Common Folk Collective

This is promising. A new podcast called The Organist from the folks at The Believer/McSweeney’s/KCRW.

President Obama told the New Republic he would have to “think long and hard” before he would let a hypothetical son play football. Now that the NFL head injury conversation has reached the president, will the NFL go farther in protecting players? Obama specifically addressed the college game:

I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.

Researchers at UCLA have found signs of brain damage in living NFL players. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the blowout:

I don’t know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?)…After that, I don’t know how pro football can stand for long.

Amtrak continues its remarkable growth:

Amtrak announced that 737,537 passengers used its trains between Tuesday, Nov. 20, and Monday, Nov. 26. That breaks the record set last year, when the rail agency carried 724,051 riders; that, in turn, broke the record set in 2010 when 704,446 passengers took Amtrak; and that, of course, eclipsed the record-setting mark of 685,876 riders in 2009.

[WashPo]

Some Garrett County Press news: We’re releasing a rip roaring true crime book by Chicago journalist Gera-Lind Kolarik. The book is Prisoners of Fear, and it’s detailed as well as entertaining and it’s only $2.99: