Author Blatantly Steals The Title Of Stab’s Weekly Podcast, The Drop

Alright, maybe author Thad Ziolkowski isn’t an avid listener of Stab Podcasts, and his new book seems pretty valuable, so I’ll cut him some slack. 

Thad recently published “The Drop”, which touches on “How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery.” The sport in mind being surfing, of course. 

According to the New York Times:

An addict’s first hit and a surfer’s first wave are neurologically linked through the “thrill of being gathered up and borne along as if by magic.” While drug addiction eventually makes the abuser unemployable, Ziolkowski writes that the surfer will often “arrange to be underemployed.” Procuring street drugs, with their dangerously irregular dosages, can be an unpredictable but oddly thrilling ordeal. Surfing, too, is thrilling precisely because of its unpredictability — which Ziolkowski says accounts for its so far total failure to register as a spectator sport.

Many of the most striking passages in “The Drop” burrow into the correlations between surfing and drug abuse, some overt and others hidden. For starters, the surfer and stoner archetypes hit American pop culture at roughly the same time, the former through the seminal surfing film “Gidget,” of which Ziolkowski performs a surprisingly fecund thematic excavation.

Despite the scandalous, TMZ-like title I used for this post, the book actually addresses serious trends within the surf community and highlights the mental benefits of riding waves.

Check out the full story here.