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Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #5, Edition #4

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Back, once again, with another Start the Weekend Right Link Series. I hope that the links in this week’s offering give you some fun articles to read to get your weekend started right. And I know that there are more people out there reading these updates today than a few weeks ago and I have heard your feedback, so I am going to try to include some more contemporary links each week, too. I continue to recommend using Feedly as an RSS reader (and, again, I am not getting any payment for recommending this product – I just really like it as a replacement for the old Google Reader). If you already have a Feedly account, then you can follow my blog by clicking here.

5 Reasons You Can’t Quit Sugar, Mark’s Daily Apple
And we can start this week with a link to an article posted just a few days ago! Mark’s Daily Apple is a great resource for those individuals looking to learn more about the paleo lifestyle, what it means to eat like a caveman, and what it means to be healthy for life. Some 9 years ago, I read and loved this website’s book called The Primal Blueprint. This article is an expansion of some of the great ideas that are in that book.

Why I Stopped Journaling, Art of Manliness
This is one of the articles where I might not completely align to the takeaway points. Last month, the author wrote a great entry talking about how they stopped journaling because they did not have any big decisions to make, they got better at managing their emotions, and they have friends now. For some, journaling helps in all of those aspects of someone’s life. For me, daily journaling is a stress reliever and a way to get my thoughts out of my head with a paper and pencil.

Why Ed Schools Are Useless, Minding the Campus
I have a doctorate from an education school where I loved the experience, and before I obtained that doctorate, I earned a post-master’s certificate from another educational school where I loved the experience. The argument in this article from 2013 says that education schools have “very little rigor and no incentives to excel academically” and they use some data to back that perspective. My instinct tells me that this is probably a case-by-case basis.

Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness…, Condemned to DEBT
Back in April, the very good Condemned to DEBT blog provided a brief analysis of Vice President Joe Biden’s student loan plan. If you are a student loan wonk like I am (I mean, I have been one of their bigger individual customers), then this is something that you want to read. However, based on what I read at this link, I was not that impressed with the plan. Admittedly, I’m usually not impressed with anyone’s plan for student loans.

The 10 Best Top 100 Books Lists, Book Riot
There’s nothing newsworthy in this link – it is being included here purely for entertainment purposes! This link will take you to a list of the top 10, top 100 books of the year lists. Again, the top 10 lists of the top 100 books… for the year 2013. This is one of the outcomes from keeping so many links bookmarked for so long of a period of time – I wind up with 7 year old links to lists of lists! I’m probably entertaining myself far more writing this than you are reading it!

Have you come across any great articles lately? If so, then please share those links in the comments below. And one more time for those of you who love reading online articles, I strongly recommend using Feedly as an RSS reader. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!

Second Thoughts: On High School and College Football

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Back in 2013, I created a spreadsheet of different topics that I might write about on this blog. One of the categories was called “Second Thoughts” and the idea was to capture some of my “hindsight being 20/20” style thoughts on different elements in life. For example, today I am going to write about playing football in high school and how I wound up not playing football in college. It would have been hard for me to write about those two things objectively when I was still so close to them (and I am sure that what I write below is not objective anyway), but with so much time between my playing days and today I think that I am able to look back and offer a reasonable, only marginally-biased opinion.

My first comments about playing football in high school is that I am glad for the experience, I am thankful for the lifelong friendships that being on my football team provided, and… I would never, ever want my nephews or young cousins to play football. That perspective might seem counterintuitive or hypocritical – it is not, I assure you. I began playing football during my freshman year of high school, which was 1995. Back in 1995, the research and science around the lasting impact of the intense head trauma that one experiences when playing football was not mature yet. That research had not evolved to where we are today, which is the firm understanding that the repeated head trauma that football players endure leads to diminished mental capacities over the course of their lives.

