Society, Law & Politics

CUriosity: Why do so many people watch football on Thanksgiving?

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:54:26 +0000

CUriosity: Why do so many people watch football on Thanksgiving? Daniel William… Wed, 11/19/2025 - 07:54

Lisa Marshall

In CUriosity, experts across the CU Boulder campus answer questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Jared Bahir Browsh, assistant teaching professor and director of the Critical Sports Studies Program at CU Boulder, explains the historical and social roots behind the Thanksgiving football tradition.

Georgia Tech and Auburn face off on Thanksgiving Day in 1921. (Credit: Public Domain photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Think of Thanksgivings past, and you might conjure memories of family gathered around the table, the Macy’s parade playing in the background, and the smell of turkey and pumpkin pie.

Jared Bahir Browsh remembers the games.

There was the notorious 2012 “butt fumble” when New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez collided head first with the rear end of his teammate and dropped the ball, allowing the New England Patriots to run it in for the touchdown. And the time in 1999 when Dallas Cowboys cornerback Deion Sanders (a.k.a. Coach Prime now) caught two interceptions to help defeat the Miami Dolphins.

One year, Browsh, who spends the holidays in his hometown of Philadelphia, skipped the turkey altogether when his uncle got the family last-minute tickets to an Eagles game.

“We all kind of looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t care about the dinner. Let’s go,’” recalls Browsh, clad head-to-toe in green-and white Eagles gear as he stands in Folsom Field for an interview. “In our family, Thanksgiving and football are synonymous.”

They’re not alone. According to the NFL, a record 141 million people watched Thanksgiving football on TV in 2024, making it the highest Thanksgiving Day viewership on record.

That doesn’t surprise Browsh, a teaching professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies who studies the social and economic impact of sports. He views Thanksgiving football as not only a rich tradition dating back 150 years but also as a potent cultural touch point that can unite people, even in the most divided times.

“Family dynamics can create tension on Thanksgiving sometimes, but football provides this shared cultural experience that crosses age, gender, religion and political affiliation,” he says. “We don’t have many of those experiences anymore.”

As Browsh notes, Thanksgiving itself was established to promote unity, and football came along around the same time.

President Abraham Lincoln founded the federal holiday in 1863 to promote peace between Northerners and Southerners during the bloody Civil War.

Six years later, on Nov. 6, 1869, Princeton and Rutgers faced off for the first official American football game. Just 11 days later in Philadelphia, the Young America Cricket Club and Germantown Cricket Club played the first Thanksgiving football game on record.

Previously in CUriosity

What can horror films teach us about society?

Or read more CUriosity stories here

In the years before the 1920 establishment of the NFL, high school, club, and college teams routinely closed out their seasons on Thanksgiving Day, with communities packing into the stands to display their shared pride.

Thanksgiving football first hit the national airwaves in 1934 when listeners huddled around the radio to hear a new NFL franchise, the Detroit Lions, face off against the Chicago Bears.
In 1953, the Lions made history again—hosting the first nationally televised Thanksgiving game.

“People said football would never work on TV, because the lighting was uncertain and it was more of an in-person experience,” says Browsh.

Since 1966, the Dallas Cowboys have hosted a nationally televised Thanksgiving game every year but two, a tradition that Browsh says has helped the team clinch its reputation as “America’s Team.”

The Lions have also hosted a game every Thanksgiving, although some critics called for that privilege to be revoked during the team’s disastrous 0-16 2008 season. The NFL sided with tradition, the game went on, and the Lions lost 47-10.

Today, in addition to the Cowboys and Lions games, other teams vie for a coveted third game in the evening.

Tens of millions look on as they dish up seconds. And in the days to follow, they bask in the victory or lament the loss of their team in grocery store lines, office break rooms and group chats.

“In this oversaturated media environment, we have fewer and fewer shared movies or other forms of media to bring us together,” says Browsh. “But we still have football.”

Politics and other touchy topics can divide families on Thanksgiving, but football often unites people from across society, says Jared Bahir Browsh.

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John Oliver segment on public media gets major assist from CMDI

Megan Maneval — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:19:36 +0000

John Oliver segment on public media gets major assist from CMDI Megan Maneval Wed, 11/19/2025 - 07:19

College of Communication, Media, Design and Information

When Last Week Tonight wanted to talk about cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, its researchers called communication historian Josh Shepperd.

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Deepfakes and AI in the courtroom: Report calls for legal reforms to address a troubling trend

Lisa Marshall — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:28:25 +0000

Deepfakes and AI in the courtroom: Report calls for legal reforms to address a troubling trend Lisa Marshall Mon, 11/17/2025 - 13:28

Lisa Marshall

From cell phone footage to bodycam and surveillance clips, U.S. courtrooms are awash with video these days, with more than 80% of court cases hinging to some degree on video evidence.

