Blocked and Reported

Katie and Jesse discuss the online outrage surrounding the French film 'Cuties,' which has slightly more underage twerking than most 2020 cinematic releases. How did this film come to unite such a broad swath of people in disgust? What is Ted Cruz's strategy for getting the American government to investigate a French filmmaker? Then the hosts speak with Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown about the bro...

The hosts discuss Donald Trump's sudden fixation on ostensibly "un-American" critical race theory in government diversity trainings. What does a good-faith critique of these trainings look like that doesn't slide into fearmongering or red-scare-esque grandstanding and witch-hunting? Will the politicization of everything prevent people from focusing on what matters, which is whether these trainings...

After Jesse reveals yet another shocking secret about his mysterious life, the hosts discuss the case of Jessica Krug, a George Washington University professor who appears to have admitted to pulling a Rachel Dolezal: she pretended to be black. What a mess! But perhaps not all that shocking in our identity-obsessed age. Then the hosts respond, in depth, to an email from a reader who wants to be ta...

In today's patrons-only episode, Jesse interviews Justin Tosi, a philosopher at Texas Tech University and the author, with Brandon Warmke, of the new book Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk . After discussing the book, Jesse and Justin move on to a broader conversation about the current, precarious moment for open inquiry in academia, as well as the turn toward activism in philosophy t...

After an intro in which Jesse impresses Katie deeply with a brilliant, cutting-edge character he has clearly put a lot of time into developing, the hosts discuss a hellish few days in Kenosha, Wisconsin: first, the police shooting of Jacob Blake, and then Kyle Rittenhouse's killing of two protesters. Doesn't there have to be a better way for police to resolve altercations like the one that ensued...

In this week's episode, Jesse addresses an ugly rumor about him posted to Blocked and Reported's Apple Podcast review page. Then the hosts discuss Conor Friedersdorf's article in The Atlantic, "Anti-racist Arguments Are Tearing People Apart," which centers around the accusation that it was racist for a white man to bounce his friend's black baby on his lap during a Zoom call (really!). In the epis...

In this week's threesome of an episode, which was recorded with enthusiastic consent by everyone involved, Katie and Jesse talk to Dan Savage about the strange case of Alex Morse, the young, gay, Democratic congressional candidate and Massachusetts mayor accused of... well, it isn't quite clear. But what is quickly becoming clear is that Morse appears to have been set up by college kids loyal to h...

In one of the weirdest online controversies yet covered by Blocked and Reported, Katie walks Jesse through the wild, twisting tale of @Sciencing_Bi , a young anthropologist who just wanted to do good work, but who was tragically hindered from achieving this goal by the vicious anti-bisexual currents that dominate academic anthropology -- and by a university hell-bent on LITERALLY working her to de...

Things are not going so great in Portland, where months of rowdy and sometimes destructive protests have been met with a federal response that has understandably scared and infuriated residents. But what's really going on there? Have we reached a point where it's basically impossible to find credible, contextualized accounts of complicated situations like this one? Will the Wall of Moms be undone...

After Katie recounts a listener complaint and the cohosts announce a new focus for the podcast, the bulk of the episode consists of an interview Jesse conducted with Freddie deBoer, a brilliant thinker and writer whose first book, "The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice," is a searing indictment of the American education system's most entrenched orthodoxy:...

After Jesse reluctantly reveals some incredibly embarrassing and personal details about his love life in the opening segment, the hosts discuss the week's two big media stories: Bari Weiss's resignation from The New York Times and Andrew Sullivan's firing from New York Magazine. Is this a sign that these outlets are narrowing their windows of acceptable opinion? Was Weiss's treatment in her workpl...

After Jesse bravely expresses an opinion that is likely to get him cancelled by Cancel Culture, and to potentially destroy the podcast entirely, the hosts, who are clearly hated by God Himself (of maybe... HERself??), devote almost the entire episode to Letter Discourse and Counter-Letter Discourse. The discussion mostly concerns the harassment of a Vox staffer, which Jesse contributed to and feel...

Katie and Jesse signed a letter that was published in Harper's! It's pretty basic but given Twitter's reaction you would have thought it was an excerpt from Mein Kampf . In today's episode, the hosts discuss why they signed the letter and run through some of the most unhinged and disingenuous reactions to it, discovering, in the process, that one of the letter's loudest critics tried to get them b...

