If you have read Giri Nathan's tennis blogs on Defector, you know that no one else writes about that sport with the insight, invention, and humor that he does. If you have just read Defector this week, you'll know that he has a new book out called Changeover that enfolds some of the reporting and writing he's done here, and a bunch of new stuff to tell the story of the rising rivalry between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. It is very good, and I admired it very much. So much so, in fact, that despite interviewing Giri about it twice in the same day—we recorded this episode on Tuesday morning, and Patrick Sauer and I talked to him about it again at our reading series in Brooklyn on Tuesday night—there's still a bunch of stuff I wish I'd asked him about. It's that good, and also I am that bad at interviewing people.
We only had Giri for 30 minutes, but there is a lot of tennis chat in that block, and exactly one minute of Knicks material, much of it focused on Giri's favorite tragic French draft bust. A lot of that talk is writer stuff, and Giri was obliging in talking about how he wrote a whole book in three months, why he wrote the first draft of it longhand, and how he turned the notes he took while enjoying the bleary and half-psychedelic late-night experience of watching a marathon tennis match into language that is both edgy and weird. He also made his case for Sinner and Alcaraz as triumphs of tennis technology and human adaptability, and for Daniil Medvedev as one of the great tragicomic supporting players in sports, and for more appreciation of the moment and human ingenuity in tennis writing.
And then he was gone to handle man-with-a-book-out responsibilities, and Drew and I were on our own. Or not quite on our own: There was the Funbag, and there were questions, and so there was nothing to do but face our fears and confront whatever was on the minds of our listeners. A question about whether anyone would remember the Titanic if it didn't sink on its maiden voyage gave me an opportunity to make a tedious New Jersey–centric point about the Hindenburg disaster and recommend the unproduced Die Hard On A Blimp script I read back when I was trying to work in the movie business; Drew's principled refusal to yes-and any of my blimp-related stuff is frankly admirable. A question about commercials led us first to talk about ones that we actually like—I was happy to celebrate the "lint licker" and "can I get a hot tub" line readings as real art—before getting into the ones we really, really don't. Drew talked about where ads come from, good and bad, and we kicked around various lazy, celeb-studded ads and discussed why they feel so insulting.
Our last question was about the extent to which our current ultra-dire national moment is the result of an extended masculine freakout, and while we both agreed that the answer was yes, both of us were eager to answer it at length. The resulting conversation is pretty good, I think, but also all over the lot—it enfolds both the sadistic grift of online-style masculinity bullshit and the importance that softcore Cinemax erotica played for our generation, as well as how people grow into being adults and how some people might manage to get older without ever quite doing that. I share my conspiracy theory about why tech creeps and reactionaries actually hate higher education, and why I hate that. The word "deskilling" is spoken aloud; it was time to go. The next couple of weeks will be heavy on football talk, as the calendar dictates. I'm glad I got in one last annoying monologue for the road.
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