10 NEWS People
Treating Covid patients instead of blocking
Laurent Duvernay-Tardif wasn’t with his Kansas
City Chiefs teammates when they lost on Super
Bowl LV Sunday, said Adam Kilgore in The
Washington Post. The 6-foot-5, 321-pound
offensive lineman, 29, sat out the season to fight
the pandemic, trading in his Chiefs helmet for
a mask and face shield. A native of Montreal,
Duvernay-Tardif holds a medical degree from
McGill University but has not yet been licensed to practice. When
the triumph of winning last year’s Super Bowl gave way to the hor-
rors of the pandemic, he called Canadian health authorities and
offered his help. They sent him to a long term–care facility, where
three days a week he drew blood, administered meds, and fed and
bathed desperately ill patients. “From an emotional standpoint,”
three days was all he could handle, he said. The doctors, nurses,
and other staff at the facility left him in awe. “The amount of
sacrifice is unbelievable,” he said. Duvernay-Tardif missed football
this year, and admits he’s worried his year off will hurt his career.
But he feels he’s where he needs to be. “The definition of what it
means to be a hero changed because of those people,” he said.
The Cassandra of the ‘attention economy’
Michael Goldhaber is the prophet of the internet era, said Charlie
Warzel in The New York Times. A former theoretical physicist,
he foresaw in the 1980s how the nascent world wide web would
rewire our attention spans and reshape the social order. With
a 1997 essay in Wired, he helped popularize the term “atten-
tion economy,” warily eying a future in which anyone “can now
have a crack at the global audience.” In subsequent articles he
predicted online influencer culture, the coarsening of political dis-
course, and terrorists using the web to recruit and communicate.
“It’s amazing and disturbing to see this develop to the extent it
has,” said Goldhaber, 78, who lives quietly in Berkeley, Calif. He
sees the rise of Donald Trump—who rose to power by paying
attention to people who felt starved of it—as a perfect emblem of
an era in which attention is power. He frets that rational discourse
is “drowned out by the loudest and most ridiculous.” The Capitol
insurrection, driven by conspiracy theories promoted online
and on cable TV networks that generate nonstop outrage, only
deepened his worry that the attention economy and a healthy
democracy may be incompatible. “It felt like an expression of a
world in which everyone is desperately seeking their own audi-
ence and fracturing reality in the process,” he said. “I only see
that accelerating.”
Lisa Guerrero endured so much humiliation as a sideline reporter
for Monday Night Football that it almost drove her to suicide, said
Andrew Marchand in the New York Post. In 2003, the sportscaster
was recruited by MNF executive producer Fred Gaudelli. But
affronted fans tagged the former L.A. Rams cheerleader and swim-
suit model as a bimbo—and some early slipups gave them ammu-
nition. She was extremely nervous on camera—and more so off-air,
throwing up before every game. “I was terrified,” she said. “I wasn’t
afraid of the job. I was afraid of [Gaudelli] screaming at me after
every game.” Fired after a single season, she sank into depression,
often unable to get out of bed. When she flipped on sports radio in
her car one day and heard the hosts mocking her looks and calling
her Monday Night Football’s “biggest liability ever,” she hit a break-
ing point. “I considered killing myself,” she said. Her social worker
father talked her down, convincing her there was life beyond
sports. She’s proved him right, shining as a crusading investigative
reporter on Inside Edition, winning more than 30 awards over the
past decade. “I get to make a difference in people’s lives and make
change happen,” she said. “I wake up and pinch myself every day.”Getty
,^ A
P^ (2 )Guerrero’s Monday Night ordeal
QTom Brady basked in
congratulations from
wife Gisele Bündchen,
his three children, and
ex-girlfriend Bridget
Moynahan after
winning his seventh
Super Bowl this week.
The Tampa Bay Buc-
caneers quarterback, 43, and Moynahan,
49, split in 2009, and Brady’s new relation-
ship with Brazilian supermodel Bündchen
was complicated by news that Moynahan
was pregnant with Brady’s son, Jack. But
Moynahan, Brady, and Bündchen agreed
to co-parent Jack and have been on good
terms. Moynahan sent Brady a sweet mes-sage on Instagram after the former New
England Patriots star led the Bucs to victory.
“I am pretty sure I am not the only one from
#patriotsnation celebrating @buccaneers,”
Moynahan wrote. Bündchen, 40, went on
the field to smooch the Super Bowl MVP.
Sources said Moynahan and Bündchen are
now quite close. “Gisele and Bridget now
actually talk as much as Tom and Bridget, if
not more,” a source told the New York Post.
QAaron Rodgers casually revealed that he’s
engaged last week in the middle of his NFL
Most Valuable Player acceptance speech. The
Green Bay Packers quarterback said, “
was definitely a crazy year. I got engaged
and I played some of the best football in my
career.” Rodgers, 37, didn’t name his fiancée,
but it was recently reported he was dating
Big Little Lies co-star Shailene Woodley, 29.QNew York Timesstar science reporter Donald
McNeil Jr. resigned last week after more
than 150 newsroom colleagues protested his
use of the “N-word” during a 2019 Times-
sponsored trip to Peru with high school stu-
dents. Times leadership initially said McNeil,
67, would be “disciplined” but not fired after
learning that he spoke the word in a discus-
sion about whether it was wrong for a teen to
use it in a video. But after colleagues said they
were “outraged” McNeil did not suffer more
severe punishment, he resigned, saying he
now realized he had shown “extraordinarily
bad judgment.” McNeil, who joined the pa-
per in 1976, earned acclaim for his coverage
of Covid-19, and the Times nominated him
for a Pulitzer Prize. His resignation sparked
internal dissension, with defenders saying
he’d been forced out by a mob.