Time To Say Goodbye

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...

Hello from the Matt Levine fan club!  This week, the writer and editor Max Read returns to discuss the disintegration of the tech world.  2:45 – First, Max and Jay explain what happened to cryptocurrency exchange FTX , founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), and how its calamitous end has eroded people’s faith in crypto. We marvel at FTX’s narrative arc (“ Star Wars” and a Bahamian polycule !), the so...

Hello from the decline of the West!  This week’s episode features a wonderful conversation with Minh-Ha T. Pham, a professor at Pratt who researches fashion labor under global capitalism and digital capitalism—and whose new book, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things , is out now.  3:45 – We begin by reminiscing about the era of the fashion blogger (including Minh-Ha herself ) and the role that young, tra...

Hello from Jay’s trick-or-treating route!  This week, Jay listened to hours of affirmative-action arguments from the Supreme Court so that you (and we) didn’t have to. He recounts Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sharp line of questioning and lays out the progressives’ Catch-22. Does a third path reveal itself if we deny Harvard and its peers their institutional, “meritocratic” power? Is it true that Asian...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit goodbye.substack.com Hello from Tammy’s mysterious trip to Korea!  In this bonus ep, we answer questions from our beloved subscribers. Thank you for getting us to ponder:   * The political dimensions of K-12 school lotteries * A post-affirmative action world * Midterm election hotspots (plus: the effects of labor power and anti-Asian se...

Hi from the science desk!  Jay and Tammy chat this week with a very special guest, eco-apocalypse reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis. Her work has appeared on the How to Save a Planet podcast (RIP) and in The Atlantic and The New York Times , among other places .  Kendra tells us about her non-traditional path to journalism, the trouble with climate journalism in many newsrooms, and the burden and oppor...

Hello from Tammy’s surfing hagwon!  This week, we’re celebrating 1 MILLION DOWNLOADS! Sounds fake, we know, but Substack doesn’t lie. Thanks for tuning in to our ramblings for the past two and a half years—long live TTSG! At the top of the show, we listen to a posthumous podcast with New Yorker editor John Bennett and several of his writers. We reflect on “Bennettisms” about the editor-writer rela...

Hello from a U.S. neocolony!  It’s just Tammy and Jay this week, trying not to obsess over surfing and wallpaper.  We talk about the new Netflix show, “ Mo ,” which, despite its marketing, avoids many pitfalls of the mainstream immigrant tale. The show succeeds on account of its main character: the very flawed yet charismatic Mo, a Palestinian-American man with a pending asylum case, played by com...

Hello from Mexico City!  This week, we talk about the Iranian uprising with Kiana Karimi, a scholar , writer , and friend of the pod who has been active in the fight for women’s rights in Iran and its diaspora.  But first, in other feminist news, Jay catches Tammy up on the latest high-stakes poker controversy , with its wonderful 🤢🤑 mix of money and misogyny.  Kiana begins by reading from an es...

Hello from a Korean sublet!  This week, our friend Jennifer Wilson joins us to discuss the art of cultural criticism and test out some takes on James Harden, Gramsci, and Russia.  First, we discuss Boston Celtics coach Ime Udoka’s suspension and the ongoing fallout. What can fans’ reactions teach us about today’s top sports commentators and the proliferation of meme culture?  Then, we glide seamle...

Hello from a beach in Busan!  It’s just us this week, talking through the good, bad, and ugly of this week’s news cycle.  Just before we recorded, the news dropped that Adnan Syed, the subject of the first season of the hit podcast “ Serial ,” was released from prison with a vacated conviction after 23 years. We grapple with the opportunity and ethical risks of narrative podcasts, especially when...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit goodbye.substack.com Hello from Tammy’s apartment! (Please forgive the less-than-stellar audio quality on this one.)  For our latest TTSG book club meeting, Tammy is joined by the wonderful Lisa Hsiao Chen to discuss her debut novel “ Activities of Daily Living .” The book follows Alice, a Taiwanese American living in Brooklyn in her la...

Hello from Seoul (both real and fictional)! This week, we welcome our friend and K-drama expert Jenny Wang Medina back to the pod to discuss the new Netflix hit “ Extraordinary Attorney Woo .”  The legal-procedural K-drama follows an autistic attorney, Woo Young-woo, who joins the ranks of a high-powered law firm and quickly proves herself invaluable. It’s wholesome, marginally sea-themed, and set...

Hello from three time zones!  This week, Tammy is joined by Debt Collective organizers Ann Larson and Eleni Schirmer to reflect on the movement that won historic relief from student debt.  But first, we remember the great Barbara Ehrenreich, who passed last week. Ehrenreich was an author and activist best known for her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed , a hard-hitting yet beautifully written dive...

Hello from Washington state!  This week, we’re joined by Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network and repeat pod guest, to chat about immigration (and, briefly, Nathan Fielder’s bizarre new show, “ The Rehearsal ”).  We start by diving into Caitlin Dickerson’s exhaustive report, in The Atlantic , on the Trump administration's family-separation policy. We reflect on the unique horr...

Hello from Philly!  We’re lucky to be joined this week by former podsquad member Andy Liu, for an in-depth chat about his three favorite things: sports, history, and Taiwan.  First, we review the new Netflix documentary about Manti Te'o , the college-football star who fell from grace after being catfished a decade ago. We discuss the many failures that led to Te'o’s ostracization, as well as the r...

Hello from Mai's high-speed European train!  This week, Tammy and Jay watch “ Free Chol Soo Lee ” and speak with Julie Ha, who co-directed the film with Eugene Yi. The new documentary follows Chol Soo Lee, a Korean man in San Francisco who was wrongfully convicted of murder in the 1970s, highlighting the pan-Asian movement for his release and his troubled readjustment to life outside. Julie discus...