Thanks to Marshall Fine, critic-in-residence at The Picture House in Pelham, I had the opportunity recently to preview “The Imitation Game,” which has “Oscar nods” written all over it, deservedly so. It’s a superbly crafted film about a story that resonates in our own time, acted with the kind of understated emotion that is the hallmark of British performance by a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) and Keira Knightley.

The film, which opens Nov. 28, tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Germany’s Enigma Code during World War II by creating a machine that was the forerunner of the computer, saving millions of lives in the process (although that, we shall see, was complicated).

Turing was a man ahead of his time in many ways. Today he’d be a gay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Instead he was a closeted social misfit – taunted mercilessly at prep school in the savage way that belongs exclusively to children and later prosecuted when his homosexuality was uncovered after the war. Forced to choose chemical castration in lieu of a prison sentence, he committed suicide in 1954 at age 41 – one of 49,000 men prosecuted for homosexual acts in England between 1885 and 1967. In 2013, Turing was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II – which still implies he did something wrong to begin with. ...

The cover story for the Nov. 9 New York Times Magazine asks the provocative question: Is football the next tobacco?

The answer is “No,” and the key to that answer lies not in football or tobacco but in something else – influenza.

Like the flu, tobacco is airborne. If you were to smoke in let’s say an NFL arena, you would be subjecting not only yourself but the people all around you to carcinogens. Tobacco lost its household brand identity, because enough people came to understand that it wasn’t just about other people smoking themselves to death. It was also about how secondhand smoke could kill you.

But when you go to that same NFL arena to watch a game, you’re not risking a brain injury; someone else is. And for many people, that is, selfish or not, an acceptable risk.

President Barack Obama, a Chicago Bears fan, may have voiced the sentiment of a nation when he said that if he had a son, he would not let him play football. And yet, he says, he will remain a fan.

“At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” Michael Sokolove quotes him as saying in The Times Magazine piece. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret.”

The president is a rational, compassionate man. So are we all – rational, compassionate people who are comfortable with other people bashing their brains in for our amusement, because, hey, they know what they’re getting into, much like a prostitute or a stripper or a porn star. It’s just another meat market. ...

Alan Turing, gay sex and the real ‘Imitation Game’

Why football won’t go up in smoke