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Even law-and-order states have grasped the need to refashion so-called hair-trigger community supervision systems that reflexively and unnecessarily send people to prison for minor infractions that have no bearing on public safety. Some have hired additional case workers to make their systems more effective, have given newly released inmates better access to drug treatment or mental health care, or have developed community sanctions that send only the most troubled or repeat-prone offenders back to prison.

A recent analysis by the reform-focused Council of State Governments Justice Center found that states like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas have seen dramatic reductions over the last decade in recidivism connected to probation or parole.

Then there is New York. The state, which has closed more than a dozen prisons over the last decade alone, is a national standout when it comes to sentencing reform. But a new study from Columbia University's Justice Lab calls on state lawmakers to do significantly more to address the problems with the community supervision system, which come at a considerable cost to the local jails where most of the people locked up for state parole violations are held.

At a time when the number of people being detained in New York City jails is shrinking, state parole violators represent the only subgroup of offenders that is growing. Between 2014 and 2018, for example, the percentage of people held on technical violations of parole increased by 15 percent, even as the overall jail population declined by 21 percent.

A November 2017 snapshot count of city inmates found 1,460 people in New York City's jails for state parole violations. If this were a stand-alone group, the report's authors note, it would be larger than the population of any jail in the state, with the exception of New York City's sprawling Rikers Island complex. Among other things, this population is an obstacle to the city's goal of closing that historically troubled complex altogether.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called on the State Legislature to make changes that would help those in custody for parole violations, such as abolishing money bail for people accused of misdemeanors, eliminating state supervision fees for people on parole and reviewing how child support is calculated for people incarcerated for more than six months.

But the Columbia study calls on the Legislature to do a lot more. It recommends that the state adopt several common-sense reforms, most of which have already shown promise in other states. These include: adopting a system of graduated sanctions and rewards, instead of automatically dumping people into jail for minor infractions; capping jail terms for minor parole violations; requiring a judicial hearing before parole officers can jail people accused of technical violations; shortening parole terms for people who stay out of trouble for specified periods of time; and using the savings reaped from cutting the prison population to expand education, substance abuse and housing opportunities for parolees, who need considerably more help than they're getting to forge stable lives in their communities.

These proposals would be a heavy lift in the conservative New York State Senate. But they make good policy and economic sense, and would bring the state to the forefront of the parole reform movement.

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council of state governments justice center

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Even law-and-order states have grasped the need to refashion so-called hair-trigger community supervision systems that reflexively and unnecessarily send people to prison for minor infractions that have no bearing on public safety.

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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TLS9LZJKawWr8jW4Lys17UgVZ7nQ_sDWf9H3cRLjF2c/edit#slide=id.g34181ffc9d_12_0

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Contests

One of our 2017 editorial winners wrote about China's unofficial ban on Korean cultural exports, such as the boy band Exo. Credit... Starnews, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view.

Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself. When you're done, submit it using the contest form below by Thursday, April 5, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Be sure to read the rules, also below, before posting.

Our judges will then use this rubric (PDF) for selecting winners to publish on The Learning Network.

As teachers know, the persuasive essay has long been a staple of high school education, but the Common Core standards seem to have put evidence-based argumentative writing on everybody's agenda. You couldn't ask for a more real-world example of the genre than the classic newspaper editorial - and The Times publishes, on average, two of them a day.

And at a time when breaking out of one's "filter bubble" is more important than ever, we hope this contest also encourages students to broaden their news diets by using multiple sources, ideally ones that offer a range of perspectives on their chosen issue.

So what issue do you care about? Gun violence? Sexual harassment? Social media? You decide.

Good luck, and please post any questions you might have in the comments. We'll answer you there.

_________
Note: The submission form has been removed from this page. The contest is closed.
_________

Video

The New York Times's editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal provides seven tips for writing an effective editorial.

To help with this challenge, Andrew Rosenthal, in his previous role as Editorial Page editor of The Times, detailed seven pointers in the video above. And we have published related lesson plans, including " For the Sake of Argument: Writing Persuasively to Craft Short, Evidence-Based Editorials," " I Don't Think So: Writing Effective Counterarguments" and " 10 Ways to Teach Argument-Writing With The New York Times," that offer additional teaching ideas.

We have also culled a list of 401 prompts for argumentative writing organized by category, to help inspire you - although, of course, you are not limited to those topics.

We encourage you to look at both our comments on last year's winners and the winning essays themselves. They can serve as excellent models, and they cover topics from active-shooter school lockdowns to Korean television shows in China.

