What It’s Like When ICE Invades Your City, With Arif Hasan

It is one of the rules of podcasting: if you can avoid it, which you generally can, you should avoid the "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables" trap. This trap's extremely pithy name was inspired by a June 2020 episode of Bill Simmons' podcast entitled "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables With Ryen Russillo," the title of which aptly (and, again, pithily) sums up the challenge of attempting to talk about something extremely serious (in this case, it was George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police) while also talking about The 2005 NBA Redraftables. It's a hazard for podcasts that want to be serious sometimes and silly at other times, and while it's not an argument for being all one or all the other, it is a reminder of how jarring it can be to try to be both. All that said, I have some news:

We did it. We did the Truly Sad Day In America Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables thing, and I believe we were right to do it. It helped that this week's guest, Arif Hasan of the Wide Left newsletter, is both one of the best people to talk to about the disgraceful ongoing ICE offensive in his home city of Minneapolis and one of the best people to talk to about this week's NFL Playoff slate. But also there was really no other way to do it. While there is plenty of silly stuff in the episode—the first line in my notes is "Drew's Berlin mayonnaise misadventure"—there is too much bad stuff going on not to talk about it, and too much interesting football happening not to talk about that. As a result, the episode broke down into two notably clean halves: the first being about what it is like when ICE invades your city, and the second involving a lot of stuff about the Buffalo Bills.