‘Ballyhoo!’ Professional Wrestling’s Wild West-Like Origins
Professional wrestling’s Wild West-like origins kick up a lot of dust in Jon Langmead’s history of the sport’s rough housers and con artists, Ballyhoo!
Professional Wrestling
Vince McMahon and the Damaging Impact of Failing Upward
WWE’s Vincent McMahon has brazenly failed upward over and over again, profoundly impacting (and damaging) American culture along the way, argues Abraham Riesman in the biography Ringmaster.
Muhammad Ali and the Day Fans Pelted the Ring With Trash
In his new book, Ali vs. Inoki, Josh Gross untangles the complicated history of the 1976 meeting of two legends -- and a failed experiment.
Professional Wrestling, Racism, Transracial Identity, and Why We All Need to Lighten Up
In contrast to our ossified conceptions of race in other aspects of life, race in professional wrestling is a gimmick, a performance of an identity, which one can adopt or drop as part of the game.
In Defense of Openly Enjoying Professional Wrestling
All it took was a trip to the Royal Rumble to see how similar the warped reality of the WWE is to The Kardashians. Or The Real World. Or Duck Dynasty. Or Honey Boo Boo.