Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com We discuss a viral advice column titled “You Fat-Shamed Your Beautiful Girlfriend.” It begins with a letter from someone wrestling over how to handle a partner’s weight gain. The advice giver’s clap-back (“If your girlfriend wrote into this column with this story, I would tell her she should break up with you...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy and Sarah dive back into the faked death of romance novelist Susan Meachan, thanks to journalist Ellen Barry, who did a deep dive in the NYT . After learning details of her (actual) life, do we have any more empathy for Meachan and her seduction by and escape into Romancelandia? Next we look at the scan...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy has been enjoying the audiobook of Harry Windsor’s blockbuster memoir, “Spare,” but Sarah thinks a more fitting title might be “Spare Me.” They debate the controversial figure of Prince Harry, grieving son in a golden cage but also emblem of millennial entitlement and empty social-justice activism. Sara...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Have you ever known someone who came back from the dead? (Aside from JC and Manti Te'o's girlfriend.) Well, you do now: Susan Meachan was a prolific writer of self-published romance novels when, following reports of online bullying, her suicide was reported in 2020. Alas, Meachen apparently found being dead a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com 2023 is off to a roaring start, as the Twitter vultures rip apart the carcass of podcaster Lex Fridman’s reading list of the classics. ( On the Road ? Biiig mistake.) We discuss the passing of TV pioneer Barbara Walters, whose gently probing style allowed her to act as a kind of collective consciousness. She...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com It’s our year-end wrap-up, and a flirtatious/contentious one! Nancy and Sarah spar over “Glass Onion,” the latest “Knives Out” mystery, before running down the most memorable moments of the past year (and 49 episodes!), from Will Smith’s slap to Teal Swan’s manipulation. We chat celebrity, cults, and spiritua...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Meghan Daum is an acclaimed essayist who hosts two podcasts, the interview show “The Unspeakable” and the current topics-based “A Special Place in Hell” with Sarah Haider. Meghan is an inspiration to many, including Sarah. While Nancy bakes pie in some upstate New York location, Sarah engages in a far-ranging...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com The Los Angeles trial of Harvey Weinstein ended with jurors proclaiming the disgraced movie mogul alternately guilty, not guilty, and [shrug emoji]. Nancy and Sarah plumb deeper on the trial, centered on the allegations of four Jane Does (including one spouse of a California governor). The two-month trial gai...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Twitter seemed so simple at first. Both of us joined in 2009, and Nancy loved the economy of form, though Sarah was confused by the purpose and character count. She wound up live-tweeting things like, “Her hat is weird.” Thirteen years later, Twitter is the white-hot center of a cultural debate over politics,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy and Sarah watched the Harry and Meghan series on Netflix so you don’t have to. Actually, they never finished it, but that doesn’t stop them from having opinions. “I’d rather watch an hour-long ad for Purina cat food,” Nancy declares, while Sarah is still processing how the Prince was first drawn to Megh...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com The New York Times stages a (one-day!) strike, and Nancy and Sarah debate unions, or what Sarah sees as a “20th-century infrastructure being dragged to 21st-century.” We also talk the Twitter Files, in which Elon Musk releases thousands of internal Twitter documents to two independent journalists, and legacy...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Performer Irene Cara died this week, but what was she doing before that? How did a major ‘80s talent just … disappear? We answer that question and discuss the cultural impact of the 1980 musical Fame , which is like a blueprint for our American Idol -inspired, TikTok-addled moment. The Alan Parker movie may b...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy and Sarah talk Thanksgiving turkeys — both the actual food, and the items we could do without . After killing off some sacred cows (Nancy’s looking at you, Brussel sprouts), we delve into She Said , the movie about the New York Times investigation that helped bring down Harvey Weinstein and launch #MeTo...

We weren’t thrilled by the idea of covering Candace Owens’ new documentary on George Floyd. Sarah was so nervous to log onto Daily Wire, you’d think she was downloading porn. Nancy scoffed at giving 90 minutes to a provocateur she detests. “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold” is flawed, but it also raises questions the media has largely ignored, introducing us to Floyd’s two roommates, who carried the fin...

