Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

I’m back! It has been a turbulent, chaotic winter. I have watched as democracy and the rule of law have been upended, students in the U.S. legally at both the schools I went to are being detained and held without trial, and as one of the most powerful people in America is a teenager who goes by the name “Big Balls.”

Things have been bad.

Also I’ve done some job hopping and had to navigate some uncertainty at work.

And on top of that, most of the sports I cover have been out of commission.

But as the temperatures go up and the days get longer, hope springs eternal. It’s given me enough of a spark to get back to writing this. Hope and joy are the main ingredients of curiosity, which, as the name implies, is the driving force of this newsletter.

So where am I at? I work for MSNBC now! I’m currently producing for “Inside with Jen Psaki,” the Sunday afternoon and Monday evening shows hosted by the former White House press secretary, and I’m hoping I can follow her to her new primetime show debuting later this spring, which will air Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 pm Eastern.

More details on what that looks like if I’m able to stay on her show. If not, I’ll be sure to let you know where I am so you can follow along.

I hope you have been taking care of yourself during this time and can find some joy wherever you can get it. It’s more important than ever.

What's Inside

• The Most Curious Thing This Week: Opening Day

• My Reporting

  • NWSL

    • Chosen Family: Ashley Hatch (reluctantly) strikes a pose

    • Sibling Showdown: Boade vs Boade

    • It Takes a Village: Jordan Silkowitz's long road home

  • MSNBC

    • Mixed Signal: Jeffrey Goldberg stops by our show

• Something Good I Ate

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s Opening Day!

Ladies and gentlemen and non-binary folks of all ages, baseball is back! 

More than any other sport, baseball is the one that, for me at least, is best at generating joy.

In no small part, it’s down to its association with spring and summer, the times of year when things are blooming and it becomes easier to enjoy life outside.

Its slow and steady rhythms allow you as a fan to tune in and tune out to your heart’s content. The gaps in between play allow for broadcasters to paint a picture and tell stories, and let fans in the park and at home alike hear everything in the background: the vendors shouting about peanuts and beer, the fans producing a collective din of a thousand conversations, the organ bouncing out the notes for charges, Mexican hat dances and Russian folk songs alike.

For the nerds among us, there are oodles and oodles of statistics breaking down every detail of every player. And even at the game, it’s easier than ever to consume it all. You get near-instant information on how hard the ball comes off the bat, how much break is on each pitch, even the angle of the pitcher’s hand as he releases it.

All of this is a very poetic way of describing something that is really, really boring.

I can hear all the people I’ve tried and failed to evangelize to love the game (my fiancée and my late grandma chief among them) deride baseball for its lack of action, mocking the outfielders standing around wiping their nose or itching their jock, coming out for one shift after another of doing absolutely nothing.

No matter how many times I would note the importance of outfield shift alignment, there’s only so much I can do to convince those who are not disciples of the faith that is baseball.

Nevertheless, I press on, finding joy where others find boredom.

At least entering Thursday, every single team was undefeated. (Except the Chicago Cubs, who lost both of the two pre-Opening Day games played in Japan last week. Sorry, Cubs fans.) Every fan had reason, even somewhere in the deepest crevices of the most pessimistic minds, to be optimistic about their team.

And beyond the satisfaction of hearing the sounds of summer, I hung on every pitch as I heard new Yankees radio broadcaster Dave Sims paint the picture of new Yankees closer Devin Williams getting out of a 9^th -inning jam to seal the club’s first win of the young season.

I followed from home as my local team, the Washington Nationals, held firm in the 9^th to force their game to extras but then let the bottom fall out to lose 7-3 to the rival Philadelphia Phillies.

The season will be long and there will be plenty of ups and downs but even when things get tough, I’ll take the high of baseball being back.

My Reporting

NWSL

This is a story about one soccer match. But it’s also a story about family. The family we have, the family we choose, and the village around us that does what one family cannot.

On the pitch, over the course of 90-plus minutes, a pretty normal game unfolded, ending 2-0 in favor of the Washington Spirit. They notched their first home win of the season in a rematch of last year’s quarterfinal vs Bay FC.

But instead of tactics, shot creation or luck, the defining theme of Friday’s affair was family.

Chosen Family

One of the best things about sports is that teams become a family of sorts. Not just for the fans who gather there and form communities around them, but for the players. A mix of people who have worked their entire lives and been pushed to excel all bonding together and working toward a common good.

Many times in sports, people are just there to do business. But sometimes, you get to see people who like each other and have fun doing the work.

On Friday night, that was the Washington Spirit. And nowhere was it more visible than when striker Ashley Hatch notched her first of the two goals she scored on the evening.

