Hulk Hogan

Saturday

Neal Pollack

Hulk Hogan, my hero

To many people mourning him this week, Hulk Hogan was a larger-than-life super being, an outsized professional wrestling character with a singularly American persona. “I watched him lift 350-pound men over his head and throw them out of the ring,” President Trump said on Friday.  I appreciate a good show as much as anyone, and have seen Rocky III many times. But I was never really a pro-wrestling guy. For me, Hulk Hogan is an important figure because he helped bring about the defeat of one of my life’s great villains: Gawker Media.  Since only a couple of dozen people remember my personal drama with Gawker, I’ll provide a brief summary.

hulk hogan gawker

Thursday

Jack Hunter

RIP Hulk Hogan, the omnipresent Eighties icon

Hulk Hogan, who died today at 71, will be sorely missed. But in July 1996, arguably the most famous and beloved pro wrestler of all time was standing in a ring as fans booed and threw trash at him. He had just turned into a bad guy for the first time ever.  This was the second time Hogan would take professional wrestling to unprecedented heights.  Nearly 30 years ago, Hogan formed the villainous “New World Order” (NWO) for Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Because of Hogan’s group, WCW would beat the former top wrestling company, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) for 83 straight weeks in the TV ratings.  No other company had ever beaten WWE in the ratings.

hulk hogan

Friday

Matt McDonald

A new subdued Trump at the RNC

Milwaukee, Wisconsin “The challenge for Trump,” says The Spectator editorial from this month’s magazine “is to show Americans a steady hand and a normal face.” The normal face the Republican National Convention opted for was that of wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, who took to the stage waving a huge American flag, began his remarks by yelling, "Well let me tell you something brother" and later removed his jacket so he could tear his vest in half to reveal a red "Trump-Vance" tank top underneath. "Let Trumpomania run wild!" he screamed. The Fiserv Forum was exuberant. High up in the stands, Russell Brand was sat a few rows behind me, for some reason. Is this America's new normal? https://twitter.com/jordanuhl/status/1814111040076153156?

donald trump subdued rnc

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

How is the new Gawker so dull?

Gawker returned in 2021 with the air of a drunk stumbling back into a party he had never been invited to. Leah Finnegan, the new editor, admitted that the brand was “toxic” but appealed to the reader to keep “an open mind and an open heart.” (What is this? Gawker or an e-celeb issuing an apology video over a sexual harassment scandal?) Me, I was biased. I hated Gawker. The original site was a hive of mean-spirited moralists. The average Gawker employee was the sort of person who would post revenge porn while lambasting people who mildly transgressed against speech codes. Their writing pioneered the sort of effortful indifference that still leads Brooklynites to claim that people are “having a normal one” and things are “like, er, yikes”.

gawker

Sunday

Luke Coppen

It’s the eschatology, stupid

The year of our Lord 2020 did not begin auspiciously. In January, a swarm of locusts the size of Manhattan buzzed into east Africa. In Australia, wildfires that consumed 46 million acres and a billion animals reached their peak. In March, a 5.7 magnitude earthquake struck Utah, knocking a trumpet from the hand of a golden statue of the angel Moroni atop Salt Lake Temple. In April, a 2.5-mile asteroid grazed past Earth. And there was something called the coronavirus. While all that was happening, the US saw a spike in Google searches for the term ‘apocalypse’.

eschatology