Time To Say Goodbye

Hello from Montréal!  🥳 Reminder: Join us THIS SATURDAY, June 10th, in Brooklyn, for our subscriber picnic ! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for more details.  This week, we welcome back our friend Max Read—dad, Twitter lurker, hat seller, and creator of the incredible Read Max newsletter—for an anniversary chat. (12:30) We speculate about the next phase of A.I. ascendancy and (28:25) large lang...

Hello from Jay’s dried-out basement (finally)!  This week, writer Hua Hsu joins us for a record fourth appearance on the pod as part of our neverending anniversary celebration. In a wide-ranging chat, we touch on (7:08) how podcasting has influenced our interview styles, (16:55) the "Succession" series finale [SPOILER ALERT], and (27:30) Tammy’s accidental encounter with edibles. (38:22) We also l...

Hello from Mai’s COVID den!  It’s just Jay and Tammy this week. (3:25) First, we chat about a mini-generation of Asian women named after Connie Chung and the news anchor’s professional legacy. (22:18) Then, we discuss the public killings of Banko Brown in SF and Jordan Neely in NYC—and the disturbing turn against poor (particularly Black) people in our cities.  We ask:  Has America so devalued the...

Hello from the vault!  In the first of a series of episodes commemorating TTSG’s third anniversary, OG Andy Liu returns. 🎉 We look back at the first episode we ever released, on April 13, 2020 , and ask:  (9:30) Was Andy right to attribute both the spread of the coronavirus and the backlash against Asian Americans to China’s growing power?  (34:30) Has COVID diminished the concept of U.S. excepti...

Hello from the start of AANHPIXYZ Heritage Month! It’s just Jay and Tammy this week, going long on two of our favorite topics: U.S.-Korea relations and progressive media. [3:15] First, we address the carefully crafted viral moment from Korean President Yoon’s debut at the White House, and the sanitizing of human rights realities in Asia. [17:30] Next, we discuss the controversy over an article abo...

Hello from a cruise ship!  This week, we welcome book critic and Philly basketball devotee Jennifer Wilson back to the show. We discuss [1:00] the epidemic of belligerent airline passengers; [6:25] the surprising (and not so surprising) firings of Tucker Carlson from Fox News and Don Lemon from CNN; [15:10] Jen’s favorite 76er, James Harden, and his ejection for nut-punching; and [27:40] journalis...

Hello from a 90-degree day in New York! This week, we’re joined by Alex Han, executive director of In These Times and a longtime organizer based in Chicago. Alex previously worked for Bernie’s 2020 campaign and SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana. We get into the context behind the surprise mayoral win by former teacher and organizer Brandon Johnson, over “corporate reformer” Paul Vallas. We disc...

Hello from Jay’s COVID den! Mai would like you to know that she begged Jay to skip recording and rest after he tested positive for COVID , and did the same with Tammy a few weeks ago. They did not listen. Please don’t follow their bad example! This week, Tammy and Jay chat with repeat guest Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network and longtime organizer for immigrant rights. [1:45...

Hello from the Bay Area!  This week, it’s just Jay speaking with Malcolm Harris, the author of the recently published Palo Alto : A History of California, Capitalism, and the World . We talk about [5:40] why Malcolm wrote a 600-plus-page epic instead of a shorter, more personal book; [27:25] Palo Alto’s origin story, including Leland Stanford and immigrant labor on the railroads; and [43:20] what...

Hello from Jay’s flooded basement! (Apologies for our less-than-ideal audio.)  This week, our guest is Bryce Covert, a writer who covers the culture and work of child care (and its increasingly dire state) in the U.S. Bryce tells Jay and Tammy [14:50] what she’s been hearing from providers as pandemic-stimulus funding dwindles; [27:55] why care workers haven’t been able to win better pay, even in...

Hello from Tammy’s COVID bunker!  This week, after a short tribute to Montana’s “dean of journalism,” Chuck Johnson, R.I.P. , Tammy speaks with Kshama Sawant, the three-term socialist Seattle City Councilmember who recently announced that she will not seek reelection after this year. Instead, she has launched Workers Strike Back , “an independent, rank-and-file campaign” to support organizing nati...

Hello from Jay’s tradlife mancave!  It’s just us this week, dissecting all the ways our culture has gone too far. We begin with [0:20] a debrief of the most Asian (American?) Oscars ever. Then, updates [20:40] on feminism in South Korea and [40:38] the Stepford wives of TikTok .   In this episode, we ask:  Are Asians now over represented in Hollywood?!  What happens when electoral politics revolve...

