On the N.F.L.’s march to complete a 269-game schedule amid a pandemic, more than 700 players, coaches, and other team personnel tested positive for the coronavirus. It upended rosters, with the Denver Broncos starting a game without any of their three quarterbacks and the Cleveland Browns once fielding a team with nearly all of their receivers out, and it postponed games, with some outbreaks pushing them into midweek or to a bye week.
Through it all, only one of the league’s 32 teams remained untouched by the virus: the Seattle Seahawks. And how they made it through the long season virus-free, in Washington State, where the United States’ first positive case was reported, is a testament to innovative thinking and procedures. The team’s devotion to following health guidelines became a guidepost for the N.F.L. and other leagues grappling with how to proceed as the deadly virus continued to grip the country.
“They invented a playbook for a safe practice environment at a time when the future was deeply uncertain and people were questioning the wisdom of pro sports starting up,” said Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist who has helped organizations respond to the coronavirus and informally advised the Seahawks. “You have to be willing to absorb some costs, and you need leaders who can communicate in a crisis.”
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The N.F.L. rolled out a grand experiment to play a not-at-all socially distanced sport in a pandemic. The Times went behind the scenes with the Seattle Seahawks and the Cleveland Browns to understand how the science and the upheaval played out. credit credit…Pool photo by Ted S. Warren
Jacksonville is the most populous city in Florida and is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States as of 2020.It is the seat of Duval County, with which the city government consolidated in 1968. Consolidation gave Jacksonville its great size and placed most of its metropolitan population within the city limits. As of 2019, Jacksonville’s population was estimated to be 911,507, making it the 12th most populous city in the U.S., the most populous city in the Southeast, and the most populous city in the South outside of the state of Texas. The Jacksonville metropolitan area has a population of 1,523,615 and is the fourth largest metropolitan area in Florida.
The night that sports began shutting down was the night that the United States began shutting down. On March 11, 2020, an announcer at the Oklahoma City Thunder’s home arena told fans just before tip-off that the evening’s game had been postponed. Within an hour, the visiting Utah Jazz revealed that a player—soon identified as the center Rudy Gobert—had tested positive for COVID-19, and the NBA also declared that it was indefinitely suspending the season. Suddenly, Americans were forced to accept that the coronavirus pandemic was going to completely disrupt everyday life.
Although the NBA eventually resumed its season by creating a playoff bubble, and other professional and college leagues figured out a way to return in some form, the sports world is still struggling for normalcy nearly a year after widespread shutdowns began and fans turned their attention to matters of life and death.
As the pandemic dragged on, the leagues, universities, pro franchises, and other entities that profit from a multibillion-dollar sports economy made a push for games to return. But these efforts also reflected a working assumption that the mere presence of sports would provide comfort, and perhaps a welcome distraction, for people who wanted to escape the horrors of the pandemic, at least momentarily.
In 2016, I interviewed an entrepreneur named Sean who had co-founded a small technology startup based in London. As with many organizations at that time, Sean and his team relied on e-mail as their primary collaboration tool. “We used to have our Gmail constantly opened,” he said. Then they heard about a slick new instant-messenger service named Slack that promised to streamline office communication: “There was this hype, so we decided to try it.” Once the team switched to the tool, the rate of back-and-forth messaging intensified, eventually reaching a stressful peak when a demanding client insisted on the ability to directly communicate with Sean’s employees using Slack. The team soon burned out, and two engineers quit. In desperation, Sean moved the company off Slack. When I spoke with him, some time had passed since this incident, but the memory of the service’s omnipresent notification ping remained strong. “I hear that sound, it gives me the shivers,” he said.
I thought about Sean when I heard about Salesforce’s proposed acquisition of Slack for close to twenty-eight billion dollars. From a financial perspective, the deal probably makes sense. Sean’s company was one of many to embrace this platform when it arrived on the knowledge-work scene. Today, Slack has millions of users and reported more than six hundred million dollars in revenue for the last fiscal year. The shift toward remote work during the pandemic only reinforces the company’s value to the marketplace. But a lot of us share Sean’s fatigue with Slack. Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah laments that the platform transformed the American workplace into a “dystopian micro-Twitterverse,” while the technology journalist Casey Newton tweeted, “Salesforce is paying $28 billion for an app that people shut down when they need to get things done.” Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating; we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. To dismiss this confused reaction as the usual grumbling about new forms of communication, however, would be a mistake. A closer look at Slack reveals an underlying dynamic with potential economic ramifications that make twenty-eight billion dollars seem paltry.
