ICYMI

In this episode, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim are joined by writer, comedian and  Glamorous Trash   host Chelsea Devantez to break down this watershed year of celebrity memoirs. The trio crowns the best and the worst titles, dissect what separates a good memoir from a great one, and reveal the shocking figure who has appeared in way more memoirs than you’d expect. This podcast is produced by S...

On today’s episode, Rachelle and Candice are joined by Patrick Marlborough to discuss their recent essay for Slate,  “The Death of the Internet as a Haven for People With Autism.”  They wrote, “Things began to shift, if imperceptibly at first, with the advent of social media, and the steady corralling and corporatization of that otherness, weirdness, fun, and joy.” On the show, Marlborough describ...

In this episode, Rachelle and Candice map out what happened when TikTok food personality  Keith Lee  traveled to Atlanta and ignited a  culinary controversy . Lee is a former MMA fighter-turned-influencer who has been taking food tours around the country, ranking their cuisine and posting his reviews on TikTok. He was tasting restaurants in Atlanta when the itinerary took a turn for the worst: bad...

On today’s episode brought to us by  WBUR’s  Endless Thread , co-host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Nora Saks look at the Lofi Girl phenomenon. At least 13 million YouTube users subscribe to the channel Lofi Girl. Created by the mononymous French music producer Dimitri,  Lofi Girl  is a 24/7 livestream of an anime girl studying in her room and listening to lofi hip hop. For many, she’s become the...

In this episode, the co-hosts of Slate’s ICYMI , Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim, join Prudie (Jenée Desmond-Harris) to answer letters from readers about whether the following categories of people are unreasonable: moms who bring their kids to wineries, boyfriends who refuse to hard launch their girlfriends on social media, and husbands who are suspicious of their wives’ friendships with single m...

In this episode, Rachelle Hampton is joined by Slate staff writers Nitish Pahwa and Nadira Goffe to discuss their  respective   pieces  about Hasan Minhaj. Since the New Yorker published their article on  Minhaj’s “emotional truths,”  the comedian has been at the center of a media firestorm that led to him publishing h is own 21-minute response video . In the resulting discourse, questions have be...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim are joined by Amy S. Choi, co-host of  The Mash-Up Americans  podcast. They talk about the burgeoning phenomenon of immigrant mom TikToks, videos and sketches that showcase the hilarious and loving ways children see their immigrant parents. They ask why immigrant moms get more online love than immigrant dads, and how these videos are healing bot...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim walk through DJ Envy’s latest legal troubles, which include seminars, flipping houses and a Ponzi-like scheme. Then, they’re joined by legal affairs reporter  Meghann Cuniff , whose extensive coverage of the Tory Lanez trial crowned her the Batman of Black Twitter. Cuniff talks about her first internet memory, how she ended up covering the Lanez...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim dive into the saga of Jon Romano. At the age of 16, Romano walked into his high school with a shotgun in an attempt, he says, to commit law-enforcement-assisted suicide. Though no one was killed in the ensuing violence, a teacher was shot and injured. Romano pled guilty to attempted murder and reckless endangerment. He served 17 years in prison...

On today’s show, Rachelle and Candice hang out with Teen Vogue associate editor Aiyana Ishmael. They dive into Aiyana’s internet diary, which includes an early Timothée Chalamet fandom, her  Dance Moms  obsession and  dressing up like Bella Hadid  for a week. This podcast is produced by Se’era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If...

On today’s episode, Rachelle and Candice answer a question from a listener about a viral pesto recipe. Susi Vidal, a 25-year-old food influencer, posted  a simple recipe for pesto on September 1st . Since then, the introduction to her video which goes “Call me crazy but I’ve never liked store-bought pesto” has been used as a launching pad for wild stories about everything from terrible breakups to...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim dive into the decades-long transformation of LinkedIn from a website for digital resumes to a social networking platform whose devotees have earned the name LinkedIn Lunatics. Founded in 2003 and sold to Microsoft for $26 billion in 2018, LinkedIn has become an inescapable feature of the job hunt. But while the site is ostensibly founded on prof...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim talk to writer Cyrena Touros about Dracula Daily, a newsletter that emails bite-sized passages from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel to more than 235,000 readers.   As an epistolary novel,  Dracula  is broken into letters written between May and November. Dracula Daily emails those letters to readers, who have now created a book club-like fandom rife wi...

