The following podcast contains explicit language.

People who are listening for the first time, might hear a bad word or two.

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

This is Hang Up and Listen for the week of March 30th, 2020.

On this week's show, Joe Varden of The Athletic,

we'll be here to talk about when sports.

We'll be back on TV and the financial pressures behind ensuring that happens as soon as possible.

We'll also discuss the scheme, the HBO documentary about a middleman who paid college

basketball recruits and assessed the fallout of a movie

that touches on hijinks at Arizona, LSU, and a bunch of other schools.

Finally, I'll interview tennis player Christy Ann about the life of a pro athlete who's off

the tour and her relationship with their parents who've encouraged her to leave the sport

and get a corporate job.

I am coming to you again from my house in Washington, D.C. We are holding up okay here, though I am

told we do need to vacuum, so I'll get on that. Joining me from a couple miles away is Stefan

Fatsis. He's the author of the book's Word Freak and a few seconds of panic. How are you

doing over there, Stefan? I vacuumed the first floor yesterday. Second floor awaits. I guess there is

probably a divide in America among people whose quarantine abode becomes cleaner or becomes

filthier. I definitely know which one Joel is. Oh, yeah. We're really into it right now. We're basically doing a spring cleaning. It's been a lot of fun. With us from Palo Alto in his clean place. It's Slate staff writer, host of Slow Burn season three, Joel Anderson. How are you doing, Joel? Doing good, man. Saturday was a big day around here. Two Saturdays ago, we put up new curtains and now now we're just really going through everything. I put away all my slow burn three books, which is about 30 of them, and put them up somewhere different. So things are looking up as much as possible.

Everyone should check out Joel's interview with the proprietor of a family-run grocery store in the Bay Area. Really fascinating. And I must say, Joel, it was kind of inspiring. Like the person that you talked to was like really on top of their shit. Yeah, I'd been to buy that grocery store a few times and it's a pretty cute kind of luxury marketplace still. Not a place that you would go to get cereal, for instance. Obviously, they put a lot of care into that store. And it was really nice that they split out. That woman is extremely busy right now, like all grocers are at this time. And for her to take time out and talk to me, it was like really, really cool. Yeah, you could just see that they'd do a really good job over there. Stefan, making two out of three of us who wrote good pieces for Slate last week, your story about the

dictionary and an emergency edition of coronavirus-related words. That was fascinating.

Thanks. Yeah, Merriam Webster, as I wrote, acting like a newsroom on deadline, not a dictionary,

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