Time To Say Goodbye

Hello! Today, we talk about the rural vote and the positioning of Tim Walz as the rural whisperer. Will it work? Is there such a thing as a “rural identity” that might look at Walz and gravitate towards him? What’s the thinking behind all that? To help us through it, we talked to Paolo Cremidis, the organizer of the recent Rural Americans for Harris Zoom call and the executive director of the Outr...

Hello! This week we’re extremely excited to have on Astra Taylor, a filmmaker, author, and organizer with the Debt Collective . We talk about Walz, whether VP picks matter, good vibes and joy for once, and also what the hell was RFK Jr. thinking when he dumped that dead bear cub in Central Park. Astra also talks to us about the book she co-authored with Leah Hunt-Hendrix titled “ SOLIDARITY: THE P...

Hello! We brought back repeat guest and esteemed journalist Bradford William Davis to talk about White Dudes for Harris, “weird,” and Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference this week in Chicago. Also discussed: good cringe, Cocomentum, and whether the left should just kinda let the liberals and the identity politicians cook. Please enjoy! This is a public episode....

HELLO! Today we talk about the Kamala campaign, who she should pick as VP, speculate on where Joe Biden might be, and offer a spirited defense of AOC doing politics. Gets a bit unhinged in the middle tbh but we at least had a good time with this one. If you’d like to see Trump play the theme song, click here (Substack won’t let us embed tweets bc Elon did it first, I guess. https://x.com/Graduated...

Hello! Today, we talk about what exactly is going to happen to the country just a few days after the assassination attempt of Donald Trump and whether this will go down as a turning point in the country’s history or if it might just be quickly forgotten as everyone goes deep into RNC and JD Vance talk. Jay shares his very stupid thoughts on whether Donald Trump might have seen God after a near-dea...

Hello! This week, we are back from vacation and catching up on the only story in America, which is the mental fitness of the President. Jay is on Team “The Democrats are probably too incompetent and divided to actually run a difference candidate in time and so it might actually make sense for them to just get behind Biden and hope everything breaks correctly and they draw to flush against Trump’s...

Hello! Today, we are extremely excited to have on John Ganz, author of the new book When the Clock Broke , a retelling of the 1990s that touches on politics, music, television, and the history of right wing cranks who ultimately would become a prelude for Trumpism. There’s a ton that we discuss: The LA riots, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, Sister Souljah, and much more. If you’re interested in how...

Hello! Today we’re doing a Pardon The Interruption-styled show in which we go down a list of topics. We’re experimenting a bit with format these days and so please let us know if this more rapid fire version works for you! Today’s topics: Hobby Horsing as a sport? Dimension Apple from a great post from the Read Max Substack . Tiger parenting in 2024. Are you a crazy sports parent or a math/violin...

Hello! Today, we have a great conversation with Andrew Boryga, the author of VICTIM , a truly subversive and funny novel about a young writer who hustles his way through the media world by just giving it what it wants from him: oppression stories, identity trauma tales, and a lot of embellishment. We also talk about Caitlin Clark (Jay tries to do a sports talk segment) and the great novel JAMES by...

Hello! Today’s show is a talk about an exciting new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman titled “ What are Children For ?” (Release date: June 11) We talked about “slow love,” the common complaint from millennials that they do not have enough financial stability to start families, the ambivalent mother narrative, and something right in Tyler’s wheelhouse: eco apocalypse fiction. Why is the Un...

Hello! Today, we talk about Biden’s speech at Morehouse College which should be seen as a preview for his message to Black voters amidst polling results that show he has lost a significant percentage of both the Black and Latino vote. We also talk about the passing of Bill Walton, activism in the NBA and sports, in general, and what we should think about the social justice basketball moment from 2...

Hello! This week, we have on David Austin Walsh, author of “ Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right ,” a new book that tracks the development and coddling of far right political figures and their co-dependent relationship with mainstream Republicans. Lotta good history here and David asks Kang whether he thinks “Rich Men North of Richmond” is still good. This is a lively...