The gang celebrates July 4th by barely mentioning it. Instead, Jesse and Katie talk about Blocked and Reported's arguably FIRST EVER beef, which involves a very sensitive staffer at The New Republic. Then they relay two real corrections and one fake one from previous episodes, talk about the increasing possibility, in light of a new court decision, that at least one contributor to the Shitty Media...

Jesse interviews Yascha Mounk about the threats liberalism is facing from both the left and the right, and Yascha introduces a new platform he is launching to help stem the tide. The duo also discuss Yascha's great but infuriating article in The Atlantic, "Stop Firing the Innocent," the origins of the gender wage gap, antifa, the racial politics of police reform, and more. Make sure to check out p...

A reckoning is afoot, as Jesse finally confronts Katie over her abusive managerial style. After the hosts get that out of the way, they proceed into a discussion about The New York Times' decision to publish the famed rationalist blogger Scott Alexander's full name -- and the rather effective-seeming countermeasure Alexander pulled in response. Then they move onto a broader conversation about jour...

If you develop severe physical symptoms whenever you go more than a day without hearing fresh content that includes Katie's and Jesse's voices, you're in luck: Here's an interview the hosts did with Jeremiah Johnson of The Neoliberal Project ( here's his Twitter account) which Johnson generously shared (it's also up on his own organization's Patreon page). It was a pretty wide-ranging discussion -...

If hearing Jesse and Katie dig around in the strange innards of "White Fragility" wasn't enough Robin DiAngelo for you, have we got the thing: an interview Katie conducted with a woman whose former company, throw into disarray by a racial microaggression, brought in DiAngelo to conduct a full year's worth of antiracism training, complete with (unpaid) homework. It went.... strangely, and at one po...

(UPDATE, 6/21/2020: Replaced the original file with one that has a new intro from Katie about some violence that took place in the CHAZ. This is the version we'll be posting on the free feed tomorrow, but everything is otherwise identical. -Jesse) In the intro, Katie regales Jesse with tales from the CHAZ. Then, in part because Jesse is obsessed and desperately needs to get a lot of vitriol surrou...

The roiling tremors on the left continue, as a young progressive data analyst gets fired for... it's honestly too ridiculous to even type, and the Poetry Foundation shows us what a truly hysterical meltdown looks like. The hosts use their intellect and savvy to try to understand the difference between two 'violent' acts: "kneeling on someone's neck until they die horrifically" and "issuing a state...

Bari Weiss did some tweets about how there is a generational divide at The New York Times that is, in her view, hampering the paper's ability to publish quality commentary and journalism. In response, a sizable cohort of her colleagues LITERALLY devoured her (metaphorically, on Twitter). In their most frustrated episode yet, Katie and Jesse explain why Bari was fundamentally right. That doesn't me...

For this, the first-ever patrons-only Blocked and Reported interview, Jesse interviewed Ben Burgis, a philosopher, prolific writer for Jacobin and other outlets, and the author of Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left . Among other subjects, the duo discussed self-sabotaging messaging on the left, the flaws in Jordan Peterson's conception of 'post-modernism,' and the class element missing from...

In today's episode, the hosts zero in on an obscure, under-covered newspaper known as "The New York Times." Specifically, they discuss an explosion of employee anger over the paper's decision to publish a column by Sen. Tom Cotton, and what it can (maybe) tell everyone about internal dynamics in some media companies at the moment. Then, they shift gears to a Times article about a nonbinary 7-year-...

There's so much going on that Katie and Jesse are back again, already. In this episode they discuss the protests and riots popping off all over the country in response to George Floyd's horrific death, the media's predictably sloppy handling of some of the complexities of police reform, and the difference between meaningful and performative activism. Should they appoint themselves leaders of the n...

In this week's episode, Katie and Jesse discuss the Amy Cooper/Christian Cooper incident in Central Park. Is this different from other instances of online shaming? Do we lose something when, in trying to understand a complicated problem like police shootings and other abuses, we focus in on individuals rather than institutions and structures? Why are white women so often pilloried these days when...