Dear Adam Silver Dear Adam Silver

Dear Adam Silver listeners! It has been a minute! I am glad to be back at the mic and sharing a conversation that touches on themes of family, expectations of gender and health trauma all via the topics of basketball and astrology......very timely for Mother's Day.

I am excited to share my conversation with interdisciplinary artist, educator, mystic and Team Captain of New Craft Artists in Action (NCAA) Maria Molteni, who is back on the show (first featured on Episode #32: Maria Molteni and Basketball Magic). 

Maria and I unpack the wonderfully complicated and nuanced Senda/Sedna zine that we worked on together this past November, which includes an essay about Senda Berenson (founder of women’s bball) and an essay about Sedna 90377 (Maria's favorite Trans-Neptunian Object). The printing of this zine coincided with the release of Maria’s Star Ball, which was created based on the design of the Cosmic Court in Fall River, MA that Maria painted alongside local students and NCAA members. On this episode we discuss the zine, the ball and all of the themes and concepts that they offer to us.

Please be aware that Maria and I are very candid on this episode and discuss on our struggles with our body, some relating to infertility, and familial trauma.

You can find the Senda/Sedna zine for sale here and the Star Ball on sale here and you can follow Maria on Instagram @strega_maria

Journalist, photographer and writer Blake Gillespie is back on the pod to discuss his article for SLAM entitled In War-Torn Ukraine, these Ukrainian Hoopers are Trying to Uplift Others Through the Power of the Game.  Follow some of the basketball players mentioned in this story, including Natalia Yudytska who can be found @tasha_shorty and Dmytro “Smoove” Kryvenko, found @smooveukraine. You can also follow Blake and his every growing collection of hoops photos @sacredhoopsbook. 
Blake and his work have been featured on three previous episodes of Dear Adam Silver, including episodes 44, 48 and 81. 

Dr. Johanna Mellis is an Assistant Professor of History at Ursinus College where her research focuses on international sport during the Cold War, namely in the Eastern Bloc and Hungary especially, in order to connect the local voices and experiences of Hungarian athletes to the IOC and broader international sport society. Her manuscript, Changing the Global Game: Hungarian Athletes and International Sport During the Cold War, examines Hungarian sportspeople’s interactions with the International Olympic Committee from 1948-1989. Changing the Global Game shows how Hungarian athletes, Socialist Hungarian state sport officials, and the IOC gradually realized by the 1960s that sporting cooperation with one another - and not East-West political clashes nor resistance - was the way to achieve their respective aims of sport success, career and financial stability, and political and institutional strength.

Our conversation covers many different topics, but we do repeatedly come back to a consistent theme of unlearning our early understandings of world history through sport to form a better, more accurate, and historically inclusive narrative. 

You can follow Dr. Mellis's amazing and well curated Twitter feed @JohannaMellis. As I share in the podcast, my eyes have been opened to a multitude of different historical perspectives on sports through Dr. Mellis's Twitter account. 

Dr. Mellis also cohosts the End of Sport Podcast, a podcast on capitalist sport, labor, and justice for end times. The show features interviews with athletes, critical sports journalists, and fellow academics to explore all the ways that people use sport to harm others - i.e. through racist mascotry, the NCAA and higher ed’s exploitation of Black and Brown college athletic workers, sexual abuse and harassment, transphobia, and more.

You can read Dr. Mellis's writing alongside her End of Sport cohosts in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, The Guardian, Time, The Baffler, and more. She also has sole-authored pieces with The Washington Post and Arizona State University’s Global Sport Matters.

As always, thanks for listening! Please share, rate and review Dear Adam Silver wherever you get your podcasts. 

Mikey Yates is a painter currently based in Kansas City, MO and a resident at the Charlotte Street Foundation, where our interview took place. Mikey paints tiny moments that carry a significant weight to him, sometimes also engaging with historical world events. Basketball, his first love, comes up again in different scenes that he depicts and his rich, dynamic palette brings a glow and reverence to each of his paintings. Grateful to have the chance to talk shop with Mikey and unpack how his work, and deep appreciation for basketball, came to be. 

You can see and find out about his work here and be sure to follow him on Instagram @mikey_yates. 

Please rate and review Dear Adam Silver wherever you get your podcasts! Thanks for listening, as always. 

Blake and Giovanni are on the pod today to discuss pickup basketball and the creative culture around the game. We touch on playing during COVID and post vaccines, including their personal experiences, and the ways they have used basketball and photography as a means to connect with  other likeminded people around the world.

Thank you to Blake and Giovanni for coming on the show. Follow them on instagram! Blake is @sacredhoopsbook and Giovanni is @hgnext. And feel free to listen to my earlier conversations with Blake, featured in Episode 44 and Episode 48.

Thank you to all you listeners out there! Please subscribe to Dear Adam Silver, and if you already are subscribed, please share, rate and review wherever you find your podcasts. Thank you so much for all of your support.

Noah Cohan and John Early who are on the show to discuss their project Whereas Hoops. Noah Cohan is the Assistant Director of American Culture Studies at Washington University St. Louis and is a previous Dear Adam Silver guest from Episode 22 where he joined the show to discuss his book on fandom entitled We Average Unbeautiful Watchers. John Early is an artist and senior lecturer at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington university St. Louis. Their collective project Whereas Hoops was created to draw attention to the lack of basketball courts in Forest Park, which is located in St. Louis and is one of the biggest urban parks in the country.....but with all that space, there are still no basketball courts. Noah and John are working collaboratively to highlight this issue within its' proper historical context and hopefully correct it in the long term. 

Follow Whereas Hoops on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you to John and Noah for coming on and thank you to you all for listening! Please subscribe, share, rate and review Dear Adam Silver wherever you get your podcasts.