Time To Say Goodbye

Hello from the miserable gap between episodes of “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”! This week, Jay and Tammy are joined by the great Jia Tolentino, a writer at The New Yorker and the author of Trick Mirror . We start by talking about Jia’s recent piece on housing (= the rent is too damn high) on the worker-owned site “Hellgate” —and her dreams of organizing her building (not Tammy’s “white projects”) i...

Hello from Tammy’s undisclosed location!  The hosts start with a brief discussion of Leanna Louie, a law-and-order Democrat running for District 4 Supervisor in SF . What might she represent for the future of Asian-American politics?  Then Jay and Tammy are joined by investigative journalist Ali Fowle to discuss Myanmar. The country’s military regime recently killed four prisoners, including well...

Hello from a walk-up apartment!  This week, Tammy and Jay invite food-and-culture writer Wei Tchou to discuss trends in plant-based meat and beverages. Wei has written beautifully about fermenting tempeh , making her own soy sauce , and learning to love baijiu .  In our first investigative segment (lol), we send Jay out on the streets of Norcal. The U.S. chain Peet’s Coffee has proclaimed this the...

Hello from mild SF and summerpocalypse NYC!  This week, Jay and Tammy discuss what’s been on their minds this week: the state of the Democratic party and the shifting culture around drug use in the United States. Plus: Jill Biden on tacos and bo gadas!  We read New York mag columnist Jonathan Chait’s critique of Biden and ask why the administration has such a failed legislative strategy. What, if...

Hello!  This week, Tammy and Jay remember John Bennet, a former New Yorker editor and Columbia journalism professor who passed away this week:  They are then joined by policy analyst Paul Williams to discuss the concept of social housing and its potential in the United States. How did we arrive at a political consensus so averse to public housing of any kind? Can other countries’ programs help us...

Resending because of a tech glitch. Thanks for your patience. Hello from Cleveland!  This week, we speak with friend of the pod Danny Bessner, an historian of U.S. foreign relations and co-host of the podcast American Prestige.  Danny discusses his new Harper’s essay , which argues for a departure from American exceptionalism, once and for all. He lays out the two main camps in U.S. foreign policy...

Hello from Jeju-do! This (harrowing news) week, the podsquad welcomes repeat guest Jenny Wang Medina —Emory professor, TV addict, literary translator , and hallyu expert—for a discussion of Jay’s favorite recent K-drama, Our Blues . We talk about abortion, matriarchal haenyeo , regionalism, debt, and goose fathers. What makes Jeju-do such a compelling site for fiction? How are dreams deferred in t...

Hi from Chicago! This week, Jay and Tammy talk about a rising tide of worker organizing, rising gas prices (ugh), and a new, very timely TV show. Tammy reports back from her trip to Labor Notes (along with pod listener Matt), starring Amazon Labor Union, Starbucks Workers United, and Tío Bernie. What kind of union moment are we in? Then, what’s the relationship between inflation and the labor mark...

Hello from Andy’s couch! We take a break from the NBA finals to record Andy’s last ep as co-host : ( Per his request, the podsquad talks Amy Chua’s now decade-old book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother — and argues about everything in it. Is the Chinese Tiger Mother actually a thing? Does it matter that Chua is an upper-class second-generation parent? What kind of Asian America does the book descri...

Hello from a 24-hour layover! Tammy returns from her travels and tells us about hanging out with cool Asians at the International Federation of Journalists conference in Oman. Then, we discuss the latest on the Uvalde shootings and the increasingly outrageous reports that local police officers and government officials are bullying parents and evading even the tiniest bit of accountability. How doe...

Tammy’s off for the week! Jay and Andy are joined by The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner to talk about his viral interrogations of subjects from John Mearsheimer to Amy Wax to that unhinged Covid conspiracy theorist from spring 2020 ; checking in on the bleak pessimism surrounding last week’s horror in Uvalde, TX; and a wide discussion of this year’s NBA playoffs featuring the Boston Celtics and the G...

Hello from the Betaverse! This week, we briefly touch on headline news from Asia: that a jet-lagged Biden pledged military support for Taiwan against China—a comment the State Department is now trying to walk back, lol. Then, onto the main event: a deep-dive on the new film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, starring Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu, directed by the...

