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Go Home Morning Reading Assignment

TIMOTHY NOAH SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

Morning Reading Assignment

BY TIMOTHY NOAH

I woke this morning to Frank Deford on NPR exhorting me to read Taylor Branch's Atlantic piece on the college sports racket ("The Shame of College Sports"), a topic dear to Deford's heart. Branch writes with special clarity and fervor about the everyday moral outrages that society works hardest to ignore, which is why he was so well suited to chronicle the rise of the civil rights movement in his justly praised three-volume biography of Martin Luther King. Branch's January 1990 piece for New England Monthly about the sordid history of state-sponsored lotteries remains the best thing ever written on the subject. Branch is a former student athlete himself; I'm hazy on the details but I think he played football for the University of North Carolina. I probably won't comment on Branch's piece, since I'm a sports ignoramus and I try to avoid topics on which the average reader is guaranteed to know more than me. But I'm definitely going to read it, and so should you.

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15 comments

Nothing says we're in the back-to-school season like your favorite online magazine giving you homework assignments.

- Tristan

September 14, 2011 at 9:37am

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I'm ready for the assignment. And you, Tris?

- liberalref

September 14, 2011 at 10:14am

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I'm ready for the assignment. And you, Tris?

- liberalref

September 14, 2011 at 10:14am

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Wow - a new day is truly upon us! Jonathan Chait linking approvingly to an article knocking college sports (and one mitten-shaped Midwestern state's university's football program no less!) is about as imaginable as, oh say, Marty Pertez linking with gushing praise to a Guardian article knocking Netanyahu's treatment of Obama! Serves Jonathan Chait right for leaving us, but , jeez, I can't help feeling some huge taboo has been violated! The fact that Noah evidently did it unconsciously just makes it all the more thrilling and scary!

- mtinora@me.com

September 14, 2011 at 10:15am

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Seriously, Timothy, you might want to think about getting the locks changed. Pronto.

- mtinora@me.com

September 14, 2011 at 10:18am

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Wow, I'm not that ready. After I clicked on the Save function, I saw that there were three comments and I thought that someone slipped in ahead of me, after Tristan. But no, my comment appeared twice. That hasn't happened in a while.

- liberalref

September 14, 2011 at 10:18am

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I love the seriousness and level of engagement on display here. Please be patient with me as I learn this form--even though I worked at an online magazine a dozen years I have never really been a blogger before. (Well, except Chatterbox at the beginning. But in those days two items in one day was a huge deal.) I am pondering whether it was wrong for me to call the GOP candidates "clowns." Still undecided, but I'm pondering. And yeah, I really am not Chait. I'm a terrific fan of the guy, and as I said in my introductory post my politics are pretty similar to his. But my crotchets are entirely different. I hold no brief for Michigan and have no particular dislike of Ohio. I do not think Mitt Romney's campaign is going down the tubes. Etc. You'll become acquainted with my own petty obsessions soon enough.

- Timothy Noah

September 14, 2011 at 12:46pm

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Tim, Kudos for that thoughtful response.

- Tristan

September 14, 2011 at 1:09pm

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I think that your use of the word "clowns" was unfortunate, I don't like Michele Bachmann et al. one little bit either, but the name-calling belongs in the comments section, I think. Readers shouldn't expect you to be Jonathan Chait, Timothy. That is absurd. And I am glad that you don't have an animus against Ohio. The worst feature of Chait's blog was the Life In Ohio series. It was juvenile and unbalanced, which is why it was popular with many commenters. I read this morning that Ezra Klein has taken on to his WonkBlog two TNR writers, Bradford Plumer and Suzy Khimm. Klein wants to narrow his focus because he realizes how easy it is to get things wrong when one tries to comment on so much. That should be an object lesson for any number of TNR mini-wonk readers, such as roid and dro, who already "know" all of the answers. But this will sail over their heads, as usual. Again, welcome to TNR. And I am so sorry that you lost your wonderful wife, Marjorie Williams, in 2005.

- liberalref

September 14, 2011 at 1:20pm

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Thank you. I don't know Plumer but I do know Khimm. She's terrific.

- Timothy Noah

September 14, 2011 at 1:31pm

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Liberalref, Ohio and Michigan are huge college football rivals (alas, I have too much dignity to actually refer to their teams by their cutesy names) and their legions of fans engage in good natured teasing. Hence Chait's very amusing running 'Life In Ohio' gag. They're, of course, very similar Rustbelt states. Ones that border each other no less. That similarity - both blue-collar Midwestern states having some trouble in the post-industrial age - keeps the scorn from being anything like a NY/NJ rivalry in which one one state often does look down on the other. Michigan vs Ohio (I'm thinking in terms of the entire state, not just college campuses) is not Manhattan vs. Newark; rather it's Flint vs. Youngstown. There thus was true humor in Chait's faux exasperation, shocked Victorian dowager shudders and head-shrugging man-of-the-world resignation as he (the son of regal, cultured, humane Michigan) had no choice as a journalist but to contemplate and share the latest fllthy barbarianism from Ohio. The joke was largely in his shameless relentless teasing and feigned innocence. Timothy Noah, A self-conscious colloquial tone seems to arise in blogs and online and it may take you a while to adjust your own prose to it. A mere commenter I fall back on the rote shtick (the "nah" and "um" and "eh") of the form, but, eh, you'll find your own way. Choosing, no doubt, to go with something much more graceful and formal than this. I have no opinion on the "clowns" issue, but, yeah, see the dilemma. BTW, here's what happened the last time someone questioned college football round here: http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/78134/college-sports-and-class-bias-jaccuse It's Chait's one blind-spot and it's really truly amusing - I won't say Freudian - that on your third or fourth post you managed to inadvertently hit on it.

- mtinora@me.com

September 14, 2011 at 2:01pm

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The shame is the higher education industry, in which athletics is but a part, albeit a major part. It takes a large student body and alumni to support not only big-time college athletics but the enormous physical plant and human resources of today's "leading" (mostly state) universities. And it is big-time athletics as much as the academics that attracts all those students and alumni. My prescription for football: require the NFL to support it's own minor league, rather than dumping the cost (both the dollar cost and the social cost) on the colleges and universities as they do now. That would provide an alternative to all those "student athletes" who attend college as a ticket to the NFL, an alternative for which the athletes can be paid whatever the market will bear. And I have little doubt that today's college football factories would see a precipitous decline in both their football programs and freshman applicants, as serious student athletes would, instead, look to the institutions with more of an academic offering. College football would move to Vanderbilt from the University of Alabama, to Duke from Auburn, and so on. And as today's football factories drop in importance in athletics, so would their enrollment, which would benefit both the taxpayers who support them and the "students" who otherwise would continue to attend them in return for a degree with a declining value. Branch's prescription, on the other hand, would be to continue the current arrangment but make the shame more transparent by paying the "student athletes".

- rayward

September 14, 2011 at 2:13pm

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Nobody picked up this form faster than Cohn. Nobody. Talk to him.

- rayward

September 14, 2011 at 3:38pm

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You're doing fine man! People are just hazing you because they like you and you're the new guy, happens to everyone.

- WandreyCer

September 14, 2011 at 7:56pm

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Name calling or not, "clowns" is definitely an apt adjective when speaking of the GOP candidates.

- GSpinks

September 15, 2011 at 3:37pm

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