The article is titled I Say Forbidden Things About Sports, and he does! Here are the six actual benefits:

1. To promote physical fitness and healthy living
2. To celebrate the values of sportsmanship and fair play—because these will make athletes better human beings, better citizens, and better participants in their communities.
3. To teach the benefits of unselfish teamwork and counter the intense promotion of selfish individual behavior in society.
4. To show youngsters how to deal with defeat and setbacks (as well as winning)—because they will face these again and again in life.
5. To bond together a community—both among fans and between opponents by the goodwill created via fair competitions.
6. To instill valuable life habits of discipline, hard work, courage, and persistence.

Instead, notes Gioia, the young athletes are taught that:

• Winning is more important than anything.
• There’s no value in losing. Losers get the ridicule and mockery they deserve.
• Maybe you need to play on a team, but rewards will depend on your success and fame as an individual—so always look out for your own selfish interests.
• Healthy living is okay, but don’t let it keep you from clubbing and late-night partying—because those are the perks of the athlete’s life.
• Cheating will enhance all these beneifts (sic!) — just don’t get caught.

How very true. To take NBA, an American sport with which I am the most familiar, you can see it in the large swings in score when the losing team snaps and realizes they can’t win the game and therefore they don’t even try.

Do read the whole thing.

🏀 Speaking of sports, how about them Wizards? Of course it happened while we were away and couldn’t enjoy the rare win, but it is also good since it was against the Nuggets and the family is split around which team we would have supported. So it goes…

Seeing those PET scans after CAR-T 5–10 years ago was transformative but it has now become superfluous. Yes, yes, that was a nice anecdote, can I now please see some data? #ASH24

100% of patients developed grade ≥3 neutropenia. “The safety profile was mild” #ASH24

PCA maps are the new PET scan, only with zero clinical relevancy instead of at least some. Much more subjective, too! #ASH24

Quote of the day is from The Hinternet:

This, then, is the real transformation, of which Jones’s addiction diagnosis is merely a symptom: that absorption, which used to represent a secret inner life, has been sneakily transfigured into a siphon by which our native curiosity is sucked away and sold. Where once we were rapt, now we are gift-wrapped. The text is reading us.

Including this one, if you are reading it on anything other than an RSS client.

For some light weekend reading, may I suggest this Chris Arnade quartet:

• Why I Walk
• How to Walk (12 miles a day)
• How to Travel
• Why and how to walk 200 miles

The inconsistencies in capitalization are entirely Arnade’s.

United Airlines IAD→SAN flight is full, the person in front of me is talking about sickle cell disease, and I know a good chunk of people on board. I should also be looking at the #ASH24 program instead of writing this but oh well.