"Scent designer Sissel Tolaas and photographer Nick Knight teamed up to explore a fragrance that charts the emotional landscape of violence."

"Collecting sweat samples at cage fighting matches and analyzing the chemicals by means of gas chromatography, Tolaas and Knight evoke a provocative portrayal of aggressive dominance and sexual behavior, captured in the throes of violent action itself."

A product/art project, commented on by Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I did not want to open it. It appears that I shy away from violence even as a smell: sweat, body odor, the dankness and rankness of gyms and locker rooms, the certainty that it will make me wrinkle my nose like a packed summer subway or a urine-soaked stairwell. The thought of a smell wrung from the sweat-soaked t-shirts of cage fighters creates a ripple of distaste and even fear at the imminent prospect of inhaling, a sensory reaction before the sense in question is even engaged.

She shies away from violence, this lady named Slaughter. Yet she promotes a twee art project that taps the allure of violence.

Isn't "taps" so the right word there?

Wrestling voted back into the Olympics.

"The sport - one of the original disciplines at the Ancient Olympics - had been due to end its Olympic participation at Rio 2016 following its dismissal by the IOC earlier this year."

Wrestling's triumph in the vote follows a number of sweeping reforms made following its exclusion, including overhauling its rules, administration, gender equality and operations.

"There is a 400 year old tradition in Japan to make babies cry."

"Every year mothers hand over their babies to sumo wrestlers who make them cry. Baby crying is considered healthy and a prerequisite for good luck. The winner of the contest is the sumo wrester who makes the baby cry faster, usually by scaring them...."

What's the best comic remark you ever made that was not laughed at by the people you were with at the time?

This is a question based on a story Meade just told me, about something he said to some other guys when he was in high school. He's remembering: 1. what he said, 2. how funny he thought it was at the time, and 3. that the other guys — 3 boys who were on the wrestling team — reacted with cold silence and, then, departure. And for all these years, Meade has continued to believe that the remark was really funny.

Tell me your stories like that. And feel free to try to figure out Meade's joke.

He was in his art class, working on a painting. The project was to do a painted interpretation of a famous painting, as Picasso did here, painting his version of this Velasquez. The painting he was doing was this Van Gogh of sunflowers. The 3 wrestler boys — one of whom was a friend — had dropped in to hang out in the art room, and they'd been saying things like "Look, it's art boy" and "Meade's a real artiste."

What's Billy Corgan doing these days?

The Olympics have cut wrestling, and one young man grapples with disappointment.

Kyle Snyder, 17, "a 5-foot-11, 215-pound marble slab of an athlete — undefeated in his high school career, and the top-ranked prep wrestler in the country at his weight class."

“I just grew an overwhelmingly powerful love of wrestling, and it was all I could think about,” Snyder said. “I didn’t want to be out on the football field. I wanted to be getting better at wrestling. I think I have an addictive personality, and when I fall in love with something I keep thinking about it and thinking about it.”

“Wrestling is his calling,” said Snyder’s coach.... “He probably spends 80 to 90 percent of every waking hour thinking about wrestling.”

Sad that they took wrestling out of the Olympics... and it's also sad that a determined, competitive kid like this has absorbed a message from modern American culture that extraordinary concentration and dedication is a mental disorder.

I think I have an addictive personality....

How did a 17-year-old American learn to talk about himself like that? Is it a disarming faux-modesty that he's developed so that other kids don't lose their self-esteem (like they could do as well if they were weird enough to spend all their time on one thing)? Or does he genuinely think of himself as deranged and analogous to a junkie? Shouldn't a successful high school athlete be regarded as someone to be emulated by other kids (and not a bizarre outlier to be observed for entertainment's sake but disregarded as any kind of example of how to live)?

Here's some discussion of what psychiatric experts consider to be the characteristics of an addictive personality:

- Impulsive behavior, difficulty in delaying gratification, an antisocial personality and a disposition toward sensation seeking.

- A high value on nonconformity combined with a weak commitment to the goals for achievement valued by the society.

- A sense of social alienation and a general tolerance for deviance.

- A sense of heightened stress.

This isn't at all the same thing as exceptional dedication.

I'm not knocking Snyder. He's 17 and a great achiever. I'm knocking the culture that got a message through to his still-developing mind.