We’re putting out a last call for submissions to our resource guide on the best places to freelance (that actually pay on time — the on-time part is key here!), which rolls out to paid members next month. We’ve gotten lots of great submissions for writing and editing gigs, but we’re hoping to get more media-adjacent jobs like social media, digital production and audio. Free subscribers who contribute will get access to the guide too. 

Today’s issue features my chat with Claire de Lune about her new podcast, ‘Basketball, Etc.,’ one of the most inventive sports shows to come out this year. We touched on pretty much everything: her pivot from touring musician to basketball reporter, being a woman in a male-dominated industry, how putting yourself out there (crazy internet trolls aside) does pay off and a whole lot more.

Then in Seen and Heard: possibly one of the most peculiar items to date, as people call out Glamour over an Angel Reese post. Plus, a ‘Derry Girls’ favorite gets her own podcast, NYT names its new business editor, the ‘Serial’ team is back with a new podcast, another CNN shakeup and more.

xoxo,

Stephanie

In the world of bro-y sports podcasts, Claire de Lune’s show is an anomaly. Yes, she’s a woman in an arena dominated by men. But what really sets ‘Basketball, Etc.’ apart is that it skips the game highlights and focuses on the human side of the sport.

The first episode had me locked in, even as a non-basketball fan: Claire talks with experts about why so many players practice meditation and how it affects their performance on the court. In other episodes, she talks with comedian Desus Nice about the whiplash of watching his childhood team (the Knicks) go from underdogs to NBA champs, and with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers about his love for the Lakers. There are no SportsCenter-style, chest-puffing debates here. Just thoughtful conversations about basketball stories you probably haven’t heard.

I first came across Claire in a past life, when I was writing The Washington Post’s weekly concert roundups and her band, Tiny Deaths, came through town. Her pivot from label-backed musician to NBA reporter for The Guardian is a wild one. Stuck at home during COVID, she started a podcast with a friend out of boredom, Spotify poached her to host on its live-audio app, and a Guardian editor who followed her on Twitter DMed to ask if she’d ever write about basketball. My big-picture takeaway from our chat: putting yourself out there can come with real baggage but is ultimately worth the squeeze.

The meditation episode made me realize I’d never thought about how mindfulness connects to how players perform. How do you come up with the themes for each episode?

Well, for that episode, that literally just came to my mind. I was watching a player at the free throw line and watching them take a deep stabilizing breath and close their eyes, and I was like, wow, that’s so interesting. It looks like they’re almost doing a little miniature meditation. That piqued my interest, and it was around the time that Wemby [San Antonio Spurs player Victor Wembanyama] had gone and studied with Shaolin monks over the summer. I started working on that episode over a year ago, which is funny because it ended up being a 40-minute episode, so you never know how much time went into it. That episode is unique in the sense that it’s just me hosting and serving as the journalist reporter.

On future episodes, we have guest contributors and the format is more like ‘This American Life,’ where there’s a guest journalist that comes in and does more of the reporting, and then there’s a central conversation between me and that journalist, where they report back on their findings.

The guiding light rule for any of those stories for me was, could you find this anywhere else right now? And if so, then it’s not the right fit for this. Because I intentionally wanted things that — they don’t have to be newsy, they don’t have to be relevant, they don’t have to involve a big name. Just the little outer corner fringes of the sport, those stories. So we have a story coming up on the secret life of mascots, and this journalist Eve Peyser basically embedded herself with an NBA mascot and learned about their life path to that point. So a story like that, I’m just like, who else would even be doing that right now?

I think an important thing to delineate is, I love what Pablo Torre [host of ‘Pablo Torre Finds Out’] is doing, and it’s very necessary and important to the fabric of journalism, but we’re on the opposite end of the journalistic spectrum from that. He’s trying to do really important investigative reporting and break news, and I’m trying to tell a sweet story to make you feel in touch with your humanity and bring a new context to a sport that you enjoy. It’s just night and day.

It’s such a refreshing way to talk about the sport. Without giving too much away, what are the most interesting things you learned while planning this season?

Oh, I feel like I’ve learned so much already. And it’s not just [about the] NBA. I will say that we do have women’s basketball stories as well, and then also non-professional basketball, or youth basketball.

When you’re doing a new show, you figure out, what is our identity, what is our voice, what defines this? You have an idea of it, but then it also reveals itself as you go. Music was like that to me as well. With an album, it’s, ‘what’s the connective tissue with this album?’ and it just reveals itself. For me, the connective tissue has been that all of these stories, even the ones that seem a little bit more surface, have ended up being so moving and heartwarming, even the ones that are sad or melancholy, or that don’t necessarily have a happy ending. So that’s been such a pleasant surprise to me: the humanity that we’ve been able to find in every single episode, even in the ones that seem more fun or frivolous.