In addition, you can watch our free, archived webinar, featuring the Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and Kabby Hong, a high school English teacher.

1. Use at least one Times source. You can write your editorial about any topic, as long as you use at least one source from The Times. That should pretty much open the whole world to you, as you may be surprised how much you can find in The Times.

Be advised that nytimes.com has a digital subscription system in which readers have access to five free articles each month, but after that you will be asked to become a digital subscriber. The Times also offers K-12 digital subscription plans for schools. But all Learning Network activities for students, including our daily writing prompts, as well as Times articles linked from them, are free, so you can access them without exceeding the five-article limit.

2. Use at least one non-Times source. But make sure that the source you use is a reliable one. We encourage you to find sources that offer different perspectives on an issue.

3. Always cite your sources. Our submission form contains a required field for entering your citations. We include an example as well, though you can use M.L.A. or A.P.A. styles, or just list the website URLs. Even if you use a print source or an expert interview, you must provide a citation. Readers (and judges) should always know where you got your evidence.

4. Be concise. The editorial must not exceed 450 words. Your title and list of sources are separate, however, and do not count as part of your 450-word limit.

5. Have an opinion. Editorials are different from news articles because they try to persuade readers to share your point of view. Don't be afraid to take a stand.

6. Write your editorial by yourself or with a group. If you are working as a team, just remember to submit all of your names when you post your entry. But please submit only one editorial per student. If you're submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual.

7. Be original and use appropriate language. Write for a well-informed audience, but include enough background information to give context. Be careful not to plagiarize: Use quotation marks around lines you take verbatim from another source, or rephrase and cite your source.

8. Submissions must be from students who are 13 to 19 years old, and they may come from anywhere in the world. Unlike in previous years, students can now use their entire name if they want.

9. All entries must be submitted by April 5 at 11:59 p.m. Easternusing the contest form above. If you have questions about the contest, feel free to post them in the comments section, and we'll respond to you there.

10. Follow these instructions if you need proof that you entered this contest. Within an hour of submitting your editorial, you should receive an email from "The New York Times" with the subject heading "Thank you for your submission to our Student Editorial Contest." If you don't receive the email within an hour, even after checking your spam folder, then you can resubmit your entry. Be sure your settings allow emails from nytimes.com.

After two attempts and waiting over one full day, if you still have not received a confirmation email, you can contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com with the email address you used in the contest form. Use the subject heading "Please send me an email confirmation for my editorial contest submission." Be sure to include your name and editorial title (or subject) in your email. You may have to wait up to a week for a reply.

11. We will use this rubric (PDF) to judge entries, and the winning editorials will be featured on The Learning Network.

" Writing an Editorial" Unit Plan, by Lindsay Thompson

" Reader Idea | He Said, She Said, I Say: A Researched Argument Essay," by Danielle Harms

" Reader Idea | Using an Op-Doc Video to Teach Argumentative Writing," by Allison Marchetti

" Reader Idea | Using Room for Debate to Teach Argumentative Writing and Discussion Skills," by Gerard Dawson and Justin Rex

" Reader Idea | An Argument-Writing Unit: Crafting Student Editorials," by Kayleen Everitt

Good luck and have fun. We welcome your questions and comments if we have omitted details that might be useful. Let us know how we can help.

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The Learning Network runs contests for teenagers all year long. See our full calendar.

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Our Fifth Annual Student Editorial Contest: Write About an Issue That Matters to You (Published 2018)

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Contests The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view. Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself.

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Contests

One of this year's winners wrote about school lockdown drills. Related Article Credit... Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times

Update | Read the work of _________ this year's 10 winners here and this year's runners-up here.
For the past four years we've invited students to write short editorials about issues they care about, and each year thousands take up the challenge.

Students often start with thoughtful questions from their own lives: Why is my school's athletic program better funded than its music program? Why do we hide in the corner of our classroom during active shooter drills? Why don't my classmates stand during the Pledge of Allegiance? And they develop sophisticated, sincere and well researched answers in response.

Students look at the nation's and world's problems and hunt for solutions - to improve the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in China, for example, or to reduce recidivism rates for U.S. prisons.

We really like this contest because it asks students to look closely at their world and find something, large or small, they want to change. So, if you don't like being last in line all the time because your surname starts with "Z," then take a stand. If you want more characters in books and movies to be more like you, then write about it. If you want society to be less wasteful or more tolerant, then tell the world. Change starts with noticing, thinking critically, and starting meaningful conversations - and that's what these students have done in their editorials.

