Next spring I’ll be teaching History and Politics of Sports for the second time. It’s hard to know how much change to make, given that the inaugural class was forced online halfway through semester by a global pandemic. But one difference is already evident: I’ll be leading the course by myself, since my friend and colleague Chris Moore will be taking a well-deserved sabbatical.
So I thought we might use The 252, the podcast we initially created to preview the course, to pre-record some interviews with Chris that will let him continue to speak into History and Politics of Sports, even while he’s away from campus.
We’ll do more of that once we’re back into our fall routine, but we got started this week, with a new episode of The 252 in which Chris explains why political scientists are interested in the Olympics. That segment serves as a dual preview: of the summer games starting next week in Tokyo and the winter games that will open next February in Beijing — at the end of the first week of our class.
You can stream or download that episode from Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other providers that carry Channel 3900. You’ll also hear Sam Mulberry, Chris, and me preview some events we’re looking forward to watching in Tokyo and review some summer sports stories, including the Name, Image, Likeness revolution in college sports, racist responses to England’s loss in the European soccer championship, and the NBA playoffs.
The Pietist Schoolman 