Firehose #106: LET’S GET READY TO RUM-BLE!

Also: Please consider donating to my nephew’s memorial service

Before we get (a tad early!) into this weekend’s epic frivolities, a significantly more somber note: On Sunday, my brave nephew, Zach Alessi, died at the unendurable age of 23 after fighting long and bravely against the cruelties of Cystic Fibrosis. Zach was a football and baseball fanatic -- you try be a CF-having varsity quarterback! -- and he loved Pittsburgh teams most of all. At one point during the grueling lung-transplant process his parents snuck him out to go watch a Steelers game in person, and you’ve just never seen a happier kid. I happened to be in Iron City the day he died (meeting there three very lovely listeners!), and everywhere there were reminders of what Zach loved most.

The memorial service is on Monday, which is the start of the Democratic National Convention, which I am covering for Reason, so I can’t go. But I did contribute to the GoFundMe that’s helping my poor stepsister and Beth and her husband Randy, who have been moving heaven and earth for their son, defray some of this latest, most terrible cost. As of this morning they’re at $5,824 of the $15,000 target; I would be so appreciative if any of you sweet people sitting on your betting-markets winnings or whatnot could contribute a bit to a family you have never met, but would love if you did. Thank you!

* Any of yinz experiencing FOMO about tonight & tomorrow in Chicago? Well, stay tuned to this space later today for a special announcement….

* Your columnists did their regular stint Wednesday on The Megyn Kelly Show, talking about Tim Walz’s unresponsive response to criticism of his military service depictions, the actual worst thing about the Walz pick, Donald Trump’s polling woes, Kamala Harris’s debating style, and the media not getting it about various. Full episode:

Big shout-out, BTW, to the Internet sleuths who correctly deduced that my expressed weariness therein over the repeated usage of Latin pseudonyms by American political commentators was NOT due to the eye-glazing hyperbole from Cynical Publius, Publius Decius Mus, Publius, et al, in addition to not-exactly-Latin-but-still-trolling Mencius Moldbug and Bronze Age Pervert, but rather that I had never heard of a little thing called The Federalist Papers. Guilty. As. Charged.

* Ol’ Reaction Face did one of his Free Press livestream thingies Thursday night, talking about Kamala’s “radical economic vision, RFK Jr.’s flailing campaign, Ukraine’s successful incursion into Russia & Candace Owens’ melted brain,” with Batya Ungar-Sargon (vet of Episode #451), Bridget Phetasy, and Peter Savodnik. Sadly, it will not embed, but here’s the link.

* Can we just admit that Ask a Jew has the very best show descriptions? Please clap:

America’s favorite Nepo baby after Jesus, the greatest one-eyed war hero since Moshe Dayan, the man who puts the Ho in Idaho -- we are honored to welcome Ben Dreyfuss to Ask A Jew today. In this vulnerable, first of its kind tell-all, Ben opens up to us about his relationship with social media, his famous father, Judaism -- and why he still hasn’t forgiven Bin Laden.

* Our gravelly voiced friend Harry Siegel (#3, #116 & #320) and his podcast got a nice lil’ write-up in The New Yorker. Excerpt:

The one time Eric Adams went on the “FAQ NYC” podcast, he said something dumb. This was early 2020, when Adams was soft-launching his 2021 mayoral campaign. Harry Siegel, one of the show’s hosts, asked Adams if he planned to carry a gun while serving as mayor. “Yes, I will,” Adams said, proudly. Adams, who spent twenty-two years in the N.Y.P.D., also suggested that he’d fire the mayoral security team. “If the city’s safe, the mayor shouldn’t have a security detail,” he said. “He should be walking the street by himself.” These comments made news. Adams’s opponents argued that they showed he was weird, overconfident, and out of touch. Adams has not returned to the “FAQ NYC” podcast since.

“FAQ NYC” is a talk show about New York City hosted by Siegel and Katie Honan, two veteran local journalists, and Christina Greer, a political scientist who studies Black ethnic and urban politics. New episodes usually drop once or twice a week; listenership for each usually numbers in the thousands. Among those tuning in are local elected officials, bureaucrats, aides, reporters, flacks, and political operatives. Siegel is an editor at the City, a nonprofit news site, and a columnist at the Daily News. Honan is a senior reporter for the City who largely covers City Hall; she often posts TMZ-style videos of herself asking Adams questions from between three and twenty feet away. (“Mayor Adams, do you want to respond to the government’s criticism of New York’s handling of the migrant crisis?”) Greer teaches at Fordham University. “We come from different avenues, which I think people appreciate,” she said. “I’m not a journalist. I’m a political scientist. I’m also a Black woman in New York City.” The show often ends up interrogating the assumptions and enthusiasms of the city’s political observers. “All you New Yorker-reading, New York Times-reading schmucks,” Siegel told me, in his mellifluous old New York baritone. “No offense,” he added.

This past week, the hosts of “FAQ NYC” gathered on a Zoom call to discuss a topic that has come up frequently in recent episodes: Adams’s reëlection prospects in 2025.

* On the gonna-be-released-any-minute-now Members Only #221, we talked a bit about Steph Curry’s remarkable Olympics gold medal performance. So did some of the sports nerds in our universe, including Nate Silver (“he’s definitely among the 10 best players of all-time”), and Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408), who reflects a bit on the man he once covered:

The closing “Nuit Nuit” explosion against France, in France, was the rare iconic NBA player run outside of North America. It feels huge for him, and a bit unexpected.