The show is through iHeart. How did that partnership come about?

Really early on, when I had the idea for this show, iHeart was one of the first platforms we talked to. I’m just eternally grateful to them, because if you told someone, “Hey, we want to make a pretty ambitious, not trendy, narrative-focused sports show hosted by a woman who’s not famous, and there will be no athletes attached to it at all,” I think that would probably be a hard no from a lot of places in 2026. People don’t really make narrative podcasts that aren’t true crime anymore. You could just put a celebrity and a couple of their childhood friends in a room and talk, and the ratings will be great. So why would [a network] invest in a narrative show? And one of the selling points I gave to iHeart when I was pitching them on it is, the problem with a lot of sports programming is if you don’t listen to it within the 48 hours when it was released, it’s completely irrelevant. The shelf life is zero because you’re talking about games and things happening in real time. We’re evergreen. So if someone misses this whole season and then goes back next summer and is on a long road trip and needs a bunch of things to binge, all of these episodes will be just as relevant then as they are now, and in sports specifically, I think that’s rare.

You mentioned it’s hard to sell a show hosted by a woman without celebrity name recognition. In general, what’s it like being a woman covering sports right now?

Well, it’s funny timing, because I was just talking to someone yesterday about why I don’t ever reveal where I am in real time on the internet, besides when I’m at the arena, and that’s something that my male counterparts never have to think about. I’m never gonna be like, “oh, I’m watching at this sports bar,” because there [are] crazy people online who, some of them in a positive way and some of them in a negative way, would want to come find me. I’m not even a celebrity. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for some of my colleagues who are actually — like Mina Kimes or someone like that, who’s on TV every day. But besides just the practicality of having to think about safety, I get a ton of “this is why women shouldn’t talk about sports” whenever someone doesn’t agree with me. I think a privilege that men in sports have that they don’t even know is that someone can just disagree with them, and it’s not gendered. So if someone has a bad take or a take someone doesn’t agree with, they could just say, you’re an idiot. And I would love to hear that. Just call me an idiot. Say you don’t agree with my take. It doesn’t mean that you’re stupid because you’re a representative for your entire gender. And I do think that we have to prove ourselves twice as hard as men in the space, and actively be disproving preconceived ideas about what women think and what our interest level would be in a sport.

But I will say the only positive thing that I don’t hear talked about a lot is, I think it’s easier for athletes to open up to female journalists. I think they feel there’s less of an alpha male competition going on. Maybe because of sexist preconceived ideas that we are not a threat, it’s easier to do our jobs in that way.

Is that mostly about the podcast, or your writing for The Guardian, too?

Most of the questioning [of] my authority is when I write sports stories for The Guardian, and when I’m guesting on sports talk shows where I give my opinion on real-time sports things. That’s when I get a lot of really sexist, negative feedback. Some people just have too much free time. And we’re representing the job that they wish they had, and also the woman that they can’t get at the same time.

So they’re projecting their insecurities onto you. Classic!

In every dimension.

How do you keep that from getting to you, especially with such an active Twitter presence?

It’s really hard. Honestly, for a year, I had my comments turned off on Twitter. You couldn’t reply to my tweets at all, and that was literally just a mental health thing. Even though I know these people aren’t people whose opinion of me I would care about if I met them in real life, to be inundated with that on a daily basis is exhausting. But then I had dinner with my friend Nick Wright, who’s actually going to be the guest on the podcast this coming week, and he was like, “Hey, unsolicited advice, but you have to turn your comments back on. Just don’t read them. Literally, just don’t ever check them. And if you miss stuff, you miss stuff. But in this phase of your career, all engagement is good engagement.” And I’ve been able to mostly take that advice. I feel like it would be in bad faith for me to [say] it doesn’t get to me at all.

The way that I deal with it is, ultimately, if I wasn’t doing something really cool, that wouldn’t exist. If I was just doing a job that made me miserable, that wasn’t following my dreams and passions, none of those people would be there, angry about it. And also, I do genuinely have a lot of empathy and pity for someone whose life would lead them there, for someone who would take time out of their day to go be cruel to a stranger. I give them a moment of, that’s really too bad that that’s where your life led you, and then go on with my life and the things that bring me joy.

Let’s talk about your music career. Do you see a through line between making music and the storytelling you do now?

