Guilty Pleasures:

via Robin Hanson:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2026/01/07/david-lease-the-skating-lesson/

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"Three women, when asked about Lease, confessed he’s their “guilty pleasure,” saying they’re appalled by some of what he says yet still long to hear more."

[Guilty pleasures matter because they reveal what attracts us even when we wish it didn’t. ... For example, drinking Coke is a guilty pleasure in my life.]

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"The words he used? “Not everybody who was on that plane was talented at skating,” and they were being “taken advantage of because we all know they weren’t going to make it at skating.”"

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"Though he never competed himself, he grew up loving everything about skating. As a teenager, he spent his babysitting money on hard-to-get tapes of skating events until little towers of video boxes filled the house. He devoured every book about skating he could find at the library where his mother worked.

After college, he started a skating blog. He learned quickly that the more he tweaked skaters for the silly things they said in interviews, the more people clicked on his site to read it. Even the blog’s name, Aunt Joyce’s Ice Cream Stand, was a sardonic, gossipy reference to rumors about the same-gender partner of a top skater’s mother.

In 2012, he and Jenny Kirk, a skater who had been a junior world champion, combined to make “The Skating Lesson,” which they said was about the life lessons learned from the sport. They interviewed skaters, talked about real-life issues and gave campy recaps of the previous week’s news. Kirk drifted in and out of the show while attending law school, but Lease remained."