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Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating: we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. Photograph from Panther Media GmbH / Alamy
On Thursday, July 11, 2019, without a dollar in his pocket, Anthony Estes flew from Charlotte to Las Vegas for a basketball tryout. He didn’t have a place to stay in Vegas, but then he hadn’t had one in Charlotte either, so “what difference does it make,” he thought to himself, “the street is the street.”
Estes was 26 years old and since his freshman year in high school, he hadn’t played longer than a single season for any one team or coach. Shuttling between Long Island, Washington DC, and North Carolina, he grew from a gangly kid into a 6’6, 220lb force of nature. Scouts marveled at his potential—“The sky is the limit,” one recruiting service touted—but Estes lacked the consistent adult presence in his life to help him reach it. He ended up playing one year of Division 1 at North Carolina A&T, then bounced around the junior college ranks before landing behind bars a few times.
Now he was homeless.
The tryout in Vegas was the three-day “TBL Pro International Exposure Event,” hosted by a nascent pro circuit called The Basketball League. The stated mission of TBL is to help unheralded players gain a foothold in the slippery underworld of pro basketball: Find an agent, impress a scout, and grind their way up the food chain, to a team overseas or maybe, if all goes right, a shot at the G League, the NBA’s official development arm.
Maipo is a stratovolcano in the Andes, lying on the border between Argentina and Chile. It is located 90 km (56 mi) south of Tupungato and about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Santiago. It has a symmetrical, conical volcanic shape, and is among the southernmost 5,000-meter peaks in the Andes.
Maipo is located within the Diamante caldera, a feature measuring 15 km by 20 km that is about half a million years old. It rises about 1,900 m (6,230 ft) above the floor of the caldera. Immediately to the east of the peak, on the eastern side of the caldera floor, is Laguna del Diamante, a lake that formed when lava flows blocked drainage channels from the caldera in 1826. The Diamante Caldera erupted 450 cubic kilometers (108 cu mi) of tephra, 450 ka.
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An image from Maipo volcano from the Mendoza region of Argentina
Even though the presidential election is over, we’re still doomscrolling through gloomy news about the coronavirus surge. The rest of your daily routine is probably something like mine while stuck at home in the pandemic: Divided among streaming movies on Netflix, watching home improvement videos on YouTube, and playing video games. All of these activities involve staring at a screen.
There has to be more to life than this. With the holiday season upon us, now is a good time to take a breather and consider a digital detox.
No, that doesn’t mean quitting the internet cold turkey. No one would expect that from us right now. Think of it as going on a diet and replacing bad habits with healthier ones to give our weary eyes some much-needed downtime from tech.
“There’s lots of great things to do online, but moderation is often the best rule for life, and it’s no different when it comes to screens,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the author of “iGen,” a book about younger generations growing up in the smartphone era.
Something strange was in the air at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. It wasn’t just that deadlines loomed—that was typical. A shareholders meeting was just around the corner, which never brightened the mood, but that wasn’t it, either. Tinker Hatfield Jr., a 35-year-old sneaker designer, couldn’t quite put his finger on it. His boss, Nike’s creative director, and lead shoe designer, Peter Moore, typically blasted music in his office while he sketched new ideas for shoes. But this summer morning in 1987, the music wasn’t playing.
A few weeks prior, Rob Strasser, Nike’s vice president, suddenly handed in his resignation. Nobody had seen it coming. Strasser was an industry veteran who’d spent nearly two decades as Phil Knight’s marketing guru. He’d become a local legend, “the man who saved Nike.” In three years, he’d turned the company’s fortunes around by signing Michael Jordan to the most high-profile and successful athlete endorsement deal in history. Soon, Jordan’s contract would be coming up for renegotiation. Wherever Strasser was about to go, he seemed poised to take Jordan with him.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
The N.F.L. rolled out a grand experiment to play a not-at-all socially distanced sport in a pandemic. The Times went behind the scenes with the Seattle Seahawks and the Cleveland Browns to understand how the science and the upheaval played out. credit credit…Pool photo by Ted S. Warren
Photo by Rick Stewart
James' World 2 