I definitely think that being an artist made me better at this job and helped me stand out amongst my peers when I was first starting, because, first of all, I didn’t know any of the rules of sports journalism. I didn’t go to school for it, so I didn’t even know the rules I was breaking, which ended up being a blessing in disguise because I wasn’t so precious about everything. I was really just genuinely passionate and curious, and I think that was a superpower. And then also having been an artist, having been in the shoes of the person getting interviewed, I think helped me a lot with interviewing athletes and people. To be good at music — not to do music, but to be good at it — you have to be really in touch with your humanity, your feelings, empathy. You just have to be an emotional sponge, and that’s why I think the music industry chews up a lot of people and spits them out: the very characteristics that make you good at making the art itself make you really ill-equipped to handle the music industry, and that was my experience. But I think those same characteristics make me a good people person and journalist, and make me more equipped to read the room, ask the right questions, be good in an interview setting. As a musician, everything is about me and my feelings and my experiences and my psyche and my trauma, and it’s been a really refreshing change of pace to completely decenter myself. This really isn’t about me at all. It’s about telling other people’s stories, and using my storytelling abilities that I’ve developed as a songwriter to shine a light on other people.

I read that you didn’t become a basketball fan until later in life. Tell me about that arc, leading up to covering basketball for The Guardian.

I’m in my 30s, so when I was growing up, there was this false dichotomy of you were a jock or an artist. The younger generations have been a lot more open-minded to people containing multitudes and being able to be interested in more than one thing. But I was very much the obnoxious “sportsball” artsy person my whole youth, because I just felt like you had to pick a lane, and music was always my number one passion in life. I was on tour in my early 20s, and my drummer was a basketball fan. I use that term very lightly, because I very quickly surpassed him in fandom, but he was a dude who watched sports, you know? And so he had the NBA playoffs on in our green room, and I was bored, because there’s a lot of downtime with music, and I was just watching with him, and I fell in love. It was love at first sight. It was my escape from music, because music was all-consuming for me. The guy I was dating, my friends, my social life, my job — everything was the music scene, so I had no life outside of it, really. And it was really nice to have something to think about and look forward to that wasn’t music-related. I never in a million years would have thought that it would be a career path. It just happened organically, because I built a bit of a following online, by accident really, talking about basketball, just because I needed people to talk to about it. It was such a good life lesson for me, because the way I approached my sports career was so opposite of how I had approached music.

With music, I wanted it so badly; it was all I ever wanted in life, and I felt like I was holding on so tight all the time because it was my childhood dream. And I was so casual and so genuine and laissez-faire about basketball and the opportunities that were coming my way. I was like, this seems fun. Sure, I’d love to go cover an NBA game. Whatever. And the ease with which I was able to navigate that career path, I think, was completely correlated to the ease with which I was approaching it, and the fact that I was genuinely leading with joy and fun and curiosity, and not with any pressure at all. Just take the pressure off, do the things that bring you joy and that you’re interested in, and enjoy them as much as you can. And maybe good things will happen, but nothing good is going to come of you squeezing the life out of something.

For Maxed Out, we always end by asking what you like to read, watch, and listen to in your downtime.

Gosh, downtime. I am so all-consumed by my job right now. This is really embarrassing to admit, but it’s just the truth. All the books that are sitting next to my bedside and all the things that I should be consuming that are really enriching have been completely overtaken by fantasy football.

I am so competitive, and I didn’t really care about football. But my friend invited me at the last minute to join his fantasy league last year, and I did it, and I ended up winning it, which is the worst thing that could have happened, because it created a monster. Now I consume so much fantasy football content and prepping and doing research about football players and stuff. I will say, though, I’ve been listening to the new Phoebe Bridgers album a ton. And it was fall for one day in L.A., and that was what this album really demanded and needed. I wish that we had more fall days here, because there is a weird cognitive dissonance of listening to this very emotional music, and it’s just not a cloud in the sky, sunny. But she’s from here, so it also works, because I feel like there’s that Los Angeles malaise of, what’s happening in my internal life doesn’t match the external, and that has its own melancholy to it.

Totally understand. We also ask: how much time do you spend on your phone each day?

Oh my god, my screen time! I’m scared to look. It’s definitely eight hours. It’s probably more than that. It’s really bad.

That’s about average for our guests, actually.

There’s definitely been times, like during NBA free agency, I feel like it’s 12 hours. It’s every waking moment, basically.

I see a guitar in the background. Are you still making music?

Yes. I’m getting back in the studio. Actually, this weekend I was supposed to go in the studio with a friend and start working on music again. This is the longest I’ve ever gone without making an album since I was in high school. But there just weren’t enough hours in the day. For the podcast, I am the lead producer, host, talent booker. I am doing everything for it, so it’s just taken over my life. But I miss music, and I think I’m excited. This is my first time ever making an album where it’s not my full-time job and my livelihood doesn’t depend on it. So I’m really excited to see what that unlocks for me, because I’ve never had this level of freedom with it, where it’s whatever happens. I’m not on a label right now. I left my last label after my last album, so I don’t owe anyone anything. And also, if it is a failure, I can still pay my rent. So I’m excited to see what that looks like.

There’s something freeing about that. Less pressure can make room for something new.

