American Football, Radio Lab

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to American Football, a podcast from RadioLab. Link here.

(flickr: Dewayne Neely/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Along with conflicted parents and players and coaches who aren’t sure if the game will survive, we take a deep dive into the surprising history of how the game came to be. At the end of the 19th century, football is a nascent and nasty sport. The sons of the most powerful men in the country are literally knocking themselves out to win these gladiatorial battles. But then the Carlisle Indian School, formed in 1879 to assimilate the children and grandchildren of the Native American men who fought the final Plains Wars, fields the most American team of all. The kids at Carlisle took the field to face off against a new world that was destroying theirs, and along the way, they changed the fundamentals of football forever. 

Carlisle Indian School's 1903 football team (U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center)

More photos to see. Link here. 

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Cindy Sherman, American, b. 1954

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link here to 

Episode 468: 

Switcheroo 

from This American Life

"Widely recognized as one of the most influential artists in the contemporary art world, Sherman has presented a sustained, eloquent and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, she has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.  To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist and wardrobe mistress and has hitherto deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters from siren to clown to aging socialite." -source is Trendspot.com

Link here to see more of Cindy Sherman's work on her website.