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Jeanne Marie Laskas [0-0] American
Rank: 104
Writer


Jeanne Marie Laskas is an American writer, journalist, and professor.

Computers, Romantic

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There's no telling how many guns we have in America - and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. Computers
101
The Gun Control Act of 1968 was an attempt to impose order. It set up the Federal Firearms License (FFL) system; gun stores would have to become licensed, and they would have to follow certain rules. Felons, illegal immigrants, and crazy people would be prohibited from buying guns.
102
Whether we buy into the rhetoric or not, one thing has been made clear: Illegal immigration is a problem reaching a breaking point, and something must be done.
103
Every vice president since Mondale has lived up on this hill, on the twelve-acre campus of the Naval Observatory in Northwest Washington. It's a pretty house with a wraparound porch and a white turret.
104
Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.
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A face isn't an organ, like a liver or a heart. A face is muscles, nerves, bones, and skin. A face is more like a hand or a foot.
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In 2003, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a year later, a national ethics committee in France, said that face transplantation would be going too far. The risk of complication would far outweigh the benefits.
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Fallon tells me about first starting 'Late Night': how he knew audiences were dubious.
108
When people spot Fallon in public, they do not shriek or drool or go wobbly in the knees. It's a different look entirely. A tilt of the head, mouth agape, eyebrows rolled like you do when you see a puppy.
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Almost as soon as it aired, 'Late Night' became one of the most buzzed-about shows on television.
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I'm not a sportswriter.
111
In the Dobbsian view of America, the mainstream media isn't evil because it's liberal but because it's lazy. And Washington is utterly corrupt, has sold out, Democrats and Republicans alike. And corporate America is an insatiable pig.
112
'Affable' is the word that often comes up from reporters, even staunch critics, who meet Lou Dobbs for the first time.
113
When he emerged Lou Dobbs the populist, he was so hard to peg. A mishmash of contradictions: anti-outsourcing, anti-globalization, pro-international-trade, pro-free-enterprise, anti-corporatism, pro-choice, pro-Second Amendment, pro-gay-marriage, pro-gays-serving-openly-in-the-military, pro-military, anti-war-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.
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You can't think 'Dole' without thinking 'Bob Dole' and cartoons and third-person good times. He was one of those politicians: the kind you jabbed but were happy enough to have around.
115
Bob Dole is not a romantic, at least not an immediate one. Bob Dole is not one to waste a lot of time on metaphor. Romantic
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Bob Dole is not a bitter man. That part is jarring. His life was hard.
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Bob Dole. He's like the neighbors' Labrador retriever your dad used to curse for all that barking, all that darn digging in your mom's tulip bed, and now look, you live next door to a godforsaken pack of teeth-baring rabid Pomeranians, and, good golly, Bob Dole!
118
In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting.
119
On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.
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Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. 'Iron Mike,' legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons.
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Mike Webster lost all his money or, maybe, gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon, Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.
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It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.
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Ndamukong started out playing soccer, like his sister before him. She excelled at it, played for Mississippi State, made the Cameroon national team.
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Buzz was, of course, the second man to walk on the moon. Buzz made a rap video, 'Rocket Experience,' with Snoop Dogg. He did the cha-cha and the fox-trot and was eliminated in the second round of season ten of 'Dancing with the Stars'.
125
Neither Neil Armstrong nor Michael Collins had a mental breakdown after returning from the moon.
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'The melancholy of all things done' is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.
201
No matter what your age, gender, politics, nationality, social or financial standing, every single person inhabiting the planet Earth has the same reaction to him: 'Holy crap, Buzz Aldrin, you went to the moon!'
202
By 2012, Dan Gilbert was well over his LeBron James-abandonment hissy fit. He opened Cleveland's first casino, with 1,900 slot machines and eighty-nine table games.
203
The LeBron 11, for $200, has hyperposite construction - a combination of Foamposite material and performance synthetics - and a new layer of Lunarlon cushioning; and anyway, Nike generates about $300 million off the sneakers.
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Pearl Harbor? Michael Bay doing a movie about the single most devastating, most holy day in United States military history? Why, that's like the Three Stooges doing a Holocaust movie. Or Barney doing 'Hamlet'.
205
'Bad Boys', which Bay made when he was just twenty-eight, having never made a movie before, having done a string of commercials and music videos with artists ranging from Donny Osmond to Meat Loaf, grossed more than $140 million worldwide.
206
The last time Congress seriously addressed the notion of creating a way to keep track of America's guns was 1968.
207
The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.