But in the age of artificial intelligence, the legal system is ill-prepared to distinguish deep fakes from real footage and handle other AI-enhanced evidence equitably, according to a new ��-led report.

“Courts in the United States, both at the state and federal level, lack clear guidelines for the use of video as evidence in general, and this picture is only going to get more complicated with the rise of AI and deep fakes,” said senior author Sandra Ristovska, associate professor of media studies and director of CU’s new Visual Evidence Lab. “We felt that something needed to be done.”

Sandra Ristovska, director of the Visual Evidence Lab at CU Boulder.

In this social media post, a Washington Post reporter demonstrates how easy it is to use Sora 2 to create fake body cam footage.

A screenshot of a deepfake video testimony presented in Alameda County, California court earlier this year. The judge threw the case out and sanctioned the plaintiffs for "intentionally submitting false evidence."

The 26-page report, compiled by 20 experts from around the country, comes as new AI video generators have made it remarkably easy to create life-like clips, including fraudulent witness testimonies and crime scene footage. Meanwhile, AI is increasingly used to enhance real video footage, making poor quality recordings easier to see and hear, and to match security camera clips with suspects — sometimes in error.

Among other reforms, the report calls for specialized training for judges and jurors to help them critically evaluate AI-enhanced or AI-generated footage, as well as national standards governing what kind of AI is permissible.

“Judges, attorneys and jurors treat video in highly varied ways around the country, and if the playing field isn’t equal, that could lead to unfair renderings of justice,” said Ristovska.

The rise of deepfakes

On Sept. 9, 2025, a judge in Alameda County, California, threw out a civil case and recommended sanctions for the plaintiffs after determining that a videotaped witness testimony was a deepfake. The case was among the first known cases in which a deepfake was deliberately used in the courtroom.

Due to rapidly advancing technology, Ristovska suspects there will be more.

She points to a recent social media post in which a reporter demonstrated how easy it is to abuse the new Sora 2 video generation technology: In less than a minute, he was able to get it to make a video showing “bodycam footage of cops arresting a dark-skinned man in a department store.”

"This shows how AI-generated videos are becoming misleadingly persuasive and how they can be exploited to incriminate and further marginalize racial and ethnic minorities," she said.

Right now, she’s more concerned about a different problem—what she calls the “deepfake defense.”

More attorneys may be painting real video footage as fake.

For instance, in a 2023 lawsuit brought by the family of a man who died when his Tesla crashed while using the self-driving feature, the company's defense counsel attempted, unsuccessfully, to dismiss a video by claiming it was a deepfake.

“If this continues, jurors will accord little or no weight to authentic footage that they really should be paying attention to,” she said.

AI enhancement

Deepfakes aside, lawyers are increasingly submitting authentic videos that have been enhanced by AI to make the sound or visuals clearer. But not everyone can afford to use those technologies, said Ristovska, and while some judges allow them, some don’t.

“There is a real concern that AI enhancement may exacerbate already existing inequalities in access to justice,” she said.

AI is also routinely used to match surveillance video with potential suspects through facial recognition technology. But the system is far from fool proof.

One recent Washington Post investigation found that no less than eight people have been wrongly arrested after being identified by facial recognition software.

“People are so accustomed to thinking that the technological solution is the trusted solution that even if it is a low-quality image or video, if it is run through AI, people will trust that it is an accurate match,” she said.

Educating judges and jurors

Ristovska has studied video evidence and the impact it can have on human rights for most of her career. She founded the center in April to bring together experts from across multiple disciplines to address the shifting landscape around video use in the courtroom.

In addition to new trainings for judges and jurors, the report calls for the establishment of a new system for storing and retrieving evidentiary videos, which are far harder for journalists and the public to access than text court records.

It also calls on technology companies to develop ways that make it easier for viewers to detect deepfakes without putting videographers who want to remain anonymous (like whistleblowers and activists) in jeopardy.

“Our hope is that this report inspires legal reforms, policy proposals based on science and more research,” Ristovska said. “This is just the beginning.”

The inaugural report of CU Boulder's new Visual Evidence Lab warns that the legal system is unprepared for the flood of video, including AI-enhanced or generated footage, hitting U.S. courtrooms.

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Deer in the spotlights: What Bambi tells us about animation and death

Megan Maneval — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:40:28 +0000

Deer in the spotlights: What Bambi tells us about animation and death Megan Maneval Mon, 11/10/2025 - 07:40

Children aren't just blank slates—they create meaning from the media they experience. An expert says that's a reason to think about how we show themes such as violence and death.