But winning this contest? It's no easy task being selected as a winner out of 7,895 entries, a record. How do you make your writing stand out from the piles of other editorials submitted to our contest - especially when you have no more than 450 words to get your point across?

Here's one way: Start strong. Grab our attention in the first few sentences, but don't take too long to state your argument.

Here's another: Pick a fresh topic, or a new angle on a popular topic, and be very clear about what you are arguing. Often when students narrow in on a specific concern, their editorial becomes more persuasive.

What else? Write with an original, confident voice and avoid formulaic language and structure. And if appropriate, acknowledge, and deftly dispatch, counterarguments.

Below, we list 10 winners, 15 runners-up and 45 honorable mentions. We also include a PDF of all the finalists, including 58 who made the cut to the third round of judging, but didn't quite reach the winner's circle.

Starting May 22, we will be publishing one of the Top 10 essays each weekday in posts that we hope you will spread on social media, hang on school bulletin boards and perhaps even use as "mentor texts" for next year's contest.

Thank you for participating - and we hope you'll take part in our Summer Reading Contest, starting June 16.

_________

Each category below lists our favorites in alphabetical order by title. Where titles were missing, we came up with our own.
Top 10 Winners
" A Psychedelic Cure?" by Reagan Briere, age 16
" In Nothing We Trust" by Francesca Kelley, age 18
" Leave the Citizens to Their TV Shows" by Yijia Hu, age 17
" Losing the Internet" by David Scharts, age 15
" Reform the Prison, Then the Prisoner" by Katherine Leonard, age 16
" Stopping Bullets With Locked Doors and Silence Is Already Pulling the Trigger" by Daina Kalnina, age 15
" The Anguish of the Rich" by Yiqi Wang, age 17
" The Asian Misnomer: What the Affirmative Action Debate Misses" by Matteo Wong, age 16
" The Collateral Damage of Defending Democracy" by Sarah Heiland, age 18
" The Missing Anthropological Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History " by Alec Farber, age 16
_________ Runners-Up
"America First" by Safa Saleh, age 17
"America? More Like Ameri-Can't Vote" by Gianni Carcagno, age 17
"Climate Literacy: A Critical Step Toward Climate Stability" by Ella Shriner, age 14 and Hannah Witscher, age 15
"Cultural Appropriation: A Measure of Empathy" by James Chang, age 16
"Discourse Is Democracy: Allowing Uncensored Speech on College Campuses" by Abigail Hogan, age 17
"Drone Warfare: The Failing Fight Against the Modern Hydra" by Michael Levinger, age 16
"Generation Code Red" by Grace Scullion, age 16
"Humane Human Zoo?" by Ella Ward, age 15
"Paper or Plastic? How About a Paper ON Plastic!" by Melody Markert, age 17
"The Future Disintegration of American Democracy Through Athletics" by Julianne Yu, age 16
"The Case for Teaching News Literacy" by Mary Hannah Grier, age 17
"The Unspoken Alphabet Problem" by Stephanie Zhang, age 14
"The 'War on Drugs' Will Never Work; Legalization Will" by Kristina Vakhman, age 18
"There Is No Happily Ever After Without Once Upon a Time" by Bridget O'Leary, age 17
"When Will This Class Be Useful?" by Casey Stark, age 15
_________ Honorable Mentions
"#WorldChanger" by Joyce Zhou, age 17
"A Case for Impassiveness" by Lea Marchl, age 16
"A Scoop in the Right Direction" by Emma S., age 18
"AP Tests Don't Leave Enough Room for the Human Side of History" by Tom Malmgren, age 16
"Are My Shoulders Distracting You?" by Mairi Alice Dun, age 17
"Autism: Educated and Extraordinary" by Isabella Zhang, age 17
"Bittersweet" by Rena Rachlin, age 15 "Child Labor in the U.S. Today" by Jasmine Campos, age 16 and Charlotte Principal, age 16
"China Needs Silver Lining" by Wangchen Zhou, age 17
"Colleges Should Abandon Race-Based Affirmative Action to Achieve True Diversity" by Eric Davis, age 18
"Embrace the Mess" by Chi Yu, age 14
"Fast Fashion Is Destroying Our World" by Melissa Wang, age 17
"Food Stamps Need a Change" by Patrick Meara, age 17
"Governor Cuomo Frees the Plastic Bagss" by Jiayan Chen, age 17
"Help Wanted: Moderate Politicians" by Ireland Degges, age 17
"High School Should Not Just Be About Sports" by Swathi Kella, age 16
"How Far Can Post-Truth Democracy Take Us?" by Jiahe Yang, age 18
"How to Revitalize the Public Education System" by Dhara Yu, age 18
"Last Man Standing" by Kathryn Porter, age 16
"Leave Me Alone" by Celia Silver, age 17
"More Than a Morning Kick" by Emma Cary, age 16
"Multiple Choice: Not Multiple Enough" by Yi-Mei Templeman, age 17
"Picking Cotton: An Immigrant's Perspective" by Allan Njomo, age 16
"Post-Democracy" by Nadav Ziv, age 17
"Should Juvenile Offenders Receive Life Sentences Without Parole on Their First Offense?" by Tayler Gavetti, age 16
"Should Obamacare Be Repealed?" by William Pharo, age 16
"Single Payer: A Cure for America's Healthcare Woes" by Akshay Manglik, age 13
"Streaky Friendship" by Yuxin Long, age 16
"Technology: A Hindrance to Learning" by Zachary Weiss, age 17
"Teens, Technology, and The Pursuit of Happiness" by Sam Jagolinzer, age 17
"The Bluest Note" by Nicholas Dasoveanu, age 18
"The College Conspiracy" by Serenity W., age 17
"The Cost of Health Care May Be in Your Genes" by Sophia Lo, age 16
"The Demoralizing of the Elizabethan Language" by Olivia Seymour, age 14
"The Disposable Nightmare" by Tianxin Guo, age 14
"The Education Gap" by Adam Traweek, age 16 "The Environment in the Age of Trump" by Elliot Tuttle, age 17
"The Growing Problem of Screen Addiction" by Kaitlin Craig, age 16
"The Picture of Education We Must Change" by Danielle Naidrich, age 17
"Tipping the Pay Scale" by Ruhee Damle, age 14
"Untitled" by Melinda Hartz, age 16
"We Should Be Teaching Rap Music in Schools" by Jack Zuckerman, age 19
"What Do You Call Someone That Only Speaks One Language? An American." by Paige Patton, age 16
"Where Are All the Rainbows?" by Storm Viridian Murray, age 17
"Where Trump's Ban Stands Legally" by Marcus Linde, age 16
_________ And All the Finalists, Including 58 More Great Editorials That Made It to Round 3 (PDF) Judges: Amanda Christy Brown, Shannon Doyne, Caroline Crosson Gilpin, Michael Gonchar, Annissa Hambouz, Thomas Houston, Shira Katz, Willow Lawson, Linda Leavitt, Sue Mermelstein, Anna North, Roxie Salamon-Abrams, Katherine Schulten, Matt Schwarzfeld, Natlie Shutler and Kate Spence-Ado

