OBSESSED (#3): The WNBA's secret weapon, Amy Poehler's satirical podcast and the devastation in Gaza

Our third weekly dispatch.

Happy Friday! Wow. Our third newsletter. Are you enjoying it? I am, thank God — what kind of oaf dumbass wouldn’t enjoy having a bunch of gorgeous people opt-in to letting her scream at them once a week?

I’ve already got some exciting new ideas for OBSESSED, one of which I’m going to put into action right now: highlighting some wonderful things that people I dig and admire did last week. This is not an exhaustive list; it’s simply everything I could think of at 12:53 a.m., having just returned from seeing the Eras concert film the way it was meant to be seen: fanny pack stuffed with PB&Js while the perfect amount of stoned.

• Carlos Greaves, a sweetheart and truly prolific political satirist, just published a damn book. It’s called Spoilers, and it’s for anybody who’s seen movies and enjoys laughing. If you’re in New York, come to Carlos’s book launch party on Monday!

• Dear friend Evan Allgood published a wonderful humor piece in The Museum of Americana that reads like Pixar’s take on a Benjamin Button story. Big praise.

• Lillian Stone, with whom I hope to one day share a communal home upstate, did something she’s really good at for freakin’ GQ: digging for the core driver fueling a deeply specific internet trend.

• Felipe Torres Medina, an absolute doll and celebrated wife guy, crushed a wonderful Late Night segment in which he teaches Stephen Colbert (and, uh, me) the difference between Latino and Hispanic.

• Happy Bryan Washington week! Bryan’s third book, “Family Meal,” is out in the world, and thank goodness for it. Bryan’s first two books are gorgeous and intimate; he writes about our simplest rituals and daily pleasures with a really sweet, special reverence.

Ok, let’s get into it.

I CAN’T STOP WATCHING…

The WNBA. Who said that? Me? It’s still surprising, because I’ve never really cared about sports. I hadn’t even heard of New York’s WNBA team, the Liberty, until my brother Charlie started posting quick, informative TikToks about women’s sports a few months ago. Falling in love with the Liberty has been exceedingly easy. For starters, they’re one of two WNBA superteams, having assembled the league’s best players over a deliberate, years-long campaign to build an unbeatable machine. (The Liberty just lost the 2023 WNBA Finals to the league’s other superteam, the Las Vegas Aces.)

Point guard Sabrina Ionescu, realizing she forgot to read last week’s OBSESSED.

But the WNBA feels markedly different from every other professional sports league in the U.S. As Brittany Luse discusses in a recent episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute, that’s because the WNBA’s players are markedly different from so many other professional athletes. Many of them are queer women of color, and more vocal about social justice issues. WNBA players have often been the first professional athletes in the U.S. to speak out against racism and police brutality. The fanbase is more progressive, the programming more creative; a recent Liberty game at Barclays Center was punctuated by quick dedications to the BIPOC women who helped build hip hop 50 years ago. It feels like a sports league; also, like a warm, fuzzy subculture that’s quickly (and fucking finally) gaining mainstream adoption.

Oh, and the Liberty’s mascot? That would be an absolutely stacked elephant named Ellie who gives zero fucks, has a fat ass, and recently twerked her way into a New York Times profile.

I CAN’T STOP LISTENING TO…

My new favorite podcast, Say More with Dr? Sheila, the first in a three-show deal that Amy Poehler’s Paper Kite Productions landed with Audacy in September.

Amy Poehler’s Dr. Sheila, carrying some spare glasses in case she runs into somebody trying to read OBSESSED without their specs.

In each episode of Say More, Dr? Sheila (Amy Poehler), a therapist whose credentials aren’t your concern, treats couples struggling with all kinds of issues: clingy mother-in-laws, suspicions of infidelity, a husband begging his sleepy wife to embrace the “ethical non monogamy poly lifestyle,” which he just learned about online. Poehler’s Dr? Sheila is aloof, eccentric and vain; she frequently works extra Kroger ads into the conversation and isn’t afraid to tell patients if they’re boring her. It’s all improvised, and the cast is stacked: couples include Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, Ana Gasteyer and Chris Parnell, and June Diane Raphael and Paul Scheer.

Each episode clocks in at around 25 minutes; they’re a breeze to binge and modeled after Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin?. The therapy session structure is a perfect format for improv; enough structure to keep things on-track, broad enough to make weird.

Paper Kite’s other two productions will be structured as a true crime podcast and a men’s interview show. And to me? This rules! Paper Kite’s programming seems to be headed in an exciting direction: satirizing — or, at the very least, infusing some silly surrealism into — the relatively young podcasting ecosystem’s most well-trodden, successful genres.

Because, my god, is podcasting something that deserves to be skewered. Here’s my take: because podcasts are consumed solitarily (unlike music, TV and film, which are often shared or enjoyed communally), their success stories speak more to our deeper, more personal and often darker impulses. True crime makes up a significant slice of documentary series, but utterly dominates the podcasting world. And we’re living in viciously misogynistic times; Roe is gone, and trans people, particularly trans women, are the right-wing’s current obsession, in large part because they threaten mens’ carefully controlled idea of what women are, and what that version of womanhood says about them. Joe Rogan, who hosts the world’s most popular podcast, frequently hosts transphobic thinkers.

Framing podcasts in those terms casts a darkness over them. It makes me excited to see Poehler and team skewer more of them, as stupidly as possible, for years to come.

Not to mention, it just feels like a fresher format for a comedy podcast. The vast majority of comedians’ podcasts feel like a version of a sketch or variety show, or something close to stand up. I’m excited for — and craving more of, I’m realizing — the podcasting world’s version of a half-hour series. Something closer to TV. Because in a perfect world, everything is TV. And TV is everything.

I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT…

The thing that’s haunting all of us: a government’s brazen genocide of a defenseless people.

From the AP: Palestinians flee from northern Gaza to the south after the Israeli army issued an unprecedented evacuation warning to a population of over 1 million people in northern Gaza and Gaza City to seek refuge in the south ahead of a possible Israeli ground invasion, on Oct. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa, File)

There isn’t anything new to say here, other than what has to be said. The Israeli government’s attack on people in Gaza and Palestine are subhuman. Hamas’s attack on people in Israel was subhuman. The utter uselessness of it all haunts me. That the significance of your one singular life — the only life you get — could be stolen in the name of absolute pointlessness, for nothing but racism and jingoism and nationalism, in the name of nothing good, is beyond comprehension.

The Israeli government’s intent to commit genocide is plainly obvious — the country controls Gaza’s access to fuel, electricity and most of its land borders. It blocked trucks containing desperately needed food and water from going into Gaza, leaving civilians to boil mud and skim what they could off the top. It’s evil and homicidal, and America’s blind support for the Israeli government’s actions is inexcusable.

Some impactful reads from this week:

• Meg Indurti wrote perhaps the most compelling reflection on how this — the Israel-Hamas war, violent police states, greedy CEOs, unaffordable health insurance, grocery deserts, the hamster wheel of capitalism that robs workers of the bulk of their lives — is connected to an apathy about our state of being that we quickly need to turn into activated anger.

• For Al Jazeera, Belén Fernández wrote about weaponized empathy, and the powerful role it plays in ongoing propaganda efforts.

• Rob Delaney wrote a gorgeous, gutting essay for The Guardian on the human desire for revenge — and why that’s not only wrong, but ultimately pointless.

That’s all I’ve got. If you’re able to donate funds, consider the Palestine Children's Relief Fund or the United Nations Children's Fund. Thanks for reading! Do a little more than you think you can. See you next week.