To football’s credit, they have worked to improve the equipment that is used and to enforce new rules to protect players’ heads. I appreciate those improvements and hope that they are the first in many more changes to the game to protect its players. However, I cannot imagine a world where I would endorse the young ones in my family actively engaging in that type of brutality when the function of their brains is what is at risk. No thank you. By the way, both of my brothers were football players (one was a championship football player and the other was the captain of his team) and my cousin was on my football team (we were championship players then and, now, hall of fame players at our high school) and we all completely agree on this point. We all also agree that if one of the next generation of the family wants to play football, then we would talk to them about it and let them make their own decision, but we would discourage them from joining the team.

As for my experience playing high school football, I loved it. I was able to play for one year with my older brother as a senior on the team when I was a sophomore and I got to play all four years with my cousin. In my hometown, I came from a smaller, feeder grade school that fed into a larger high school, so being on the football team was a way for me to meet new friends, integrate into the larger high school, and build a feeling of attachment to the larger community. All of that worked out very well for me and I think it worked out well because I was a good football player (not a great player, but good enough to start on a championship team my senior year). I can never speak ill of the amazing connections that I built from playing football and, ultimately, from wrestling and being on the spring track team (the weight throwing team, not the runners!).

The one area where I have a constructive criticism for high school football and all high school sports is the constant pressing for more reps, practicing longer hours, and doing something “one more time.” In hindsight and across all of the sports that I played, I do not think that there was much benefit to the “one more rep” mentality. In fact, there is a growing chorus of folks who are saying that the “one more rep” mentality is dangerous. I leave that contemporary argument to those who are making it today. In my experience, though, staying a little bit later, pushing to press up a little bit more weight, and spending additional time preparing for an opponent seems like it was a bit much – at least for the high school level of competition.

At some point during my senior year, I started receiving letters from local, small colleges (Division III) to play football for them. I received a few letters about wrestling, too. I did not pursue any of them in a significant way. One day, one of my buddies who was a running back on the team and I were called into a special meeting to meet with a recruiter from a local university that played in what was then-known as Division IAA (today called Division I FCS). To make what could be a long story short, both my buddy and I opted not to play for that college, but both wound up going to school there anyway. I talked to the football coaches at the university at the time and told them that I wanted to get acclimated to college before playing football. They weren’t interested in that, but said if I wanted to, then I could attempt to walk-on to the team after my freshman year and to come and talk to them after the spring semester ended.

As it turned out, I became friends with several of the football players at my college and I even shared a dorm suite with two of them who I became good friends with that year. I also became friends with some of the college freshmen football players that lived in other parts of the campus and they were all really nice guys. At some point, I started lifting weights while in college and at that time the weight room for the students was shared with the athletes. Without gassing myself up too much, I lifted as much or more than the guys who would have been my contemporaries on the college football team. I’m not so arrogant to think that this was purely because I was stronger than some of those guys, but rather I recognized that they were engaged in a specific type of weightlifting where I was just lifting weights for fun. When you become more specific in your training routine, you can naturally reduce the amount of weight that you might lift in certain standard lifts. I think that is what was going on.

After my freshman year, I went and talked to the football coaches and told them I was ready to walk on to the team. I remember talking to one of the coaches and the look of complete disinterest that he had in me and my story (the same guy who was excited about me potentially joining his team 18 months earlier). I think the conversation turned when I mentioned that during my freshman year, I did really well (a 3.9 GPA after my second semester, which he liked) and that I met a bunch of new friends when I joined my fraternity – that went over like a lead balloon. That coach somewhat reluctantly gave me the paperwork that I needed to get filled out from my doctor and told me that once I got him the completed paperwork, he would get me the dates of the walk-on practices.

Well, I got a physical, had the paperwork completed, and sent it in to the coach… and that’s the end of the story. The coach never got back in touch with me, never let me know about when I could try to walk-on, and never initiated contact again. I did not follow-up with him because I believed then, as now, that some things are not worth chasing. After seeing the utter look of disdain on that coach’s face when I mentioned that I lived a great freshman year and a big part of that was joining my fraternity, I knew that this was not going to be a good interaction and that I probably would not want to pursue a long-term connection with that guy. This is another marked difference between the high school and college settings, for me at least – I genuinely liked each of my high school coaches no matter how hard or aggressive they got with me and my teammates. For the college coach to be jumping up and down enthusiastic about me and my buddy joining his team while we were in high school and then completely uninterested 18 months later, it just did not sit right with me.

