Interview: On Football, War and Brain Trauma

On Sunday, the New England Patriots battle the Seattle SeaHawks in the fight for the Super Bowl XLIX title. If you tune in, you’ll hear a lot of commentary on the game phrased just like that – teams battling in the trenches, players blitzing downfield, the blunt force of a tackle – tried and true football-as-war metaphors.

But the links between the game and the military are more than semantic. Here’s one more thing they have in common: the psychological and physical toll of violence on the human brain.

We talk to Steve Fainaru, an investigative reporter who co-wrote a book about traumatic brain injury in the NFL and won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his series on private military contractors in the Iraq War.

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