Excerpted from “Clinton’s Imagination Problem,” David Brooks, New York Times, 6 May 2016

This year it seems especially important to show voters that you see them and know them, and can name the exact frustrations in their lives. Clinton’s speech was filled with the flattery that candidates always offer their audiences — “Appalachia is home to some of the most resilient, hard-working people anywhere.” But the political rhetoric was conventional and she didn’t really capture the texture of life.

She didn’t really capture the way economic loss has triggered a series of complex spirals, and that social decay is now center stage. A few decades ago there were 175,000 coal jobs in the U.S. Now there are 57,000. That economic dislocation has hit local economies in the form of shuttered storefronts and abandoned bank buildings.

Everywhere there are local activists trying to rebuild, but it’s hard to hold off the dislocation, distrust and pessimism. Birthrates drop. Family structures erode. Life expectancy falls. People slip between the cracks and inevitably drug use rises. According to The Charleston Gazette-Mail, between 1999 and 2009, per-capita consumption of oxycodone, hydrocodone and fentanyl tripled. By 2009 West Virginians were annually filling 19 painkiller prescriptions a person.

Heavy opioid use often slides over into heroin use. Heroin overdose deaths tripled between 2009 and 2014. In those years the state had the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation.

It’s not surprising that there’s so much drug use in towns where there’s so little to do. But the root of this kind of addiction crisis is social isolation. Addiction is a disease that afflicts the lonely. It is a disease that afflicts those who have suffered trauma in childhood and beyond. And once the social fabric frays it’s hard for economic recovery to begin. I ran into employers in Pittsburgh who had industrial jobs to fill but they couldn’t find people who could pass the pre-employment drug test.

Halberstam is gifted and inquisitive enough to make this structure work, but the result is nothing so robust or riveting as When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss's biography of Lombardi. In Steve Belichick, we meet the first quiet man of chalk, a lifelong assistant coach who specialized in scouting his teams' opponents, finding their strengths and weaknesses. Like his son, he disdained celebrity, preferring the praise of players and fellow coaches; he never sought the head coaching job at the United States Naval Academy, where he coached for 33 years.

– Richard Sandomirov, “X's and O's,” New York Times 27 November 2005

Belichick subsequently attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he played center and tight end. In addition to being a member of the football team, he played lacrosse and squash, serving as the captain of the lacrosse team during his senior season. A member of Chi Psifraternity, he earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1975. He would eventually be part of the inaugural induction class into the university's Athletics Hall of Fame in spring 2008.

-- Wikipedia

. . .

A slender, soft-spoken minister’s son newly elected to Congress — his father was a Republican — Mr. McGovern went to Washington as a 34-year-old former college history teacher and decorated bomber pilot in World War II. He thought of himself as a son of the prairie as well, with a fittingly flat, somewhat nasal voice and a brand of politics traceable to the Midwestern progressivism of the late 19th century.

Elected to the Senate in 1962, Mr. McGovern left no special mark in his three terms, but he voted consistently in favor of civil rights and antipoverty bills, was instrumental in developing and expanding food stamp and nutrition programs, and helped lead opposition to the Vietnam War in the Senate.

-- David E. Rosenbaum, “George McGovern Dies at 90, a Liberal Trounced but Never Silenced,” New York Times, 21 October 2012