Time To Say Goodbye

Hello from a USPS mailbag! This week, before getting into your letters, we reminisce about Saturday’s election news a.k.a the international dopamine-flood event. We “wow just wow” at the Democratic establishment’s (ridiculous and ridiculously premature) punch left, and swoon over AOC’s punch back in an interview with the New York Times . We also dissect a viral video of Tucker Carlson explaining w...

Hello from Philly, Berkeley, and Missoula! In this #2020 special, we share our jaundiced views of the U! S! A! and the election as of Wednesday night, 24 hours after polls closed.  Discussed: * Tuesday night’s emotional roller-coaster * Post-vote explanations based on racial and ethnic checkboxes * “ Jay Kang, (G.O.P.) political consultant ” * Propositions 22 and 16 in California * Tammy’s feel-go...

Hello from Tammy’s snowbank! This week, we welcome TTSG friend Hua Hsu , a professor at Vassar and a staff writer at The New Yorker , who just wrote an excellent pre-election story: “Are Asian Americans the Last Undecided Voters?” The piece digs into stuff we’ve been obsessing about, on and off the air, including the fuzziness of the Asian American label, the rise of East Asian Republicans, organi...

Bonus pre-election episode! Two weeks ahead of the last judgment, Andy talks with two organizers about the “existential battle” over the soul of the Democratic Party. Brooke Adams , a second-generation Taiwanese Seattleite, worked for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign in Iowa, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania before joining People’s Action this summer. Tobita Chow , a Chinese-Japanese-Canadian-Amer...

Welcome to the Terrordome! This week, we have a brilliant guest, TTSG pal and Korean literature scholar Jenny Wang Medina , who grew up in her family’s beauty-supply store, to guide us through a mini-PhD on Korean hair, the Black hair market, and Cold War commodity history. Then, a brief look at the ongoing democratic uprising in Thailand. 0:00 – HAIR! * The New York Times’s coverage of the Na fam...

A bonus deep-dive episode into the culture and politics of Big Tech and Silicon Valley! Today Andy chats with the writer Wendy Liu (no relation) about her recent book, Abolish Silicon Valley . A programmer, former Google intern, and startup founder, Wendy has written on a host of political-economic questions swirling around Silicon Valley today: how to organize contract workers in Silicon Valley ;...

Hello from the National Speech & Debate Tournament! This week, we unpack the idea of court packing, look for common cause with working-class whites, and ask what’s up with the Taiwanese military.  0:00 – Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation proceedings began Monday. Will the questioning be more Acoustic Lindsey Graham or Lindsey Graham Unplugged? Inspired by a recent episode of the Dig podcast (Hi, Da...

Happy belated Mid-Autumn Festival!  We pried Andy away from doomscrolling 45 to bring you this late-night episode of semi-coherent thoughts on the American regime, post-wet market theories of Covid-19, and listener queries on class. 0:00 –  What is, even, anything? The big, maskless T has Covid, as does everyone around him. We talk conspiracies and sad, middling fantasies of functioning government...

Hello from Andy’s Zoom lecture! This week: the class politics of the Netflix K-drama “Itaewon Class” (이태원 클라쓰), success and failure in leftist utopias, and “slouchy Asian” fashion. 0:00 – Happy Birthday, Mama Kang! Plus: Tammy introduces Andy and Jay to Eileen Fisher. 6:10 – Jay binge-watches (the notably progressive!) “Itaewon Class,” which Tammy inhaled long ago; Andy makes plans to catch...

Hello from the TTSG drop-out commune! This week, a longer-than-we-intended show about the TikTok saga, Chinese/US hegemony, and nationalist traps. We also respond to a few of your brilliant emails and DMs. 0:00 – Jay explains his obsession with the history of Jonestown, and we toss around a few theories of left (and right) millenarianisms. 5:30 – After all Trump’s blather about security, TikTok, U...

Whither memory: Guantanamo W. Bush paints over his legacy. Hello from the future! Inspired (triggered?) by last week’s commemorations of 9/11, we get a bit contemplative. How will future generations remember (or suppress) the events of the Trump era, especially the mass death of Covid-19? We discuss state-sanctioned memory in the US and China, how Trump has effectively rehabilitated George W. Bush...

Greetings from Jay’s 95-degree basement! This week, we start, inevitably, with our takes on Jessica Krug, the historian caught assuming a series of brown and Black identities. We then respond to a provocation by Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels : that talk of racial disparities distracts from the universal thievery of neoliberal capitalism. Finally, we dig into the live-action remake of Mulan...

