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Let’s begin by assuming you’re not planning to watch WrestleMania this weekend. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), with its ridiculous bombast and barbaric violence, has turned people off for decades. Yet its popularity—not to mention its profound influence on American culture and politics—persists. Below, I explain why.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment Something odd is happening with handbags. Childbirth is no fun. But an extremely fast birth can be even worse.

The Man in the Arena

WWE can be eerily prophetic. Had you watched WrestleMania 23, back in 2007, for instance, you would have seen a future president of the United States, Donald Trump, standing in the ring with a devilish smile, preparing to humiliate the WWE head honcho, Vince McMahon.

Although scores of articles have been written about the connections between wrestling and Trumpism, comparatively little is understood about McMahon—who, in reality, is one of Trump’s close friends. (During the 2016 campaign, McMahon was reportedly on the extremely small list of individuals whose phone calls Trump would take in private; his wife, Linda, went on to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.) A new biography of McMahon, Ringmaster, came out earlier this week, and I spent some time with its author, Abraham Josephine Riesman, trying to unpack the book’s principal argument: that McMahon and WWE led to “the unmaking of America.” McMahon reigned over the thorny world of professional wrestling until last summer, when he stepped down from his position as CEO and chairman following an alleged sex scandal and related hush-money payments. (Sound familiar?) He returned as chairman at the beginning of this year, after the WWE’s investigation into the allegations concluded.

What McMahon understood better than anyone was that the physical act of wrestling was just one element of what the audience wanted. Millions of people flock to WWE for the monthslong story lines, the operatic entrances, the cheeky backstage drama. Wrestlers seize the mic and deliver fired-up speeches filled with taunts, zingers, and thrilling call-and-response sections. Trump grew up a wrestling fan and mastered these arena-style linguistics. His rallies, his debates, his interviews, his social-media posts—no matter the venue, Trump relied on WWE tactics. When he launched his first presidential campaign back in 2015, this approach was shocking to some. And even more shocking when it worked.

The 45th president is not scheduled to make a cameo at this weekend’s WrestleMania. At the moment, he’s preparing to turn himself in to the authorities in New York City on Tuesday following yesterday’s grand-jury indictment. One of Trump’s congressional acolytes, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, announced that she, too, will be in New York on Tuesday: “We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!” she tweeted today. Greene has also used WWE tools to propel herself to elected office. Earlier this year, during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Greene heckled him, not unlike a WWE fan screaming from the sidelines.

I’ve watched a lot of old wrestling clips in recent weeks. Specifically, I went down a rabbit hole of interviews with the wrestler Ric Flair. Flair routinely boasted of his alligator shoes, his Rolex watch, his libido. His absurd brag—“I’ve got a limousine sittin’ out there a mile long!”—may or may not make you think of Trump and/or his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, whose use of hyperbole was, shall we say, unrestrained.

I texted some of these outlandish Ric Flair videos to friends. In response, a buddy pointed me to an October 29, 1985, speech from Flair’s former wrestling nemesis, Dusty Rhodes, a.k.a. “The American Dream.” The grainy YouTube clip of Rhodes’s monologue has more than 2.6 million views. It’s three and a half minutes long, and worth watching in its entirety.

Whereas Flair’s oratory is all “me,” Rhodes takes the approach of “we.” Rhodes ticks off examples of challenges that everyday Americans face, something that the stylin’, profilin’ Flair could never understand. His speech has a decidedly Grapes of Wrath feel to it. “Hard times are when the autoworkers are out of work and they tell ’em, ‘Go home!’” Rhodes shouts. “And hard times are when a man is workin’ a job 30 years—30 years!—they give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say, ‘Hey, a computer took your place, daddy!’ That’s hard times!” Trump, for all of his abhorrent narcissism, shrewdly uses the “we”—specifically, the us-versus-them—approach in nearly all of his campaign speeches to similar effect. When headlining this month’s CPAC conference, he sounded not only like a vengeful pro wrestler, but like someone seething with menace: “I am your retribution.”

This year’s WrestleMania title match will be between the current champion, the hulking Roman Reigns, and Rhodes’s 37-year-old son, Cody. The younger Rhodes is a cocky blonde who leans heavily into American-flag iconography, wears a business suit and power tie, and goes by “The American Nightmare.” (Again: Sound familiar?)

WrestleMania used to be available on pay-per-view, but now it’s a two-night event streaming on Peacock on April 1 and 2. I am not the die-hard wrestling fan I was back in middle school, but I’ll likely dip in and out of the broadcast to catch a few of the monologues, if not the matches. I don’t want to go so far as to predict that a future president will enter the ring, as was the case in 2007. But I wouldn’t rule that possibility out.

