The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, I'm Josh Levine, Slate's national editor and the author of the book The Queen,

and this is Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen for the week of July 22nd, 2019.

This is usually the point at which I tell you all the various sports things we're going to

talk about, but this show is not going to be like those other shows. Last week, I went on the

Long Forum podcast to talk about my so-called journalism career. And at the end of that episode,

I came to believe that I needed to do a long interview with someone about their journalism career

in the hope

of starting some kind of lucrative Ponzi scheme.

Joining me in the Washington, D.C. studio, not Stefan Fatsis, he's off at the Scrabble Championship

this week.

We miss him.

But joining me this week, special guest, I'm expecting him to bear his soul in exchange for

three small bottles of water. It is Dead Spins, Dave McKenna. Welcome, Dave. Oh, my pleasure. Author of the Queen. You think that's a little too self-promotional? Well, I'm going to use it from now on, too. I liked the way it sounds. You're going to ratio me because we're going to talk so much more about you than about me. Me, your favorite

topic? Yes. So I wanted to start by telling people how we met. I started at City Paper in 2002,

which was my first journalism job. And this story actually becomes a little bit about the fallibility

of memory, because this didn't happen until 2003, but I was opening up

the paper. It was a requirement that we read the paper every week, makes sense. And there was a

column in there by the City Paper Sports columnist, and it was about Louisiana quarterbacks,

because Washington at that point had this guy Patrick Ramsey, little known, little remembered guy. He went to

Tulane. And so McKenna here wrote about the long and storied history of quarterbacks from Louisiana.

And among them was Payton Manning, who went to Isidore Newman School, which is the school that I went to

...