I was looking over someone’s shoulder this morning on the subway while they were reading the sports section of… the Post? AM New York? Metro? Regardless, there was an action shot from a football game, and I couldn’t help noticing that there was a ton of pink behind the players. I looked more closely, and it turned out to be a huge breast cancer awareness ad inside the stadium — I think it may even have been about self-exams. Kind of crazy how far we’ve come: I was just reading in The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ridiculously compelling “biography” of cancer) that in the early 1950s, the New York Times refused to publish the words “breast” or “cancer” in its pages (thus making it impossible for a survivor to place the announcement she wanted to run about a support group); today, advertisements push the importance of early BREAST (gasp!) CANCER (gasp!) detection in the background of a professional football game, that stronghold of masculinity and wholesome American values. Progress!
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