Michael Lewis’s new podcast explores the arbiters of fairness—the refs—who function in all corners of our world: sports, courts, newsrooms, consumer products, art, and more. Lewis’s contention is that societal refs are under attack and less believed or trusted.
Ref, You Suck! kicks off the podcast by looking at sports refs in the NBA. Lewis’s storytelling is good. I don’t have a lot of interest in basketball, but I was engaged and learned stuff I found interesting, not even concerned about how it was going to tie in to the theme of unfairness and not playing by the rules.
But the theme was tied together in the final 10-minutes, when Lewis talked with Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner, who’s exploring whether “a sense of being privileged makes you disobey the rules of the road or the laws of the land.”
It’s this linking of Keltner’s studies of privileged rule-breakers to NBA-stars challenging refs that got me excited about the series. I found the stories in each episode interesting; sometimes oddball. But they all came from the perspective that fairness—the thing referees and arbiters are supposed to ensure—is under attack, because the authority of our refs and arbiters is under attack. When that starts happening, the world feels rigged.
It’s a timely topic, well-told.
[One basketball thing I learned was the NBA has a Replay Center where off-court refs have access to high-power technology to review on-court plays a ref wants looked at. Another surprise was to learn a ref signals the Replay Center if they want a call reviewed by twirling their fingers in the air.]
- Podcast Link: Against the Rules
- Episode Link: Ref, You Suck!
- Host: Michael Lewis
- First Episode: 4/2/19
- Duration: 41 minutes
- Link to Other episodes
- Pursuing Podcasts Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Against the Rules is where “journalist and bestselling author Michael Lewis…takes a searing look at what’s happened to fairness—in financial markets, newsrooms, basketball games, courts of law, and much more. And he asks what’s happening to a world where everyone loves to hate the referee.”
Photo source: 27707 on Pixabay
This blog is my space to share podcast episodes I’ve found educational, enlightening, insightful, shocking, mind-bending and more. The pace at which I write versus the pace at which new podcast episodes are released is like a snail to a Ferrari. I’ve no reservations about writing about a podcast episode released two years ago. When something is good and it stays good, it deserves recognition. Pursuing Podcasts is a slow-curation project.
Podcasts are exploding. If you think you’re the only fanatical podcast listener out there…oh…how wrong you are. The medium is growing so fast, we can now swim in our own little niche genres; talk smack with fellow true crime fans; argue over which is the “best” podcast for making sense of our current political climate; find programs suitable for children…in different age groups; serve up our favorite humor programs. It is a mighty fine time to join the podcast train.
on a hunt. A hunt for fellow podcast fans: podcasters, bloggers, friends, those who listen to and write—or broadcast—about podcasts. I’m on a hunt for podcast programs: I have 90 logged into a spreadsheet right now. I’m constructing lists of episodes I love; of shows I hope to write about. I’m thinking about topics that have grabbed me, and am ferreting out programs that covered the same topic, but from a different angle. It’s like geocaching…except it’s not. And I realize I sound slightly crazy.
I still remember my first time; that gateway moment.
Pursuing Podcasts 