There is this deep need among the journalistic class to be both the vanguard and the mainstream.

And it doesn't line up. It doesn't add up. It can't hold together.

Either you are radical and really pushing the boundaries of the culture and freaking out the squares

or you're making all the squares happy.

It's just it doesn't, it doesn't make sense.

And yet there's this odd need.

And I don't think it's just the journalistic set.

I think it's a lot of people.

I think people on the right certainly want to have the silent majority on their side.

But there's this weird, there's this weird need to be both the underdog and the

overdog all at once.

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. My guest is Ethan Strauss. He is a

sports journalist. Now, we don't talk a lot about sports around here, mostly because I do not follow sports,

but I am nonetheless a fan of Ethan's and of his substack, House of Strauss. His work there,

which includes articles and essays as well as a podcast, covers not just sports itself, but the

cultural and even political forces that surround

are human fascination and devotion to sports.

In his own words, he puts it this way.

Sports happen to comprise one of the few spheres in American life where millions of people

from different backgrounds share real-time experiences.

In the recent, that's post-1960s, past, sports served as a place for the nation and its cities to bond over passions that were mostly walled off from the surrounding world.

Within the last decade, those walls were breached.

...