Category: Excerpts

On the afternoon of May 26, 1987, a New Jersey state trooper doing routine stops on the Garden State Parkway pulled over a rental car carrying two men. The infraction was an open can of St. Pauli Girl beer, part of a six-pack from a nearby convenience store. When the window was rolled down, the trooper smelled marijuana. The driver admitted there were a few joints under his seat.

“Hands on the hood, feet back, and spread ’em,” the driver later remembered the trooper saying before he radioed for backup. Handcuffing the driver took two pairs of cuffs; he was a very big man. The troopers then pulled the passenger from the car and searched his bag. They found a vial of white powder. The passenger was arrested too.

They were taken in separate cars to the police station, where the driver was identified as James Edward Duggan Jr., better known by his professional wrestling identity, “Hacksaw.” The passenger’s ID said he was named Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, but even the arresting officer recognized the popular World Wrestling Federation character The Iron Sheik. The powder tested positive for cocaine. But within a few hours Duggan was released, and so was Vaziri after signing an appearance bond. They returned to their car and continued southbound to Asbury Park, where they were scheduled to beat each other up before a crowd of thousands later that night.

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In 2014, IKEA, the Swedish-based global furniture company, sent a cease-and-desist letter to a blogger by the name of Jules Yap. Yap ran the extremely popular website IKEAhackers.net, which helped people “hack” IKEA furniture into new, creative, and unexpected designs. The site was already almost a decade old when IKEA’s lawyers demanded that Yap hand over the URL. What follows is a case study from Superfandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are.

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In their book, Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are, authors and cofounders of toy company Squishable Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron Glazer dig into how some brands manage to turn ordinary consumers into diehard fans. In this edited excerpt, they discuss why Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting is know as the “Woodstock of Capitalism.”

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Tish Bellomo looks to be in her fifties, but it’s difficult to know for sure — there are few pictures from the past forty years of her or of her sister Eileen, who goes by “Snooky,” without both of them sporting wild, fluorescent-colored hair. News clippings from the eighties hanging in their shared office show it layered, feathered, and back-combed into a fiery mane. At the moment, hers is bright pink with a green streak at the front — a nod to the hair-dye brand that made her and her sister famous four decades ago, and the company they still run today: Manic Panic. [Read more]