Time To Say Goodbye

Hello! Today’s episode is an interview with Carrie Sun, whose memoir PRIVATE EQUITY came out yesterday. (Buy it here !) The book is a memoir about the time Carrie spent working as the right hand for one of the country’s most famous billionaire hedge fund managers. We talk about the allure of finance and Wall Street, Ishiguro and restraint in writing, the ways in which political awakenings can some...

Hello! Today, we talk about the Apple Vision Pro and its grim vision for how you should be spending your time. Also, we talk a lot about Jaron Lanier’s most recent essay about the Virtual Reality in the New Yorker , specifically the question he poses about how technology should fit into our lives and whether tech can just create things because they’re cool without affixing their products to some g...

Hello! This week we have on Musa Al-Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. We talk a lot about “kids these days” and the tendency for all sorts of reactionaries to blame them for everything that’s wrong with this country. Don’t like illiberal attitudes on campuses? Blame the kids. Do you think free expression is at risk? Blame the kids. Feel like democracy is on the brink of c...

Hello! This week, we talk about the big Polyamory article in New York Magazine and the proposition that breaking the bonds of monogamy might be a political statement, one that frees both sides from the constraints of marriage. Are we just reinventing ways to justify selfish behavior? And why does every personal decision in the lives of upper middle class, well-educated people need to turn into som...

Hello! In today’s episode, we talk about Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower,” a science fiction novel from 1992 that unexpectedly found itself on the best seller’s list in 2020. The novel imagines a violent and grim future in which the world has warmed beyond safe inhabitation, the lucky get to live in walled off communities while the poor all kill one another in the streets. We talk about...

Hello! I’m very excited to announce that Tyler Austin Harper will be our co-host for the next month or so. Tyler was on the show last month and introduced himself then, but for those who missed it, he’s a writer at the Atlantic and a professor of literature in the environmental studies department at Bates College. He specializes in extinction literature and film. For the next month or so, Tyler an...

Hello! Today we have a great interview with Nithya Raman, the City Councilmember for Los Angeles’s District 4. We talk about housing, the despair around the homelessness problem in California’s biggest cities, and whether there might be a different future for the city’s political machine. My interest in Councilmember Raman started back when I was writing the newsletter for the Times because there...

Hello! In our Discord server, which you can access by subscribing to the show for a measly $5 a month, a user asked me to not do shows about sports. I took this request seriously as I generally aim to please, but am sad to announce that after much deliberation, I do think it’s worth having a conversation about a very distinct phenomenon I’ve observed over the past few years. As recently as 2020, i...

Hello! Today on the show, we have Tyler Austin Harper, a literary scholar and an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College. We talk about the history of extinction literature, the books that tech moguls read and the vision it inspires, the dangers of science fiction and all that’s happening in the Ivy Leagues right now. 0:00 - Jay talks about the new direction of the show, whic...

Hello from the “White Projects”!  For Tammy’s final ep as co-host, we answer questions from our beloved subscribers. Thank you for asking us to ponder:  * Vice, Jezebel, and the loss of irreverent digital media * What makes podcasting so terrifying (and freeing)  * Biden vs. Trump in early polls + in Tammy’s reporting on young voters  * Our worst takes from 3.5 years of blabbering  * Whether TTSG...

For Tammy’s last TTSG book club as pod host (!), we welcome Jillian Tamaki, award-winning author and a key member of our early-COVID Discord crew. Jillian’s new graphic novel, Roaming , published with her cousin and co-author, Mariko Tamaki, follows three Canadian college freshmen on a spring break trip to New York. We hear about Jillian’s use of vernacular tourist archives like Flickr and YouTube...

Hello from Philly!  This week, Andy joins us for one of Tammy’s last eps as a host of TTSG. 🥲 After catching up on dog COVID , [6:10] we discuss how China’s historical self-identification as a vanguard of the Third World has given way, through decades of technological and economic growth, to a more general anti-West position . [29:00] We also reflect on the various pockets of U.S. public opinion...

Hello!  This week, Jay talks to a student organizer for Columbia University Apartheid Divest , a coalition of seventy five student organizations who have been organizing and putting on protests on campus. Last week, the administration of Columbia University suspended two of the student groups – Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace .  The organizer and Jay talk about why Co...