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Voters' dislike of PAC donations cuts across political lines

Megan Maneval — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:06:46 +0000

Voters' dislike of PAC donations cuts across political lines Megan Maneval Tue, 11/04/2025 - 15:06

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

CU Boulder political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave's research finds Republicans and independents share Democrats' concerns over corporate donations in federal elections.

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Expert calls East Wing destruction a rejection of history, culture

Megan Maneval — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:28:31 +0000

Expert calls East Wing destruction a rejection of history, culture Megan Maneval Fri, 10/31/2025 - 14:28

College of Communication, Media, Design and Information

Azza Kamal, preservationist and professor of sustainable planning, laments the leveling of a section of the White House to add a ballroom.

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CUriosity: What can horror films teach us about society?

Daniel William Strain — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 21:39:13 +0000

CUriosity: What can horror films teach us about society? Daniel William… Thu, 10/30/2025 - 15:39

Daniel Strain

In CUriosity, experts across the CU Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, in honor of Halloween, sociologist Laura Patterson takes a stab at: “What can horror films teach us about society?”

The 2025 Norwegian film "The Ugly Stepsister" examines beauty standards facing young women, with grisly results. (Credit: Marcel Zyskind/IFC Films/Shudder)

Laura Patterson loves a good scare—turning the lights down, popping on a horror film, and watching the blood splash across the screen.

But the scholar, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Sociology at CU Boulder, believes that horror movies can do more than just creep you out. The genre also reveals a lot about the world we live in.

“I like horror movies, on the one hand, just because they're fun, and I think being scared is really fun,” she says. “Horror films also let us discuss some of the hardest things that we go through as people.”

Laura Patterson

Patterson may be one of the university’s biggest horror buffs.

She teaches a class for undergrads called “Gender, Race, and Chainsaws” and co-hosts the horror movie podcast “Collective Nightmares.” She’s also tried her hand at making her own short horror film. “Silent Generation” tackles the terrors of growing old and will appear later this month at the Denver Film Festival.

“They act as a mirror and can reflect back to us the societal biases and stereotypes that we have,” Patterson says. “We can look at, for example, who is a victim and who's a villain, who gets to live and who deserves to die, who can save themselves and who can't.”

Speaking of stereotypes, the horror genre has had a long and complicated relationship with women.

In the early days of scary movies, women were usually portrayed as victims. They screamed. They fainted. They got rescued by men.

Slasher flicks of the 1970s and 1980s, however, gave rise to the “final girl.” That’s the name for female characters (almost always innocent and chaste) who find their inner strength and stop the killer. They include Laurie Stode in the “Halloween” franchise, Nancy Thompson in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and Sidney Prescott in the “Scream” films.

But that trope still has issues.

“You have certain women who are picked and chosen as special and deserving protection, and it doesn’t matter what happens to every other woman,” Patterson says.

More recently, a new generation of women writers and directors has emerged in Hollywood.

They include Mimi Cave, director of the 2022 film “Fresh.” It follows a young woman who goes on a weekend trip with a man she just started dating—with predictably gory results.

Previously in CUriosity

The aspens are changing color in Colorado. Why do they do it?

Or read more CUriosity stories here

“It helps now that we have more women writing and directing horror films because we get to see the stories being told from their perspective,” Patterson says.

She adds that horror fans can still enjoy movies even if they don’t agree with their messages. Patterson sometimes has more fun watching movies she doesn’t see eye to eye with. They include this year’s “Weapons.” At its start, the film hinted at tackling big questions around school shootings, Patterson says, but never wound up delivering much of a point.

She urges her students to think critically about the films they see, and to be aware of the lessons the filmmakers are passing on, whether they mean to or not.

When it comes to 2025, Patterson says it’s been a great year for horror.

She recommends “Sinners,” a film about the blues, vampires and much more in Jim Crow Mississippi. Also on her list is a gruesome take on the Cinderella fairy tale called “The Ugly Stepsister.” This slept-on Norwegian film follows the titular ugly stepsister as she goes to increasingly twisted lengths to make herself more beautiful. It’s not for the faint of heart.

What about the squeamish out there, those who watch scary movies with their fingers over their eyes?

If they consider the underlying themes in horror films it can sometimes make them a little less frightening—at least in the usual sense, says Patterson.

“I’ve had several students come up to me and say, ‘I used to think that the guy chasing somebody with a knife was super scary. But now I realize that the patriarchy—that’s what’s really scary.’”

Horror movies offer messages about the world we live in, even if the filmmakers never intended to comment on society. Sociologist Laura Patterson wants her students to be aware of what films are telling them.

