe it. The show is a television adaptation of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice and ohh baby it does not disappoint. The show, like the book, features a large and complex cast of characters. It also features everything awesome you can think of: decapitations, midgets, prostitutes, small children being thrown out of windows, incest between twins (WarmingGlow: "Twincest"), puppies, and swords. If you watch the first episode of this show and you don't like it, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror and figure out what happened to your life.

EDIT: This show is even better than I thought possible. I now understand how tween girls feel about Justin Beiber. I'm that excited. Let me know if you need info on how to watch.

Like The World is Flat, but for criminals.

Mafias on the Move by Federico Varese. This well researched book tracks the globalization of organized crime. Varese dives into this interesting and difficult to study world with energy and detail and successfully amasses a stunning picture of the flows of organized crime around the world.  Grab it on Amazon, you'll read it in a day.

To Those Who Love The Game

 My great day came and went, I do not know how.  Because it did not pass through dawn when it came, nor through dusk when it went. 

As I write this, men and women in labs across the country are studying the effects of multiple sub-concussive forces to the human brain. They're studying the brains of former boxers and football players.

Eventually, they will prove what we already suspect: getting hit in the head repeatedly causes chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive neurological disorder. C.T.E. is ugly: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, and then dementia.

Football has never been more popular than it is today, but the party's over.

Boxing will be the first to go. Medical professionals are already calling for a ban, and boxing is unlikely to put up much resistance. Fights will take place outside the US and appear on pay-per-view as usual. Revenue stream intact, boxing will soldier on.

Once boxing is banned, football's days are numbered. This is how it will go: if football can be shown to be similarly bad to boxing, and if boxing is banned, football should be banned too.

The NFL is already in full damage-control mode: concussions are enemy number one in the league. This public relations gambit is working beautifully now, but it won't last.

The problem is that chronic traumatic encephalopathy isn't just caused by concussions. C.T.E. is mostly caused by repeated sub-concussive forces. It's the jabs, not the hooks that get you.

The damage is caused every snap as linemen slam their heads together. Lineman and defensive lineman slamming heads together is an integral part of football. The game cannot exist without it. The game of football as we know it today will be banned in our lifetime.

We should cherish every down we have left. 

And so, for those who love the game, I want to help you love it more.