Mass for Shut-ins: The Gin and Tacos Podcast

Questions Kyle and Jennie join me for an unusually strong mailbag. In this first part we talk the wild events of the last month in the presidential election, fielding several questions about what is and isn't different now that Harris-Walz has replaced Biden-Harris. Is "You're weird" a good strategy? Do they have their shit together at long last? Why does the campaign feel so different, and is tha...

Questions Kyle and Jennie join me for a close look at three of the wildest weeks in recent American political history - we talk the Trump assassination attempt, Biden's brain, JD Vance, and (checks notes) former Buffalo Bills kicker Scott Norwood. You are currently listening to the first half (free!) of a two-part episode; Part II is available to Patreon subscribers here , so go ahead and sign up...

Kassia St. Clair, author of the 2017 best-seller The Secret Lives of Color and the Sunday Times Book of the Year follow-up The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History (2019) joins me to talk about her new book, Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the 20th Century . It's the story of the utterly bonkers 1907 auto race from Peking to Paris, which didn't let things like the fact that...

In 1972 a middling team from the Scottish Premier League played four exhibition matches in Nigeria and distinguished itself so profoundly with its pitiful play (and boorish attitude) that its name became a synonym for stupidity. Grousing about how much your host country sucks while losing 4-1 to a team of amateurs called "Stationery Stores FC" leaves a pretty profound impression, I guess. The come...

Question Kyle and Question Jennie join me as we discuss the 18th century fad of using the emerging understanding of the phenomenon of electricity to entertain. Men who considered themselves worldly natural philosophers and amateur scientists found it relatively easy to blow the minds of party guests by demonstrating some basic concepts that we're too jaded to appreciate today. Nowhere was this mad...

Perhaps you've heard of Operation Gladio, the infamous post-World War II NATO program to train "stay-behind" agents to fight guerilla-style against a future hypothetical Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Believe it or not, the United States Air Force, briefly in partnership with the FBI, devised exactly such a program it carried out in Alaska between 1951 and 1958. This went beyond the planning s...

Dr. Laine Nooney (NYU) joins me to discuss the early days of personal computing - particularly how people figured out what to do with home computers after they became convinced that they needed one - in their 2023 book The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal . If you were alive in the pre-internet era, this book is both a great trip down memory lane and a new way to think about the usua...

Professor and author Nicholas Dagen Bloom joins me to discuss his new book The Great American Transit Disaster: Austerity, Autocentric Planning, and White Flight (University of Chicago Press). You know transit is a mess in the United States but take my word for it: after reading this book you will understand how and why in a brand new way. If you think you already know the story, you don't!  Quest...

Continuing a topic we broached on a recent bonus episode on Patreon, Questions Kyle and Jennie join me as we sort through the wonderful if baffling world of school assemblies submitted by listeners and readers. You have to hear some of this stuff to believe it, but suffice it to say America's educational system is very concerned about abstinence and marijuana. Please support Mass for Shut-ins, an...

Question Cathy returns for a long overdue dip into the mailbag. We hit a range of topics including: how the recent Supreme Court ruling will affect college admissions, 90s cultural fads, the mind-bending heat affecting much of the planet this summer, what the DeSantis campaign's flop tells us about the war on "wokeness," and how some state-level Democratic parties have gotten so much done with raz...

Artist and author Brian Brown joins me to discuss his new book The He-Man Effect: How American Toy Makers Sold You Your Childhood .  We talk about our memories of toy advertising and cartoons from the Eighties and the political and regulatory changes that opened the floodgates to marketing at children. Inhumanoids, M.A.S.K., SilverHawks, and Sectaurs are just a few of the D-list intellectual prope...

Question Kyle and Question Jennie join me to discuss one of the most poorly thought-out, pretentious stunts in the history of pop culture, wherein an early UK techno-electronica duo churn out a novelty song, one hit single, and a book about how to write a novelty song before topping it all off by burning one million pounds, one £50 bill at a time. It's the kind of anti-capitalist, Art School edgin...

