Jessica Luther

A Team of Their Own,” about an all-girls travel youth baseball team, Girls Travel Baseball (GTB). Not only did Bleacher Report like my idea, they even sent a film crew to help chronicle the team. To the point where NBC Nightly News sent their own camera crew to cover GTB a few weeks after my piece published. I am honored and proud to say this piece is a Best Of for both Longreads and Longform in 2017.

It’s a striking piece because the mothers seem unable to imagine a world wherein abusers (in these cases and most cases, men) are held accountable for their violent actions. They engage in victim-blaming, of course, and try to thread the needle between “falsely accused” and “wrongly accused,” mainly predicated on their own definitions of what counts as sexual assault, definitions that have, thankfully, become more comprehensive since when those mothers attended university. It throws into relief how we accept without question the consequences of being a victim; or rather, how we have all become ok with the cost of being victimized (because being a victim is a feminized position in our society’s hierarchy and we cannot care about the feminine). But when it is time to seriously look at the cost to those who harm once that harm comes to light, all we see is the ruination of the abusers’ lives, all we focus on is how hard it is for them to be held accountable, all we want to know is how long it will take for them to be redeemed so we can wash our hands of this case and, in turn, this issue and resume moving through the world with our heads in the sand.

A glowing press release from the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats announced this morning that they have hired former Baylor head football coach Art Briles to be the Assistant Head Coach Offence. The assistant coaches claimed Briles wasn’t made aware of the incident involving football players and the alleged victim until nine months after the alleged incident occurred. The statement said, “Briles told [the victim’s coach] to report it to the police and prosecute the players if there was any wrongdoing. The Baylor assistant coaches claimed in the statement that the victim’s coach later said, “I think Coach Briles handled the matter honorably and with the serious attention it deserved.

I have struggled to figure out what to title this post and how to talk about Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted Worldbecause, in very large part, I liked this book a lot. Newport then spends the rest of the book telling you why deep work is the best and how great you’re going to feel when you get good at doing it, and how draining shallow work is and how you need to cut it out of your life as much as possible. I am going to embrace a hard stop at the end of the day (no work, including emails! , at night), using the time I’m walking the dog to work through a particularly thorny part of an argument I’m writing, and not always immediately turning to the ease of scrolling through my phone when I’m even the slightest bit bored. I then wondered about getting rid of shallow work because you have enough money to pay someone to take on the burden of it for you and what that, as much as the gendered aspect of this book, tells us about who gets to do deep work.