For football fans, there is no time longer than the two weeks, in late January, between the NFL’s conference-championship games and the Super Bowl. It’s a news wasteland, a long pause in the postseason’s frenetic action, and sports reporters scramble to find the slimmest fresh angles to corral their fickle, and hungry, readers.
So you can imagine that a press release sent out by the University of California at Los Angeles just before this year’s Super Bowl, “UCLA Study First to Image Concussion-Related Abnormal Brain Proteins in Retired NFL Players,” got a bit of attention. “PET Scan May Reveal C.T.E. Signs, Study Says,” The New York Times article was headlined; CNN, ESPN, and others published similar reports. A cursory reading of the coverage would have prompted almost anyone to think: Well, this is a problem that’s about solved.
At the end of “A Brain Gone Bad,” my recent article…