In a pre-Super Bowl interview on CBS’ Face The Nation, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell repeatedly refused to acknowledge a link between brain injuries and football, even as a growing amount of research is making the link between the game and the development of debilitating cognitive diseases ever clearer and perhaps even overwhelming.

CBS host Bob Schieffer asked Goodell point blank if he would acknowledge the link between football and brain injuries. Goodell demurred: “That’s why we’re investing in the research. So that we can answer the question, what is the link? What causes some of the injuries that our players are still dealing with? And we take those issues very seriously.”

Later, Goodell again ignored the question. “We’re going to let the medical individuals make those points,” Goodell said. “We’re going to give them the money, advance that science. In the meantime, we have to do everything we can to advance the game and make sure it’s safe.” The NFL, he added, has not covered up the links between concussions and brain disease. Instead, “the NFL has led the way.”

Taken together, research has formed a strong link between football and degenerative brain diseases. NFL players are four times more likely to die from Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s Disease than the general population, and recent studies have bolstered the links between football and degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which has been linked to dementia, depression, and suicide. Other studies have shown that football players perform worse on cognitive tests than non-football players.

And the NFL has hardly “led the way” into concussion research, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Malcolm Burnley showed recently in a timeline of the NFL’s response to concussions. The first chair of the league’s concussion task force, formed in 1994, regarded concussions as an “occupational hazard,” and the league rejected the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines for returning concussed players to competition in 2000. It was still publishing research skeptical of the dangers of concussions in 2005; in 2007, it still claimed that research did not show that “having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly,” even though CTE had already been found in multiple dead former football players.

That’s not a history of leading the way. That’s a history of standing in the way. The league and Goodell have plenty of reason to continue standing in the way, given that acknowledging a link between football and brain injuries, as well as the league’s role in obscuring that link in the past, would open it up to legal and medical liabilities it doesn’t want and possibly can’t afford. It would turn the discussion from one centered around how to make football safer to one centered around whether football can be made safer. And that discussion would jeopardize the $8 billion (and growing) industry that is professional football. Goodell isn’t obstinate in the face of an increasingly clear reality because no link exists. He’s obstinate because acknowledging that link would threaten the business he oversees.

The sexual abuse of parishioners—particularly children—by members of the clergy has become a defining scandal for the Catholic Church, changing the dynamics between priests and their flocks as lay Catholics demand accountability from Rome. But before crises in Boston and other American cities, a group of brave, deaf men in Milwaukee began speaking out in the 1970s about a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused as many as 200 of them. Mea Maxima Culpa, a new documentary about their experiences and their courage, premieres on HBO at 9PM tonight.

I spoke to Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning director of Mea Maxima Culpa about how to record interviews with deaf subjects, the need for transparency in Catholicism, and how the Catholic Church functions like Enron. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I grew up in the Boston area, so I’m familiar with the breadth of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse issues. But I was curious, how did you come to this particular story about clergy sexual abuse when there are so many?

Well, I mean, I grew up in Boston too, for that matter. But actually I came to this story because I read it in the New York Times. What impressed me about it were two things. One was the connection between the Milwaukee story and the policies of the Vatican. That was a revelation that hadn’t been properly known at this point. And two was the heroes at the heart of the story, who I didn’t think had been properly celebrated. We hear a lot about victims. We don’t hear a lot about heroes…

They were protesting forcefully despite their handicap, and despite rather major prejudices towards the deaf. There’s a deposition, as you saw in the film, in which Archbishop William Cousins is asked “Why didn’t you reach out to ascertain whether these allegations of abuse were true for the victims?” And he was like, “The victims were deaf. What would they have to say?”

Do you think that Father Murphy decided to work in the deaf community because he would have access to children who were doubly vulnerable?

There’s a dstinction to be drawn in this film between the pedophiles and the coverup. I regard him as the classic predator. A compulsive sexual deviant who was a predator in the way he went after children. Predators tend to look at places where they can go after their prey as easily as possible. Predators tend to hide in plain sight, in a place where they can have access to a lot of victims. He was the interlocutor between their parents and the kids. That was really terrifying. On the part of Murphy, anyway, I think it was a lot of predatory behavior. But he used the church, and he used his skills. You can’t look at this situation and say Murphy became powerful in the deaf community in order to be able to prey on children. I think he also very much cared about the deaf community and a lot of people in the deaf community supported him because he had raised so much money. I think we have to see this as part and parcel of how predators hide in plain sight.

What do you think that Catholic reformers can learn from this protest about how to change the church and hold it accountable?

