As Olympics Approach, Jill Pilgrim Analyzes Sports Protests

Jill Pilgrim, co-founder and principal of the Precise Advisory Group, has been blogging on sports issues at the Precise website. In a recent piece, she focused on the topic of "Run A Mile in Their Sneakers: Olympic Games & Political Protest." Pushing off from an article in The Nation magazine, Pilgrim writes,

The Dave Zirin article, “After 44 Years, It’s Time Brent Musburger apologized to John Carlos and Tommie Smith” —http://bit.ly/NzlD34 — gave voice to a myriad of issues and sub-issues that surround the quadrennial (now bi-annual) celebration of “selected” sports that is the Olympic Games.  These include: the exploitation of athletes’ talent for the financial gain of a small cadre of elite business executives and their business enterprises, the unavoidable focus that an Olympic Games brings to the issues of human rights, discrimination and politic power and, most of all, the failure of international organizations such as the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee to achieve their lofty goals such as “[t]o develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” or to prohibit “[a]ny form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise”.

Coco Myers: "Picky Eater" Featured in NY Times

Writer Coco Myers appears in a Sunday New York Times article today with the title "The Picky Eater Who Came to Dinner." The article addresses dinner parties and other events where hosts adjust menus for guests with food restrictions. Featuring a photo of Myers preparing a salad in her East Hampton, NY home, the article says,

Some group-dining devotees say they are happy to adjust as the occasion demands. In April, Coco Myers, a writer who avoids gluten and lactose, invited a fish-averse friend to a dinner party in East Hampton, N.Y., hosted by a couple who don’t eat red meat. A few days earlier, the hostess (Scott O’Neil, a painter and an amateur cook, who had been planning a seafood stew) e-mailed Ms. Myers to ask about problem foods.
“Sometimes I go to dinner parties, and you just deal with what you get, right?” Ms. Myers recalled. “But she put it out there.” So she compiled a dietary no-fly list: no fish, no gluten, no lactose.