This Week in Our Dumb World
Scar Tissue
For those who don’t know, the Players Tribune is ostensibly a platform for fist person athlete commentary and opinions. Nine out of ten it’s exactly as bland and boring as you would imagine this to be. But every now and then and the athlete will write something personal and special.
This starts off as a typical (if very well written and honest) story of an athlete struggling with addiction, but it goes far more interesting places. A wonderful and honest personal essay.
Dude probably thought I was dead.
And, man, those paramedics and cops … I can’t imagine what they must have been thinking about me. It must’ve been a pretty crazy thing to see — kind of weird and confusing at the same time. But eventually they get me into the back of an ambulance, and the whole time I’m sitting there I’m trying to piece together what had happened the night before.
I can’t remember a thing.
Even after they drive me to the hospital, while I’m being looked at by a doctor, after all that time had passed, I’m still super groggy from all the pills. I’m fading in and out.
Then at one point a trainer for the Red Sox walks in. So now I’m not only in a daze, but I’m also really nervous and stressed about the team finding out what happened. The hospital had done a drug screen, but I told the nurses that I would not allow it to be released to the Sox. So even though it was pretty clear to anyone who saw me that morning what had gone on, the team never had specific proof of what I had taken. Or how much.
They didn’t know.
And, honestly, neither did I.
When the drug test came back, it showed that I had mixed a bunch of Percocet with some Ambien that night.
Then I stabbed a TV and apparently went wild for a few hours without even knowing it.
PONZI SCHEMES, PRIVATE YACHTS, AND A MISSING $250 MILLION IN CRYPTO
Our world remains a baffling and fascinating place and I continue to marvel at humanity’s capacity to invent new ways to commit fraud.
‘Everybody is a genius,” said Albert Einstein, and every Redditor is an Einstein. Unsolved crimes attract amateur detectives, who canvass the internet for clues. The amateur’s most valuable advantage is time. Law enforcement has the edge in nearly every other category: crime labs, informants, surveillance technology, forensic databases, the threat of arrest. When it came to the case of the missing Quadriga millions, however, the balance was reversed. About 76,000 individuals held accounts on Quadriga, and some of the most technically sophisticated of them were out hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Much of Quadriga’s rise—and Bitcoin’s—had been fueled by speculation from greenhorns who had heard something exciting about cryptocurrency from their nephew or cable news. But just about every cryptocurrency expert in Canada had a Quadriga account. They had believed in Cotten and felt betrayed. They wanted answers. They wanted revenge.
Traditional law enforcement, meanwhile, had only the vaguest understanding of the subject. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked questions so rudimentary that they shocked the experts they interviewed. “It’s just completely out of their wheelhouse,” says a Quadriga creditor and cryptocurrency expert who was interviewed after publishing his findings online under the moniker QCXINT. “I spent a couple of hours on the phone explaining the basics to an RCMP investigator and came away feeling like he’d be much more comfortable with a dead body, a loaded gun, and a trail of blood.”
The court-appointed monitor, Ernst & Young, employed cryptocurrency experts but was roundly ridiculed for a string of blunders that began when, shortly after seizing control of Quadriga’s remaining funds, approximately $1 million was “inadvertently” transferred to one of the accounts that Cotten’s death rendered inaccessible. There were limits, furthermore, to the scope of the monitor’s investigation. Its object was not to track down every lost Bitcoin but to maximize the pot of money that could be returned to Quadriga’s creditors. (For months, Miller Thomson, the Bay Street law firm appointed to represent the class of creditors, received hundreds of emails a day inquiring about the lost funds, and answered such a constant barrage of phone calls—heartbreakers about lost pensions and college savings, babies crying in the background—that its lawyers could do little else.) Since the cost of Ernst & Young’s investigation is borne by the class, it made little sense to spend resources on highly speculative inquiries without assurance of success.
There was no such constraint on the outraged creditors—or the true believers who saw in Quadriga’s collapse an existential threat to cryptocurrency’s integrity at just the moment it had assumed an eggshell veneer of legitimacy. Bitcoin was founded on the principle that no individual or institution should be trusted. Every Bitcoin transaction appears in a public ledger—the blockchain—that can be consulted by anybody with internet access. Within hours of the announcement of Cotten’s death, a crowdsourced, scrupulously documented investigation, applying the logic and methodology of the blockchain, was afoot.
The Square Dancing Conspiracy
For the record, I usually enjoyed the square dancing unit of gym class. It was fun and different and, as someone who liked girls from a very early age, I generally enjoyed the chance to dance and awkwardly interact with the girls in my class. But also the dancing was generally pretty fun. If I remember correctly.
In this way, I have served the interests of white supremacy. AS HAVE ALL OF YOU WHO TOOK SQUARE DANCING IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.
In order to bring his dream to life, Ford poured tons of money into square dancing and country music in general. In 1926, he published an instruction manual for aspiring square dancing instructors titled “Good Morning: After a Sleep of Twenty-Five Years, Old-Fashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford.” He also required his employees to attend the square dancing events he created for them, funded fiddling contests and radio shows promoting “old time dancing music,” as well as the creation of square dancing clubs across the US—where modern, Western-style square dancing as we know it now was really created.
Perhaps ironically, given Ford’s intent to squash the influence of black music, America’s square dancing tradition—like nearly everything else—was in fact built by black people. While European dance traditions like the French quadrille certainly informed the evolution of square dancing, the addition of the call-and-response form of calling out dance moves initially started with the black slaves, who were required to perform at white dance balls in order to reproduce the steps themselves without formal dance training.
Nonetheless, Ford saw these dances as intrinsically white, and thus more intrinsically wholesome. Along with his wife and their square dance instructor Benjamin Lovett, he campaigned to bring square dancing to the physical education classes of students across the country, believing it would teach children “social training, courtesy, good citizenship, along with rhythm.” The schools agreed, and by 1928, almost half the schools in America were teaching square dancing and other forms of old-fashioned dancing to students.
The Deep Sea
The best things on the internet are things that exploit and celebrate the interactive and animative aspects of being online. This scroll through the depths of the ocean is an example of all those best things.
List of Pizza Styles
While I imagine that this list is not exhausting, it does give me a chance to discuss the strangest pizza phenomenon. Do you know that, in Hawaii, the vast majority of pizza places advertise themselves as being “Boston style pizza”? Has anyone ever heard of Boston style pizza? It’s not on this list!
Someday, I will find the long-form article about how this weird regionalism came to exist.
Also, I bet you’re thinking about eating pizza right now.