Waiting to X-hale

While Karen is on vacation, Wynter brought in special guest host Abby Gardner ( We Have Notes Podcast/Substack ) to talk about ALL THE THINGS: Biopics, Harry Styles, mixtapes, movies, Kate Bush, old Hollywood, new Hollywood, Joan Crawford, Florence Pugh...seriously, it's a dense pop culture discussion from top to bottom.  Grab a snack and settle in! 

Karen and Wynter have been seduced by Irma Vep , Olivier Assayas' "serialized" HBO Max revisitation of his own 1996 indie film of the same name starring screen goddess Maggie Cheung (his ex-wife). The two get into all the series' meta-narratives,, including Alicia Vikander as a modified K-Stew. Light SPOILERS. Karen is obsessed with #PREATH's (Christen Press and Tobin Heath's) sizzle on the ESPYs...

Wynter has returned from her European vacation to tell us about her encounter with Aline –not to be confused with Celine, who the main character of this French-Canadian film very closely resembles. Karen tells us about Chris Belcher hot new memoir Pretty Baby (Simon & Schuster), chronicling her life as a queer teen rebel who escapes small-town Appalachia to become  a renowned Lesbian Dominatrix in...

This week Karen is joined by author, curator, and former kitchen-geek Jennifer Doyle, as well as Chef Courtney Storer to talk about the buzzy and bingeable FX series The Bear.  As the culinary producer on the show, Chef Coco gives us the inside scoop on how the actors recreated the tense, fast-paced atmosphere of professional kitchens, while revealing what happens to all the food they make on set....

Wynter is out of the country, so Karen invited her longtime gaysian/theysian pals, Summer Kim Lee (a cultural critic and UCLA professor), and JJ Chan (an artist and designer based in Brooklyn) to talk about the highly anticipated gay(sian) rom-com, Hulu's Fire Island . The three talk about some of their own summer gaycations together and apart, while diving deep into the details of Fire Island dow...

CW: discussions of violence, self-harm, domestic abuse, mass shooting–in other words, of our everyday lives in the U.S.A. Wynter and Karen welcome special guest Raquel Gutierrez, author of the new book Brown Neon (out June 7). The three revive a conversation they started over drinks during the Gen X festival about vengeance movies centering women, and fantasies of fighting back in a bleak timeline...

This is an edited version of the live show - Patreon members get the full unedited video! The Gen X festival's Humanities co-curators (Wynter & Karen!!!!) take the stage for a live podcast recording along with special guests Sandra Bernhard and Kevin Smith!   

Wynter and Karen reflect back on the music of 1992 and 2002, from Pitchfork favorites to the Billboard Hot 100. In addition to selecting their MVP songs and albums from each year, they each get into what they were wearing and gift an NFT idea to Ja Rule in the process.  Wynter continues delving into the saga of millennial overreachers by entering the world of WeCrashed, while Karen sobs to the epi...

This week Karina Longworth, the creator, producer and host of You Must Remember This joins us for a preview of the pod's  latest season on the "Erotic 80s." Before the three regale you with tales of peering at their parents' Playboy magazines (and whatever played late at night on cable), Wynter and Karen tell us what's up this week by diving into the first Adrian Lyne offering in 20 years, Deep Wa...

Wynter and Karen look back on their favorite Oscars years and winners in recent, i.e. prime GenX decades, as we round the corner to the 94th Annual Academy Awards.  Before they take a 1985 and 1992-heavy trip down memory lane, the two get into the latest TV exegesis on millennial hustlers, The Dropout and Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber , before launching into an unexpected Guy Fieri lovefest, e...

We're thrilled to welcome back Ann Powers of NPR Music, and author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music to talk to us about the future of music. We explore other critics' predictions about the future, including Ted Gioia's speculation that we may have more dead musicians performing for us in the form of holograms, deep fake vocals, and more. From A.I. K-Pop...

Karen returns from her bout w/ the Omarion variant to catch up with Wynter about Super Bowl Sunday, including all the ads, and the "GenX has arrived" halftime show featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop, Mary J. Blige, Eminem and 50 Cent.  Their main segment focuses on how uncannily films and TV from the past have predicted elements of our present (or their future), from 1973's Soylent Green set in 2022, to Rob...

Hot on the heels of our last episode on Yellowjackets, Wynter and Karen are inspired to revisit the year 1996 and what it gave to us in fashion, fragrances, music, TV, movies and more. Before they get into all that, and what they were each up to at the time, they finally sit down for a much needed & extended processing session about And Just Like That… the SATC reboot on HBO which has made the non...