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A Call to Action: Winners From Our Fourth Annual Student Editorial Contest (Published 2017)

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Contests Update | Read the work of _________ this year's 10 winners here and this year's runners-up here . For the past four years we've invited students to write short editorials about issues they care about, and each year thousands take up the challenge.

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I have had a direct view of the changing way we digest sports and its news over the past 25 years. After nearly a decade in Major League Baseball as a player, I wrote extensively about life in and around the game, culminating with seven years on air at ESPN. One theme that was stressed as critical to my role as a sports analyst was the importance of access.

It helped to know people on the inside to provide weight to that access. This could lead you to authentic first reactions to a potential story or could be the story itself. Then, for social media relevance, new metrics began to quantify your value. Being retweeted or "liked" now had professional significance.

Fans also sought and were granted increasing entree to the complete world of athletes. The locker room, once a sanctuary, became open - and open to interpretation - just as hot microphones dotted the playing field for in-game audio. Soon we propagated time-sensitive videos capturing evidence to be vetted by a ravenous public. All was in constant review, whether or not a game was going on. We were in the know 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as athletes created newsworthy content just by living. During my time on air, I didn't even always have to frame that content: It was often revealing enough in its raw, unfiltered state. Just capture it.

Now when we watch a game, it is more than a viewing experience. Technology allows us to receive analysis of what we are witnessing as it is happening, and it provides the means to send out our analysis to others.

But through the eyes of the athlete, it's a different picture. That analysis could be sport-related - a breakdown of your curveball or your historic success on clay courts - but it could also be personal, an arena where you have little control over the interpretation. Regardless, your visibility, whether you wanted it or not, comes at a price: the erosion of privacy and confidentiality. It is always game time.

