12 Comments
Mar 29Liked by Helen Lewis

I teach at Iowa, so I enjoyed the Caitlin Clark piece. I have a lot of athletes in some of the courses I teach, so the focus on student athlete and team culture was fascinating.

Many faculty are now suddenly REALLY interested in women's basketball (many of my friends/colleagues now have season tickets, when I doubt they'd ever attended an athletic event here prior to Caitlin Clark), something I think is a little funny considering how indifferent and often disdainful they have been of college sports in the past.

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The Hooven piece is terrific - I admire how she puts up hypotheses one after the other, gives them the very best evidence she can find, and then knocks them down. Certainly about as far from the traditional pyramid news story structure as it’s possible to be.

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I don’t know how you find this stuff but thanks for pointing it out. The Iannucci/Morris 2002 piece was fantastic, mixing tasteless, brutal and funny in the very best traditions of satire. My favourite was the one about the substitution of Diane Keaton in the remake of Manhattan.

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Caitlin Clark is a wonderful case. Worth getting to know better, though if Wright Thompson’s done a piece on here there’s probably not that much more to know.

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When I listen to you speak I detect irony about 50% of the time. Not complaining! I'm including your reference to Jordan Peterson (attractive? charismatic?) into your much smaller ironic written output.

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Great piece on Taki. I was slightly surprised at Neil’s quotes - elsewhere he has been much more critical of Taki. See for example this tweet - https://x.com/afneil/status/1083755599442165763?s=46&t=CS0iWXYuamF-99jvSRSB2Q - but there’s somewhere else he said a bit more I think. Couldn’t find that in my Google searching but did find this re Neil which I find a little insufficient, to say the least … https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2004/apr/21/sundaytimes.pressandpublishing

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