The first week of the NBA season has been overstuffed with huge news stories that call into question the legitimacy of what we are being shown on the floor—namely, Jaylen Brown’s spray-on hair situation. Also, the second night of NBA hoops was followed by the arrest of a current coach and a current player, and the NBA world is making sense (often poorly!) of the biggest gambling scandal to rock the sport since at least Tim Donaghy.
To make sense of it all, we were joined by Liz Franczak of the great TrueAnon podcast. Liz is both a ball-knower extraordinaire and someone with interesting thoughts on how power is wielded, so we were thrilled she could join us. We talked about the scandal, the degree to which gambling has saturated sports media, and the ways this fits into larger-order patterns of societal atomization. Speaking of which, Daniel Kolitz just penned an opus for Harper’s on gooning, and we used that as a point of reference for a discussion of the gambling stuff as a mere facet of the Total Content Immersion, Forever mindset. Also, we spent a while talking about Austin Reaves and LeBron James as paragons of millennial excellence. It’s a good, stuffed episode.