This makes me look at my playing career differently. I wonder how, if Twitter had existed then, I would have handled the public release of, say, my father's illness, or pushing back against trade rumors coming from every direction when I played for the Texas Rangers in 2003. I viewed privacy as having the choice of whether to address a personal issue beyond my trusted circle. For public figures today, that choice is considerably more limited.

As fans, we generally welcome these tidbits on the people we admire or enjoy as performers. We see a private side that can explain their drive or make them more relatable. Yet we do not want to go too deeply, given that the domain of their performance is often an escape for us. We don't want to be bombarded, or even confronted with anything slightly uncomfortable, let alone politicized or polarizing.

So the players can find themselves in a quandary. This social world that can build a brand, even raise an army of followers, is the same social world that is insatiable in its demands and expectations. The athletes are always a walking story, not just their story, but potentially for proximate strangers who can selfie or photo-bomb themselves into prominence.

It's true that the simplicity of "the game" went out the window long before football players knelt in protest. For years now, fans have been going to stadiums that are more like family entertainment centers, where the game is not enough. When you watch games with or on phones, even if you're at the ballpark, the pitcher's windup can be interrupted by breaking news or maybe a reminder to pay your water bill.

Fans from earlier generations reminisce about how it used to be. The times before the advent of social media - less noise, more sport. Just as I, an athlete from an earlier generation, wonder about the repercussions of a contrived reality. The observer interfering with the experiment used to be a concern, but we have moved to an invisible observer being part of the experiment. Now as we split the athlete's time into thinner tranches, he or she is always on the record. And if we are on top of everything an athlete does, we see the blemishes, real life converging with real time. A consequence of the red camera light being perpetually on.

There is little time for reflection in these environments, so naturally we see everything as is, including some issues we would rather not see when we pop open a beer and tune in to "Monday Night Football." The lines blur between an athlete's pain and our escape from the workplace, his spiritual reflections and our politics, her moment in the sun and our daily grind, her sorrow and our happiness. Yet for the athlete, there is little time to find other platforms to express much of anything given the moneyed and self-absorbed nature of the co-opted time in his world. Not unless he wants to miss the window, the news cycle of his moment. If he waits, he or his message runs the risk of irrelevance. That's the fear.

I would like to just watch the game, too, but the athlete may just want to catch a cab without being passed over, she may just want to be a champion without being compared to a man, he may just want to honor his fallen brother's service to his country, she may just want to not be judged by what she is wearing, he or she may not want a pronoun attached to them. These elements could be part of what makes them tick in the game we love. Yet we still say, as we always dismissively have, "Just shut up and play."

From Jackie Robinson to Billie Jean King, many have spoken out since the advent of sports. The benefit of time and patience often rewards us with the true significance of their efforts, even if we disagreed with their approaches or were uncomfortable along the way. These pioneers reminded us that change is always unsettling and that silence changes nothing.

Many of these athletes are now letting us know that we are not listening well, not remembering sport's longstanding relationship with activism, that in our rush for the bottom line they have been reduced to sound bites and clips, providing little room to address anything in great depth. In turn, we have lost the helpful pauses, periods, ellipses, deep breaths and perspective-granting exercises that allow for collaboration, dissent or dialogue.

We cannot have it both ways. Know everything but learn nothing, see everything but be blinded, count but not allow someone to matter, hear everything but not listen. The players are now responding to our escalating voyeurism with intimacy. Will we reciprocate - or put up a two-way mirror?

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Opinion | Fans Expect Access to Players, but Do They Really Want to Listen?

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I have had a direct view of the changing way we digest sports and its news over the past 25 years. After nearly a decade in Major League Baseball as a player, I wrote extensively about life in and around the game, culminating with seven years on air at ESPN.

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What is the point of sport? The recent death of Sir Roger Bannister, who ran the world's first four-minute mile in 1954 while he was a medical student training in his time off, suggested one answer. The publication two days later of a devastating report into doping in cycling and athletics by a parliamentary select committee suggests a rather different one. Sebastian Coe, a Conservative peer who had held, as a professional, the world mile record that had once been Bannister's, gave a dismal showing in his testimony about his time in the International Association of Athletics Federations. Before becoming president Lord Coe was vice-president for eight years, a period in which one of the then president's sons was, the IAAF said, taking bribes to expunge the records of failed drug tests on Russian athletes. He told the committee that he was aware only in the vaguest terms of suspicions about the organised, industrial-scale doping of Russian athletes, and the possible involvement of the president. Later an email came to light showing him forwarding detailed allegations from a whistleblower to the head of the Federation's ethics committee (a body that does in fact exist) although he says he never read them. The committee observed that his account of his own incuriosity about these allegations "stretches credibility". It further described his reason for not publishing a scientific study into the prevalence of doping in athletics as "frankly risible".