One of the reasons I left NBA media is that I felt like I’d run out of things to say. I tried to contextualize what Steph Curry was doing at his peak, sometimes to the chagrin of other fanbases who chafed at the homerism. He was so unbelievable that describing felt like evangelizing. In the beginning, not everyone in the NBA world watched enough to be fully aware. In the middle, a lot of people were watching, but some weren’t believing their eyes. Eventually, everybody more or less got it.

I exited around that “Eventually” period, for a variety of reasons, including and especially because I couldn’t augment the experience for other people anymore. […]

I’m glad I left the basketball scene and the grind altogether. I don’t miss it in its totality, but I do miss certain aspects. To be in the building for those moments, to feel that energy, to see a crowd thrill to Steph Curry giving them what they expected, in a way that still manages to shock. I miss being there for that, especially with the bittersweet understanding that a fully realized career has only so many seasons left. I don’t know how much longer the Steph experience goes. I just know that the entire basketball world is going to feel a similar nostalgia, if it isn’t already. He will be missed, so much so, that we already miss him. Nuit Nuit.

* Moar Ethan: The Straussian this week also brought on Kat Rosenfield (#448) to talk about her “What the Childless Among Us Leave Behind” essay, as well as “Nike’s new direction and a range of other subjects related to the modern gender wars.”

* Have we seen this before? Have we not seen this before? I can’t remember, but on Thursday our Aussie wake-up pal Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328, #423, #445) posted the audio of a video conversation he apparently had earlier this spring with Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412 & #442) and Jesse Singal (#111 & #171):

* Speaking of newly available video footage from springtime NYC, Herr Moynihan’s contributions to a Tangle event (w/ the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell and Newsweek’s Josh Hammer) are now available for your perusal:

* Book Club fodder alert! Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427) is out with a new list of “the best books on free speech & free speech history.” Without spoiling the results, I will share that some of the authors include such past guests as Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344) and Jonathan Rauch (#323).

* Speaking of books (and Book Club fodder?), our girl Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) has a brand spanking new book available for pre-order just starting today (Kindle version, anyway), titled Forty Bucks and a Dream: Stories from Los Angeles. Complete with intro from Sarah Hepola (#354). Shall we read from that? We shall:

In 1986, Nancy Rommelmann drove to Los Angeles in a silver Subaru station wagon with two bags of clothes, a Cuisinart, and a very fetching portrait taken by Richard Avedon, who happened to be a family friend. The move made no sense, given that Nancy had no job, no place to live, and $2,000 to her name. But the move made all the sense in the world, given that she was young and ambitious and curious enough to dream. […]

The pages that follow are a slow-building revelation – not of Nancy’s acting talent, which never made it past a few student films and roles as an extra, but of her ability to observe the world and render it on the page. She became a writer, and in story after story she introduces us to characters we might otherwise miss: The Beverly Hills bikini waxer who muses about her pageant days, the Mexican gardener eating soft-shell tacos on a plush hillside he cultivates for a movie star, the cop who had a gun jammed to his forehead and never could tell his wife. Nancy’s wide saucer eyes, the ones that seemed destined to light up the silver screen, turned out to be very good at prompting strangers to share their secrets.

* Email of the Week, no punctuation added, goes to Taylor G.:

Hey what up podcast 

I’m high right now and this might be some stoney baloney bullshit, or maybe it’s true 

We are in the midst of a culture war, during a cold war, and we won the last cold war with culture. Blue jeans and rock and roll helped tear down the Berlin wall, Soviets envied our culture and wanted to be American 

This will never happen if we have a culture war, because no one wins a culture war, we all lose 

You know what kind of culture wins the cold war? The new Beyonce album. Hot chicks in cowboy boots and american flag clothes. That's the America I believe in. Beyonce belongs in the grand american tradition of outlaw country. This is why Willie Nelson has interludes on the album pretending to be a country music radio DJ smoking a joint, he wasn't allowed in the country music establishment because he smoked reefer 

Beyonce is how we win the culture war, more hot chicks in cowboy boots. Lana del Rey has a Texas country album coming up. This is how we win. This is the America I love, this is the culture that's the envy of the world. 

I'm an Uber driver in Texas. When that Beyonce album came out, it blew me away. At first I didn't think to check it out, because I typical don't go for pop or female icons, I'm a straight dude. I do know that hot women love Beyonce, my hot women passengers where requesting that album, going crazy for it, going out with groups of hot women in cowboy boots, playing with country and Americans aesthetics in cool and interesting ways, being hot, and having fun

FUCK YEAH THATS MY AMERICA RIGHT THERE USA USA USA USA!!!!!!!

Fellas I just won the cold war, I'm the new Henry Kissinger. Hey pentagon and NSA guy reading my emails, hit me up. Uber is paying like shit. I'll work for you, I will Psyop America to victory in the cold war. We can do this 

Look here - we have a sickness in the west, an addiction. It's to sociology. The social sciences, including politics, have become a disease that invades all aspects of life. Check out the quote from Pope Francis, he said he sees the Bible as a sociological text, and he says Jesus is a communist

OHHH MY GOD THATS A LOBOTOMY AND A HALF 

Look here - that stuff is supposed to TRANSCEND the political, it's supposed to TRANSCEND sociology. You are supposed to be greater then that

That's why this asshole pope called Ukrainians cowards and weak for not surrending. He doesn't understand that he's supposed to be or a realm greater then the earthy concerns of power, politics, ideology, war, and social science 

This is a sickness. What's the answer? Hot chicks in cowboy boots 

USA! USA!

Walkoff music is your Chicago pre-game: