Shortly after US president George W. Bush was elected in 2001, he read through a report on president Bill Clinton administration’s failure to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. At some point during this session, Bush took a pen and scrawled in the margin, “Not on my watch!”
“Magic realism is defined by what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.” These words appear in the opening sequence of the first episode of Narcos, a thinly fictionalized TV series based on the life of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Though the events that follow are based in reality and would not traditionally be considered magic realism, the fact that one of the most popular shows of the past two years opens using this term signifies its importance in contemporary popular culture in 2016—even though it has its roots in a literary genre invented long, long ago.
One of the joys of the Olympics is getting to watch esoteric sports you’ve possibly never heard of. A couple of days in, and you’ll find yourself dictating the finer points of rhythmic gymnastics to bemused onlookers, or explaining the workings of the modern pentathlon in great detail to your cat. The question of why certain wonderfully obscure sports make it into the Olympics while others don’t, however, is more vexing than the scoring metrics for the parallel bars.
