Author: Gary Arndt

Ask most Muslims what the holiest site is in Islam, and they would all obviously tell you it is the Kaaba at the Great Mosque of Mecca. Ask most Christians what the holiest site is in Christianity, and you might get a blank stare or at least several different answers. Through most of Christianity, there has been one place that has been agreed upon as the holiest site, and it has been the cause of wars and disagreements which have continued to this day.

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For eight seasons, the TV show Dexter showed the fictional life of a crime solving forensics expert who just so happened to have been a serial killer who killed serial killers. This got me wondering, has there ever been a real life Dexter? A killer, or even a criminal, who targeted other criminals? Well, there sort of has been. Learn the story of the real life Dexter on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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The ancient Romans had a practice called Damnatio Memoriae, which was to banish someone’s memory from public life. It was also sometimes known as oblivion. It called for the complete deletion of the person’s name or image from all statues, inscriptions, coins, and texts. While the practice neither began nor ended with the Romans, they are ones who gave it the name we used today. Learn more about the history of expunging people from history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Sports history is littered with really bad teams. The 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers didn’t win a single game and wound up losing 26 in a row. The 2012 Charlotte Bobcats went 7-59 for a .106 winning percentage. The 1899 Cleveland Spiders set a record for futility in baseball winning only 20 games out of 154. However, all of those teams are giants compared to the worst professional sports team in history: The Washington Generals.

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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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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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