Greetings from our virtual union hall!  This week, we talk protest and death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, and consider what to make of the longstanding, but local, street confrontations between the far right and “Antifa.” We then turn to the recent NBA players’ boycott(?) / strike(?) / demonstration(?): What does it mean, in labor terms? Why do we get so excited about bajillionaire...

Hi everyone: Today we’re presenting a conversation between myself (Andy) and my college friend Merlin Chowkwanyun , assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.  For years I’ve peppered Merlin with questions about how to understand the never-ending debate over “race versus class” in the US -- for instance, this New York Times piece from two...

Hello from behind the Great Firewall! As summer winds down and election season begins to heat up, we reflect on the political prospects of Asian America and the mess that is the Democratic Party. We discuss AOC’s speech at the DNC last week as evidence that the party has lost the thread. We then examine Trump’s WeChat ban and the many uses of this Chinese super app. This leads to a concluding conv...

Hello! We’re very excited to have Pulitzer Prize winner and Macarthur Genius Grant recipient Viet Thanh Nguyen on the show. There was a lot to discuss and a lengthy conversation that I (Jay) found absolutely fascinating about the role of academia, especially during a time of national protests. A lot of history in this one as well — if you didn’t know about AAPA and Third World Liberation Front, th...

In a late-Sunday-night mega-recording session, we discuss the big news of the past week: Kamala Harris, the first major vice presidential candidate who’s Black, Asian American, and a woman. Commentators have tried to pick apart her identity from countless angles: Is she Black enough ? Indian enough ? Caribbean enough ? An Asian-immigrant icon? In other words, the kind of juicy s**t you KNOW your p...

In this episode, Tammy gabs with her old friend Radhika Natarajan, a professor of history at Reed College and low-key brilliant TV critic. Radhika talks about her childhood in Ohio, her parents’ emigration from Tamil Nadu (relevant spoiler: an arranged Brahmin marriage), and her scholarly work on post-colonial migration, citizenship, and multiculturalism in Britain. (Bonus: BAME = POC/BIPOC?) She...

Hello from the ledge of cancellation!  We have some heady stuff for you this week—on school segregation, the perennial struggle between historians and journalists, and religiosity in Asian America.  0:40 – After a quick update on Tammy’s new life of canoeing in Missoula, Jay describes his roundtrip between Berkeley and Whidbey Island, when he listened to the newest, most Upper West Side podcast ev...

Hello from three time zones!  This week, we mull the Covid-era classroom (fears of contagion and falling behind), the meaning of Trump’s attack on TikTok, Nike-brand kneeling (and not kneeling) in the NBA bubble, and universalism and particularism in the Black Lives Matter uprising. 1:40 – Will Tammy find an Oriental market in Missoula? How does Andy plan to teach through his screen? What will be...

你好 from cyberspace!  This week, Jay scuba dived the depths of Asian American TikTok to engage Andy and Tammy in a critique of gendered home-cooking videos . How far have we really come? We then get a bit more serious, with a discussion of the continuing Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Portland and lessons in coalition-building from the 1970s Combahee River Collective .  4:10 – TikTok Coo...

Hello from 1997!  This week, we start by crate-digging our souls, with a discussion of Lilith Fair-era feminist (and feminine?) music. We then ponder the ongoing Black Lives Matter rebellion in Portland , an op-ed on “white fragility” and its race-baiting subconscious by the country’s most lucid Catholic conservative, and what it means to be (or cosplay being) “transnationally Asian .” 2:22 – Jay...

Credit: Carolyn Drake Hello from the greater Sea-Tac area! Andy and Tammy here with a bonus episode, interviewing Darren Byler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado and an expert on the Uyghur people, a Muslim community in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China.  Darren’s years of anthropological research in Xinjiang will be published in a forthcoming book titl...

Hello from our galaxy brain!     This week, we begin with a brief chat about (social) media “cancel culture,” based on an open letter recently published in Harper ’s . We then discuss a workplace controversy at the Boba Guys chain; the suicide of the mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, and what his death means in the context of South Korean feminism , per Tammy’s reporting; and a telling exchange about...

Greetings from our USB microphones!   In this episode, we discuss ICE’s recent rule prohibiting international students from staying in the U.S. if their colleges go fully online. We also dig into questions of cross-race solidarity in the Black Lives Matter movement, especially regarding Latinx/brown communities. Finally, we answer our first sampling of listener questions.  As always, thank you for...