Chaotic Wrestling & Ghost Stories
Reflections on Friday night wrestling. Also, why do we have ghost stories and urban legends?
Featured Articles
Meditations on Chaotic Wrestling
Off-Topic • 28 Oct 2024 • ~4450 words
On faith and wrestling and how sometimes they're kind of the same thing.
The most common criticism hurled at wrestling, by far, is that it is somehow “fake”. Naysayers bemoan that wrestling’s supposed inauthenticity makes it something fit only for the most gullible and slow-witted among us. This criticism bothers me because it lacks nuance. Wrestling is exaggerated and predetermined, but to deny the authenticity of the showmanship, athleticism, and energy that engulfs the atmosphere is to lie to oneself. Just because that showmanship, athleticism, and energy manifests in a way that subverts the expectations of what a sporting event should be doesn’t mean that it’s not real.
The Lessons of Lore
Longreads • 29 Oct 2024 • ~4850 words
Ghost stories reveal our collective anxieties amid times of change.
Dr. Joey Fink is the chair of the history department at High Point University, located just five miles from Lydia’s Bridge. Much of her work focuses on women’s history and labor movements in the US. She says tales like Lydia’s exist largely outside the traditional historical record. One way to gauge the power of ghost stories and other urban legends, she suggests, is to evaluate how long they last, and how they get retold. The key, she says, is to look at “what is the story doing to help people make sense of themselves or the world around them.”
Recommended Articles
‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads?
The Guardian • 29 Oct 2024 • ~6500 words
In avatar therapy, a clinician gives voice to their patients’ inner demons. For some of the participants in a new trial, the results have been astounding.
If you hear voices, clinicians don’t generally ask what they’re saying to you, beyond whether they are asking you to harm yourself or others. “There’s been a reluctance to engage much with the content of voices,” Ben Alderson-Day, an associate professor of psychology at Durham University who specialises in psychosis, told me. “That’s in part because of a concern that if you ask voice-hearers to elaborate, you might engage in ‘collusion’: you may make [the voices] more real for people.” A clinician may diagnose a patient with psychosis, and prescribe them medication or CBT, without knowing what the patient’s voices say to them. This new therapy demanded that voices were listened to closely, and responded to as if they were spoken by entirely real external beings. Trial participants would create an avatar of their voice: a moving, three-dimensional digital embodiment that looks and sounds like the persecutor inside their heads. They would be guided by a therapist to have a dialogue with the voice – and the hope was, through doing so, gain control over it.