On today’s episode, Rachelle and Candice discuss if movies should be posted on TikTok, why eavesdroppers are turning brunch into an unsafe space, and how a scamming minister almost got away with alleged fraud. This podcast is produced by Se’era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FA...

On today’s show, Rachelle and Candice are joined by Jessica Bennett and Susie Banikarim, the hosts of  In Retrospect , a newly-launched podcast that explores pivotal moments from the ‘80s and ‘90s that shaped them. Bennett and Banikarim crack open the pages of their internet diary, revealing their first fandoms and the internet fights that still loom large in their memory. The four discuss the way...

On today’s episode, Rachelle and Candice dive into the latest mystery plaguing the internet—the unprecedented rise of podcaster Bobbi Althoff. Althoff launched  The Really Good Podcast  in April and since then has landed interviews with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, including Drake, Offset, Tyga, Lil Yachty and Shaq. But the admitted “master interviewer with weeks of exp...

On today’s episode, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton are joined by Daisy Rosario to discuss the hottest show of the summer:  Suits.  The USA Network procedural follows a magnetic cast of law firm employees who bend the system, fire off quips in court and essentially, wear suits.  Suits  isn’t the most buzzy or exciting series out there, so how did a show that ended in 2019 experience a resurgence...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton is joined by  Alexia Fawcett,  a PhD candidate in linguistics at UC Santa Barbara and  Kendra Calhoun , an assistant professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Calhoun and Fawcett wrote a presentation titled, “ They edited out her nip-nops: Linguistic innovation as textual censorship avoidance on TikTok ,” which explor...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton is joined by  Jane Marie , the host of  the award-winning podcast The Dream  which recently released it’s highly-anticipated third season all about life coaches. The two discuss the rise of life coaching and it’s connection to the MLM universe, how the internet has accelerated the life coach boom and what exactly the American Dream has to do with any of this. T...

On today’s episode, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim are joined by  Jane Friedman , author of  The Business of Being a Writer   and the publisher of  Hot Sheet , a newsletter about the publishing industry. The three discuss Friedman’s recent battle with AI-generated books that were being published and sold under her name on Amazon. Friedman published a blog about the saga titled “ I Would Rather S...

On today’s show, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton are joined by Slate business and tech writer Nitish Pahwa to describe his recent piece on  the deranged world of vintage fast-food training videos . In the depths of Youtube, videos from companies like McDonald’s, Hardee’s, and Jack in the Box depict a bygone era where employees were trained by animated burgers and celebrity cameos. This podcast is...

On today’s episode, Rachelle and Candice field a listener question about Bloom, the green powder nutrition company that’s popping up all over TikTok. They’re joined by health and wellness writer Julia Craven to talk about Bloom’s virality and what we should know before jumping on the green powder bandwagon. But first, they break down Tinder’s latest villain: the Tabi Swiper. This podcast is produc...

On this week’s episode brought to us by Slate’s  The Waves , Tory Lanez has been sentenced for  shooting Megan Thee Stallion , and we have THOUGHTS. Scamfluencers co-host and former BuzzFeed reporter  Scaachi Koul  is joined by Refinery29 deputy director  Kathleen Newman-Bremang  to unpack why so many people turned against Megan despite Tory Lanez being a wasteman. They explain what exactly is a “...

On today’s episode, Rachelle and Candice are joined by sustainable stylist and fashion educator  Lakyn Carlton  to discuss TikTok Shop — a new feature that lets users purchase products without ever leaving the app. TikTok Shop is a modern day QVC, where merchants can shell products they’ve made — or are authorized to resell — in live videos with products tagged on screen. In the age of Amazon Stor...

As an end of summer treat, Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim dive deep into the drama that engulfed BookTok earlier this August. Over the spring and early summer, hockey-themed romance novels enjoyed a rise in the BookTok charts, a rise that led to an influx of new fans into the hockey community. One team in particular, the Seattle Krakens,  became the unofficial team of BookTok , with Swedish play...