Hatch is a pretty reserved person both on the pitch and in her media availabilities. She’ll crack a smile but she doesn’t share a ton with reporters and doesn’t usually wear her heart on her sleeve the way some of her more expressive teammates do.

But the team had decided: anyone who scored a goal tonight was going to do a catwalk and strike a pose, with ten other teammates posing as photographers.

Hatch was not the type of person who would lean into such a thing. But her team—her on-field family—dragged her into it. And as is often the case with family, you suck it up and do it for them.

So when the ball found Hatch’s head and then bounced in for a goal, Hatch dutifully struck a pose.

Esme Morgan, the Spirit’s starting center back, fessed up to being the mastermind of the celebration, and she said she got the green light from the Spirit’s usual celebration whiz, forward Trinity Rodman, to spread the word.

“We’re spreading the word around the dressing room, and we very specifically told [Hatch], actually,” Morgan said postgame. “So I think we manifested that she was going to score.”

Hatch, for her part, sighed when explaining after the game that she was reluctant to do it but agreed.

“Probably looks really silly, but it was fun,” Hatch said. “They committed to it, so I committed to it.”

By the time the Spirit scored their second goal and Hatch realized it bounced off her before heading in, she could let a bit of her confidence out. She quickly pointed to herself to direct her teammates toward the celebration.

Sibling Showdown

And let’s not forget, there’s also the family you get by blood. Friday’s game served as a reminder of that for Tess and Meg Boade. Tess, the starting midfielder for Bay FC, squared off against her younger sister Meg, a rookie reserve midfielder for the Spirit, for the first time as professionals.

“Family is the best part of it all,” Tess Boade told me postgame.

“It was conflicting because we lost, so there’s a tough aspect to tonight as well, but it was really cool to see Meg out there. And after all our years and both of us playing professional, the whole fam was here today, so it was really special,” she added.

And while only Tess got to play in Friday night’s game, the Boade family was juggling their split loyalties.

“Since Meg is new to the Spirit, they didn’t have any gear yet but they started the game with Bay gear and somehow ended the game with Spirit gear. They, I think, mobbed the team store,” Tess Boade said.

I wasn’t the only one to interview her over the course of the evening, as Amazon Prime, who was broadcasting the game, taped a pregame segment where the two sisters interviewed each other.

And as you might expect, they also swapped jerseys postgame.

It Takes A Village

And then there’s the village. Everybody owes their success in some form or another to the village. It’s that mix of blood relatives, chosen family and the community around you that helps you out along the way. Maybe they were your parents’ friends, or your classmate in school, or a coach when you played sports as a kid.

In some small way, they all helped you. But rarely does a person get them all gathered together to cheer them on.

Bay FC goalkeeper Jordan Silkowitz had that whole village behind her. By her family’s count, roughly 100 people came out to cheer on the 25-year-old keeper, who grew up just a few miles down I-66 from Audi Field in Fairfax, VA.

But her road to the starting goalkeeper role was far longer. 

She’s in her third season in the league but this is her first season where she has been able to play. Unlike other players, goalkeepers usually aren’t swapped out mid-game and a starter tends to play every minute of every game if they’re able.

Players like Silkowitz who start out as backups can often have to wait for years for a chance to step up.

Friday’s game marked just her third career appearance. But being close to home, she had quite the supporters section with her.

On a night where the Spirit asked fans to dress in black for a “Blackout” night, the Silkowitz cohort stood out, wearing orange and dark blue for Bay FC, with a handful matching her by wearing her bright green goalkeeper jersey.

When she started her pregame warmup, she stoically practiced stopping shots. But as her family hustled over to get close up, Silkowitz’s cold demeanor melted away. The smiles and laughs started breaking out.

When I spoke with her family pregame, it was so clear just how proud they were. 

“For any of the women playing in this league, it’s so competitive, they all work so incredibly hard and to not be able to play is hard,” Joni Henderson, Jordan’s mom, said.

“It’s hard to sit on the bench when you’re putting in hours and hours of training. So I just really commend all of these women for sticking with it and waiting to get their shot.”

“It’s absolutely unreal,” Jesse Silkowitz, Jordan’s sister, told me. “As a younger sister, I always tell her, it’s such a blessing for me to be able to see her be an inspiration to so many young girls as she was to me growing up. And it just absolutely warms my heart. 

While this was Jesse’s first time seeing her sister play as a pro, her parents are three-for-three in seeing their daughter play, first on the road in Utah, then at home in San Jose and most recently in DC on Friday night.

Robert Silkowitz, Jordan’s dad, told me he played goalkeeper in high school.

“I wasn’t good,” he said. “Believe me, I can show you pictures.”

He added that Jordan wasn’t always a goalkeeper but that her willingness to play has always stayed consistent.