Hello from a D.C. hotel!  This week, our guest is Ken Chen, writer, professor, and former director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW). We discuss [6:45] Ken’s recent piece for n+1, about photojournalist and activist Corky Lee and the deep histories of class, race, and violence woven into his work, centered in Manhattan’s Chinatown. [1:03:20] We also chat about writing, publishing, and...

Hello from our normal, boring lives!  Tammy returns from her reporting trip out West, and Jay is back at work after taking half his parental leave. It’s just us this week, talking through [3:20] the political disaster that has unfolded around the derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio. Plus, [28:25] a new Intercept interview with D.E.I. consultant Tema Okun, about her viral paper...

Hello from a sci-fi future! Tammy’s on a reporting trip this week, so it’s just Jay talking to our guest Ben Recht, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. We talk about the history of artificial intelligence, the new bots from Open AI (ChatGPT) and Microsoft (Bing A.I.), and share some of the reasons why they are both skeptical but also kinda impressed.  In this...

Hello from an ongoing ecological disaster!  Our guest this week is Nick Wurst, a freight-rail conductor and a member of the SMART-TD union, who joined Tammy and Jay after an overnight shift. Nick is also a socialist and a member-organizer with Railroad Workers United , a cross-union solidarity organization. He was featured in Tammy’s recent New Yorker piece about the state of union power in the U....

Hello from Juilliard!  This week, our friend Vinson Cunningham, award-winning critic at The New Yorker , joins Tammy and Jay to discuss 2022’s wokest(?) film, “Tár.” (Spoiler alert!)  [1:00] Before we get into it, we address Kyrie Irving’s request for a trade from the Brooklyn Nets… and what makes him so annoying. (We recorded before Irving’s move to the Dallas Mavericks was announced.) Plus: What...

Hello from our culture of violence!  This week, Tammy and Jay talk through some painful questions following the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers.  For more on the cases and reports mentioned in this episode, see:  * San Francisco’s attempt to expand police surveillance: Breed and New DA Jenkins Pushing Hard to Expand Police Access to Private Security Cameras All Over Town *...

Hello from Tammy’s dark apartment!  This week, Jay and Tammy are joined by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel , with Artie Vierkant, and co-author, also with Artie, of the new book Health Communism , a manifesto that reimagines our systems of care.  [2:00] But first, we try to process the horrific mass shooting at a dance studio in Monterey Park , California, in which eleven...

Hello from rental hell!  This week, Tammy is joined by two friends of the pod who work in housing: Ritti Singh, a tenant organizer in Rochester for Housing Justice for All (and a TTSG Discord leader), and Navneet Grewal, a longtime attorney currently working for Disability Rights California .  [5:30] Ritti breaks down the role of a housing organizer, particularly in a majority-tenant city, and Nav...

Hello from a Berkeley basement!  This week, Jay takes a break from being his daughter’s personal helper to catch up with Tammy.  [5:25] We start by discussing right-wing obsession with gender and sexuality. What do recent attacks on librarians tell us about older moral panics and Republican strategy? (Check out this Vice News video of a librarian in Michigan , a ProPublica piece from June about th...

Hello from what feels like the distant past!  This week, erstwhile co-host Andy Liu joins Jay and Tammy to look back on 2022. (A note from Mai, our producer: Paid subscribers can get the full version of this ep , with some bonus banter about gambling, parental virtue signaling, etc.! Also, we recorded a week ago, so please forgive dated references to Morocco in the World Cup, Elon, and Jay’s not-y...

Hello from somewhere other than Jay’s basement!  This week, we’re excited to release the episode we recorded in New York with Hua Hsu, as part of Tammy’s residency at the A/P/A Institute at NYU. Hua is a TTSG regular and the author of a new memoir, Stay True .  The book focuses on Hua’s friendship with Ken, a classmate at Berkeley who was killed the summer before their senior year. We probe the bo...

Hello from South Korea’s sad World Cup cheering section!  This week, we talk about the unrest in China with Dr. Ting Guo, a scholar at the University of Toronto who studies religion, politics, and gender in transnational Asia. Ting is also great on Twitter and co-hosts a Mandarin podcast called "in-betweenness" (@shichapodcast) . [7:50] The protests in mainland China—and, in solidarity, throughout...

Hello from the picket lines!  This week, Jay and Tammy report on labor actions on the streets of Berkeley and Seoul.  [4:30] First, Jay tells us what he’s heard from striking student workers at the University of California. More than forty-five thousand UAW union members are drawing attention to their financial precarity and austerity in academia. We parse the possible fault lines among this remar...