Malcolm Gladwell wrote one of the best essays of the year in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. In Offensive Play, Gladwell begins by describing the terrible brain injuries that linebackers get from repeatedly hitting each other. Their job is to use their heads as battering rams, and the repeated bangs in the head, sometimes as many as a hundred in a routine practice, add up and lead to dementia similar to those of people who suffer from Alzheimer's disease.

That bit of reporting was interesting on its own, but Gladwell subtly adds another layer to the article. Using Michael Vick as a bridge, he turns to the topic of dog fighting. He discusses anthropological research about dog fighting. The dogs are bred to keep attacking over and over despite terrible injury. Due to their intense desire to please their owner, they fight with broken bones and blood gushing from their neck.

He makes clear comparisons to the football. Is football just as cruel and blood thirsty as dogfighting? Are we destroying these athletes? And are football fans just as diabolical as those who sit around the dog fight rings and put money on the fighting dogs? How different are my son and my husband who watched the football from a friend's sofa last night from Michael Vick who did jail time for cheering on the pitbulls?

He ends the essay with a discussion of the current situation for Vick's pit bulls. Instead of being euthanized, they were sent to an expensive and intensive rehabilitation center to learn how to trust humans again. Most of those dogs will never be the family dog in a suburban home. They have been too thoroughly ruined, but Gladwell said that we still feel that their expensive care is morally justified, because we have an obligation to care for dogs that heroicly fought for the love of their owners.

Perhaps we have a moral obligation to care for dementia-ridden linebackers who also heroic fought for their owners without regard to their personal safety.

I haven't been a huge fan of Gladwell's books, but this essay is a triumph. I love the gradual and layered transitions. Fine writing.

In Harvard Magazine, Louis Menand writes about the PhD problem. Students, especially those in the humanities, spend a decade getting a PhD that doesn't prepare them for teaching or for gainful employment. The system results in homogeneous, over-prepared teaching staff; it uses ABDs as cheap labor. Like Gladwell, he questions the cruelty of the system that destroys hard-working, young people. Instead of using their heads to slam against the opposing team, they slam their heads against the books, dissertations, fickle advisors, and an impossible job market. They face repeated assaults from nasty peer review letters and snide discussants at conferences.

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is
simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and
uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and
drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never
finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put
in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking
people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in
programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not
get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that
graduate students constitute a cheap labor force.

One of the commenters said that after getting a Harvard PhD, he/she has been unable to find work and was on the brink of homelessness. Certainly the system has an obligation to help these individuals who gamely fought the losing battle of graduate school.

UPDATE: Great response from Lillian.