Hello from Prague! Tammy tells us about her travels through Czech Republic, and Jay describes his favorite cioppino recipes. Then, a few items from the news: The US is experiencing a critical baby-formula shortage. We get into the political and economic factors behind this crisis; discuss the role of formula and the US’s regressive family leave policies ; and dabble in a bit of libertarian pro-fre...

Hello from a million-person protest! We wish… This week, we speak with a brilliant friend of the pod, Kate Redburn, a lawyer and legal historian . Kate takes us through the leaked Supreme Court draft decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , and explains how decades of organizing and legal scheming by Christian conservatives got us to this point. They also predict...

Happy belated May Day! We celebrate international workers’ day by discussing a newly remastered version of the 1979 documentary The Wobblies (directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer), now showing in theaters and online. We discuss the continuing relevance of the Industrial Workers of the World for today’s labor movements, its universalist vision (in contrast to that of the AFL), the role of t...

Hello from a reunited podsquad, each back in their natural habitat! This week, taking off from an essay by Jamelle Bouie , we discuss the right wing’s composite attack on queer educators and racial-justice curriculum as an attack on public goods. How should the Democrats—and the left—respond? Plus: notes on and from the lockdown in Shanghai and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Thanks for listening...

Hello from the Staten Island Ferry! This week, the podsquad reunites for all kinds of $$ talk. We begin with a chat —occasioned by a book prize Andy received — about how to balance leftist politics and theory in journalism and academia. Then, our main topic: the historic victory by Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at the JFK8 warehouse! We discuss Tammy’s reporting in The New Yorker , traditional/large ve...

Hi everyone: Today it’s just me, Andy, talking with guest Adolph Reed, Prof. Emeritus at University of Pennsylvania, about his new book The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives . Drawing from personal experience, he argues that racial segregation cannot be fully explained through abstract ideas about white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It was a coherent social order animated by ruling class power. ...

Hi from multi-culti Toronto! (We wish.) This week, Jay and Tammy discuss the urban housing crisis, the weird and embarrassing SCOTUS confirmation hearings of (Future Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the lovely new animated film, “Turning Red” (which Tammy womansplains to Jay). (Andy will be back soon.) Thanks for listening, and K.I.T. via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com , https://twitte...

Hello! This week just Jay and Andy and with guest Max Read . We talk about all things “disinformation.” First up is Andy’s n+1 essay last week on the lab-leak Covid conspiracy, what it says about the world’s ideas about China, and the plausibility of conspiracies today. Then a wider discussion about whether the Ukraine invasion and competing claims of “disinformation” have presented a new crisis f...

Hello from New York! This week, Tammy interviews the playwright and TV writer Hansol Jung. They talk about Hansol’s childhood in South Africa and South Korea, the feeling of being 70% fluent in both Korean and English, religion and structural sexism in the recent Korean presidential election, race in theater and TV, building queer characters, and how Rent changed everything. Hansol’s latest produc...

Hello from a South Korean ballot box! (Tammy wishes.) This week, Andy and Tammy talk to the political scientist Neta C. Crawford * of Boston University (soon, Oxford University) about the human and ecological costs of the war in Ukraine, the China dimension , and what a global movement for peace should strive for. Plus: Andy discusses his review essay on Chinese economic history and neoliberalism...

Hello from our doomscroll… Today we talk about—what else?—the events in Ukraine this past week :-( We chat with Sophie Pinkham, an essayist, reporter, and expert on the region. In 2016, she published Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine ( read an excerpt in Dissent ). She has written about politics after the Maidan protests ( The New Yorker ), the election of President Volodymyr Zelensk...

Hi from the United States of empire! The podsquad reunites in Amurica. This week, we talk about the murders of two women in New York City and the recall of school board members in San Francisco. Christina Yuna Lee and Michelle Go died in nightmarish attacks. We process our feelings and explore how Asian Americans, policymakers, and members of the general public are interpreting/using the women’s d...

Today’s episode is a conversation with Eugene Lim, the author of the novel Search History . Eugene’s one of our favorite writers. We talk about experimental fiction, Asian writers, Eugene’s life as a school librarian, what constitutes good and bad writing, identity questions in fiction, and we even take questions from the audience who watched this talk on Discord. If you’d like to be part of our n...