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Working in a gun store is hard on your feet and your back.
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Getting a gun should be easy for good people and impossible for bad people. The only trick is telling the difference.
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In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere.
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Football is in a guy's DNA. A primal thing. You should play it so you can talk about the glory days when you get older and drink Bud with the guys from the office. Get it done when you're young, while you have the chance.
212
The ESPN complex is a 255-acre playland, as beautiful and perfect as the Magic Kingdom itself down the road - except it's sports!
213
Jim Udinski has been coaching in the league for the past fourteen years, and his Division II team, the Lenape Valley Indians from suburban Philadelphia, has already made history - twice.
214
Women are more emotional than men, so they must attach emotion to their memories.
215
Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'
216
The new disease was named chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the NFL fervently and repeatedly denied that such a thing had anything to do with the league or its players.
217
Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.
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A coal mine greets you with only one sentiment, then hammers it: 'This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people'.
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Coal mines make the news only when they explode, collapse, kill. It's exciting! Tragedy! Fodder for a cable-news frenzy.
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Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world. The woody plants occur naturally in the sandy gravel understory of Maine's coastal forests, where little else bothers even trying to grow.
221
Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.
222
As a closeted gay man, Jim McGreevey lived a life of presentation, a gay man portraying a straight man.
223
One thing Jim McGreevey wants the world to know: Leading a double life as a gay man trying to appear straight was easy for him to pull off. He was 'good' at it. Not only that - it helped him become a better politician.
224
One cheerleader per season per NFL squad is chosen to attend the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. All season long, the cheerleaders speculate about who will be chosen.
225
Contrary to popular mythology, not all NFL cheerleaders are bimbos or strippers or bored pretty girls looking to get rich. The Ben-Gals offer proof. Neither a bimbo nor a stripper nor a bored pretty girl would survive the rigorous life of a Ben-Gal. The Ben-Gals all have jobs or school or both.
226
People assume NFL cheerleaders are within some vague sniffing distance of the good life, but a Ben-Gal is paid seventy-five bucks per game. That is correct: seventy-five bucks for each of ten home games. The grand cash total per season does not keep most of them flush in hair spray, let alone gas money to and from practice.
301
People assume cheering in the NFL is mostly about a girl trying to snag herself a big, beefy, stinkin' rich football player. That is not the case.
302
The 'modern' air-traffic-control system, and the FAA itself, was created in the aftermath of one of the most dramatic commercial midair bashes, way back in 1956.
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LaGuardia is jammed into just 680 urban acres; taxiways are tight; runways intersect; you can't launch a departure until the arrival on the other runway crosses the threshold or else the airplanes will ... collide.
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LaGuardia Airport is tiny compared to its sleek modern counterparts, like Atlanta or Denver with their endless parallel runways spread over thousands of acres.
305
One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it.
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Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them midflight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool.
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The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, serves 5 million people in seventy-eight California cities, one of six landfills operated by the Sanitation Districts of L.A. County.
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A person can't just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches.
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For centuries, native Eskimos cut blocks of oil-soaked tundra from natural seeps to use as fuel. In the 1920s, explorers arrived and began poking holes. In 1968, they discovered Prudhoe Bay State No. 1, the largest oil field in North America and one of the largest in the world, and a year later the adjacent Kuparuk field, the second-largest.
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People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska's North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho.
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The island is named Oooguruk, an Inupiaq word meaning 'bearded seal,' an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska's North Slope.
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In the early 16th century the Italian physician Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, a pioneer in the science of anatomy, came up with the idea that perhaps 'brain commotion' was caused by the thrust of the soft structure of the brain against the solid case of the skull.
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The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can't keep it from sloshing around. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull.
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If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can't fully protect the head from damaging impact.
315
Mike Webster's death was significant. Iron Mike. The best center in the NFL. Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. Four Super Bowl rings. He had played in more games - 220 of them - than any other player in Steelers history.
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