Related:

How wrestling explains America Donald Trump, wrestling heel

Today’s News

After a grand jury voted to indict Donald Trump yesterday, he will likely be arraigned on Tuesday. One of his lawyers said that the former president is prepared to go to trial. The Minneapolis City Council approved an agreement with the state of Minnesota to revamp its policing system, nearly three years after George Floyd’s murder. A “high risk” storm alert—a rare weather designation reserved for severe events—was issued for parts of the American Midwest and mid-South.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Maya Chung explores what California means to writers. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson unravels why Americans care about work so much.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

The Influencer Industry Is Having an Existential Crisis

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.

Influencers in the Wild has been turned into a board game with the tagline “Go places. Gain followers. Get famous. (no talent required)” And you get it because social-media influencers have always been, to some degree, a cultural joke. They get paid to post photos of themselves and to share their lives, which is something most of us do for free. It’s not real work.

But it is, actually. Influencers and other content creators are vital assets for social-media companies such as Instagram, which has courted them with juicy cuts of ad revenue in a bid to stay relevant, and TikTok, which flew some of its most famous creators out to D.C. last week to lobby for its very existence.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The woolly-mammoth meatball is an all-time great food stunt. The rise of AI Taylor Swift Photos of the week: a tattoo convention in Ecuador, a sunrise over Rio de Janeiro, and more

Culture Break

Chris Reel / Prime Video

Read. “The Vendor of New Hearts,” a poem by Colin Channer.

“Once way far in time in a village coiled from stone / I met an elder in a teahouse. He proposed, and I said yes / I’ll join you, and we walked together to the vendor of new hearts.”

Watch. Swarm, Donald Glover’s horror-comedy (on Amazon Prime), has a twisted take on celebrity culture.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tomorrow, April 1, marks the 20th anniversary of the White Stripes’ Elephant, one of the defining rock albums of the new millennium. You surely know the inescapable earworm “Seven Nation Army,” but I think the peak of the record is track eight, “Ball and Biscuit,” a swaggering garage-blues romp.

P.P.S. An impeccable list of records also turn 20 this year: Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Jay Z’s The Black Album, Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, My Morning Jacket’s It Still Moves, Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co., and the Strokes’ Room on Fire, to name just a few. As you settle into this Friday night, pour yourself a drink and crank the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, yet another 2003 banger. Here’s a great clip of Karen O and the band crushing “Y Control” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The World Blind Golf Championships in South Africa, a memorial for victims of a shooting in Nashville, a tattoo convention in Ecuador, a sunrise over Rio de Janeiro, flooding in California, protests in Israel and France, China Fashion Week in Beijing, a T-Rex auction in Switzerland, and much more

Just south of Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient stone barrier that cuts across England from coast to coast, is a Roman fort called Vindolanda. Built around 85 A.D. and occupied for more than 300 years, Vindolanda was the tense interstice between empire and unoccupied frontier—a largely self-contained city at the edge of the Roman world. Today, surrounded by green, picturesque countryside, it is a wellspring of insight into the human past.

Thousands of wooden objects have been found at Vindolanda, most of them mundane—bits of wheels, remnants of furniture, a toilet seat. Rob Sands, an assistant professor in archaeology at University College Dublin, was recently examining these objects for an upcoming exhibit when he came across one particular artifact and did a double take. The artifact’s official description labeled it as a darning tool, a crafting device that helps secure fibers and can be shaped like a mushroom or maraca. But to Sands, the “darning tool” looked much more like a wooden penis.

Sands made that hunch official last month, when he and Rob Collins, who had been researching phallic stone carvings from Vindolanda, published a reinterpretation of the ancient object as a disembodied phallus. They proposed three possible functions for the wooden carving based on an analysis of its most-worn areas, details of its shape, and the cultural context in which it was created: a decorative good-luck charm, a pestle, or most provocatively, a dildo. Collins, a senior lecturer at Newcastle University, in England, told me that the first time he had closely examined the nearly 2,000-year-old object, he’d noticed “some really interesting wear patterns” that were highly suggestive of a use quite distinct from sewing. “This doesn’t prove anything,” he told me, but it reinforced the possibility that the object might have, in his words, a “business end.”

