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Wrestling with Disbelief: The Referee

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Professional wrestling is an art form (I do not use that term lightly, or with any sense of irony). It is theatre in the guise of a sport. It has its own logic, its own rules, its own laws. The laws and the rules of wrestling are different, but both rely on the referee.  What is wrestling?   The legendary referee Earl Hebner dwarfed by The Rock Wrestling in its simplest form is a physical competition between two wrestlers that takes place in a ring. In order to win, one must pin the other's shoulders to the mat for three seconds. There are very few rules, but that means the rules that do exist are all the more important. In addition to the two wrestlers -as with other sports- there is a referee. The referee gives the illusion of legitimacy, but they are also a point of potential drama. A referee is a narrative tool that can be employed for dramatic effect, because if the referee doesn't see it, then they can’t enforce the rule, and if a referee happens to be dist...
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Covid-19: Lost in Translation

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If there is anything to be learned from the current global pandemic, it’s that the truth is not only difficult to find, but a lot of the time it might as well not exist. Of course, we are learning personal truths: what life is like without commutes, schools, and physical contact. These things can all teach us a lot about ourselves, but the truth of the pandemic itself is something far less easy to discern.   Re-opening schools will herald a return to some form of normality, whatever that will look like. Overabundance of Data One way we are able to access and understand the pandemic is through the numbers associated with it: infection rate, daily death-tolls, hospital capacity, numbers of hospital staff, the list goes on. We are living at a time in which newspapers publish the deaths from the virus on a daily basis. They are put onto graphs, overlaid with talk about flattening peaks and comparisons with other countries (in lieu of the Olympics, at least the UK might cl...
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