Hello! This week we talk about something we meant to discuss last week — Macklemore’s new song “ Hind’s Hall ,” and politics in music and literature. There’s some Immortal Technique, the Coup, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young thrown in there too. We also talk about the pretty bad polls that came out for the Biden campaign, which showed him losing in some weird ways in battleground states and to...

Hello! This week we are happy to present one of our most requested guests, Vincent Bevins. He is a longtime foreign correspondent and the author of two books, The Jakarta Method and If We Burn . We talked about the lessons of the mass protests of the 2010s around the world, the allure and some of the downsides to leaderless/horizontal protest movements, and about how the media has covered the camp...

Hello! This week we revived a TTSG tradition of answering your questions on the air. Topics covered range from why Tyler puts on a wetsuit and swims out to rocks to fish for striped bass, the rise in extreme sports, why standardized tests are actually good, the state of the student protests going forward and our worries about state repression, and Jerry Seinfeld complaining that all sitcoms are to...

Hello! Today, we talk about everything that’s happening on campus from Columbia to NYU to Berkeley. Tyler talks about the responsibilities of faculty in these moments and what he thinks is driving a surprisingly strong faculty response to the arrests in New York City. We also talk about how to process the instances of antisemitism at these protests and Jay talks about some of the difficulties that...

Hello, Today’s episode is our conversation with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who traveled to European Hospital in Gaza in late March. He talks to us about what he saw there and the massive humanitarian toll, particularly on children. We talked about the conditions at the hospital and the role of the doctor as truth teller in a conflict that is being obscured from view. Dr. Sidhwa and his co...

Hello! Today, we have a packed show with our guest Danny Bessner of the American Prestige podcast. Danny argued the other side of the fascism debate and expressed why he and others believe the word is not appropriate to describe what’s happened to the American right. And Danny stuck around while we discussed Tyler’s debunking of the book “White Rural Rage” and why the type of liberal elite discour...

Hello! Today’s guest is the John Ganz, author of the Unpopular Front substack and the upcoming book “ When The Clock Broke .” We talk about the now years-long debate about whether what’s happening among the right wing in American should be called “fascism” and how such definitions should and should not be used in a political manner. We also talk about normie/resistance liberals and the concept of...

Hello! Tyler is back for today’s episode in which we talk about open container laws in New Jersey, the discourse about the discourse on Kate Middleton and the Royals, and some thoughts on how to get children off their phones and the Internet, more broadly. Jay reveals that his takes are aging at a more rapid rate than he is and Tyler proves his Marxist bonafides by suggesting the most radical plan...

Hello! Today a very special March Madness episode with New York Times and CNN contributor Jane Coaston. We talk about the recent ascent of women’s basketball, the gendered ways in which we always expect good, progressive behavior from women’s coaches and athletes, Caitlin Clark-as-Larry Bird and Caitlin Clark-as-baller, and a bit about NIL and the transfer portal. I’ve wanted to have Jane on the p...

Hello! Today’s episode is a talk with Vinson Cunningham about his new novel GREAT EXPECTATIONS which came out yesterday and is in bookstores everywhere. It’s everything you would expect from Vinson: beautiful sentences, long meditations on hoops, the church, and love, and a engrossing storyline that follows a young man who goes to work on the campaign of a certain senator from Illinois during his...

Hello! Today, we talk to two people who have been thinking about reporting about AI for quite a long time: Repeat guest Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley and Karen Hao, a journalist who has written an excellent series of pieces for the Atlantic. We talk to Ben about SORA, OpenAI’s video generator that only exists in trailer form so far and what might...

Hello! On today’s episode, we talk about Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty Air Force twenty-five year old who self-immolated in Washington, D.C., the history of the act and how it has been seen in different eras and different contexts. We compare, for example, how Barack Obama talked about the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor who is credited with sparking the Arab Spring...

Hello! Today, we talked about a topic that we’ve been circling around for a while — the minority vote. We now have months of polls all pointing towards the same trends in terms of Black, Latino and Asian voters all moving towards the right for a variety of reasons, most of which are left unexamined by many in the mainstream presses. That, of course, doesn’t mean that we don’t hear about the “Black...