When crime finds itself licensed, there It's good to be back. I was out for a little bit on vacation,

long 4th of July weekend, went out to Napa wine country in California just gorgeous out there and it's definitely some much needed

R&R but back in the saddle now happy to be with you and I have a very cool listener question today about sports ball.

It is not often in the life of a humble book bro that his interests in high culture and the canon and the West and

great literature gets to merge with his off-the-clock interest in sports But this is that time for me. Sometimes I think we don't

associate sports with the more elevated ideas or questions or matters that we deal with here on this

show that come up in the great works of the Western

Canon, perhaps hoidy toyy-de-de-eacademics tend to think that sports conversation is beneath

them at least in their professional lives, but it turns out that taking a look at sports and the history of

sports, which has been around forever for as long as there have been human societies, they

seem to have done some kind of recreational

sporting activity. This can actually reveal a lot, a lot of profound and

sometimes kind of unsettling stuff about human nature and it can help us to think about some of the primal forces that are at work in our

civilization that are always at work on the edges of society and civilization but might now sort of unnervingly be coming back to the

center of our lives in particular as the influence of Christianity and more broadly the Abrahamic scriptures kind of recedes from Western civilization

you're starting to see more and more of what I have come to call the

Allegroic forces that is the forces that seem like they might just be

metaphors or ideas, but actually start to take the shape of pagan gods.

And so that's what this listener question is about and I'm excited to answer it. I am going to get into it. But most of all I'm excited to answer it because it gives me an opportunity to tell you guys one of the most wild out-of-pocket stories from Western history that nobody's ever

heard. I mean obviously some people have heard of it but it's not one that typically makes it directly into your high school

history books this is a story that's got absolutely everything it's got sex it's got violence

it's got arson it's got people acting utterly ratchet and doing the most in the streets.

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