We’re a nation of sports nuts. We rally around our favorite teams, deify athletes, and sustain a multibillion-dollar industry built to celebrate athleticism and human endurance. As a result, athletes face intense pressure to consistently outperform one another and their own prior outings, often at their own expense. Despite how effortless athletes make their performances look on the field, their bodies are constantly under duress, constantly on the verge of the next injury, often maximizing short-term glory at the expense of longer-term health and well-being. Now technologies like high-tech helmets, mobile virtual players, training robots, and biometric data services are being deployed with an eye toward sidelining most sports injuries.

Join Future Tense—a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University—on Thursday, March 23, in Washington, D.C., to consider the effectiveness of these efforts to make sports safer, and our relationship as fans to the bravado sports culture that can at times romanticize injuries and view them as an integral part of the game.

The reception will begin at 5:30 p.m., followed by the main program at 6 p.m. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.

Speakers:

Ellen Arruda
Professor of mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering, University of Michigan

George Atallah
Assistant executive director for external affairs, NFL Players Association

Derek Belch
Co-founder and CEO, STRIVR Labs

Victoria Jackson
Sports historian, Arizona State University

Josh Levin
Executive editor, Slate

Roderick Moore Jr.
Vice president of sports performance, Catapult Sports

Nicholas Schmidle
Staff writer, The New Yorker

Kenneth Shropshire
Director, Wharton Sports Business Initiative, University of Pennsylvania

Buddy Teevens
Head coach, Dartmouth Football