Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And here was the cruelest part for him.
The man who had spent his life controlling everything around him could not control or hide this.
It was happening to his own face.
And of course, he met it with a kind of quiet, almost touching effort.
He tried hair restoratives, and when they failed, he bought a wig and tested it nervously at church one Sunday and was relieved when the congregation approved.
And in time, he would keep a rotation of wigs cut to different lengths, which he wore in sequence over the weeks so that his hair seemed to grow longer and then be freshly trimmed.
He was an aging man going through gentle, elaborate lengths just to look ordinary.
The biggest cruelty of it was the timing.
Because his enemies had taken to calling him a literal monster, his own estranged brother Frank used the exact word to describe him in one of Tarbell's articles.
Of course, it had been a figure of speech and taken out of context, but Tarbell never let that get in the way of her narrative.
The illness, as one biographer put it, made him look like a hairless ogre, stripped of all youth, warmth, and attractiveness.
The illness had given him the physical face his accusers had always insisted he wore, and the worst of it was still coming.
In a few years, Ida Tarbell would point to this disease, this medical affliction, as the outward proof of the rot she said laid inside him.
The first installment of Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company appeared in McClure's magazine in November 1902.
Her original outline had three articles, but the public had other ideas and the magazine's rule was to keep printing as long as the readers kept buying.
It would in the end run 19 installments over two and a half years.
What strengthened this series was that she had a man on the inside, Henry Rogers, who was a senior director of Standard Oil.
Historians suggest that he was an arrogant man who reached out to her, believing he could charm her and perhaps spin this story and settle some scores.
For two years, she came to the Standard Oil office, whisked in one door and out another while Rogers reviewed her findings.
And she noticed, kept the light trained on the founder and off of himself.
Showing 2021–2040 of 20,679 · page 102 of 1034
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