Month: August 2020

One of my dirty secrets is that I’m a fan of pro wrestling. Whenever I tell people this the first thing I inevitably hear is, “you know it's fake right?” This idea that people think professional wrestling is real comes from the concept that wrestling insiders call kayfabe. Learn about the history of kayfabe and how this concept from professional wrestling can be used to navigate the modern world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Pablo Escobar was the biggest drug lord the world has ever known. At the height of his power, he had a near-monopoly on cocaine trade in the United States. He had a peak inflation-adjusted net worth of $60 billion dollars. He was personally responsible for thousands of murders and dozens of acts of terrorism in Colombia. Today in Colombia, there are approximately 100 hippopotamuses roaming wild. What do these two things have to do with each other? Well, everything.

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Traditionally, the royal families of Europe would arrange marriages amongst their children to establish alliances and bonds between their houses. While this really isn’t done that much anymore, it also wasn’t that long ago that it was done. One monarch, in particular, Queen Victoria, was really good and marrying off her children. So good in fact that almost every royal house in Europe can trace their ancestry back to her.

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Boxing used to be one of the most popular sports in the world. A world championship bout would draw millions of people to their radios or televisions and could pack the largest stadiums. Since then, it has waned in popularity in no small part due to the confusing array of titles and organizations which now exist. The WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO, IBO, WBF, and IBA and many other organizations all with their own set of initials, all hand out titles.

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In a terrible summer often filled with stories about monuments to terrible men, here is a story about an American hero. Build monuments to Robert Smalls.

Originally released on February 10th, 2016.

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Music
* Julia Rovinsky plays Phillip Glass’ Metamorphosis I, from her album Dusk.
* There’s an excerpt from Paul Drescher’s “Casa Vecchia,” from the Mirrors: Other Fire album.
* There’s a chunk of Jose Gonzalez’ “Instrumental” from his Stay in the Shade EP.
* “Manny Returns Home” from Bernard Hermann’s score to The Wrong Man.
* Branka Parlic plays Philip Glass’ “Mad Rush.” Twice.
* “Quiet Fan for SK,” by P.G. Six.
* Things get heavy to “Particles of the Universe (Heartbeats)” from Dan Romer and Ben Zeitlin’s score to Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Notes
There’s a lot written about Robert Smalls, with a lot of contradictory information. I found Edward A. Miller’s Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress particularly useful to sorting it all out.
Some other sources I consulted while researching this piece:
* The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union by the Don, James McPherson
* From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839-1915, by Okon Uya.
* And, for what it’s worth, Robert Smalls: The Boat Thief from RFK Jr.’s American Heroes Series is an enjoyable and surprisingly thorough version of the story for young readers, if you’re ever looking for that sort of thing.

Have you ever been told to follow the chain of command or else? In most organizations with a hierarchy or with a bureaucracy, there is a set way in which things have to be done. If you have a suggestion or a complaint, you have to go to your immediate superior, and not jump over anyone’s head. If it wasn’t for one man jumping over the heads of his superiors and jeopardizing his job, we might never have landed on the moon.

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For many people, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is the measure of the health of the overall stock market. In reality, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is really just the performance of a collection of 30 blue-chip stocks. The index was created in 1896 and back then there were only 12 stocks in the index, and most of them are no longer household names. 

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