Welcome to the Dark Side of America’s Favorite Pastime

In 2018, the NFL launched its Inspire Change initiative, which encourages (among other things) players to adorn heartfelt messages on their helmets. Past inscriptions include: “Be Love” Stop Hate,” and “Inspire Change.”

But as millions of fans tune in on Feb. 9 for Super Bowl LIX, their focus may be less on the messages on the helmets and more on the heads inside of them. In the last few years, damaging reports about the harmful consequences of traumatic brain injuries in college-and-professional football are more frequent than quick shots of Taylor Swift clapping for the Chiefs.

The inherent danger in a game where 250-pound men slam headlong into each other is nothing new.

But the negative attention around that danger is. The February 2025 Socionomist cover story Concussions in Football – The Hits Keep Coming. By Chuck Thompson: 

Decades ago, people did not suspect that football caused serious damage to players’ brains. The joke was that a player who took a major hit simply “got his bell rung.” After a brief examination by the team doctor, he would usually return to the field. But negative mood fuels the uncovering and outing of scandals, and it has done so regarding the link between repeated head-jarring in football and the long-term consequences for players’ brains, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

In an article published in World Neurosurgery, Geoffrey R. O’Malley and eight other researchers said that “significant attention [has been] paid to concussions and their subsequent impact on the long-term health of players” (July 2024). This attention has been so intense that since 2015, the NFL itself has kept a tally of annual concussions among its players. (See Figure 2.) This tally, which reveals an increase in concussions since 2020, is just one example of the damaging evidence and bad publicity that medical reporting continues to produce regarding the lingering effects of repeated head trauma. 

And that’s just the first quarter. Chuck’s cover story captures the historic correlation between “scandalous discoveries linking brain injuries to American tackle football and negative public awareness campaigns aimed at revealing those discoveries” dating back to 2000.

Speaking of football, New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rogers recently admitted to having seen an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon in his 20’s. He’s not alone! The February Socionomist also includes part 2 of a riveting study in the long history of scientific and social fascination in the possible existence of extraterrestrials. Why we’re in a “watershed moment” of mainstream acceptance of alien life has everything to do with social mood.

And to close things out, the February Socionomist questions whether Wall Street’s declaration of victory over the “war on inflation” is founded in facts – or fantasy. On Our Radar topics include the threat of new disease outbreaks, from bird flu to foot-and-mouth; the rise of nostalgia for a “better past” and slumping demand for big-ticket-art pieces.

Read the new February Socionomist today with a single-issue special offer.

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