Violence in Football, A North American Ape Fossil, and the Pain Scale - Dinner Table Digest № 34
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
In the last Digest, I shared the full report of the Committee investigating the January 6th Insurrection, which happened two years ago today. If you haven’t yet had a look at it, that’s okay - at over 900 pages, it’s a lot of reading. But if you really want to punish yourself, there’s no better day to start reading than on the Insurrection’s anniversary.
Maybe you want to pass on that today - that’s okay, I’ve got a few pieces to share that might interest you instead.
Sections: Damar Hamlin / Nebraska Man / Peter’s Spotify Top Tracks / Chronic Pain and the Pain Scale
The Terrifying Collapse of Damar Hamlin and the Everyday Violence of Football - Louisa Thomas - The New Yorker
I was watching the Buffalo Bills - Cincinnati Bengals football game on Monday, January 2, when Damar Hamlin, a defensive safety for the Bills, stumbled on his feet and then keeled over, apparently in the middle of a heart attack. I’ve been a fan of the game of football since I was a kid. I was around the high school game, acting first as the leader of the Sticks Crew for home games, before becoming the ball boy in Grade 11, finally putting on the pads in Grade 12, only to get hurt on my second play, bringing to an unceremonious end my playing time. Needless to say, I’ve seen a lot of football and do not shy away from the fact that the hard-hitting violence is part of the draw for me. While violence is inherent in the game, what I saw on Monday night was scary AF - the now-quantifiable physical and mental damage to young bodies taken with each snap requires that we re-think the game and our enjoyment of it.
Whether fans and players want to admit it, though, part of the appeal of football remains rooted in its risks—the hectic action, the collision between awesome skill and raw force, the suspense that comes with every snap. Hamlin’s cardiac arrest has shown us again what we always should have seen, how real those risks are. After all, what he experienced wasn’t something outside the bounds of the game. He was doing what he’s done countless times, and what we’ve seen countless times, too—hoping, on some level, that nothing would go wrong, but knowing, on some level, that it could.
The Curious Case of Nebraska Man - Madeline Bodin - Atavist Magazine
This fascinating piece traces the history of science denialism in North America by highlighting the role that American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn’s supposed Nebraska Man fossil played in the infamous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. This trial, which featured popular politician and polemicist William Jennings Bryan arguing against the scientific validity of evolution in what was essentially a show trial, solidified the tradition of anti-science laws in many conservative states, a problem which continues to this day.
The timing of the tooth’s arrival was almost providential, as if God himself were responsible. The fossil, which Osborn guessed to be a few million years old, might influence scientists’ ongoing search for humanity’s ancestors. More important for his purposes, it would almost certainly embarrass his rival. Perhaps, contrary to Bryan’s quip in the Times, there was an American ape after all.
“Tooth just arrived safely. Looks very promising. Will report immediately,” Osborn telegraphed Cook on March 14. Later that day, he followed up with a jubilant letter. “The instant your package arrived, I sat down with the tooth, in my window, and I said to myself: ‘It looks one hundred per cent anthropoid,’ ” Osborn wrote. “I then took the tooth into Doctor Matthew’s room and we have been comparing it with all the books, all the casts and all the drawings, with the conclusion that it is the last right upper molar tooth of some higher Primate.”
Osborn was known as a snobbish sophisticate, but in his letter to Cook he gushed with excitement. “We may cool down tomorrow,” he wrote, “but it looks to me as if the first anthropoid ape of America had been found by the one man entitled to find it, namely, Harold J. Cook!”
After dispatching the letter, Osborn set in motion a publicity machine that is hard to imagine working so swiftly in today’s scientific communities, with their safeguards like peer review. It helped that Osborn controlled one of the cogs. On April 25, the museum’s own scientific journal, American Museum Novitates, published a paper by Osborn announcing “the first anthropoid primate found in America.” Osborn named the newly discovered species Hesperopithecus haroldcookii.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t the tooth of an ape, but the tooth of a peccary.
Peter’s Spotify Top Tracks Playlist
Using another app that I now cannot remember, I have created a playlist of my current top 100 tracks on Spotify, updated automatically at the end of every day. If you want your pulse on what I’m listening to, this is the place. Feel free to ❤️️ the playlist for your own future listening.
The Problem With the Pain Scale When You Live With Chronic Pain - Joe Gardner - The Mighty
One of the biggest issues I have when communicating with health care professionals, friends, and family is my ability to describe my pain. Rarely is it easy to describe, and rarer still when I am able to provide a number on the traditional pain scale. The section below describes how chronic pain patients, like me, have to ‘convert’ the pain scale so that it makes sense to others who do not have chronic pain. Yes, I do this all the time.
A chronic pain patient’s pain scale is very different from the standardized pain scale. If you want me to rate pain on a scale of 0-10, you have to realize my chronic pain scale 0 is the standardized scale’s 2. On the chronic pain scale, I’m usually at a 6 or 7 when I decide I have to go to ER, which converts to the standard scale’s 8 or 9. You also have to realize I have become very good at hiding signs of pain. I try not to talk about it because I know my friends and family get tired of hearing it. I try not to grimace when the pain hits me because I don’t want to answer questions and discuss my newest pain. I use distraction a lot to help me get through the harder times. I don’t like to draw attention to myself; I don’t want people to feel sorry for me or treat me differently because of my illness. I just want to be seen as “normal,” even though I feel anything but normal.
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