BASKETBALL FEELINGS launched in 2018 (RIP, TinyLetter) and reconciles real life with basketball, expounding on the less quantifiable stuff — like loving a sport with problems and treating chasedown blocks as an analogy for living life.
BASKETBALL FEELINGS has been featured in the L.A. Review of Books and The New Yorker, taught in Harvard’s ‘Art of Sportswriting’ class, and will soon be a book of essays by the same name from Transit Books.
I’ve written about the disconnect between softness and power, fandom and grief, intimate partner violence and the NBA’s terrible track record in examining it, empathy in sports, the false sanctity of stats, the discomfort surrounding WNBA athletes and their in-game physicality, and many times, Russell Westbrook.
The newsletter also offers a podcast to paid subscribers featuring basketball media, writers, journalists and artists where we talk about the sport’s cultural and personal intersections, while sometimes gossiping. Past guests include Louisa Thomas, Isaac Chotiner, Howard Beck, Sam Anderson, and many more.
Nice things people have said about BASKETBALL FEELINGS
“What’s notable about Heindl’s Substack is not so much her concern with feeling as subject as her sense of feeling as method, as well as feeling as social force, the thing that makes NBA basketball meaningful for everyone who participates in the culture, from fans to players.” — Liz Wolfson, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Nobody out there is writing like Katie, this is a big gulp of fresh air.” — Kelly Dwyer, The Second Arrangement
“Katie Heindl is so damn good at this.” — J.E. Skeets, No Dunks podcast
“There’s not much sportswriting anymore that permits itself to be small or sad or existential or goofy or not particularly about sports at all. Katie’s stuff is that way. Anyone who reads her is better for it.” — Colin McGowan, RealGM