The only way to extricate is to expose. Any institution that claims that the only way to protect itself is to cover up crimes isn’t protecting itself, it’s just digging deeper into a culture of criminality. If you’re a company and you discover a culture of criminality in your company, say, Enron, do you cover it up, or do you bring it forward and say our reputation is important, but rooting out crime is even more important, and therefore convincing everyone that your reputation as an upstanding company should be upheld?
Read more

Beyoncé Knowles rocked the Super Bowl halftime show last night, and, pearls clenched firmly in fist, Kathryn Jean Lopez is on it, and the national cultural decline Ms. Knowles apparently represents:

I don’t want to linger on this, but last night’s Super Bowl half-time show was ridiculous — and gratuitously so. Watching Twitter, it was really no surprise that men made comments about stripper poles and putting dollar bills through their TV sets, was it? Why can’t we have a national entertainment moment that does not include a mother gyrating in a black teddy? The priceless moment was Destiny’s Child reuniting to ask that someone “put a ring on it.” As I mentioned on Twitter last night, perhaps that case might be best made in another outfit, perhaps without the crotch grabbing. It seems quite disappointing that Michelle Obama would feel the need to tweet about how “proud” she is of Beyoncé. The woman is talented, has a beautiful voice, and could be a role model. And she is on some levels — on others she is an example of cultural surrender, rather than leadership.

I’d venture that there’s more dignity in Beyoncé’s marvelously controlled, rigorously choreographed performance than in Bruce Springsteen’s sloppy slide and camera crotch-bump of a few years back. And as much as her very much post-baby body was on display, Beyoncé’s performance was less allusively sexual than Prince’s silhouetted guitar. In fact, almost everything about Beyoncé’s off-stage life pretty much seems to meet Lopez’s criteria, from her long courtship with Jay-Z, to the child the two of them had once they were firmly ensconced in wedlock. If I were Lopez, I might actually think about striking the Knowles-Carters a medal for defying the Hollywood trend of shotgun or infinitely-delayed post-baby weddings.

But all of this is beside the point. What Lopez appears to object to, and what overrides for her any other consideration of ways in which Beyoncé might be a role model—including her financial success and careful control of her image— is the sight of a woman living in and very much enjoying her body, without needing to secure anyone else’s approval or ensure anyone else’s enjoyment. One of the hallmarks of Beyoncé’s lyrics, both with Destiny’s Child, and as a solo artist, is that no one is entitled to access to her. “Move, groove, prove you can hang with me / By the looks I got you shook up and scared of me,” she sang in “Bootylicious,” with its famous chorus. She warned a loutish boyfriend “Don’t you ever for a second get to thinking you’re irreplaceable.” In “Countdown,” she describes a relationship of equals, where she’ll “Do whatever that it takes, he got a winner’s mind / Give it all to him, meet him at the finish line,” and where “Yup, I buy my own, if he deserve it, buy his shit too.” And in “Independent Women,” Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child warned women “If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt / Depend on no one else to give you what you want.”

And I think that’s really what makes Lopez twitchy. In the 1994 script for Little Women, Robin Swicord wrote that “nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.” And in 2013, few things get conservatives twitchier than a woman who will take a ring from the right man—and in fact already has—but will do it because she wants it, not because she needs it.

The bridge is yours.

-Is Marvel going to Planet Hulk?

-Not surprisingly, an anti-Berlusconi documentary is having a hard time finding a place to screen in Italy in advance of the elections.

-Benedict Cumberbatch is probably going to play Alan Turing.

-Anna Gunn is coming back to our televisions.

-People who have DVRs apparently like watching Super Bowl Taco Bell ads about seniors.

The beginning of February brings with it the end of the excitement of a new year, the hope of spring, and the annual reemergence of a lot of idiots insisting that because Black History Month exists, we ought to have a White History Month. It’s a form of deep and racist foolishness expressed by everyone from former actress Victoria Jackson to randos on social media. But all this stupidity and privilege actually reveals something very interesting: the extent to which people ignore that whiteness isn’t a natural phenomenon, but an aggregation of ethnicities.

It’s not just that the orientation of our public education system means that the history of European peoples and Americans gets prioritized over the study of Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania, which is the rationale for Black History Month in the first place. It’s a corrective to an imbalance that’s only invisible to people who are aggressively not paying attention.

It’s that we actually have a lot of things that constitute commemorations of the history of white people. By presidential proclamation, we’ve recognized March as Irish-American Heritage Month, May as Jewish American Heritage Month, October as Italian American Heritage and Culture Month, and we even mark March 25 as Greek Independence Day. But to recognize that these are white history commemorations is to recognize that, if you start tracing back the history of whiteness, you’ll find that it’s extremely short. Those of us who check the Caucasian box on forms that ask for our racial identities used to be Jewish, or Italian, or Irish, or German, or French, with -American tacked on to the end depending on whether we’d been born in the United States or not. Those identities have been aggregated into whiteness, in part as a way of consolidating privilege and leveraging it against members of other racial and ethnic majority groups. I’m not sure what Jackson and company would make of that history if they actually studied it. But it’s what they’d find.