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How Super Mario helped Nintendo level up

Megan Maneval — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:57:34 +0000

How Super Mario helped Nintendo level up Megan Maneval Thu, 10/30/2025 - 14:57

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Forty years after the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the name remains synonymous with worldwide gaming and technological innovation.

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Young adults fear mass shootings but don't necessarily support gun control

Lisa Marshall — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:11:51 +0000

Young adults fear mass shootings but don't necessarily support gun control Lisa Marshall Mon, 10/27/2025 - 09:11

Lisa Marshall

More than 60% of adults aged 18 to 29 worry that a mass shooting will impact their lives in some way. �� 17% worry a lot. But when it comes to sentiments about gun control, the age group dubbed the “massacre generation” is deeply divided, new �� research shows.

The study, published in the journal Social Science Quarterly, found that while young adults overall modestly favor gun control, their viewpoints differ wildly depending on their gender and political leanings: Among young Republicans, young conservatives and young men, for instance, the more they fear mass violence, the more they oppose firearm restrictions.

Jillian Turanovic, associate professor of sociology

The findings call into question some previous assumptions that as this generation — raised in an era of unprecedented mass violence—gains political power, stricter gun legislation will follow, the authors said.

“This is a generation of people who live with significant fear and anxiety over mass violence,” said senior author Jillian Turanovic, associate professor of sociology. “But we found that those shared fears do not unite them in attitudes on gun policy. In fact, they polarize them.”

The ‘massacre generation’

In 2022, sociologists coined the phrase ‘massacre generation’ to describe young people growing up in a post-Columbine, post 9/11-era in which mass shootings dominate news coverage and social media, and lockdown drills are the norm.

As voters, they are poised to be extremely influential.

“Young adults today represent the most powerful potential voting bloc in the future of American policy making, so it is very important to understand how they feel about policy issues,” said Turanovic, pointing to research estimating that by 2032, Millennials and Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) will comprise almost half of the electorate.

While mass shootings are relatively rare — making up only about 1% of all gun deaths each year—they have dominated discourse around policy making for the ‘massacre generation.’

After a gunman killed 17 people at Parkland High School Shooting in Florida in 2018, young survivors launched the gun-control organization March for our Lives. In contrast, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, in which 20 children and six adults died, some gun rights advocates embraced the slogan “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

“In the wake of nearly every high-profile mass shooting incident, there is a predictable flurry of opposing discourse by gun control and gun rights activists,” she said.

National polls by Pew and Gallup have suggested that the 18- to 29-year-old set is more liberal in general and more favorable toward gun restrictions than older generations.

Turanovic and co-authors at Clemson University and Florida State University set out to dig deeper, looking specifically at how fear of mass violence influences sentiments about firearms among different groups.

The team surveyed a racially representative national sample of nearly 1,700 emerging adults and asked them to rank, on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 3 (a lot), how much in their everyday lives they fear that:

You or someone you love will be a victim of a mass shooting.
A mass shooting will happen to you or someone you love at a public event or gathering with large crowds.
A mass shotting will happen to you or someone you love at a shopping mall, store, school, bar or a night club.

Overall, 44% of the sample scored in the range of “moderate fear” and an additional 17% scored in the “high fear” range.

When asked about viewpoints on gun control, the responses were strikingly varied.

While 58% of respondents said that owning a gun does not make you safer, 42% said that it does; 32% said they believe that guns should be permitted on college campuses; 32% indicated that a permit should not be required to carry a gun in public; and 42% said gun control laws are unconstitutional.

Overall, those who feared mass violence more tended to have modestly higher support for gun control. But this pattern did not hold true for Republicans, conservatives and men.

For them, the opposite was true: The more they feared mass shootings, the more they viewed expanded access to guns as a solution.

“This shows that emerging adults today are very divided in their gun control sentiment, and those divisions are most pronounced when fear of mass shootings runs high,” she said.

Mental health support needed

At a minimum, Turanovic said she hopes the data in her study on fear itself will serve as a wake-up call to policymakers, nudging them to boost mental health support for the ‘massacre generation.’

For those interested in gun policy, regardless of whether they want controls tightened or loosened, the message is clear, she said: Tomorrow’s voters are not all of the same mindset.

“Generational change alone will not resolve America’s gun policy debates,” she said.

A new study of the 'massacre generation' reveals deep divisions along gender and party lines in sentiments about firearms.

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Students gather for a candlelight vigil in February, 2018 after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

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Students gather for a candlelight vigil in February, 2018 after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Credit: Wikamedia Commons

What's all the buzz about?

Elizabeth Lock — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 17:58:22 +0000

What's all the buzz about? Elizabeth Lock Fri, 10/03/2025 - 11:58

Having recently celebrated National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, CU Boulder scholar and "coffee-ologist" Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe.

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