Lately we have been on a little run of decently substantive episodes of The Distraction. Not all of them are substantive in a classically Substantive way: Last week's episode was about online and offline media, but about a quarter of it was about a truly horrifying regional sandwich; the NBA playoffs and NFL draft episodes were about the NBA playoffs and the NFL draft, but were about those things in a more focused and informed way than some of our previous installments. This week, in welcoming Culture Editor Brandy Jensen to the podcast, we managed to keep the quality streak going while also bringing back the dumb stuff.
We ranged across a variety of topics, without addressing any of those especially seriously or in any great depth. We began, as we occasionally do, with unusual parent maneuvers in a food/restaurant context, which expanded to enfold Brandy's experience bartending during the storied Western Canadian petro-chud extravaganza known as the Calgary Stampede. From there, we visited Drew's Hair Metal Corner and stayed for a surprisingly long while—Drew sings for this bit—then visited the Jack Reacher Universe. This is Brandy's home turf, as her iconic early Defector blog on Lee Child's Reacher books demonstrates. We talked about the tonally strange, intermittently delightful, idiosyncratically mid series dedicated to the big fella, and tried to help Drew figure out whether he wants the Reacher experience, and considered the delightful cosmic gag of little-ass Tom Cruise's (honestly pretty good) stint in the role. A great deal of Reacher lore gets some shine here: his mind-radio, his passion for Yankees bench players, that sort of thing.
The portion of the pod after the break was a speed-run of lifestyle stuff and overt nonsense. We discussed Veronica de Souza's new series Make It Nice and various apartment design quirks and irks, the risks of janky apartment shit driving me into the arms of The Abundance Agenda, and Brandy's experience moving around a lot and her unusually productive response to the challenge of making friends as an adult. The possibility of receiving a luxury airplane from the Qatari royal family and using it as a primary residence is considered, and not entirely dismissed.
If there is anything truly substantive in this episode, it comes in our long overdue discussion of the greatest romance/conservatorship-scam story of our moment, the highly public, extravagantly stilted love affair between Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson. Brandy, though not a sports person, is invested in this as a tale about the triumph of love; I, as a pedant, am mostly concerned with finding and unpacking the (many) Maine Angles there. Overall, this bit traces the line between gross and romantic, and considers the fine points of how one should and should not go about domesticating the culture's foremost Football Ogre through the power of streetwear and Instagram stunt pics. The Funbag question, which is more or less "How far could you throw your spouse in a Cliffhanger-style emergency scenario," fit oddly well into this. By the time Brandy debuted the concept of angler-style spouse-casting in this bit, it was clear that we were never going to get to anything substantive. But we got where we needed to go all the same.
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