David Roth ( @david_j_roth ) of Defector ( @DefectorMedia ) joins me to talk about one of the most memorable ad campaigns in the history of sports and pop culture, Reebok's $30,000,000 1992 "Dan vs. Dave" commercials that briefly turned two decathletes into household names and was supposed to culminate with one of them being crowned the world's greatest athlete at the Barcelona Olympics. Along the...

Question Kyle joins me for musings on concept albums as I fondly recall the 1999 gimmick-compilation "Short Music for Short People" from the pop-punk mavens at Fat Wreck Chords. The idea: 101 bands, 101 songs, each one 30 seconds long. The royalty of the genre all contributed - Blink-182, NOFX, The Offspring, everyone you remember from the late Clinton years. An impressive, if not especially liste...

Motivated by the Chinese balloon story that recently if briefly dominated the news, Kelsey Atherton ( @AthertonKD ) joins me to talk about PROJECT GENETRIX (1956), a Pentagon scheme to float almost 600 balloons over remote parts of the USSR and China. Turns out balloons are not well-suited to espionage duty for reasons that should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.  We also talk plenty abou...

At the height of the Cold War, the looming existential dread of human extinction in a nuclear holocaust was punctuated by a three-way battle for the Grand Ballroom of New York City's famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel fought by Nikita Khrushchev, the US State Department, and the American Dental Association. You'll never guess who won. These podcasts are ad-free and self-produced; I value your support on...

Labor journalist and author Max Alvarez ( @maximillian_alv ) takes a break from hosting the essential podcast Working People (@WorkingPod) and reporting for Real News Network to talk about the recent labor issues on America's freight railroads. Also joining us is Matt Weaver, a maintenance of way crew member based in Toledo working for freight giant CSX. He's active with BMWED-IBT 2624, a Teamster...

Dr. Erin Thompson ( @ArtCrimeProf ), the Art Crime Professor , joins me to talk about her book Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments. We cover the illusory permanence of monuments, the politics of taking them up (and down), and the fate of removed monuments sitting in storage right now, waiting for a more reactionary political climate to re-erect them. Question Cathy jo...

In which I stoop to being my own guest on my own podcast to talk about my book, which is available from wherever you prefer to get books in Ebook , Hardcover , and Audiobook formats. If you listen to this podcast you're almost certainly aware by now that I have a book, and in fact you may be sick of hearing about it. Nonetheless, here's a little teaser if you're still on the fence about checking i...

Two vagabonds with great luck and big balls perpetrate a hoax that made them extremely rich and hoodwinked some of the finest, most respectable citizens of early Gilded Age America. In our modern era of boring electronic fraud, the romance of walking into a bank with a bag of dirty diamonds you claim you pulled out of a hidden mine is hard to match. These podcasts are ad-free and self-produced; I...

Dr. Olufemi Taiwo ( @OlufemiOTaiwo ) joins us with his new book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) . We talk about the future of organizing and activism and what those of us without power should be doing to avoid falling into the traps more powerful actors set for us. I also do my best to embarrass him by recalling an incident from ~2005, when he and...

This is a quick teaser to let non-Patreon subscribers know that you missed the last Minicast, which I uploaded two weeks ago on Patreon .  I won't be putting all Minicasts behind the paywall, but this one was a special treat for subscribers. If you want to listen and can spare $1, join at https://www.patreon.com/ginandtacos

The resplendent radio voice of Ryan Cooper joins me to talk about his new book, How Are You Going to Pay For That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics . You might be familiar with his writing from his tenure at The Week, or from his cohosting duties on the Left Anchor podcast . He currently is the managing editor of the American Prospect . We talk the social welfare state, unemployme...

In 1989 Kraft held a promotional sweepstakes (grand prize: a new minivan) with game pieces in packages of Kraft Singles and due to a series of errors, every single one was a winner. By the time they caught the mistake, over 10,000 people had already "won" $17,000+ minivans. Kraft is based in the Chicagoland area, so the heavy local coverage this fiasco received in Summer '89 led 10 year-old me to...

The Glass-Steagall banking bill was one of the most important progressive reforms of the 20th Century. It's gone now, but as often happens with members of Congress, Glass and Steagall have been almost entirely forgotten. Glass's story offers some very interesting insights into how the ideological range of American politics has narrowed. Because Glass and Steagall, the Great Reformers, were actuall...