It is a truism, but it is also actually true that you should be careful what you ask for. Distraction episodes are typically right around an hour, and almost always on the short side of the 60-minute mark, and commenters and correspondents have in the past groused that they sometimes can seem to end somewhat abruptly. I'd argue that they always begin much more abruptly, but it is just how we do it. This week's episode, though, despite being a just-the-two-of-us affair, is not like that. It ends normally, and something like 15 minutes later than usual. And a great deal of those 15 minutes are about politics. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy with this?
To be fair, there's basically a whole normal podcast that unfolds before we get into all that. Drew and I do whatever the air travel version is of Remembering Some Guys and air our respective middle-aged gripes, then turn our attention to the World Series, which has already far outperformed the expectations we outlined with Justin Halpern last week. We talked about the instant-classic marathon of Game 3, our different but equally imperfect approaches to X-treme late-night sports television, the anti-comedy beats of baseball games that go on too long and the fun of getting to the very bottom of a roster, and shared our appreciations of Ray's fantastic late-night language in his terrific Game 3 story. Brandon and Mischa made the executive decision to leave in the lunch interruption that happened during this conversation, which led to a fairly extended round of Vietnamese spring roll chat and an assessment of the strange feeling of achievement that comes with finishing a big bottle of fish sauce. We did get back to the baseball eventually, and I explained what I underestimated about the Jays in general, and the extent to which their distinctive style of play would translate against the Dodgers. As these things go, it was a decently fun thing to be wrong about.
After the break, we turned to the newest NBA gambling story and its implications. Eventually. It's preceded by some conversation about how much any of this shit, scuzzy though it is and including the involvement of the mafia, even rates given the daily level of criminality in American life, and an appreciation of old-timey analog malfeasance, but we do get there. The question, which we addressed without answering, is to what extent the NBA, or any institution, actually wants to try to solve the problem that gambling apps present; we picked off, in a sense, where we left off on the Pablo Torre episode on this issue. How much does the NBA need this particular revenue stream, really, and could it possibly be worth it? This is one of those rhetorical questions.
And then it was time for politics talk, which began with the New York City mayoral election and its implications but inevitably became about the various other crises that make up our everyday at this moment. It wasn't as heavy as you might expect, and while the New York–specific stuff is specific to New York, the discussion about how much bigoted poison is just in the groundwater in our politics, and the role of the New York Post (and other lousy media) as the lead pipe through which that polluted discourse flows, is dispiritingly easy to project upward and outward. I talked about the anxiety that comes with wondering whether The Worst And Most Disgusting Shit might work, not despite that but because of it, the strangeness of multiple candidates running for mayor of a city on a platform of overwhelming disgust for that city and its voters, and whether anything could really dent the arrogance of the political establishment that's closed ranks against Zohran Mamdani. It sounds serious, and I guess it was serious, but it still left time for a very goofy Funbag question. Once you get past the hour mark, there aren't really any rules.
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