Newton-John’s ‘gift’ of cancer

Olivia Newton-John sings to herself to lift her spirits, said Ann Lee in The Guardian (U.K.).

She likes to repeat the lyrics “I’m healthy, I’m strong” to random melodies. “I think it’s very important to keep that positive message in your head,” says Newton-John, who was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in 2018, the third time she’d been diagnosed with the disease in the past 28 years. At 72, the British-born pop star and actress looks much younger than her age, just as she did in 1978, when she was 29 but played high school senior Sandy Olsson in Grease. She’s learned to cope with illness and tragedy in a variety of ways: Her first cancer diagnosis was in 1992, soon after the death of her father. In 2018, she had to learn to walk again after the cancer spread and she fractured the base of her spine. Newton-John has had surgeries and receives regular chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which she says have shrunk the tumors, and uses medical cannabis to help with anxiety, sleep, and pain. Her husband grows it commercially on their ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif. She doesn’t like to think of herself as “fighting” cancer, she says. “I don’t know what I would be without it. It gave me purpose and intention and taught me a lot about compassion. It has been a gift. Every day is a blessing.”

Greta’s superpower

Climate activist Greta Thunberg thinks of Asperger’s syndrome as her superpower, said David Marchese in The New York Times Magazine. She’s become a global icon in just two years since she went on strike from school in Sweden to draw attention to climate change. “Most people follow social codes,” says Thunberg, 17, “but people with Asperger’s and autism, we don’t care what people think about us.” Before becoming an activist, Thunberg spent most of her time with family. “I found people my own age completely uninteresting,” she says. “They didn’t talk to me. But then I started school-striking, and I remember feeling it was so strange, because people actually looked at me. I had always been invisible, and suddenly I wasn’t.” Although she’s been called the Joan of Arc of the climate movement, Thunberg leads a fairly normal existence, thanks to the Scandinavian tradition of Jantelagen: the downplaying of individual achievement. She does jigsaw puzzles, watches documentaries, plays with her dogs, and goes to school. Thunberg is nonchalant about her fame and says she isn’t particularly wise. “One thing that I do have is the childlike and naïve way of seeing things,” she says. “We tend to overthink things. Sometimes the simple answer is, it is not sustainable to live like this.”

What Snipes learned behind bars

Wesley Snipes thinks prison made him a better person, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian (U.K.). One of Hollywood’s top leading men of the 1990s and early 2000s, Snipes was sentenced to three years in prison and fined $5 million for willful failure to file $15 million of federal income taxes. He hasn’t given many interviews since being released from prison in 2013, although he didn’t have much to promote, since he hasn’t been in many films. Snipes, 58, calls his imprisonment “a miscarriage of justice” but says his time at “camp,” aka minimum-security prison, taught him a lot, including “the value of time and how often we squander it.” He came out “a clearer person,” he says. “Clearer on my values, clearer on my purpose, and clearer on what I was going to do once I had my freedom back.” That includes spending more time with his five children and his second wife, South Korean artist Nakyung Park, and resuming his acting career. “I don’t have time to sit back and say I was wronged and recapture all that was lost. I made decisions. I accept the ramifications of those decisions. If two and a half years of my life were in meditation and isolation out of the 100 I plan on living, good deal.”

What about smaller schools?

Schools in the NCAA’s Divisions II and III, which do not spend as much on athletics and often do not give athletic scholarships, have not eliminated as many varsity programs as Division I schools. In all, 84 Division I teams have been cut, compared with 58 Division II teams and 62 Division III teams. At the Division III University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, athletic officials are struggling with the loss of revenue generated from clinics and summer camps. “That was huge,” said athletic director Ryan Callahan, noting that the camps “subsidize up to 60 percent of our operating budget” for sports teams. At its sister campus UW–Parkside, athletic director Andrew Gavin launched a $5 million fundraiser on March 5—at the start of the pandemic in the U.S.—to renovate the gym, among other things. “The timing was interesting,” he said, adding that some typical donors decided to either skip the fundraiser or donate less than they normally would have.

Did losing the NCAA Tournament hurt?

Massively. Every year, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament not only crowns a national champion but generates nearly $1 billion in revenue from combined ticket sales and TV rights. That money is then distributed throughout college athletics, funding programs large and small. In late March, after the men’s basketball tournament was canceled because of the pandemic, the NCAA announced that it would distribute $225 million to member schools for 2020—a 62.5 percent reduction from the

$600 million that had been expected before the pandemic. And while that loss might be absorbed by a football powerhouse like the University of Texas, smaller universities are not so fortunate. The University of Wyoming was forced to make deep cuts in its sports budget after facing a $42 million budget deficit. Wyoming athletic director Tom Burman could have been speaking for all college athletic directors when he called the pandemic “the greatest adversity we have ever faced.”

An ill omen for the Olympics

Student athletes and Olympic officials are warning that college administrators’ decision to cut non-revenue Olympic sports to save money during the pandemic jeopardizes the feeder system for U.S. Olympic teams. “To be on the national team,” said Erik Shoji, a U.S. Olympic bronze medalist in volleyball during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, “you’ve got to play in college.” The former All-American at Stanford was one of hundreds of American collegiate athletes to compete during the Rio games.

The NCAA reports that eight out of 10 athletes who represented the U.S. there played in college. In total, Stanford cut 10 Olympic sports programs—including the men’s volleyball program that nourished Shoji—only four years after the university set a school record by winning 26 medals in Rio, 14 of them gold. “It’s absolutely devastating to the Olympic pipeline,” said Alexander Massialas, a Stanford alumnus and two-time Olympic medalist in men’s fencing. Stanford has cut men’s fencing this year. and former NCAA investigator, told The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins. “There has just been an extraordinary amount of spending on things that have very little resemblance to a university’s mission to educate and develop people.” Some colleges have now laid off coaches and staff in some sports. In a letter to alumni and students, Stanford University officials said they faced a $70 million budget shortfall over the next three years and had to cut 11 sports programs. The athletic department made $139 million in 2018–19, with $44 million of that total coming from football.