Slate's Hang Up and Listen is sponsored by Casper, an online retailer of premium mattresses for a fraction of the price.

Casper mattresses come with free delivery and returns within a 100-day period.

And get $50 toward any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com slash hangup and using the promo code Hangup.

Hi, this is Slate's Hangup and using the promo code Hang Up. Hi, this is Slate's Hang Up and Listen for the week of June 29th, 2015.

I'm Mike Peska.

Guess who's not here?

It's Stefan Fatsis and Josh Levine, or rather it's not.

You see, we've gone to a six-man rotation because what we're trying to do is, as you know, the latest technology shows that everyone just has a set number of quips. So we want to keep Josh and Stefan's quip count low. Actually, they're on vacation. So I could invite two pretenders to the throne here, and we could blather, blather about, I don't know, Bartolo Cologne,

some other stuff that's going on in sports, mainly Bartolo Cologne, right? Now, let's not do that.

Here's what I decided to do. I decided, with the consultation of Josh and Stefan, to invite not

other guests, but entire other podcasts. I'm populating this podcast with other sports podcasts, the world of soccer, the world of

baseball, the world of hypothetical basketball.

So the first up is dummy.

Dummy's a podcast from Howler magazine.

It's an actual print magazine about soccer. George

Koreshi is the editor and founder of Howler. And here he talks with Alison McCann.

She played on the Stanford Women's Soccer team. And guess what? She roped her former,

she's now a journalist for 538. But she roped her former teammate Kelly O'Hara into this talk.

You know, K.O. She's the defender with the U.S. women's national team. So what they're going to talk about in this segment is a post-mortem of the World Cup game against China and preview Tuesday's semi-final matchup between the U.S. and Germany. Take it away, George. Hello and welcome to a special edition of Dummy, a weekly conversation among editors and friends of Howler magazine.

My name is George Grasie. I'm the editor of Howler. We're taping this for our friends that hang up and listen. I agreed to this segment in a trade that will see Mike Peska appear on a yet to be determined future episode of Dummy. and also because you don't say no when big leagues come calling.

But honestly, I'm on shaky ground when it comes to baseball metaphors.

So let me introduce the two other people on the line calling in from California. Alison McCann is a journalist at 538 who also happened to write much of the Women's World Cup preview package for the summer edition of Howler. And I believe you're on your way up to Montreal for the U.S. Germany semifinal on Tuesday, right, Allison? Hey, George. Thanks for having me. I'm heading up to Montreal tomorrow. Super excited for the game on Tuesday. Alison, that's exciting. You played soccer at Stanford with our other guests. She's a defender for the U.S. women's national team, who the rest of our listeners might recognize from the right midfield in Friday night's quarterfinal

...