Hey, Hang Up and Listen listeners. We have a treat for you in our feed, something a little bit unexpected.

Not entirely about sports. Not really about sports at all. This is Josh Levine's podcast series about his new book, The Queen. It's a four-part series. We're rolling out the first episode here in the Hang-Up feed for you to listen. Josh Levine is here with us. Hi, Josh.

Hey, yeah.

So the first episode will be in this feed.

The rest will be in the feed for the show, specifically, the queen.

And as you said, Stefan, it is based on the reporting that I did for my book.

I'm going to tell four separate stories about Linda Taylor, the woman who was the first person known as the

welfare queen and for the book. And now for the podcast, I tell for the first time the story

of this woman's life, a woman who was made into this stereotype, a stereotype that endured

even as her, you know, the real story of her life was lost and forgotten or never

really looked into.

And in the first episode, Josh, you tell the story of George Bliss, a reporter for the Chicago

Tribune, who was pretty much the first reporter to write about Linda Taylor in the early 1970s.

Bliss was a Pulitzer Prize winner, many three times over,

started at the Tribune in the 1940s, was a byline hungry, page one story producing investigative writer

who really changed the city and then decided to dig into welfare fraud. How did that happen and how did

he get onto the Linda Taylor story? Yeah, as you'll hear in the episode, he was somebody who

had this kind of bifurcated career where he was doing these really huge investigations.

Once that had you said were very consequential, not just award-winning, but really changed

the fabric of Chicago in a lot of different ways.

But he was also obsessive about getting in the paper in the sort of old-timey way that I think

you could probably relate to from being in the journal in the sort of old-timey way that I think you could probably relate to

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