Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Greetings from Nancy’s 31st hotel room! Our roving reporter is on the scene in Asheville, North Carolina, where she gives Sarah the scoop on hurricane damage, what the politicized coverage has gotten wrong, and why it’s good to live near churches when catastrophe strikes. The two of them talk Ted Cruz vs. Col...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com “The path to success may not always be easy, but with determination and courage, you can achieve your dreams.” So writes Melania Trump (or ChatGPT?) on page 34 of the memoir released yesterday by the former first lady. And we have questions! Such as, did any of the Big Five publishers bid on the book? Who wro...

“[The Russians] always claim to free us and to help us. They free us from our houses, schools, hospitals, from our families, from everything. They want to make us completely free, and maybe even from our bodies.” - Oksana Hutnyk Nancy here. It is the 29th of September, 2024, and I'm going to take us back a few years to, February 24th, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine and started a war that is...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com To talk or not to talk about this week’s red meat media story? Well, we’re talking. Are we surprised at the appetite that some in media take in shredding one of their own in public? Of course not; it’s the same old boring mob behavior. But what’s really behind it? Professional jealousy? The moronic idea that...

Nancy here. One of the super-cool things about being a journalist is that you can contact people whose work amazes you and say, “Come on my podcast!” and they almost always say, “Sure!” As did Michael Powell, one of my favorite journalists working today, currently at The Atlantic and previously at The New York Times , where, during the height of our national meltdown (aka 2020 to 2022), Michael to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com “It’s a Tuesday night in downtown Austin, and Joe Rogan is pretending to jerk off right in front of my face. The strangest thing about this situation is that millions of straight American men would kill to switch places with me.” With that on-fire of a lede, Helen Lewis explores the appeal of the world’s top...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy and Sarah talk about a recent story in The Cut , “Was Casual Sex Always This Bad?” (Answer: Probably.) They discuss how subjective the phrase “good sex” is, but for both of them, the playfulness and abandon that makes sex one of life’s great pleasures almost never comes after picking up a stranger at th...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy talks about the protests outside Democratic National Convention, where the expected hordes did NOT show. After ten-plus years of fashionable dissent, have we moved beyond the activism moment? We discuss the limits and rewards of protest: big on catharsis, light on real change. Also on the docket: * Sara...

This week Nancy and Sarah riff on a fascinating essay in UnHerd by David Samuels, “ The March of Kamala’s Brides: Miserable young women are the Democrats' foot-soldiers .” The story lays out damning statistics on happiness and liberal women. They’re childless, unmarried, on anti-depressants: Hey, Sarah ticks all the boxes! Nancy and Sarah try to diagnose how we got here. Their discussion covers vi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy and Sarah tackle the week’s most controversial Olympics bout, when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif defeated Italian boxer Angela Carini in a 46-second fight. JK Rowling howled! JK Rowling-haters roared back at her! Has anyone ever cared this much about women’s boxing? This actually isn’t a story about trans...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Ann Bauer is a top-notch personal essay writer, who built a reputation for eloquence and honesty at Salon.com, back in the aughts when the site was still a cultural force. (Sarah was lucky enough to work with Ann back then.) More recently, Ann has become a spitfire on Twitter , where she’s sounded off on COVI...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Nancy and Sarah are back after a brief summer hiatus to talk about: white women for Kamala, “brat” and its aftermath, why Gen Z has so many slang terms for oral sex (or is that just our intern?), and how JD Vance radicalized childless cat ladies and prompted Twitter to make jokes about sex with a couch. Ameri...

Nancy is in the woods, Sarah is in bed, where she does her best work, when they chat over the phone about the epic spectacle that was this week’s Republican National Convention and the hot mess that is Democratic politics. “God is among us,” Tucker Carlson told the crowd, and the thing is: Nobody can fact-check God. Is it true? Is it false? No one can say. We’re in the realm of belief, and in the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Biden on the ropes! What’s the over-under on his time in the race? Who might replace him? Sarah and Nancy discuss the political theater of a broken system. What’s the solution? Here’s Nancy: “Let it fucking break, man.” Then, Alice Munro’s daughter reveals family secrets that cast her mother and her writing i...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com The hustle, the friendliness, the informality, the unshakeable faith that we can be anything we want to be — all while drinking Diet Coke and huffing donuts. Fuck yeah, America! In honor of July 4, Nancy and Sarah celebrate our country’s bounty in the long shadow of all that is wrong. (For example: Presidenti...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com The first Trump-Biden debate is hours away, and pundits are predicting along punditry lines (Trump gonna Trump! Biden’s booster-packet will conk out midway!), including the only person to have debated both Trump and Biden opening a “What I’m watching for…” piece by telling us about the new Broadway play she’s...

Nancy and Sarah are one-on-one today for a roving conversation that covers: Nancy’s Portland story in a Nicholas Kristof NYT column about West Coast liberalism, a violation of privacy in the latest Free Beacon scoop, and revisiting the Gen X fever that was The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire . Also discussed: * Civics Bee! * In defense of plastic straws … * Purple states = the place to be * Kee...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com “Boys in crisis.” People write books about it. Melinda Gates just pledged $20 million to study it. Pundits make their bones rolling the phrase around in their mouths. But a crisis according to whom? Who profits when the American Psychological Society claims “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competi...

by Nancy Rommelmann I’d like to introduce you to my mother. Not the woman I am sitting one foot away from in a Connecticut hospital bed, the skin on her hands as fragile as phyllo dough, the veins showing livid purple and the blue-green of old tattoos. Though it is true, her hands have always been this way. “You have such beautiful big veins,” I recall six-year-old Karen telling my mother. Maybe i...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Our guest Kat Rosenfield is one of the best cultural critics of our day: Funny, incisive, fast-moving, and a great novelist to boot (see You Must Remember This ). She’s a third-timer on this pod, which might be a record, and she’s just landed a plum gig as a columnist for the Free Press. You may know Kat from...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Olivia Nuzzi is the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine, and a total fox, not that it’s AT ALL relevant to the work she does, which is top-tier. She began her career as a teenager at an alt-weekly in New Jersey and worked on the Anthony Weiner campaign (oh boy), and a story she wrote about that exp...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com Everyone knows gun violence is a problem, but whose problem, exactly? Big cities or rural areas? Republicans or Democrats? Most people respond to these questions with emotion, best guesses, knee-jerk anger, but our guest Magic Wade responds with data. A professor in Illinois, Wade started the profound 1000 Ci...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com People are mad, version five million: A recent anti-celibacy ad on Bumble sparks outrage, a Catholic commencement speaker touting Catholic values sparks outrage, a rap mogul caught enacting violence that rap moguls are only supposed to rap about (not actually do ) — well, you see the pattern. Nancy and Sarah...

Ken Ilgunas may be the coolest writer you haven’t heard of yet. Sarah worked with him at Salon , where he wrote personal essays about: living in a van while attending Duke University; camping in the rain at Occupy Wall Street; and hiking the XL Pipeline. He’s since written memoirs about discovering the natural world and himself, including Walden on Wheels . He’s lived in Alaska and now lives in Sc...

You may not recognize Andy Mills’ name, but you likely know his work: He co-created The Daily podcast for The New York Times , where he also produced Rabbit Hole , a fantastic series on the internet, and – quite fatefully! – the war on terror podcast, Caliphate . Shit happened. It was complicated. Andy is no longer at The New York Times .  But he’s struck out on his own. Last year he gave us The W...