balkanizing, football remains this kind of centerpiece of our national political popular culture. and there has been renewed focus on race after, of course, since former san francisco 49ers quarterback colin kaepernick elected to take a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racism. he has never played football again after that. this week we are seeing new high-profile examples of how issues of racial justice, racial oppression and hierarchy play out in fraught and profound ways in this sport. it is one of the last remaining sources of entertainment that can bring together 100 million american viewers, the only one left. today was a momentous day for the national football league as the washington football team announced their new name, the commanders. nearly two years ago the team finally, finally dropped their long time name and mascot, widely considered to be a racist slur. activists had been calling for change for years and years. the team s own
it s part of the reason why we think of boston as a world leader inth terms of health car and hospitals. it helps that more than a dozen hospitals from mass general, to dana farber to boston children s to all of this famous hospitals and health care instituting that ared all famous in their own right but also teaching hospitals for harvard medical school. and theho one with by far the weirdest name is the hospital that s called brigham and women s. before d 1980, there were two different brigham hospitals in boston that were both harvard med school teaching hospitals. there was also the boston hospital for women which is kind of a weird concept but that s what used to to exist in medicine, in 1975, those three different harvard medical school teachingff hospitals, they all merged. and they got a new name, they got the still awkward to this day name of brigham and women s. that s the name of the hospital. it s a major teaching hospital, asl. i said it is affiliated wi harva
Harvard medical school is not attached to its own hospital. like, for example, stanford medical school is really highly ranked. same goes for johns hopkins goen they ve got that incredibly highly ranked medical school, johns hopkins university hospital. also at the university of pennsylvania s hospital inso philadelphia. that s a common setup for big highly-ranked medical schools but that is not how it works for harvard. harvard is the top-ranked or one of the top-ranked schools in the united states year after year. but they don t have their own individual teaching hospital. instead, harvard medical school partners with a whole bunch of hospitals. they partner with more than a dozenre different hospitals and medical institutions in the boston area and they use all of them as their teaching hospitals and affiliates.