Overall, I am glad that I did not play football in college. A few months after that awkward interaction with the football coach, a friend and former teammate of mine from high school began playing football at the college. An old injury of his was aggravated during one of the early practices and he may have been encouraged to play through it (common in both high school and college sports). He opted not to play through it and, instead, protect his body (smart move). And I have heard similar stories like that not just locally, but all over the country and not just with football, but all sports.

What I gained by playing football in high school was provided to me by my fraternity. While I have several friends who had excellent college football experiences, I do not think that I would have had a similar experience playing football at my college. And that’s completely okay for me, especially when considering the brain trauma research I mentioned earlier and the wonderful experience provided to me by joining my fraternity and growing a new group of lifelong friends.

Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #5, Edition #3

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Back again with another Start the Weekend Right Link Series after last week’s successful offering. Just a note before we get started, I continue to recommend using Feedly as an RSS reader (and, again, I am not getting any payment for recommending this product – I just really like it as a replacement for the old Google Reader). If you already have a Feedly account, then you can follow my blog by clicking here.

Resignation Letter, Bari Weiss
Well, this is a complete and total destruction of the New York Times and their editorial page. Ms. Weiss is the now-former opinion editor at the New York Times and in this scathing resignation letter she tears apart what many of us have grown to begrudgingly accept about the newspaper – that its opinion page is more than far-left, it’s off the left side of the charts. As someone who is an avid New York Times reader, I know that they have a broken editorial page that, as Ms. Weiss says, operated by an “enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” Yuck. If you enjoy reading about the behind the scenes in today’s media scene, then you want to read this resignation letter.

To Ask or Not to Ask: Experiments in Charitable Giving, Freakonomics
As you may know at this point, one of my favorite topics in the volunteering world is the business of philanthropic giving. In this 2011 post from the Freakonomics blog, they offer some commentary on a then-recent study of philanthropic giving related to the Salvation Army bell-ringers at the front of stores during the holiday season. One of their big takeaways is that giving increases 75% when you just ask someone to donate. Shocking, right?

Students Say No to Healthful School Fare, The NY Times Well Blog
This is another blog post from later in 2011 where the NY Times’s Well Blog wrote about how students in the LA Unified School District were rejecting the new, healthier food options. You might remember that about 10 years ago in this country, there was a push to make school breakfasts and lunches healthier (great idea, in my view). Well, this blog entry tells you how that played out some 9 years ago: “Students have been throwing away meals and bringing their own junk food to school, forcing the district to bring back some of the foods it worked so hard to replace.”

Higher Education is Still a Very Good Investment-Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog
The Becker-Posner Blog was a great read for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the two authors were renowned intellectuals who put their minds to work in the judicial and economic spheres. When Gary Becker passed away in 2014, Richard Posner cited that the blog would also be ending. Luckily, this blog entry is from 2013 and gives the authors’ take on why going to college is still a good investment, even in the face of increasing tuition costs.

The Four Lessons I Learned By Taking a MOOC, AIR
Even though this link is some 7 years old already, it has particular relevance to me as I am planning on taking a MOOC this summer. I saw that one of the students I mentor (at a different school and in a different state) completed a MOOC earlier this summer and that got the ball rolling in my mind about whether or not I should take one of these. For those who are unfamiliar, a MOOC is a massive open online course where enrollment is usually free. These days, many institutions of higher education have MOOC offerings from their premier schools and you can purchase a low cost certificate after completing the course showing your efficacy in that subject matter. Again, I plan on taking a MOOC this summer so I will likely report back on my experience. Stay tuned!

