There are the very special episodes that Drew and I do before heading off on vacation, and then there are the rarer ones we do while one of us is on vacation. This week's installment was one of those, as Drew joined from a beach house in an undisclosed—well, he mentions it within the first two minutes, but I won't disclose it here—New England location and I joined from my damn apartment, albeit not long after returning from my extremely disclosed annual summer trip to Maine. And yet this is only sort of a Vacation Episode, because while Drew was within hailing distance of a beach and I could still see my own time away receding in the rearview mirror, the news cycle was not on vacation.
After some talk about regional accents good and bad, complete with regional accent work of our own, we were on to the stuff that's happening. Regarding the NFL, we're still in the part of Why Your Team Sucks when all the teams actually do suck. But it was a treat to talk about the LeBron-Sixers situation for the first time in a conversation that included cautious optimism, a reckless invocation of the infamous Sports Illustrated "Now This Is Going To Be Fun" cover, and a frank disagreement about whether the Eastern Conference is actually as thin as Drew believes it to be. Decently substantive, but at the end also decently vacation-scented, as we drifted into a critique of LeBron's proposed helicopter commute, the perversity of Amtrak commuting as a concept and the apparently perverse way in which I say "Acela," and the many ways to commute like an idiot and go insane as a result. Also, there's some stuff about my experience writing an unpublishable novel on Amtrak in my twenties, which was pretty good as those things go.
After the break, we returned with a discussion of Tony Romo's Extreme Wisconsin Moment, a bunch of Tony Romo noises, and a not-quite-celebration of America's varied DWI folkways. The segue from that to Bari Weiss's tripping-down-the-stairs tenure at 60 Minutes sounds risky, but was actually fairly natural. We talked about Weiss trying to figure out what journalism is in real time, while running a major national news operation, and the broader cohort she represents of weird suckups who don't learn anything and have no respect for actual work, and how that is likely to go for her in an extremely demanding and high-stakes environment.
Finally, we turned to the Sophie Cunningham discourse, which had not yet taken its latest queasy turn, and the discussion of which had been pretty thoroughly finished off by Maitreyi last week. But there's still plenty to talk about there: the people who just don't frickin' care what other people say about them, the people who scream about the WNBA and don't know or care about it, and the proper treatment and sequestration of the reactionary grievance industry that runs in parallel to everything in the culture. Neither one of us makes a convincing case for ourselves as WNBA commissioner in the process, but we did agree that Cathy Engelbert mostly hasn't, either.
We brought the episode full circle with a Funbag question about which athlete's jersey has been burned the most. Our emailer suggested LeBron, but we reasoned our way through to a different, inevitably NFL-centric answer that considered both the environmental hazards of burning a jersey and which type of fan would be likeliest to do so. There was time to give ostentatiously barefoot Patriots WR Mack Hollins the dreaded "Poochie" comp before we brought this working vacation to a close, but that was it. Next week, when we're both back at work, you can expect it to sound pretty much the same.
If you would like to subscribe to The Distraction, you can do that through Apple Podcasts or wherever else you might get your podcasts. Thank you, as always, for your support.