If the Vindolanda phallus is what Collins thinks it might be, then it’s the first Roman object identified as such. Ancient sex toys, generally, are hard to come by. There are rare exceptions—like a stone dildo found in China dated to about 600 A.D.—but most definitive examples are more recent, like sex toys from around the 18th century in France and Japan. Yet representations of sex toys in art and texts abound; for instance, in one Greek play from the third century B.C., two women discuss a scarlet-leather dildo and how much they enjoy it. This kind of evidence strongly suggests that these objects existed in antiquity. So what has archaeology been missing?

[Read: Victorian-era orgasms and the crisis of peer review]

It’s possible that most ancient sex toys were made from organic materials and, as a result, haven’t survived: A leather dildo, or even a wooden one, has the odds stacked against it. The Vindolanda phallus happened to be preserved only because of particular soil conditions caused by repeated building on the same spot. But even when genitalia-shaped objects do survive, Collins said, they tend not to be seen as sexual—and many of them likely weren’t. We can’t always determine an object’s purpose based only on its shape: Plenty of old and modern objects are, to varying degrees, penis-shaped without having a sexual use, or sexual without being penis-shaped. In their paper, Collins and Sands cited a few other examples of ancient wooden phallic objects—recovered in Egypt, China, and Japan—none of which are categorized as sex toys.

Determining whether a particular object was used for sex can be challenging. Ideally, you’d be able to reference supporting documents, such as a mosaic or poem depicting its function, says Rebecca Fasman, a curator at the Kinsey Institute, which focuses on research related to sex. For example, the Kinsey Institute houses a five-inch-long Egyptian terracotta phallus that Fasman says might have been used sexually. The supporting evidence for that theory: It’s life-size—too big to be a good-luck talisman, too small to be art—and lacks the adornments of other commonly found phallic objects, such as wind chimes. But the artifact may have served a different purpose, or even multiple purposes, Fasman told me. Perhaps it was attached to a larger sculpture as a charm to ward off evil or a symbol of fertility.

As Collins and Sands see it, however, the fact that sex toys are missing from the archaeological record may say much more about how ancient people are studied today than how they actually behaved. Until the late 20th century, Collins said, most archaeologists were reluctant to consider the possibility that an artifact might be a sex toy at all. Prudishness and propriety limited how researchers could decipher objects and past cultures, Collins argues, with “only certain interpretations deemed acceptable for a wider public.” In the 1930s, for example, a classics scholar and poet named A. E. Housman tried to publish an examination of Roman homosexuality, but it was turned down for being too salacious, says Kelly Olson, a classics professor at Western University in Canada. These attitudes restricted people’s understanding of not just antiquity but also a fundamental part of our human story—the search for sexual pleasure.

[Read: A twist in our sexual encounters with other ancient humans]

After the sexual revolution of the 1970s, research on ancient sexuality picked up in the 1980s. Marianne Moen, a Viking expert at the University of Oslo, told me that this was a period of reassessment—through the lens of sex and gender, archaeologists could interpret historical events and artifacts in a new way. Third-wave feminism and the queer-studies movement of the 1990s also had more mainstream scholars thinking more about sex, Olson told me, but enthusiasm for sexual archaeology soon waned thanks to backlash against those movements, Moen said. Even today, the public isn’t completely on board with the idea that the Vindolanda phallus may be a dildo: Some non-archaeologists have scoffed at the possibility of its sexual use, and Collins has received some aggressive emails pushing back on his interpretation. Some people, he said, simply don’t like the idea of a dildo being wanted in a Roman fort because its potential use would suggest that male anatomy wasn’t necessary (or sufficient) for pleasure.

Archaeologists “always have to be careful not to project our contemporary values and expectations onto past societies,” Collins said. If he were an archaeologist in the 1970s and encountered the Vindolanda phallus, he told me, he might not even have known what a dildo was, and likely would not have thought to label an ancient artifact as one. At the same time, present-day researchers have to be careful not to project a modern view of sexuality onto the ancients. Fasman told me she doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that researchers are able to suggest the Vindolanda phallus is a dildo when it’s easier than ever to spot and buy a sex toy.

If Sands and Collins are correct, their reinterpretation of the phallus, along with other reassessments of ancient art, objects, and texts relating to sex and gender, show how easy it can be for researchers to overlook something in plain sight—whether that’s ancient Greek authors’ love of a dirty joke or the concept of gender fluidity in the La Tolita-Tumaco culture, of what is now the borders of Colombia and Ecuador. Olson pointed out that if the Vindolanda phallus is indeed a sex toy, its form and wear suggest it was better suited for clitoral stimulation than anything else—a rare (or rarely noticed) sign of female sexuality in antiquity. Details like this help expand our awareness of ancient sexuality beyond stereotypes.

