All the world’s a stage. So we push through the fourth wall, pierce the spandex-ed heart of professional wrestling, and travel 400 years into the past to unmask our obsession with authenticity and our desire to walk the line between reality and fantasy.

The Montreal Screwjob

When you think of professional wrestling, you probably picture cartoonish characters like Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage. But after the Montreal screwjob, the real world lurked just beneath the scripted spectacle of professional wrestling. Simon Adler tells the story of one moment that tore a hole in the fiction of wrestling.

The Real Don Quixote

Is our obsession with blurring the boundaries of reality a new thing? Or has it always been there? Everybody’s heard of the book Don Quixote, but we had no idea how totally insane, and how stirringly modern, Miguel Cervante’s masterpiece really was. It’s a story within a story within a story that beat Seinfeld to the punch by more than 400 years.