Over in the world of professional cycling, Team Sky, founded to "win clean", turns out to have had a terrible problem with asthma among its athletes. Sir Bradley Wiggins apparently suffered from an asthma that could only be treated with a steroid which has the side-effect of allowing endurance athletes to lose fat rapidly while maintaining muscle mass. This is legal provided a doctor has certified that the drug is needed to treat the asthma. Body weight is extremely important to road cyclists: when Sir Bradley raced in the Olympics on a flat track, he weighed 82kg; competing later over the mountains of the Tour de France, he weighed only 72kg. The rigours of training needed to lose so much weight from the body of an Olympic athlete can only be imagined. The evidence given to the committee - as well as the refusal of the team's then doctor to clarify one vital point - suggest that when Sir Bradley won the Tour de France in 2012 he may have been treated with this steroid at a time when he had applied for, but not yet received, the necessary certificate of exemption. Since the records have been lost, if they ever existed, we will never be sure. Sir Bradley strongly denies any wrongdoing.

Performance-enhancing drugs in sport need to be suppressed for three reasons. They can damage an athlete's physical health, especially important when their bodies are still growing. Once past a certain threshold, they corrupt the whole sport, as happened with professional cycling in the 90s, when no one who did not cheat stood a chance of winning. Perhaps worst of all, they make it seem that the only point of competing is to win. This is a hugely damaging attitude, although it permeates almost all professional and televised sports, where the financial rewards for winners can be quite grotesque. Yet sport has moral or mental benefits as well as physical ones. That's why the state should encourage mass participation, and most of the people who do that will never be champions. They need to be taught to want to win and how to lose gracefully. Coping with failure while reaching for success means our role models should not be cyclists, or track athletes, but the England football team.
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The Guardian view on drugs in sport: a deep corruption | Editorial

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What is the point of sport? The recent death of Sir Roger Bannister, who ran the world's first four-minute mile in 1954 while he was a medical student training in his time off, suggested one answer. The publication two days later of a devastating report into doping in cycling and athletics by a parliamentary select committee suggests a rather different one.

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These are a sadistic people. They emerge with air horns at 3 a.m. to check IDs and make sure the tenters have not sneaked back to the comfort of their beds. How do the Line Monitors sleep at night? They sleep well, you imagine, because they go home when they're done with the air horns. But now they look festive and are wearing blue beads. You wish you had beads.

They hand you a sheet with cheering instructions, which you are grateful for. It tells you: "Before Tip: Jump in rhythm with band's drummer. Yell 'Woo' every time you jump." It also says some strategically mean things that you are to yell at people at the correct moments. If one particular guy has the ball, you must remember to tell him his father is better at basketball. (He is a Jr. and apparently his Sr. was in the N.B.A.) If there is an alley-oop, the sheet says you must "Lean back and yell 'Oh.' Point to the baby being held up on the right side of the court. Yell 'Baby.'" You vow to ask somebody what an alley-oop is and hope one happens so you can see this baby.

You ask so many people where the student section is that a police officer feels bad for you and escorts you there.

You spot a friend from your dorm, one of the aforementioned cruel Line Monitors. She is proud you are there. She shoos you into the writhing mass of students that must stand always.

You identify some people you know well enough to stand with. You make your way to them and wedge your body into the line and glare at the person you have displaced, even though he is clearly in the right and there was no room for you.

The opposing team comes out. They are from Virginia Tech, which you hear is a nice place, but your sheet says it is not. "Virginia Tech's only national title is for bass fishing." The players from the Other Team are introduced and you must chant the ritual welcome: "HI, JUSTIN ... YOU SUCK!" We do that for each new player. Ah. This is why people hate us.

Now us! You recognize Alex O'Connell. He was in your documentary studies class last semester. He is very, very tall but you only saw him sitting and he slouches so you thought he was a normal-size person for a while.

Then the Man Himself emerges. Mike Krzyzewski. Coach K. He is our short angry Polish-American man and we revere him as a god. As with many gods, you almost never hear him talk and you see him even less. We pay him $9 million a year to be our short angry man and he has a tower where he keeps his athletes. And he is so short you can't see him now, but you know he is there because everyone is bowing over and over again.