I will say I really enjoyed the process of making my last record, because it was the first time where I co-produced all the tracks. In the past, I always wrote all the lyrics and melody, but the tracks themselves would come to me either fully done or half done and then get finished later. This was the first time where I got to make all the songs from scratch with the producers and co-produce everything and really truly write it together, every single part. I’m looking forward to that part of it again as well. But — again, being a woman in a male-dominated industry — it took me all the albums that came before to be like, actually, I think my taste is relevant. I think I do actually have a say. The imposter syndrome does fade away at a certain point, because you’re like, I’m the connective tissue throughout all these things, so I feel like I know as well as anyone what this should sound like. So I’m excited to have another fully imposter-syndrome-free album-making process.

Are you doing the podcast on your own, or do you have help?

I have a producer who’s also a woman, which is really cool. Her name’s Emilia [Brock]. She’s from a podcast production company called School of Humans, and she’s the lead story producer. And then I have an engineer, and the team at iHeart, and I work with this company called Life Here Is Grand. They’re executive producing the whole project. But it’s a one-woman show in the sense that I’m wearing every hat you could possibly wear and working really hard on it. I know Pablo Torre’s production crew is 10 to 15 people. I think we have three.

What we’re seeing and hearing around the industry.

Glamour vs. Angel Reese. I was just minding my own business when one of our dear La Fronde readers tipped me off to a little quarrel happening in the comments of Glamour’s Instagram post. The whole thing is honestly so bizarre that I’m still trying to untangle this saga myself, and my internal sources there are just as confused!

The post (which has since been deleted) was about the beauty products Angel Reese uses for game day and it was based on a January 2025 Vogue article where she talked about them. The peg was just supposed to be a nice little nod to Reese’s stellar performance in the WNBA Finals. Glamour got a little bit more than they bargained for, though: Reese wrote in the comments that she in fact does not use those products.

That triggered a wave of angry comments from others who claimed Glamour was lying about Reese’s product list — to the point where someone put a big ol’ community note under the post warning people about it. Tough crowd!

Clearly Glamour was just riffing off of that Vogue post, so it’s not necessarily their fault. And it’s not really Vogue’s fault, either. Vogue has a video of Reese applying her skincare and makeup, saying that these are the products she uses for game day. It’s not like the author misinterpreted or fabricated what she said.

Perhaps she changed her routine, which is possible given the story is almost two years old. Still, the comment did put Glamour in kind of a crappy spot. I think it’s safe to say that you can spare them your pitchforks. At least, for today.

Have a tip for me? Send it to stephanie@la-fronde.com or my Signal if you want to keep things confidential (itsstephwill.94).

NYT announces its new business editor. Deputy business editor Pui-Wing Tam will take on the top role on NYT’s business desk following the departure of Ellen Pollock last month. Congratulations, Pui-Wing!

A ‘Derry Girls’ star gets her own podcast. ‘Derry Girls’ star Siobhán McSweeney, aka Sister Michael, is taking over as host of The Guardian’s ‘Comfort Eating’ when the show returns Nov. 3. The show will have 10 weekly episodes. The Guardian has been making a big push lately toward injecting more personality-led shows into its programming. A few months ago the newsroom announced the launch of its Guardian Studios venture and last week announced the first title of that project, culture show ‘The Close Up.’

Another CNN anchor announces their exit post-Paramount merger. Bianna Golodryga says she’s on her way out for an undisclosed opportunity after nine years at the network. She is currently the co-anchor of CNN International’s ‘One World’ and previously was a senior global affairs analyst. This news comes days after Christiane Amanpour made her big announcement that she was leaving CNN after 43 years. The fact that Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison kept Mark Thompson as CNN’s chief in charge is one small, encouraging sign that the arrangement might come with some editorial independence. It’s still too early to tell, and the sources I spoke with earlier today at CNN say that they’re just taking things day by day at this point.

The ‘Serial’ team is back with a new podcast. The show is called ‘METRO with Sarah Koenig,’ and the premise kind of sounds like if ‘Humans of New York’ were made into a podcast. ‘METRO,’ which drops every other week on Thursdays, looks at human interest stories through the lens of New Yorkers. The first episode goes behind the scenes of one of the most well-known jewelers in the Diamond District, TraxNYC, and how the store boosted its sales after a video of the store’s owner getting into a fistfight with a rival jeweler went viral earlier this year. Fun fact: you might recognize the owner, Maksud Agadjani, from his appearance on ‘Uncut Gems’ (easily one of the most nerve-wracking movies I’ve ever watched).

TikTok creators can now win James Beard Awards. The organization added a new short-form culture category to its media awards for video creators. This isn’t a radical move — the foundation already recognizes just about every other type of digital media (including newsletters), so the announcement makes sense.