OZY Daily Dose

Before Zeke Nnaji’s senior season at Hopkins High School in Minnesota, the kid now lighting it up at the University of Arizona had a simple imperative from his coaches: Don’t score. For the entire preseason fall league, Nnaji effectively didn’t take a shot, setting the table for teammates and developing his skills as a playmaker.

It’s not just you; everyone is feeling it. And by “it” we mean “crushing and terrible anxiety” about the state of literally everything. A study in 2018 found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said they were more anxious than a year earlier. And let’s not get started on the anxiety induced by limited resources for getting help for anxiety. Fun! The holidays are just as likely to be a source of anxiety as a balm to it.

No one wants to write a story like this. For about half a dozen reasons. Most significantly, not wanting to be labeled a glory whore. But I know there are real people out there, with real problems with both power dynamics and sexual assault, trying to get through their days getting over something shitty that happened to them. I also know that very few of them are Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world champions who feel pretty OK with their present place in space. Like me. But this is not about that.

Don “Duck” Richardson was a menace to society.Merciless, physically and verbally abusive, Richardson built the greatest high school basketball program in Georgia history at Southwest-Macon High School. From 1971-1990, he compiled a 463-90 record (an 83.7 winning percentage), and captured six state championships, 10 regional and 15 sub-regional titles.

Jesica Gómez has lost count of the number of times she was arrested by the police since she came out as transgender at age 17. “The police used to get us anywhere, grab us by the hair and arrest us, for nothing, just for being trans,” she says. Now 48, Gómez is a leading activist for the rights of trans women in Argentina. And she isn’t alone: Argentina is on a path of change.

Before the Twin Towers fell the world was a different place. But in that place, specifically the jungles of Timor, there was another bad man. A very bad man. He wore a black Stetson cowboy hat, carried a G3 battle rifle, and when he prowled the jungles with his men, he wore soccer shoes. Shoes with a unique tread pattern that let everyone know he was there. In a world of grass huts and bows and arrows, he had become a god. Or a ghost.

If you ask Wolf Biermann, his 1976 expulsion from the German Democratic Republic was the beginning of the end for the Communist state. The details that connect the rock star’s expatriation to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall are more complicated than that, but then one of the things that made Biermann so successful was his simple style.

The Cincinnati Bengals had no idea it was coming. After all, the move hadn’t been pulled off on a professional football field for nearly 30 years. But as the Cleveland Browns prepared to kick a customary post-touchdown extra point at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium on that afternoon in September 1994, they were just moments from altering the game forever.

For years, Dominic Abels counted on Sunday business for a quarter of the weekly revenue his store earned in the now-posh Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. But in the past few months, the gaunt-faced Abels has been fined three times for keeping his shop open on Sundays in defiance of the law. The fine increased each time — from 400 euros ($440) the first time to 800 euros ($880) most recently.

More than a year after Chris Linn’s disabled son, Tom, died unexpectedly of sepsis in his 20s, his ashes were still in the U.S. Postal Service priority mail slip they had arrived in and gathering dust on a shelf in Linn’s garage. To Linn, It felt like a distant, strange way to remember her son, even though the ashes being out of sight helped with her grieving. “I knew I had them, and I thought, someday I want to do something with them,” she explains.