Wynter & Karen welcome you to Season 5 with a bushel full of SPOILER ALERTS for both Search Party and the topic of their main segment, everybody's latest obsession Yellowjackets (not that other "Yellow" TV show). Which Yellowjacket do each of them identify with vs. who they ended up with on their Buzzfeed quiz? In their eagerness to catch up at the start of the new year, Karen & Wynter get into a...

The whole gang gets frisky with a very special feline-themed holiday episode. Our favorite holigays Alonso Duralde and Dave White join Wynter and Karen to discuss Hallmark's The Nine Lives of Christmas (2014) and its brand new sequel, The Nine Kittens of Christmas (2021)--all in celebration of Alonso's new co-authored book, I'll Be Home for Christmas Movies: The Deck the Hallmark Podcast's Guide t...

Our hosts close out season four with a Halloween-themed episode that covers a spate of new horror-related releases from Halloween Kills to SyFy's Chucky series. Speaking of horror, Karen took her first cross-country flight since the pandemic started and has tales to tell, while Wynter takes another kind of Trip with a Swedish suspense film of the same name.  The two tease new GBBO related BoCo tha...

SPOILER ALERT: Details from the several episodes of Squid Game are discussed in the main segment.  Wynter and Karen join the rest of the world in obsessing over Squid Game , the S. Korean Netflix series about contestants playing children's games to try to win billions of won without getting eliminated...literally. The two also talk about this week's big reveal that W2X is curating the humanities p...

Who is the "mother SCOBY" of all Karens? Find out on this week's episode, which dives deep into Impeachment , the latest installment of Ryan Murphy's American Crime Story anthology. How does the series ratchet up its scenes of bureaucratic drama as Sarah Paulson and Beanie Feldstein disappear into the roles of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky? How has the series already shifted our hosts' perspecti...

Inspired by Kathryn VanArendonk's Vulture article about white men in crisis on TV, Wynter and Karen explore the many layers of white male aggrievement in TV, pop culture, and real-life (fr. Rutherford Falls, to White Lotus and Ted Lasso w/ a special shoutout to the new movie Vacation Friends ).  Wynter discusses the spoils she acquired in the Tom Girardi auction (Erica Jayne, on the RHOBH's ex-hus...

Film critics and husbands Dave White and Alonso Duralde of the Linoleum Knife Podcast are GUEST HOSTING W2X this week!  While Wynter and Karen are running around taking care of business (at a safe distance and masked, of course) Dave and Alonso have stepped in to discuss "geriatric" millennials, Xers, and whether these terms are even useful. And with the end of summer upon us, they share their Top...

Karen and Wynter explore two high-profile and controversial documentaries about beloved figures Anthony Bourdain ( Roadrunner ), and Val Kilmer ( Val ). What do we get from conjuring their lost voices? And what do we miss in the process? Wynter performs our semi-annual Ryan Murphy check-in, and gets pumped up about ACS: Impeachment on the Lewinsky/Clinton scandal, while looking askance at this sea...

One of our generation's greatest pop music critics, Ann Powers (NPR Music), sits down with Karen and Wynter to process the new Woodstock 99 doc, and music festivals in general, while exploring the cultural conditions that stoked this calamity.  This week, both hosts are up to going deep on Mike White's latest HBO limited series, The White Lotus , and as promised, wrap up their take on the Fear Str...

Wynter tells Karen to suck it up for a ride down R.L. Stine's Fear Street , especially with the release of the trilogy on Netflix and its deep GenX flex (from 1994 to 1978). SPOILERS ABOUND! Before we get to the scary parts, Karen insists we process this year's Emmy nominations. Which categories does she deem a veritable "Sophie's Choice"?  Meanwhile, Wynter makes some special requests of the team...

We go long this week to pore over all the shout horns, crotchy synth chords and late-80s affluence of what Mike Pace famously describes as Spago rock. Molly Lambert explains the Spago-adjacent music she and her brother have dubbed "Glass Bricks rock," and the whole panel gets into what Wolfgang Puck and Spago as fantasy and reality meant to pop culture from the 1980s onward. Wynter and Karen kick...

Wynter asks us all to think about the films and TV shows that changed the game, from those that captured the style and essence of their era ( Clueless ), to those that transformed the cultural conversation ( Boyz N The Hood , and the early-80s trifecta of Victor/Victoria, Tootsie, and Yentl ). Karen celebrates Pride month by getting into the FX docuseries, Pride alongside the series finale of Pose...