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Football Talk: Maybe Brain Damage Is Part of Being American

Slate’s having another round of football discussion this week. First came the question of the

scapegoating of the Chicago Bears’ Jay Cutler

and the limits of counterfactual reasoning. Would a quarterback with two healthy knees (or, if you prefer, a more manly heart) would have kept the Bears from losing to a better team? No. Then it was time to look ahead to the titanic, historic, and pervasively brain-damaged Super Bowl clash between the Packers and the Steelers, aka the

Concussion Bowl

. Will football ever get over its concussion problem? Or will everybody just get over caring about it?