Why is Nancy in Tel Aviv? Was it Nick Gillespie or the ghost of Michael Moynihan who gave Sarah COVID? We dive into the mid-terms, or “the normie elections,” as one person on Twitter called them. Not a red wave, but a repudiation of political extremism, a reminder that MAGA is a losing hand, that abortion matters, and that election polling doesn’t work. It’s possible the only thing this country ca...

It’s hard to overstate the impact of the Shitty Media Men List on the media landscape back in October 2017. If you’ve never heard of it, good for you (not said sarcastically). If you have, you know it was a Google spreadsheet where 70 women, who remained anonymous, input names of media colleagues and acquaintances along with their alleged misbehavior, from creepy DMs to rape. This was a week after...

Hey Smokers! Zoom hang #1, Wednesday, October 19, at 9pm ET. Paid subscribers get a link emailed day-of. Not yet a subscriber? Let’s fix that! Nancy and Sarah have fallen hard for documentary filmmaker Meg Smaker after her recent appearance on Sam Harris’ podcast . Smaker’s film, originally titled Jihad Rehab (now called The UnRedacted), was canceled before it was ever released, having met a perfe...

Sarah finally caved and watched Ryan Murphy’s Jeffrey Dahmer series, the second most-popular show in Netflix history. (Can you guess the first?). It was difficult viewing, if also able to inspire a kind of love for one of Dahmer’s victims. As she and Nancy discuss, the reasons to watch/not watch these shows are complicated. Is it possible to humanize victims who met a most inhumane end? Who gets t...

We talk men: They’re falling behind in school, crunched (or checked out) in the labor market, confused about their purpose. Not all men (of course, of course). But signs point toward what we in the media are calling “a masculinity crisis,” a landscape explored in two new books, Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men and Nicholas Eberstadt’s post-pandemic update of Men Without Work . How did the pandemic...

The NC-17 Blonde has hit Netflix, and boy, are people fired up (“necrophiliac entertainment” wrote Manohla Dargis at NYT ). At nearly three hours, the fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe’s life is tough to watch — unrelentingly bleak, a bit disjointed, with a camera that can be as vulturous as the vultures it critiques — but damn if that movie didn’t haunt us both, and Ana de Armas gives an in...

Sarah interrupts Madame Nancy in the middle of a seance, but hey, no better time for a podcast. After a brief discussion of their top five liquids (inspired by a recent interview with Malcolm Gladwell), they turn toward a 4000-word New York Times story about how Russian trolls might have influenced the implosion of the Women’s March. Nancy thinks the story whitewashes the leaders’ excesses and pre...

Nancy Rommelmann was fortunate, through accident and the fog of war, to stay with Oksana Hutnyk and her family in Lviv, Ukraine this past March, two weeks after Russian forces invaded the country. Now, in mid-September, Oksana and her daughters, ages 13 and 7, have received special permission to leave Ukraine and visit America. First stop: Nancy's cramped apartment in NYC, where Oksana has a chanc...

Nancy’s reporting from Portland, where tragedy struck after a man accused of domestic abuse was bailed out by an activist organization. Sarah’s reporting from her couch, where the Emmys forced her to sit through a women-pooping commercial not once but three times. They discuss the glory of Sheryl Lee Ralph bursting into song and how Jimmy Kimmel’s gag went wrong. Is “White Lotus” worth watching? D...

It was hard to be a person on the Internet last week without getting sucked into the sordid drama of Don’t Worry Darling , whose premiere at the Venice Film Festival brought a carpet-bombing of memes and gossip and online buffoonery that proved just how badly we all needed a collective experience. The psychological thriller, directed by Olivia Wilde, got middling reviews but captivated the masses...

Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing reminds Sarah of one of the strangest assignments of her career: Interviewing the man who presided over the end of the Cold War … about his luggage. Meanwhile, Nancy is apoplectic about an uptick in Portland violence, including a tragic and preventable murder over the weekend. But the crux of this week’s episode is “Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist,” a two-hour N...