“She started playing at four-and-a-half,” he said. “And then she was a forward until she was 12, said ‘I want to be a goalkeeper.’ Hope Solo was an inspiration in doing that. And then now, I told her, I said ‘we will drive you, we will pay, take you wherever you want to go, until you say you don’t want to practice.’ And that’s never happened since age four-and-a-half.”

As I was conducting these interviews, Jordan snuck in a heart to her family as they watched her move from station to station in pregame warmups.

She gave up two early goals less than five minutes apart and it looked like the night might quickly unravel for her. But she held firm with her family watching, as she and Bay kept the Spirit from adding to their total for the remainder of the night.

Before allowing the goals, she also managed to set a record. With some strong play in most of the season opener and a clean sheet in last week’s game vs Louisville, Silkowitz set the club’s record for most consecutive minutes without allowing a goal.

I’m not a parent just yet, so I don’t know what it’s like to watch your child do anything, let alone have an opportunity to excel in their chosen field so close to home, but I have zero doubt: she could have given up three, or ten, or a hundred goals out there, and they would have been just as proud of her for getting there in the first place.

After all, that’s what family is for.

MSNBC

Working at MSNBC has been a bit of baptism by fire. I have had plenty of opportunities to jump right in and tell some stories in a meaningful way.

Chief among them was an example from last Monday, where I had the opportunity to work with Jen on an “A Block” for the first time. For those of you not in the live TV news production business, each segment of TV, from one commercial break to the other, is given a letter. A comes first, then B, etc. Most hourlong shows have blocks lettered A-F. 

I had been producing other blocks in the show and have helped produce an A Block for a guest host but this was my first in the normal setup.

On “Inside,” the A block is where you will see and hear an opening monologue usually followed by one of our more prominent guests. And this past Monday, I got to dig into a decidedly abnormal story.

Less than an hour before we started our shift, The Atlantic dropped a piece from their editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg with the headline “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”

Mixed Signal

It’s a story that has launched a lot of criticism and a whole set of scandals, as nearly every top national security figure in the U.S. used the commercial messaging app Signal to share possibly classified but definitely highly sensitive information about a U.S. airstrike in Yemen. Except none of them noticed that the National Security Adviser Michael Waltz had (inadvertently) added Goldberg into the chat.

Thanks to some guest booking magic, we landed Goldberg for his first cable TV interview since the story dropped.

I was able to help Jen guide our viewers through the story before we brought Goldberg in for an interview.

He explained his many efforts to verify that he was not being pranked or duped in some way and reacted to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first comments responding to the piece.

I had been tasked with watching his remarks, less than an hour before we hit air. As soon as I heard Hegseth try to discredit Goldberg and deny the story, one that multiple White House spokespeople confirmed, I knew we had to play it for him and quickly wrote up a question and picked the best parts of his answer at the request of our bosses.

Goldberg’s reaction and his answer are well worth your time:

And the full interview is watchable here:

Something Good I Ate

Years ago, I was a young grad student living in Lower Manhattan. Back when dating strangers was a thing I did, a lot of first dates didn’t work out. After one that particularly stung, I took a cold January night and turned it into a night to take care of myself and explore.

I used my unlimited Metrocard to take a long ride out to the end of the 7 line in Flushing. I got off in what felt like a different continent.

Within blocks, neon signs bombarded me and lit up the nighttime streets. Some of them were in English for tech brands and major retailers while others were in Chinese. I walked through the bustle of faces—many Asian, some white, some Black, some Latino—and took to just blending in. 

I knew that I could press my luck and try food at any random stall. But I knew that had plenty of risk even with the high reward. I decided I’d wait for another day when I would travel with someone who knew the area better and maybe knew Chinese and went to the more gentrified Xi’an Famous Foods.

The chain has spread all across New York City now but had a handful of locations in early 2018 when I went there. I went to the one on Main Street in Flushing.

Inside, I found a snug escape from the cold. As a picture of Al Gore warned me not to waste napkins in somewhat broken English, I let the heat from the Mt. Qi Pork Hand-Ripped Noodles in Soup (NS3 in their letter/number menu system) warm up my frozen sinuses and mend my temporarily broken heart.

It’s easy not to fret about not getting a second date when you’re sweating and trying to survive a very spicy combination of pork, broth, noodles and vegetables. It’s the kind of spice that just teeters on the line between tolerable and too much, adding a sense of adventure to the meal.

And every ingredient did its job so well. I particularly loved the long, thick biang biang noodles, which maintained their shape well enough that they added a layer of texture to the melt-in-your-mouth pork belly.

While Xi’an Famous Foods hasn’t made it to DC, writing this has given me a craving for some thick, hand-pulled Chinese noodles. If you have any recommendations, send them my way, but I’m going to head off and start searching.