Jessica Luther

Jessica Luther is an investigative journalist, author, and co-host of Burn It All Down. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow Burn It All Down on Twitter here.

Why are you and your hosts the perfect mix? What do each of you bring to the table?
There are five of us: 3 journalists, 2 historians. While there are definitely overlaps in all of our work, I think we each have expertise in different spaces and ways that make up complementary rather than redundant. Dr. Amira Rose Davis is one of the foremost experts on Black women in sports and the intersection of race, gender, and sport. Dr. Brenda Elsey is brilliant on labor history and sport, global soccer, and specifically on race, gender, and soccer in Latin America. Shireen Ahmed is one of the best, if not the best, on Muslim women in sport, the intersection of religion, sport, and gender, and global soccer and women's sport more generally. I don't know of a more well-versed person on women's sport than our own Lindsay Gibbs. She's been reporting diligently on these topics for many years and her PowerPlays newsletter allows all of her knowledge on this to shine. And I am known best for my work on sport and gendered violence, and Title IX. But those are just our biggest umbrellas. We are all sports fans but of different sports. We root for different teams. We all have different personal stories and relationships to sport itself. We live in geographically different places. There are so many ways that we all fit together. And it helps that we are friends and have been for a long time. I think that chemistry comes through on the show.

How do you balance so many voices on one show? It must be a huge mash up of ideas and literal voices.
This has been a challenge. We are coming up on our four-year anniversary and continue to tinker with how to balance voices. We try to spread around who is on each week and have recently settled on mainly having 3 voices each time (though that's not a hard and fast rule). And we do a lot of pre-production ahead of time to give people space to think through what they want to add to the conversation and to make sure it will all flow. A long time ago, Lindsay pushed for us to have the fun opening to the show where we riff on something casual as an easy and quick way to get everyone's voice on the show immediately. So, it takes a lot of planning, I think is the shortest answer.

Who are your listeners? Are they mostly women?
We have never done a demographic analysis of our listeners. I think anecdotally, yes, a lot of women listen to the podcast. But I can also think of very devoted male listeners, and also listeners who don't fit into the binary. What I can say about our listeners is that they are lovely, they care deeply about the same issues that we do, and we know that they appreciate the work we do because it is so unique within the larger sports media/radio/podcast world.

I feel like it is so important that people listen to your show, I want to shake them and force them to sit down with headphones to hear what you're doing. If you had one sentence to describe why they should listen to Burn It All Down, what would you say?
It's the feminist sports podcast you need. Ha! I think Burn It All Down offers a fresh perspective on how to think about and understand the place of sports in our greater world, and the impact that culture has on sports and sports has on culture.

What has making the show taught you about the world?
That it's bigger than I can hold in my brain. I don't mean that in a glib way. I mean that working on Burn It All Down has forced me to recognize over and over again so many preconceived ideas I have about the world and sports within the world are actually US-specific. So much of what I take for granted as "normal" is only the norm here. A recent example of this was a discussion we had about sports ownership and Brenda blew my mind talking about non-profit and community-led ownership models for professional teams in other parts of the world. Or when we discussed whether drafts should be abolished and, turns out!, they are a US sports phenomenon so it's easy to see how you can do without them.

How has sports podcasting changed in the last few years?
It's ever-expanding, that's for sure. We joined an all-sports podcasting network last year, Blue Wire, which is not something I would have even thought of a couple of years ago (I know they existed but it was so off my own personal radar). And part of what Blue Wire was interested in with us is that we are 5 women co-hosts of a sports podcast (that's rare) and we talk about sports from a specific feminist lens (that's even rarer). They see that there is an interest in this specific content and I agree. We felt like there was a hole in sports podcasting 4 years ago when we started and while I think things are slowly getting better and more people are recognizing that sports podcasting doesn't have to sound the same all of time, I still think there's plenty of space for more work like ours.

What is the topic that sets you on FIRE? Like what is your favorite thing to talk about on the show?
LOL. My co-hosts would say "doping." I wrote a chapter on it for my latest book (Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back, which I co-authored with Kavitha Davidson) and have been obsessed with it ever since. When you drill down on doping, you really see how arbitrary so many of these rules are within sport and who gets punished for violating them. It's such a useful frame to think about fairness. But I also love a good takedown of major institutions like the NCAA, FIFA, the IOC, etc. Sign me up for those discussions any day.

If you were each going to start a new podcast, don't worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it. What would it be?
Something on sports history, I think. I'm not sure exactly what. Maybe a deep dive on Title IX and gender equity within sport (there's so many stories to tell there both before 1972 and right up to today). I think a podcast tracing the history of girls and women in baseball would be so fascinating.

Are there too many podcasts?
No.

Why do you think women love true-crime? Have you ever considered mixing some true-crime basketball in there? What is true-crime basketball?
II'm not sure why women love true crime so much. I know there's been a fair amount of writing on this. I'm sure it stems, in part, from the fact that our society is set up to infantilize women, to remind them constantly that they are not safe in this hetero-white-supremacist-patriarchy, and to diminish all reports of gender-based violence that they experience. It's a society-wide gaslight on a constant basis. So, it makes sense to me that there's a fascination for women who are constantly negotiating this untenable (purposefully untenable, I think) position of being told they are not safe and then disregarding any actual experiences that they have being harmed.

I think for media (documentaries, TV shows like 20/20, podcasts), true crime is so great because it's a mystery often (who did it) with often high stakes (especially if the crime is that someone has been killed). But it doesn't even have to be high stakes to be enthralling as a story -- the unraveling of the mystery and the putting together of the puzzle pieces is often a compelling narrative in whatever form it comes.

I have such a sad encyclopedia in my brain that when I read "true-crime basketball," I immediately thought of the horrific tragedy with Baylor men's basketball in 2003 where one player murdered another and then the coach had his players and staff lie about it in order to cover up the coach's NCAA infractions. There was a great documentary about it a few years back (I wrote a review of it.) But that's to say, I'm sure there's plenty of it if you look.

What shows do you love?
I will admit up front that I don't listen to a ton of sports podcasts. I do like ESPN Daily a lot -- Pablo (and Mina before him) is a great interviewer and it's well produced. For tennis, I listen to No Challenges Remaining. Spinsters, a new Blue Wire podcast on basketball, has been great so far. I listen to 30 for 30 whenever they put out new stuff. Diaspora United is a needed voice in sports podcasts and I'm enjoying their work.

Non-sports podcasts: You're Wrong About. Maintenance Phase. In the Dark. Noble Blood. Code Switch. Throughline. Still Processing. Today, Explained. 13 Minutes to the Moon (it's over but I LOVED it). CBC podcasts like Missing & Murdered, Recall, Someone Knows Something, Uncover. Highly recommend The View from Somewhere, Slow Burn, You Must Remember This (especially her Polly Platt series), and Hit Parade.

Thanks, Jessica!