Sports Media is filled with an endless stream of personalities, stories, and gossip, and I'm here to cover it all.

I'm John Arran, Puck's Sports Correspondent, and I've been covering the media business for right around 30 years. I have a new

podcast called The Varsity where I will take you inside the executive suites and

owners boxes that run the entire sports business. Twice a week, I will bring on the smartest people I know

to break down the hottest topics in sports media

and give you a window into the inside conversations

that are happening throughout sports media. the best known personalities in the business, everyone from Payton Manning to Jimmy Battaro.

If you have designs to make the Varsity itself, you need to listen to the Varsity Podcast.

Don't be stuck on the JV Squad this year.

I'll be coming at you every Wednesday and Sunday,

so be sure to follow and listen to the Varsity Podcast,

a presentation of Odyssey in partnership with Puck, wherever you get your podcasts. Everything Abraham Lincoln believed was darkness.

In early 1863, amid what he had called the fiery trial the Civil War.

Union forces were meeting defeat after defeat at the hands of the Confederacy.

Elizabeth Kekley, a free black woman with a dress-making business in Washington whose clients

included Mary Todd Lincoln, recalled a gloomy president walking into a room in the

residence in the White House, throwing himself on a sofa and reading the Book of Job,

the story of a righteous man tested by a God of wrath.

Job had endured, which was all Lincoln could think to do.

And then providentially on the 4th of July, amid despair and death, light and life emerged.

Word arrived of a union victory in the farmland of Pennsylvania at Gettysburg.

Later, in a conversation with General Daniel E. Sickles, who lost a leg in the battle.

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