It's just a lot to walk around with. You still have to walk around, naturally, there's stuff that needs doing and nothing is really gained by sitting around thinking about how stupid and crooked and venal everything is, and about the confluence of cultural forces conspiring to make it all dumber and nastier and worse, or about the erosion of the institutions and mores that ideally would stem that degradation. And yet, if you're the someone who thinks about that sort of thing—and if you are aware of it, it does tend to clatter around in your brain even if just as highly intrusive background noise—you can't just not think about it. The challenge, if you are aiming to remain sane, is in how you spin it.
Pablo Torre, whom we welcomed back to the pod this week, is a delightful conversationalist and a talented broadcaster, and his podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out has done some very good work of late not just in investigating and advancing big stories but in finding new ways to talk about this kind of thing. The two big stories that we talked about on this episode, both of which have been moved forward considerably by Pablo's podcast, have those kinds of head-spinning, face-palming implications, and we discussed those implications at some length and with some depth. But the ways in which he's covered both the ongoing meltdown at the NFL Players Association and the shabby boomlet in small-bore NBA gambling fuckery have managed to be illuminating on the merits and attuned to the broader bad stuff those stories suggest without making you want to sit in a dark room for five hours.
I think we were more or less able to do that in this week's episode as well, although as noted above it can be a challenge to think about the co-opting of a union by disingenuous and self-interested leadership or look upon the teeming ocean of highly online grifter sociopaths and not start feeling some serious dread. The dread is present in our conversation—I am on the podcast, after all—but I felt good as we were recording and in listening back to it that, while we looked some very intractable challenges in the face and talked about them plainly, the episode somehow wasn't really a downer. Or not just a downer, anyway. At moments like this, and on stories like these, that feels like an accomplishment in itself. A lot of the credit for that goes to Pablo, who does a lot of the talking in this one, but also there's no reason not to think and talk about this stuff, and hiding from it feels bad. We might as well try to figure out how to do it.
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