The Paleo Diet Debunked?, Nerd Fitness
Nerd Fitness is one of the most entertaining websites when it comes to fitness tips and health information. The author writes from a nerdy world view (I love it!) and takes on big issues in the health and fitness field. In this entry, he writes about the popular Paleo diet (in short, eat like a caveman) and the common criticisms of that approach to consuming food. If you are looking for a really good defense of the Paleo diet and all of the reasons why it could potentially work for you, then this is the page to read. And I also recommend clicking around the website a little bit to learn about the Nerd Fitness approach to health (I use an old Nerd Fitness weightlifting program when I’m at the gym… during non-coronavirus times).

As an aside, the more I go through these old links that I have bookmarked or saved in Feedly, the more I realize many of them lead to content that no longer exists or has been taken down. When and where possible, I will try to replace that content with duplicate versions of the material as is the case above with the article from AIR (originally posted to a blog that I follow that has since taken down the old post).

Have you come across any great articles lately? If so, then please share those links in the comments below. All subjects count from money to volunteering to higher education to sports and more! And one more time for those of you who love reading online articles, I strongly recommend using Feedly as an RSS reader. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!

Book Review: Dreamland

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Oh man… this was a tough read, but not because it was poorly-written or anything along those lines. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Author Sam Quinones did a brilliant job of writing about the opioid epidemic, where it came from, how it grew, and what direction it seems to be headed in.

A number of years ago, I remember the first time I heard someone say, “Everyone knows someone who has been impacted by the opioid epidemic.” And I thought to myself, “Hmmm, that doesn’t have to be true for everyone, right?” Well, after reading this book and living my life for a few years, yes, I think that this statement may be true for everyone. I know that one of my close friends from high school battles an opioid addiction to the point where they tried to take their own life. And that’s just one person that I know who is battling the addiction – there are many more, unfortunately. It is a horrifying drug no matter what form it takes, but the way that Quionnes wrote about how black tar heroin made its way across the country is the stuff of medical nightmare tales. There is a lot to write about in reviewing this book, so I want to just focus in on two elements that Quionnes writes about: the corporate nature of the structure for the drug dealers out of Mexico and the misinformation that was promulgated about the pros and cons of using opioid-based drugs for pain management. Also, since I read this book on my Kindle, I was able to highlight some lines in the book, a few of which I will include below. Of course, the highlights that I include below are just scratching the surface of a much larger discussion on these (and more) topics in the book.

“Without legions of middle-class kids with cars, the Xalisco Boys’ business model didn’t work. In cars, kids shot up, gave rides to fellow junkies, hid their dope. When their parents’ trust in them finally died, the kids lived in these cars, and the cars became their private bedrooms.” Dreamland goes deep into who the drug dealers were, where they came from, what brought them to this type of life, etc. That quote, from Dreamland, gives great insight into why the business model worked in middle-class neighborhoods. They operated what looked and felt like a franchise-style business. They would set up a cell in a city and then arrange the cell to be the quick delivery service for drugs directly to your door or, in the case of these middle-class kids, at a prearranged drop off point. Nothing different than ordering food for delivery, and it worked like a charm.

“To actually look up Porter and Jick, to discover that it was a one-paragraph letter to the editor, and not a scientific study, required going to a medical school library and digging up the actual issue, which took time most doctor’s didn’t have.” Earlier in the book, Quionnes exposes that the “research” on which much of the pain management movement was based on was not an academic or scientific study. No, instead it was an obscure letter to the editor that was never intended to even be sent out. This irritates me to no end not just because it exposes that the basis on which doctors began prescribing, and big pharma began producing, opioids was false, but it irritates me because this type of false authority runs rampant in a variety of worlds outside of healthcare. The social sciences are plagued with people taking data and findings that are not generalizable and then generalizing that information to “prove” their points. But that’s a story for another day. The point here is that Quionnes uncovered that the scientific roots of mass producing opioids to address pain management are false. And that is infuriating.