[Read: Before vibrators were mainstream]

Fasman and Olson said it’s fair to assume that museums and institutions outside Vindolanda house unlabeled dildos too. The National Archaeological Museum in Naples, for example, hosts an impressive collection of objects that are considered to be erotic art but may have had a more hands-on use. Much of it was found in Pompeii in the 18th century, a time when early archaeologists would not have ventured to classify artifacts as sex toys. In 1819, the art was called obscene and locked away; the general public was not allowed to see it until 2000. Every ancient object in a museum collection might be an opportunity for reinterpretation. “If this research kind of prompts a curator to go back and say, ‘Oh, that reminds me of something in our collection,’” Collins said, “that would be fantastic.”

Rescuers and local residents have been searching for more than 60 people reported missing after a landslide triggered by months of heavy rainfall killed at least seven in Ecuador's south.

Emergency services are still searching for survivors of Sunday's massive landslide in central Ecuador. Mud engulfed at least 163 homes in the small Andean community of Alausi affecting around 500 people.

The number of people reported missing is 62 after the massive wave of mud crashed down onto the community.

Seven people are missing as rescuers clear debris after wave of mud and debris swept through small town of Alausi.

Emergency officials say the massive landslide also injured 16 people in Andean community in central Ecuador.

Dozens of current and former workers who harvested fibre for Furukawa Plantaciones say their human rights were violated.

“Nothing is more emancipating than the fraternity of nations,” the presidents of Argentina and Brazil declared earlier this year, “coming together from the depths of history to make the future theirs.” This sonorous language—of emancipation and brotherhood—evoked the aspirations of South America’s great independence hero, the statesman Simón Bolívar. The reality was more humdrum: a fancy way of saying they’d like to create a common currency, known as el sur.

The plan for a currency union is merely the latest in a long history of treaties and proposals for creating a closer bloc in the region. “The ideas of Latin American integration are so old,” Jamil Mahuad, a former president of Ecuador, told me. “It’s a big dream, but a dream that has always fallen short.” During Mahuad’s term in office, in the late 1990s, the country faced an economic crisis so severe that the local currency collapsed. His solution was a desperate one: dollarization—in a way, the antithesis of el sur (literally, “the south”). In effect, Ecuador joined someone else’s currency union, but without any of the privileges of membership.

“Some of the coverage said that the sur would be the second-largest currency union after the EU, but that’s a mistake,” Athanasios Orphanides, an economics professor at MIT, told me. “The largest currency union is the United States.” The Constitution that founded the U.S. federal government in 1789 also made a point of centralizing the creation of money. Without this system, the dollar might not be so mighty; instead, states would have their own legal tenders and the power to set interest rates.

[Yanis Varoufakis: Is this the end of ‘socialism for the rich’?]

Latin American countries control their own money but at times also lose control of it. Typically, this can happen either because a central bank is pressured to do the government’s bidding and print money, rather than implement good fiscal discipline, or because the vagaries of the global economy force up the price of vital imports. Smaller economies especially tend to have more fragile currencies. When Mahuad decided to adopt the U.S. currency for Ecuador, it was not because he was an apostle of dollarization, he told me, but because he had no better option.

Attempts to bring Latin America into a closer union have met mostly with failure. Bolívar, the leader of independence campaigns in six South American countries, is perhaps the most celebrated for his efforts. In 1819, he proclaimed a single state known as Gran Colombia comprising a territory that includes today’s Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. And in 1826, he tried to assemble an even larger league of republics in the Americas with a military that could protect them from European powers. The only country that ratified the initiative was the one under his rule, which in time crumbled. The Gran Colombia federation dissolved in 1831, a few months after his death.

One reason for Latin American countries’ difficulty in forming a bloc has to do with what makes them distinct nations in the first place. The Spanish empire insisted that its colonies could not trade with one another, and divided its dominion into viceroyalties, captaincy generals, and territories, each with its own bureaucracy. When these colonies achieved independence, their armies were weak and ill-suited for annexing territory, the historian Alfredo Ávila told me, so these postcolonial nations stayed separate, and some split further (the Kingdom of Guatemala, for example, would eventually become five countries in Central America).

