Seahawks are 10-0 in their last 10 games
49ers are 8-2 in their last 10 games (losses are to Seahawks 2x)
Rams are 5-5 in their last 10 games (losses to; 49ers, Seahawks 2x, panthers, falcon)
Barry was my best friend at ESPN. A big brother figure of rock solid values. I am shook to my core. Barry gave his life to hockey and some of his ESPN family, like me, learned of his shocking death today while at a hockey rink in Las Vegas preparing for the upcoming season. Chilling and fitting--the rink was Barry's home. A more beloved ESPN institution there has not been. We love you, Barry. Forever.
ESPN's NFL PRIMETIME
August 31, 1997
Week 1 of the #NFL's 78th season kicks off, marking the only time in league history that regular season games are played in August.
Boomer, TJ, and new addition Stuart Scott break down the day's action as Primetime begins its eleventh season.
(apologies for the video quality)
At 95, William Shatner has formed a metal band, booked Riot Fest and begun recording with dozens of genre legends. These things happen.
From Michael's new interview with @williamshatner, out now.
I'm sorry we never got a chance to meet, but getting this note from Dolly really had a an impact on me. She definitely didn't have to take the time to do it. Even for a kid who mostly listened to rap music, she was an icon. A superstar in every sense. Rest easy Dolly. And thank you for the kind words.
You can’t get more Asheville than a random guy standing on a street corner on a Saturday afternoon holding a “Scott Bessent — Yield Curve Control Will Never Work You Gay Pedo” sign.
Chinese interview: The concept of atonement didn’t really exist in Ancient Greece and it didn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey. It exists in your Odyssey. Did you Christianize the Odyssey?
American interview: spin the snack wheel and then read these thirst tweets they called you zaddy
Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.
He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.
Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.
Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.
Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.
Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.
Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.
The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.