Quartz Weekend Brief—Throwback sports, earthquake math, Baltimore, rate rigging
Good morning, Quartz readers!
Sport fans will be forgiven if they think they have fallen into a time warp this weekend.
On Saturday evening in the US, two grown men will attempt to knock each other unconscious for profit. Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao is the most eagerly anticipated boxing match in years, with record-breaking audiences expected inside the Las Vegas arena where it’s being held and at home on TV. (Last-minute tickets are proving to be a better deal.)
Boxing’s popularity in the US peaked in the middle of the 20th century. Its subsequent decline is explained, in part, by changing attitudes toward brutal violence. But the sport is in the midst of a mini-revival in the US and Asia and has been resilient in some countries, like Mexico. Pay-per-view receipts for the fight, at $99 per household, were lucrative enough to unite two of television’s biggest rivals, HBO and Showtime.
The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will be proceeded by another throwback, the 141st edition of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon in Louisville. There was a time when horse racing ranked among America’s favorite forms of entertainment as well. Its decline is blamed on everything from new forms of gambling to the suburbanization of the US to concerns about animal cruelty.
Some Americans will tune into another sporting event this weekend, one that strangely enough, doesn’t actually involve an athletic contest. The National Football League’s draft, the annual process used to assign college players to professional teams, concludes on Saturday. American football is easily the country’s biggest spectator sport at the moment, thanks to being perfectly tailored for high-definition televisions. But the TV industry is undergoing rapid change, and the NFL is grappling with disturbingly violent issues of its own, on and off the field.
Football may be a long way from suffering the fate of boxing, but the Mayweather-Pacquiao bout should serve as a reminder that a popular pastime can quickly recede into the past. —John McDuling
[insertSponsor]
Five things on Quartz we especially liked
We’re trying out a new feature this weekend that lets you save each link to Pocket, so you can read them later. Just tap “Pocket” next to each item.
How our clothing came to define our gender. The idea that humans are either male or female is deeply ingrained in Western culture, but as research and the experiences of countless non-gender-conforming people show, sex and gender aren’t perfectly binary. Marc Bain explores how the fashion world is finally beginning to embrace the idea of “gender neutral” clothing. (Save to Pocket)
Video conferencing comes to jail. Hundreds of prisons have eliminated in-person meetings between prisoner and their families in favor of “video visitations,” which are considered cheaper and more secure. “It’s torture,” the sister of one convict tells Hanna Kozlowska about not being able to see her inmate brother in person. (Pocket)
Growing up in Baltimore. Yitz Jordan reflects on his childhood as the son of a single mother long before the city erupted this week in protests over police brutality. “My mother did way more than keep me from dying,” he writes. “She made me succeed at living.” (Pocket)
Speaking of Floyd Mayweather. Many people forget the boxer has a history of domestic violence that spans over 10 years and five different women. Meredith Bennett-Smith argues that anyone choosing to watch the fight this weekend is implicitly endorsing violence against women. (Pocket)
The math of earthquakes. Following the devastation in Nepal, David Yanofsky and Annalisa Merelli mapped the world’s greatest seismic hazards (Pocket); Yanofsky and Akshat Rathi explained the logarithmic Richter scale (Pocket); and Rathi and Shelly Walia looked at why women are more likely to die in a natural disaster (Pocket).
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
Did rigging markets help Deutsche Bank avoid a bailout? Last week, the German banking giant paid a record $2.5 billion penalty to settle allegations that it manipulated interest rates. In Euromoney, Jon Macaskill trawls through the case files and comes to a controversial conclusion: It looks like those sharp practices were profitable enough to explain why Deutsche Bank, unlike many of its rivals, was able to avoid a government bailout during the 2008 credit crunch. (Pocket)
The link between diversity and segregation. American cities like Chicago are among the most racially diverse in the country. But as Nate Silver mapped out in FiveThirtyEight, they tend to be the most racially segregated, as well. The opposite is often true: Less diverse cities, like Lincoln, Nebraska, are at least better integrated. (Pocket)
Silk Road’s rise and fall. The anonymous online marketplace, famous for popularizing bitcoin and also facilitating drug transactions, was the epitome of a black market. And then it all came crashing down amid accusations that included a conspiracy to commit six murders. Joshuah Bearman and Tomer Hanuka chronicled the whole story in Wired. (Pocket)
The secret history of Secret. The anonymous messaging app announced this week that it will shut down, not long after being considered the next big thing in Silicon Valley. Mike Isaac in the New York Times details how Secret went from hockey-stick growth to Ferraris to its founder espousing a belief in “failing fast.” (Pocket)
How fast America changes its mind. With the US Supreme Court considering the legality of gay marriage this week, Alex Tribou and Keith Collins in Bloomberg Business charted the relative speed of changing opinions on issues from abortion to marijuana. (Pocket)
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, left hooks, and gender-neutral clothing to [email protected]. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the weekend.