The Super Bowl comes just once a year with its orgy of wings consumption, its highly-anticipated halftime show, the football, and the multi-million dollar ad spots. The latter are a fascinating exhibit of whatever America is thinking about gender—or what advertising executives think America is thinking about gender—at any given moment. And as is always the case, there were babes, beers, and Danica Patrick chipperly selling out the rest of her fellow women for a lot of GoDaddy’s money. But for once, it wasn’t all apocalyptically terrible. Here’s what the Super Bowl taught me about gender in 2013, from best to worst:

The Good:

1. Ladies? We’re just as capable of being passionate sports fans as men—and just as capable of being devious if we think we can snag our team an advantage. Bonus points for turning household chores into a tool of team loyalty:

2. Princesses can lead armies:

3. Real men play princess with their daughters rather than blowing them off to hang out with their bros—even if they need Doritos as incentives:

The Bad

1. Ladies: overly-attached to their mothers:

This post discusses plot points from the February 3 episode of Downton Abbey.

This is one of the few times that Downton Abbey has picked up almost exactly where the previous episode left off, but despite the attention that the hour pays to how Sybil’s death is resonating through her family, it’s one that raises a more interesting question: how do you wrench yourself out of the station you’ve spent your entire life occupying? For the most part, the show answers that question in a rather old-fashioned way, by suggesting that good intentions and concern for others can provide you with a path forward, but only if you’re brave enough to take it.

Ethel, struck anew by the loss of her own child after Sybil’s death, is determined to do right by her patroness by improving the cooking that Isobel finds inedible, even correcting for her grief. She enlists Mrs. Patmore’s help, and the doughty cook defies Carson’s edict to avoid Crawley House as long as Ethel is present to help her with salmon mousse, pork chops, and a pudding. “You’ve done well, Ethel. Maybe you’ve also done yourself a favor,” Mrs. Patmore tells Ethel of her hard work.

And Ethel’s attempts to make a place for herself inspire other small rebellions among the Grantham women. When Robert storms in and demands that they leave lunch where Ethel is serving, Cora makes the subtext of her complaint against her husband clear, declaring “Robert frequently makes decisions based on values that have no relevance anymore.” And Violet’s response makes plain her strength, using the acid linguistic dexterity of the nobility to sneak hard truths into the conversation, and telling her son—while also affirming the quality of Ethel’s cooking—”It seems a pity to miss such a good pudding.” And back at home, Mary identifies her father’s actual concern, and the reason he’s doing something he might never have done in another circumstance: humiliating someone in service. “You’re angry, but not with Isobel or Ethel,” Mary, always her father’s favorite, tells him. “I think you’re angry because the world isn’t going your way, at least not anymore.” Even the most conservative member of the Crawley family is willing to defend Edith’s reach for something better.

Then there’s Daisy, who has always been reluctant to benefit from William’s death. First, she was uncomfortable accepting his pension, even though marrying him on his deathbed, despite her ambivalent feelings for him, let him die with a measure of peace. Now, she’s offered an even more significant chance at independence than that small supplement to her income: William’s father wants to make her his heir. “There are widows who take on a tenancy. And you’re liked the in big house. They’ll not refuse you,” he tells her, encouraging her to strike out on her own. “My dream would be if you were to come here and live with me so I could teach you.” It’s not just that he’s telling her she can dream better of the life in service she just always assumed was her: she has to. “You’ve forty years of work ahead of you,” he cautions. “Do you think great houses like Downton Abbey are going to go on for forty years? Because I don’t.” It’s a fascinating opportunity: Daisy’s being presented with a rare chance to bolt for a higher class status. The question is whether she’s bold and ambitious enough to take it, overcoming her own anxieties about seeming greedy or grasping.

And then there’s Edith, still considering whether to take the offer of a column, and contemplating other small usefulness in the meantime. “I sometimes wonder if I should learn to cook,” she ponders. “You never know. It might come in handy someday.” And while she’s not an outspoken advocate in this matter, she sticks to her chair at lunch at Crawley House, refusing to abandon Edith, Isobel, or her mother. Hopefully she can be inspired by the women below her in station, who live on a narrower margin, and who are reaching for gains for smaller than anything she already possess. All Edith can grab for is her own happiness. But it’s no less valuable a goal.