Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

Good Saturday morning, Curiosity Chasers!

I’m breaking from the regular Tuesday schedule to test out a little supplement. I’m not sure how often I’ll do this. It might depend on your feedback.

This is normally a sports newsletter but as you know, there are things that are very interesting that exist beyond the realm of sports.

Lately I’ve been reading and watching a lot of stuff that has opened my mind, and it just so happens most of them have no sticks or balls and no score, either.

A lot of the work that has moved me lately is by people who I know, have interviewed or have worked with in the past.

The media business is as volatile as ever and everybody is fighting to maintain their place in it and do the work that makes them proud or happy. It makes me think of the line, “don’t wait until I’m dead to give me flowers.”

So with that in mind, I’ve crafted what I’m calling “Roey’s Reads,” a list of things I’m reading, listening to and watching that have interested me and hopefully will interest you, made by people who definitely deserve their flowers.

If I do this more than once, mostly it will feature shorter works (articles, podcast episodes, talks) but occasionally a longer-form work catches my attention.

As a heads up, I want to make a conscious effort to make sure what I consume is as representative of America and the world as I can be. There are some topics that, due to my job, I can’t touch as fully as others. But recommendations for any pieces or works by women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks or anyone else who isn’t traditionally given a microphone or a pen are especially welcome.

 With that, here’s some of what I’ve found interesting lately:

Reads

Life After Coming Home

My former colleague Sasha Ingber has been on fire since she left Scripps.

Sasha’s newsletter HUMINT, short for Human Intelligence, is a fascinating look into the world of intelligence, national security, and good ol’ fashioned spying. Here’s where you can subscribe.

This week, she published an exceptional entry on what life is like for Americans held hostage abroad after they return home. She spoke with Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post reporter who was held for over a year on espionage charges in Iran before being released in 2016.

And she was able to connect with Alsu Kurmasheva, one of the reporters released in the recent prisoner swap with Russia that also freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Sasha got Alsu and her husband Pavel Butorin to talk about life after coming home. 

This passage in particular stood out:

A Golden Family Moment

What is life like as the sibling of a star?

Philadelphia Inquirer sports reporter Alex Coffey brought that to life in a beautiful column last week about watching her sister, U.S. women’s national soccer team midfielder Sam Coffey, help Team USA win the gold in Paris.

I had followed Alex for a while for her baseball coverage but didn’t realize until a couple days before the gold medal game that she and Sam were siblings.

Alex chronicled the emotional, many-hours-long journey to Paris to see her sister play and the brief moment of joy the two of them, along with their brother, shared after the match.

She highlighted the long road for both Sam and the national team and the shift toward playing with joy.

Joy is so important these days. Whether it’s in sports, politics or just about any other field, doing work with joy is taking people far.

It all culminated in one beautiful, joy-filled moment, which Alex captured beautifully.

Listens

WCBS News Time, The End

The media business can be miserable these days. So let’s flash back to 2011.

I was in high school and my mom won some charity auction that involved a day at one of New York’s biggest news radio stations, WCBS 880.

We traveled into the city to the CBS Broadcast Center, where we got to sit a few feet off mic as afternoon drivetime anchors Wayne Cabot and Steve Scott helmed several hours of the network’s years-long live coverage of just about everything.

Afterward, we got a tour of the building, where I even posed for a pic at the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News.

In the years that followed, we stayed in touch with the guys, particularly Steve Scott. His active Facebook presence, holding court on everything from local news to discussions about media ethics, made it easy to follow along and for a budding journalist like myself to learn how to think in a way that was fair and bent less toward one side or the other and more toward truth. 

As I became a journalist, the day at WCBS became an inflection point and a day where I more fully realized what journalism was and that I wanted to do it.

WCBS’s parent company owns not one but two news radio stations in New York, both WCBS 880 and the similarly iconic 1010 WINS, creators of the legendary tagline “you give us 22 minutes, we give you the world.”

As radio revenues have diminished, the company decided it needed to make cuts. On short notice, it announced earlier this month that WCBS will close up shop on August 26, with the airwaves being handed over to ESPN radio and the WCBS call letters being retired.

The network’s radio anchors received even shorter notice. Our old friend Steve had his last day this past Friday. He posted the audio of his final sign-off and the emotion in his delivery was palpable.

I know Steve’s career path is uncertain but he deserves nothing but the best as someone who has done consummate professional radio work for over 40 years.

Watches

The Language of Campaigning

Vice President Kamala Harris is now officially the Democratic nominee. When she speaks, she has to straddle a lot of different lines, particularly as a Black woman running for office.

Nobody knows Kamala Harris’s speaking style quite like Nicole Holliday. A professor of linguistics now at UC Berkeley, Holliday focuses on sociolinguistics, a.k.a. language as it relates to different social factors (class, race, gender, etc.) She also has written multiple papers about the way Vice President Harris speaks.

I spoke with her for a piece I produced back in 2022 about regional accents and she explained how, even if not as many people in places like Boston or New York sound like extras in “The Departed” or “Goodfellas,” respectively, regional accents aren’t going away, so much as changing.

In a TikTok last month that went pretty viral, Holliday explained how Harris’s speaking style incorporates a lot of elements of both African-American English and a California accent. But she also highlights a really interesting thing Harris does, namely how she switches styles of speaking from issue to issue. It’s about four minutes long but her combination of knowledge, enthusiasm and an interesting subject make it the kind of watch where you actively want to follow along.

@mixedlinguist

VP Harris is sociolinguistally awesome, and fortunately I already wrote a paper about that! #linguisttok My website with all my research:... See more

But wait, there’s more! Kamala Harris’s name is actually the embodiment of a major linguistic concept. Holliday has another TikTok where she walks through the concept of a shibboleth, a term that is used among groups to distinguish people inside a group from those outside the group. In case you were wondering why a lot of her opponents say her name “kuh-MAH-luh” rather than “COMMA-la,” she’s got you covered:

@mixedlinguist

What’s up with the differences in how people say “Kamala”? Her name has become a shibboleth that tells us about the speaker’s alignment! #... See more

If you are even half as nerdy about this sort of stuff as I am, her account is a goldmine of fascinating analyses of language, both by politicians and non-political people alike. She’s @mixedlinguist on TikTok.

More of these or no?

So, what do you think? Would you like more of these? You can reply to this edition and let me know.

And of course, tell a friend and have them tell a friend about this newsletter. I’d love to keep building our wonderful little community.