Vox Sentences: A huge new concussion study — from which the NFL is conspicuously absent

A major grant to study CTE launches with a funding controversy; an earthquake in Shenzhen, China; and the Mall of America tried to get a restraining order against the entire Black Lives Matter movement.

NOTE: Vox Sentences will be on hiatus for Christmas on Thursday and Friday of this week.
Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Did the NFL try to pull out of a major concussion study?

David Madison/Getty Images

• This week, the National Institutes of Health announced that it's giving a team of Boston University researchers a seven-year, multimillion-dollar grant to develop ways to diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a brain disease increasingly associated with contact sports, especially football — in living patients.

  [GenomeWeb]

• Right now, scientists can only definitively diagnose CTE by dissecting brains of dead patients. This severely limits the ability of scientists to study the disease's progress — and figure out how closely it really is tied to football or other sports, like hockey.

  [Boston Herald / Lindsey Kalter]

• The BU lab has been a big player in CTE research. Earlier this year, they conducted a study with the VA showing that out of 91 ex-NFL players examined after death, 87 had CTE.

  [Frontline / Jason M. Breslow]

• Curiously, the grant comes after the NFL had donated $30 million to the NIH for CTE research in 2012. According to an ESPN report,, the NFL deliberately refused to fund the BU project because the lab's director has criticized the league in the past.

  [ESPN / Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada]

• Both the NFL and the NIH dispute that story, and the NIH says this grant is separate from the studies they'll be funding with NFL money. What's more, one of the grants from the NFL project has been given to another BU researcher, who's also criticized the NFL in the past.

  [Boston Globe / Henry McKenna]

• But the timing of the grant already looked suspicious, since the Will Smith movie Concussion, about the discovery of the link between CTE and football, is coming out on Christmas. If nothing else, the ESPN story is a reminder that the NFL's response to the concussion crisis has been too little, too late.

  [Sports Illustrated / Jenny Vrentas]

A literal growth-caused disaster in China

ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images

• Rescue teams have begun to pull out bodies from a landslide in Shenzhen, China that happened Sunday. At least five people have died (although rescue crews did pull out one survivor).

  [CNN / Tiffany Ap, Shen Lu, Katie Hunt, Matt Rivers and Yuli Yang]

• The landslide was caused by the collapse of a giant pile of dirt and debris from a construction project — as clearly visualized by the New York Times here.

  [NYT / Derek Watkins]

• "Waste-flow slides" like this are increasingly common in the developing world, but this might be the first time that one has been caused by construction (rather than, say, mining).

  [The Guardian / Karl Mathiesen]

• It makes sense that this would happen in Shenzhen, though, which has become a symbol of the precariously fast growth of the "new China."

  [NYT / Neil Gough]

• Residents had spotted warning signs about the construction pile for weeks — and raised questions after the landslide about why the government wasn't doing more to prevent and respond to the disaster.

  [Xinhua]

• By Wednesday, though, the issue had dropped out of social media "trending" sections in China. It's impossible to tell whether this was due to an organic loss of interest or a government tampdown — or the latter encouraging the former.

  [Foreign Policy / David Wertime]

The Mall of America fails to ban Black Lives Matter protests

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

• Black Lives Matter protesters held a large, if brief, protest at the Mall of America today. But the real confrontation was the legal battle that preceded it.

  [Reuters / David Bailey]

• The Mall of America cracked down on protesters after a similar event a year ago. Since the MOA is private property, it was able to enforce trespassing laws against protesters for holding an event without permission.

  [Minnesota Public Radio / Curtis Gilbert and Brandt Williams]

• This year, the Mall of America sought to go one step further. It asked a judge for a restraining order against anyone affiliated with Black Lives Matter, to prevent the protest from happening entirely.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• The judge denied most of the Mall's request. But it did allow three Black Lives Matter protesters to be named in the restraining order, barring them from showing up at the mall.

  [Reportedly via Twitter]

• After the legal wrangling, the protest itself was uneventful — in part because the Mall of America asked stores to close early, before the protest began, and many complied.

  [Cody Nelson via Twitter]

MISCELLANEOUS

The best Christmas movie is Die Hard, but the best movie about Christmas is A Muppet Christmas Carol. Here's how it was made. [The Guardian / Ben Beaumont-Thomas]

• What it's like to watch The Force Awakens if you've never seen a Star Wars movie before.

  [Slate / Katy Waldman and Jessica Winter]

• When does an art museum stop being an art museum and start being a flagrant tax evasion scheme?

  [Washington City Paper / Kriston Capps]

• The editor of the Las Vegas Review Journal found out that he was taking a buyout to leave the paper...by reading an editorial in the paper.

  [Los Angeles Times / Nigel Duara and Lisa Mascaro]

• The data's pretty clear: Obamacare is working at expanding coverage.

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

VERBATIM

"It’s strange to edit a feminist website when almost nothing offends you, because the feminist website is traditionally imagined to run on offense." [Jezebel / Jia Tolentino]

• "Only by elastic measures can 'Walden' be regarded as nonfiction. Read charitably, it is a kind of semi-fictional extended meditation featuring a character named Henry David Thoreau. Read less charitably, it is akin to those recent best-selling memoirs whose authors turn out to have fabricated large portions of their stories."

  [New Yorker / Kathryn Schulz]

• "Ask them if they have a job. Little kids love that. (They almost never have a job.)"

  [Laura to Slate / Amanda Hess]

• "I didn’t have lots of ongoing conversations across different apps, and I mostly didn’t use apps at all — because most apps worth using connect you to other people, and I just wasn’t connected to many people. It was okay for my phone to be slow and clunky because I resigned myself to a social death where there is no urgency to be alive."

  [The Verge / TC Sottek]

• "There is no E. coli in Chipotle."

  [Steve Ells to Bloomberg Businessweek / Susan Berfield]

WATCH THIS

Why alcohol doesn't come with nutrition facts [YouTube / Marina Gvozdeva, Joseph Stromberg, Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, Joss Fong]

Vox / Marina Gvozdeva, Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, Joss Fong

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