And, finally, I have to offer this quote from Dreamland to end this review: “He was a football player and handsome. He was a linebacker and a ferocious hitter, and thus popular. So a lot of what he did was forgiven and he got used to that. Football players were common among the new rural opiate addicts. Some got addicted to pills prescribed for injuries. Others, like Wes, took them at parties.” Sometimes you’re reading a book and you come across a few lines like these that hit home. I know a few guys who played football both at the high school and collegiate levels and they fell into this exact trap. Life was easy, they got away with things that other people would have been sanctioned or punished for, they took a few pills maybe took a few shots, and that was the end of it. And because they did it, others did it, too. Absolutely horrifying.

And that is Dreamland, folks. Overall, it is the story of the horrifying opioid epidemic that took hold of the people in this country, regardless of age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, etc. Here’s hoping that the reform efforts that are currently underway continue and are bolstered with more funding.

Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #5, Edition #2

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Following up on last Friday’s Start the Weekend Right Link Series, here are some more links that you might find interesting to browse through as the weekend begins. However, just a note on this week’s links – they will link you to old pages on the internet. At least one of them is 10+ years old. As I continue to clean out old bookmarks and look through saved stories on my Feedly, there are going to be some old stories posted. Speaking of Feedly, I continue to recommend using Feedly as an RSS reader (and, again, I am not getting any payment for recommending this product – I just really like it as a replacement for the old Google Reader). If you already have a Feedly account, then you can follow my blog by clicking here.

Solitude and Leadership, The American Scholar
This article was posted way back in March 2010, but the elements that it inspires about leadership are timeless. The core of the message, I think, is: “What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.” I actually used those lines as the basis for a leadership presentation that I gave a few years ago – it is a great message.

Millennials No Slackers When It Comes to Volunteering, Poll Finds, The Chronicle of Philanthropy
Unfortunately, this link will only take you to a brief review of a study that I cannot seem to find a good link to here in 2020. Of course, this review was first published in December 2014, so it is understandable that the study results that it links to are no longer available. The reason why I kept a copy of this link is because I like what the data shows; namely, that the Millennial generation – those born between 1981 and 1996 – are more likely to consider volunteering than other generations. I have seen this in my own work in the nonprofit sector over the last decade and a half, so I was glad to see that there is a study validating those experiences.

Wanted: Blue-Collar Workers, City Journal
This one comes to us from the Autumn 2011 issue of the City Journal. What is great about this one is that it signaled what many folks in higher education having been talking about for a few years now. That is, there needs to be more people going into the physical labor force than we are currently producing as a nation. From the article: “For decades, Americans have been told that the future lies in high-end services, such as law, and ‘creative’ professions, such as software-writing and systems design. This has led many pundits to think that the only real way to improve opportunities for the country’s middle class is to increase its access to higher education.” The article goes on to say that the mid-career salaries for some of these “high-end” careers is in the mid-$60,000s. Certainly not something on which to build the Great American Dream.

Why I Stopped Giving to Duke, James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
One of my favorite blogs to read from time to time is the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. They take a very proactive approach to redefining and breathing new life into higher education. In this article from December 2011, the writer talks about how he stopped donating to his alma mater because they moved in a more politically correct direction. Specifically, he writes about an English professor who commented that there is no such thing as free speech. That is… kind of… concerning. Especially when considering that colleges should be bastions of free speech.

Stealth savings: Sneaky ways to fatten your account, Get Rich Slowly
And for some financial reading for everyone, this time from back in January 2012 and updated this past October 2019. This article suggests aiming for a 20% savings rate and gives recommendations on how you might be able to achieve that rate. Some suggestions that they offer are to drop a hobby and save those funds, become symbolical (want to retire by a certain age? Then deposit that numerical value in the bank every week, month, or whatever), use a bank that does not have a branch in your neighborhood so it is a frustration to take money out of the account, and to use laddered CDs (a strategy that I use) from an online bank.

Have you come across any great articles lately? If so, then please share those links in the comments below. All subjects count from money to volunteering to higher education to sports and more! And one more time for those of you who love reading online articles, I strongly recommend using Feedly as an RSS reader. You can follow JerseySmarts.com on Feedly or you can add us to your existing RSS aggregator. Enjoy!