I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.

It's the middle of January, which means there is some major football happening.

This week was the NCAA National Championship game.

The weekend this episode is publishing. The NFL Conference Championship games are going to be taking place.

And the big one, Super Bowl 60 is happening on February 8th.

And like many members, from my Puerto Rican family,

I'm going to be watching almost entirely for Bad Bunny's

Hattime Show. And that's because I don't really watch football, which is going to make this

week's interview a very fun challenge. I'm speaking with Chuck Posterman, author, critic,

the man behind a dozen books of nonfiction and fiction, an author of the newly released and very directly titled

Football. Chuck, I don't care much about football or really any sport, but I do care about you

and your books and the way you think, which is why I'm excited to have you on this week, which is why

I read this book. Welcome to the Book Review podcast. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate you

reading this book without having much interest in football. I do find that I am trying to thread

sort of a strange, very specific needle. Yeah. I think when you read a book about a sport,

there is this idea that, well, is this for people who are obsessed with it? Or is it for a person

who has some aesthetic distance from this or just knows that it's going on?

Like if I wrote a book about trees, no one would be like, well, you've got to be a lumberjack to enjoy this.

That doesn't really happen.

So I'm trying to do both of those things.

And I recognize the complexity in that.

So my initial idea for this conversation was we're going to have an entire episode in which Chuck tries to convince me to care about sports.

...