It is Valentine's Day today, but it was Coach K's birthday yesterday, so the Line Monitors gave everyone birthday hats. Why didn't they give you a birthday hat? Maybe they could tell you are a fraud. You are not a Cameron Crazie. You are a Cameron Reasonable. You are ashamed.

Some minutes pass, filled with what are apparently embarrassing turnovers on both sides. The game is not going well. The guy next to you, the one you glared at before, is yelling some particularly inventive obscenities. His name is Trevor. Who hurt you, Trevor?

The Line Monitors keep trying to get "Happy Birthday" started, but the band always interrupts before we can get to the "Coach K" part.

More basketball happens. The Line Monitors are upset because we should be doing much better than the other team, which your sheet clearly says is unranked.

There is a person in a bright-blue, full-body fur suit a couple of rows in front of you. Is he Cookie Monster? A fuzzy Blue Devil? Unclear.

You get distracted when you realize there is a guy who hurls his body on the court to wipe off the sweat when someone falls. He seems both honored to be there and filled with terror. Is this a student, frantically scrubbing bodily fluids? Either way, you are glad you are not him.

All at once, in perfect unison, the students start chanting, "TUCK YOUR SHIRT IN." You quickly scan the court and indeed, someone's shirt has come untucked. This was not on your sheet. You are caught unawares. How could you have anticipated this? You consider tucking in your own shirt.

You are starting to get the hang of some of the sounds you're supposed to make. When the opposing team does something stupid like drop the ball, you go "OOP OOP OOP" and wiggle your arms like an octopus. You are always relieved when this happens because you know you are doing the correct thing.

We are doing better! Our boys are now "sinking their 3s." Blue-fur-suit guy has a cardboard cutout of a banana. What could this signify? He finally turns around - he has a gorilla mask on! But he also has a tail, which you are sure gorillas do not have because you have earned the Duke biology T-shirt you are wearing.

O'Connell from documentary studies dunks, but it's a split second after the shot clock runs out, so it doesn't count. Duke wins anyway. The Line Monitors are relieved and smugly pretend they were never worried we would lose to the bass-fishing school.

Later you hear you were on ESPN. You take a screenshot for posterity so that your friends and family will see that, indeed, you went to at least one game. You are about eight pixels but it is clearly you, staring blankly toward the camera as the Crazies rage around you, all facing an entirely different direction. It was less than seven minutes into the game. You were wondering how early is too early to go for Peanut M&Ms.

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Opinion | I Go to Duke. Do I Have to Care About Basketball?

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These are a sadistic people. They emerge with air horns at 3 a.m. to check IDs and make sure the tenters have not sneaked back to the comfort of their beds. How do the Line Monitors sleep at night? They sleep well, you imagine, because they go home when they're done with the air horns.

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(by Dr. Paul S. Auerbach, The Wall Street Journal) - Football is entertaining to watch, but it's a violent collision sport that causes the majority of traumatic brain injuries in athletes. During a high-school season, one study finds, nearly 1 in 5 players on any given team will suffer a concussion. Many will suffer more than one. The football establishment needs to address this issue emphatically-and it can do so without changing the essence of the game that millions of Americans love.

Concussions occur when the brain moves suddenly and forcefully within the skull, back and forth or rotationally, like a lump of Jell-O in a box. The brain may require weeks to recover; what effects ultimately linger, doctors cannot fully predict. They diminish brain function, including cognition, memory, attention span, learning ability, emotional and behavioral stability and other features of "executive function." A repeat concussion that occurs before the first one has healed can cause second-impact syndrome, which is far more severe.

Beyond the acute suffering, football concussions lead to permanent neurological impairments, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, whose symptoms can include depression, aggression and dementia. The cascade begins with the first injury, which might occur in a youth football league. Each year on the field, the risks are compounded-with concussions, prevention is everything, because there is no treatment except to hope that there is no permanent impairment.

I've served on the sidelines as a team physician at high-school, college and professional football games, so I know the sport well and its potential to cause harm. As an emergency physician, I have diagnosed and treated too many concussions, and worse traumatic brain injuries, suffered while playing football. After all this experience, I'm convinced that adding one new rule would go a long way toward ending the scourge of football head injuries. That change would be to eliminate opposing "down linemen" from the game.

Down lineman are the large, heavy and strong players positioned at the line of scrimmage, usually in a crouching stance with one or both hands touching the turf. On the offense, they block opposing players, protecting or clearing a path for the quarterback and running backs. On the defense, they try to tackle the ball carrier. When the ball is snapped, these opposing linemen collide head to head like rams in a territorial dispute. Their brains decelerate quickly-play after play after play.

