Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them midflight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

'Affable' is the word that often comes up from reporters, even staunch critics, who meet Lou Dobbs for the first time.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

In the early 16th century the Italian physician Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, a pioneer in the science of anatomy, came up with the idea that perhaps 'brain commotion' was caused by the thrust of the soft structure of the brain against the solid case of the skull.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

'The melancholy of all things done' is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Working in a gun store is hard on your feet and your back.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Bob Dole. He's like the neighbors' Labrador retriever your dad used to curse for all that barking, all that darn digging in your mom's tulip bed, and now look, you live next door to a godforsaken pack of teeth-baring rabid Pomeranians, and, good golly, Bob Dole!

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can't keep it from sloshing around. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

The last time Congress seriously addressed the notion of creating a way to keep track of America's guns was 1968.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

You can't think 'Dole' without thinking 'Bob Dole' and cartoons and third-person good times. He was one of those politicians: the kind you jabbed but were happy enough to have around.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Every vice president since Mondale has lived up on this hill, on the twelve-acre campus of the Naval Observatory in Northwest Washington. It's a pretty house with a wraparound porch and a white turret.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Contrary to popular mythology, not all NFL cheerleaders are bimbos or strippers or bored pretty girls looking to get rich. The Ben-Gals offer proof. Neither a bimbo nor a stripper nor a bored pretty girl would survive the rigorous life of a Ben-Gal. The Ben-Gals all have jobs or school or both.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can't fully protect the head from damaging impact.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

A face isn't an organ, like a liver or a heart. A face is muscles, nerves, bones, and skin. A face is more like a hand or a foot.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

In 2003, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a year later, a national ethics committee in France, said that face transplantation would be going too far. The risk of complication would far outweigh the benefits.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Fallon tells me about first starting 'Late Night': how he knew audiences were dubious.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

When people spot Fallon in public, they do not shriek or drool or go wobbly in the knees. It's a different look entirely. A tilt of the head, mouth agape, eyebrows rolled like you do when you see a puppy.

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas

Almost as soon as it aired, 'Late Night' became one of the most buzzed-about shows on television.