This week, we’re joined by our friend Jamie Lauren Keiles , a former contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine who is working on a book about nonbinary identity in America and posting at the archival Instagram account @sexchange.tbt . [4:45] Jamie discusses his resignation from the Times Magazine , and why he signed the recent open letter by WAWOG (the Writers Against the War on Gaza) as...

This week, we are joined by Tania Hary, the executive director of Gisha (“access”), an Israeli legal organization that fights for the freedom of movement of Palestinians. [2:25] We discuss the restrictive status quo that was in place long before October 7, in which Israel controlled travel in and out of the occupied territories, the flow of goods and food into Gaza, and the Census-like registry of...

Hello!  This week, New York Times Magazine contributing writer and repeat guest Rozina Ali talks with us about media coverage of the war in Israel and Gaza as well as the challenges faced by journalists, more than twenty of whom have been killed in the region over the past two weeks. We also discuss whether there has been a chilling of speech in the West, the history of suppressed expression when...

This week, we’re joined by Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 Magazine and a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaka . Since Hamas’s brutal attack and Israel’s declaration of war , thousands of people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel have been killed. More than a million people have been ordered to leave the northern Gaza Strip; more than two million Gazans are being denied food, water, el...

Hello from yet another devastating news week!  [0:30] We begin by addressing Hamas’s recent attack on Israel , to which Netanyahu responded with a declaration of war . (We’ll have an area expert on the show next week to talk about all this at greater length.) [12:10] In the second half of the episode, we discuss the new U.S. Senator from California, Laphonza Butler, and how her appointment by Gavi...

Hello from the Condé cafeteria!  This week, our guest is Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a writer and editor and the former executive editor at Teen Vogue . [5:30] Samhita’s personal essay in The Cut explores how being prescribed the new weight-loss drug Mounjaro, not long after her father died of complications from diabetes, challenged her thinking around health and body image. [36:00] We also discuss the...

Hello from the negotiating table!  This week, it’s just us, talking more hot labor summer and a bit about poetry (Tammy recommends the work of Mai Der Vang !). [9:00] After 146 days on strike, the Writers Guild of America, which represents about 11,000 screenwriters, announced on Sunday that they’d reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP studio group. (Forgive the timing of this ep: the WGA r...

Hello from karaoke!  This week, we bring you more Olivia Rodrigo content –with Karen Tongson, USC professor, podcast co-host , and lover of all singable musics! [28:50] Jay and Tammy* go deep with Karen on her childhood with musician parents, AzNs in California’s Inland Empire, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), transpacific music circuits, and why it’s racist to pile on a twenty-year-old Pinay pop...

Hello from British Columbia!  This week, [4:15] we start with the latest concerning video of Mitch McConnell and whether the conversation around fitness for office can (and should) cut across party lines. [21:45] Next, we talk about the Korean fine-dining wave in NYC , the effect of soft power, and why you won’t see us at Naro anytime soon. [45:05] In our final segment, we discuss the Serial podca...

Hello from three far-flung cities!  This week, we’re joined by our pal Vinson Cunningham, staff writer and theatre critic for The New Yorker .  After briefly interrogating Jay’s recent pivot to dad-hiker fashion (pic for subscribers only), we hear Vinson’s take on the Trump mugshot . [4:05] The image gets us talking about aesthetic self-perception, the celebrity accused in popular culture, and the...

Hello from a Cessna!  This week, it’s just us, on a grab-bag anthropological journey. [2:55] First, Jay unpacks his recent trip to Martha’s Vineyard and what he learned about the academic elite on a panel about affirmative action . [23:35] Next, we discuss Season 4 of “Love After Divorce” , in which Korean-American divorcees shack up and speak subpar Korean. [42:30] Then we catch up on the sad sag...

Hello again from the ongoing climate crisis!  Kaniela Ing is a Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) organizer and former state legislator who now works as the national director of the Green New Deal Network . Kaniela joins us just days after a fire ripped through the island of Maui , decimating the town of Lāhainā and killing a yet unknown number of people. (10:40) Kaniela tells us about his relationshi...