The players wear helmets, but there is virtually no evidence that they prevent concussions. A helmet cushions the head but does not sufficiently prevent the brain from dangerously sliding and rotating within the skull. Down linemen are believed to incur frequent "subconcussive" hits-concussions that are asymptomatic or nearly so. Thousands of these over the course of a career may cumulatively cause permanent and devastating brain damage. While the NFL and other football leagues have taken steps to address the most dramatic collisions, which produce the visible, severe acute injuries, they have largely neglected the nonobvious repetitive injuries that pose the greatest danger of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

I am not aware of any doctor, coach, parent or player who argues against players' safety. But if everyone knows what is happening to the brains of these players, why is it taking so long to make the rules changes necessary to protect them?

The answer is that football is a massive ecosystem of socioeconomic forces. Colleges, coaches, owners, municipalities, advertisers and television networks pay and are paid large sums to maintain a culture of football. Players are influenced by personal goals, peer pressure, family preferences and the media. They imagine scholarships and professional contracts and glory, which are elusive for all but a very small percentage. Coaches want to win, and some get paid to do it. Companies selling equipment that is ineffective at preventing concussions-helmets, mouth guards, face masks-tout their products' effectiveness.

We've seen advances in educational programs, protective devices, neck-muscle training and diagnostic tools. Yet rule changes are the only interventions that have been proven to prevent concussions. The most common argument against them is that rule changes would make the sport less appealing to spectators: "It just wouldn't be the same."

It wouldn't-but making football safer might make it better. Eliminating opposing down linemen would only push the game in the direction it already is evolving, toward more passing and less running. If opposing linemen simply started each play upright, in a knees-bent "ready" position, with their hands in front of them, it would nearly guarantee that their hands and arms, rather than their heads, would be the first body parts in contact.

Even then, football would still have concussion risks: strikes to the helmet with hands or forearms, tackling maneuvers, falls to the turf, and errant blows. All of these occur most often during contact practice, because players spend more time in practice than in games.

To further lessen the number of concussions while preserving the spectator value, the rules could be rewritten to discourage as many unnecessary brain decelerations as possible. There have been some attempts to accomplish this-penalties for targeting, limiting the amount of contact during practice, and removing kickoffs and abusive tackling drills in youth football.

If the governing bodies that control the sport need evidence to make rule changes, my suggestion is that they could be easily tested at different levels-youth, high school, college and professional-and then outcomes compared.

A few ideas:

There should be no tackling in youth (pre-junior high school) football.

In high school and beyond, there should be no live tackling during scrimmage in practice. Instead tackling instruction and drills could be used to teach proper techniques.

Targeting-intentionally and forcefully striking the helmet of an opposing player during a game-should be cause for ejection from the current and the following game.

These would help, but eliminating opposing down linemen is the most important reform. It would diminish the head-to-head collisions that cause brain degeneration without acute symptoms. To completely evaluate the effect would likely require advanced diagnostic techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, and long-term follow-up studies on chronic brain disorders. We have the technology to do this, and we should use it.

It would be impossible to eliminate all injuries in a sport that involves tackling players to the ground. But much more could be done to prevent concussions, beginning with the elimination of opposing down linemen-or at the very least studying the idea. To do neither is to ignore a proposal for safety, to reject the pursuit of knowledge, and to continue subjecting players to needless harm. The football establishment should do something before the game ruins the brains and futures of another generation of players.
Dr. Auerbach is a professor of emergency medicine at Stanford. Published Jan. 19, 2018 at The Wall Street Journal. Reprinted here Jan. 18, 2017 for educational purposes only. Visit the website at wsj .com.
Questions

1. The purpose of an editorial/commentary is to explain, persuade, warn, criticize, entertain, praise or answer. What do you think is the purpose of Dr. Auerbach's editorial? Explain your answer.

2. What is the main idea of this editorial?

3. Describe the problem Dr. Auerbach details.

4. What solution does Dr. Auerbach recommend?

5. What are Dr. Auerbach's qualifications?

6. Do you think the change recommended by Dr. Auerbach should be implemented? Explain your answer.

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(by Dr. Paul S. Auerbach, The Wall Street Journal) - Football is entertaining to watch, but it's a violent collision sport that causes the majority of traumatic brain injuries in athletes. During a high-school season, one study finds, nearly 1 in 5 players on any given team will suffer a concussion.