[Annie Lowrey: The Federal Reserve’s artificial recession]

Later, in the second half of the 20th century, the impetus of integration that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank produced similar institutions in Latin America, all promising regional forums or more free trade. The 1960s brought the Andean Pact and the Latin American Free Trade Association. Both languished, however, and even their rebranding in subsequent decades failed to reinvigorate them. The two most promising pacts so far have been Mercosur, a customs union established in 1991, and the Pacific Alliance, a trade bloc founded in 2011. But neither has fully delivered: Mercosur has allowed so many exceptions that its zone is anything but tariff-free; the Pacific Alliance has largely failed to increase trade among its members.

And so, today, Latin America remains fragmented. Only 15 percent of trade stays within the region, compared with 55 percent in Europe and 38 percent in North America. Just one-third of continental flights connect Latin American cities to one another, and the Pan-American Highway, a route conceived with the ambition to link a hemisphere, has stretches that flood with mud during the rainy season and develop potholes capable of sinking trucks.

That lack of ties has been a significant drag on industry. “No country, not even Brazil, has a big enough local market or labor market to make products that compete with Asia,” Shannon O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “They cannot, for example, make their own cars.”

Latin America is not alone in its isolation. South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa have also failed to form major alliances, and rank even lower in intraregional trade. What perhaps distinguishes Latin America from other divided parts of the world is how long its constituent countries have talked about unity. The notion that countries sharing the Spanish language, a religion, and a colonial history could coalesce into something bigger keeps resurfacing. (Portuguese-speaking Brazil gets included because of its proximity and similarity.) The appeal of this idea seems powerful enough to inspire periodic integration efforts but not to make them succeed.

[Books: Who poisoned Pablo Neruda?]

Talk of international cooperation sometimes comes from unexpected quarters. In 2019, Brazil’s then-president, Jair Bolsonaro, proposed the peso real, a currency that would be shared by his country and Argentina, which was also then governed by a right-leaning leader. This, Bolsonaro said, would act as “a lock to keep socialism out.” The Brazilian central bank issued a statement that this currency project would not happen; the next day Bolsonaro insisted that it would, but never brought it up again. Then, in 2021, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president, proposed building in Latin America “something similar to the European Union, but more in tune with our history, our reality, our identity.” He did not say precisely what that would be, only that it would involve a complex process—and that, on the 238th anniversary of Bolívar’s birth, his dreams had to be kept alive. López Obrador, too, seems to have dropped the plan.  

Besides Bolívar’s dream, the EU provides the main model. Its evolution, however, had a very different purpose. After the end of the Second World War, Western leaders thought that binding Europe’s economies together would guarantee peace. What began as an agreement about coal and steel production among France, Germany, and the Benelux countries gradually became a common market, and then added its own institutions and ever-closer ties among its members, enabling the free flow of labor, and finally, in the late 1990s, plans for a common currency. The euro, fully adopted by 2002, is not universally loved. After the financial crash of 2008–09, heavily indebted Southern European countries were forced to endure severe austerity measures by the eurozone’s governing authorities; Greece, notably, came close to dropping out.

In light of that long and vexed history, the first printing of el sur is a ways off—which may be just as well, given some of the early reviews. “This is insane,” wrote Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the IMF. “It’s a terrible idea,” opined the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who usually disagrees with Blanchard.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

As the EU experience suggests, common currencies demand that countries have stable political systems and a shared view of macroeconomic policy. For the sur to work, Argentina and Brazil would first have to remove trade barriers, strengthen political ties, harmonize business regulations, and make moves to enable the free flow of labor and capital between the two countries. “You can’t just say ‘We’re going to adopt a common currency,’” Orphanides, the MIT professor, told me. “That’s not how it works.”

One major obstacle for el sur is that a common currency would favor only one of its two proponents. In the short term, Argentina would have far more to gain. Brazil has a strong, stable currency that is guarded by a vigilant independent central bank, which has succeeded in keeping inflation in the single digits since 2004. By contrast, Argentina’s inflation rate reached 95 percent last year—something the country’s president blames on the media. Brazil’s monetary policy has credibility in international money markets; Argentina has had to impose capital controls to keep people from buying dollars.

And like other currency or payment schemes that have set out to replace the dollar for trade in Latin America, el sur would need the central banks of member countries to guarantee it with holdings in gold or a reserve currency—which, ironically, would probably be the dollar. Alexandre Schwartsman, who worked at the Brazilian central bank in the 2000s, told me that he’s doubtful whether the sur, if it materializes, would ever become a fully operational joint currency.

Argentina and Brazil’s project is premature because a common currency requires so many other types of cooperation to work; using the same banknotes should be a last step, not the first. Before the two nations are ready to share a coin, they’d need to fix such basic problems as the hours of delay that motorists face just to cross the border between them. El sur, too, will have to wait.