Following podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, I'm Stefan Fatsis, the author of Word Freak and a few seconds of panic, and this is Slate's sports podcast. Hang up and listen for the week of January 14th, 2020.

On this week's show, we'll discuss Louisiana State University's 42 to 25

destruction of Clemson in Monday night's college football championship game, which possibly

made someone on this show content, if not even happy. Jeff Passon of ESPN will join us to

assess the punishment handed down by Major League Baseball to the Houston Astros for systematically cheating in the year they won the World Series and beyond.

And finally, we'll talk to Slate's Daniel Engber about his wrenching story about a woman who accused three New York Mets players of raping her in 1991, how those players

weren't charged, and how she and the story were forgotten.

Joining me from our New Orleans Bureau, his parents' house, is Josh Levine, Slate's

national editor and the author of The Queen, The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth. Josh, welcome. I'm pretty happy, Stefan. I don't know what the implication was that I'm not capable of experiencing joy. Well, you're a little bit an hedonic when it comes to these things. Let's be honest. Last week you said, you're a dispassionate observer, not a fan. Did I say that? You did say that. That doesn't seem like Something I would say. Yes. But enough about, we'll talk more about the game. We have some important announcements for our listeners today. Josh, why don't we start by explaining why you've been in New Orleans the past three weeks? I wanted to go to the game, man. You needed three weeks of prep to go to the Saints game

was last week. True. But now I've been working on a new season of Slate's award-winning

podcast, Slow Burn. It's going to be about David Duke and his political rise in Louisiana in the

80s and 90s, which is a story I've really been wanting to tell

for a long time. It's a story that's important to me. It was a huge thing in the state when I was

growing up here, and it's a really, you know, haunting episode from American history, one that I think is

really resonant today. And when I mentioned award-winning, critically acclaimed, what have you, I mean,

this is a series that in the hands of Leon Nafok and then Joel Anderson has just been

really amazing and I've had so much fun working on it. And that leads into our other announcement.

The host of Season 3 of Slowburn, Slate's Joel Anderson,

is going to be with us every week from now on. Stefan, I think, I speak for both of us when I say

that Joel is one of our favorite people to talk to about sports or anything else, and we're so

excited to have him be our third panelist on Hangup. So why don't we say hello to him? Because he is here today. Joel, welcome to the show. We are so psyched to have you joining us. Oh, that's great. I could hear all of that. Thank you. That was really nice to hear from all the way out here in California. Yeah, man, I'm excited. This is exactly where I want to be and exactly what I

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