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-free trade contrarianism . Also, Andy recs a book, Lactivism by Courtney Jung , for the history and deb...
May 17, 2022•1 hr 14 min
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 how the expected ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could affect the rights of p...
May 10, 2022
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 the Pacific Northwest in labor history, and continuities in the organization of labor and business ev...
May 03, 2022•1 hr 21 min
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, and ping us via Substack, [email protected] , https://twitter.com/ttsgpod , and/or htt...
Apr 26, 2022•1 hr 10 min
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 versus small/independent unions , and the links between Amazon, the Democrats, and labor . How did the...
Apr 12, 2022•1 hr 25 min
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. We talk about what he calls “neoliberal race politics,” the charge against him of “class reductionism...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr 39 min
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, [email protected] , https://twitter.com/ttsgpod , and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod ! This is a public episode. If you'd like to ...
Mar 29, 2022•1 hr 21 min
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 for media and the framework of fake news installed the last few years. Jay’s got a few recent pieces ...
Mar 22, 2022
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 production is Wolf Play — at the Soho Rep, with Ma-Yi Theater Company . She was also a writer on the forth...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 4 min
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 in The Nation ; Tammy freaks out over the imminent South Korean presidential election and reflects o...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 24 min
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 Zelensky (The New York Review of Books) , and, just yesterday, Zelensky and the war ( New York ). We discus...
Mar 01, 2022•1 hr 16 min
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 deaths. Why do we always fall back on law-enforcement responses? How do stigmas against people who ar...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 28 min
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 next BOOK TIME, please sign up for our newsletter subscription at goodbye.substack.com for $5 a month...
Feb 15, 2022•1 hr 16 min
Hi from Seoul! The podsquad returns for a wide-ranging chat on all things, sort of, broadly, sometimes diasporically China. Awkwafina made the rounds on social media, with a screenshot semi-apology(?) regarding her use of Black speech. We offer a hermeneutic reading. It’s the 10th anniversary of Linsanity . What did, and what does, Jeremy mean to Asian America? Jay and Andy revisit analyses from the time. Chinese government bros have upped their game , offense and defense, on English-language Tw...
Feb 08, 2022•1 hr 32 min
Hello from a crypto farm in rural China! This week Andy talks with the director ( Jessica Kingdon ) and producer ( Kira Simon-Kennedy ) of the new film Ascension , a documentary about working life in contemporary China. Ascension has received critical acclaim and garnered major awards and nominations, including being shortlisted for the Academy Awards ! The film features scenes of quotidian working life in a period when the government has begun to promote the “Chinese Dream,” spanning textile an...
Feb 01, 2022•1 hr
Hi from a Korean hot-stone bed ! It’s Jay and Tammy this week, talking trash about Andy. Plus: * Pandemic alcoholism and human bonds: We read and discuss an essay in Jezebel, “ I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life .” What has this tragic time clarified and obscured? What’s the off-ramp? * Does a day-trader’s lunch budget say anything about inflation? People were mad about this New York Times story , but the Big Mac Index remains durable (Tammy gets the description about half-right). The...
Jan 25, 2022•1 hr 37 min
Greetings from the Philly planetarium! This week, we discuss academic tenure, “disgusting” ideas, and left foreign policy. 0:00 – A troll-y tenured law prof at UPenn is back on her race-science kick—this time, arguing on Glenn Loury’s interview show that, “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.” What to do about Amy Wax and the Amy Waxes of the world? Should her tenure be repealed, as local politicians are demanding ? Who and what is tenure for? Is it about...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 44 min
Hello from pandemic year 3! There seems to be a panic over school closures—and a backlash against teachers and their unions. But how many US public schools have had to “go remote” because of Covid? Are these physical closures reasonable? Why are people blaming educators for everything from “learning loss” to the downfall of the Democratic party? What “shock doctrine” tactics do we need to look out for? Check out: * Jay in The New York Times , on the value of public schools and a post-Hurricane K...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 30 min
New year, new pod! “Same pod, though…” 0:00 – We discuss various New Year’s Day soups and East Asian black beans . 7:50 – Many influential writers died at the end of 2021. We explore the legacies of Joan Didion , bell hooks , and historian Jonathan Spence . 44:40 – Why is the Netflix climate change film, “Don’t Look Up,” so polarizing? Written by Adam McKay and Bernie pal David Sirota, and starring basically all of Hollywood, it has inspired a lot of commentary. Is it a good leftist film? Is it ...
Jan 04, 2022•1 hr 33 min
Hello from a pandemic bungalow! This week, we are joined by Gary Shteyngart, creator of the brilliant new novel, Our Country Friends . We talk about immigrant fiction, elite high schools, exile feelings, the Asian pop-cultural future, and Gary’s run-in with a fascist elementary school teacher. Gary is the author of the memoir Little Failure (2014) and four previous novels: Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Lake Success (2018) , Absurdistan (2007), and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002). Als...
Dec 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Hello from the Quiz Bowl room! Today we’re talking with Democratic pollster and Andy’s high school friend Brian Stryker of ALG research . Recently, the Democratic Party circulated a memo Brian wrote about the Democrats’ poor showing in some of the November elections and their uneven prospects for the 2022 midterms. You can read his interview with The New York Times here . The main topics we hit on are: how much do cultural wedge issues like critical race theory matter over bread-and-butter quest...
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr 11 min
Hello from a blockchain! This week, Jay and Tammy talk with Alex Rivera , a filmmaker, media artist, immigrant rights activist, and MacArthur genius , about crypto. What is crypto currency? How does it work? And why is it often cast as a right-wing, libertarian, carbon-depleting project? Can the left reclaim crypto for the people? How might decentralized financial networks power social movements? Post-national transactions? Worker cooperatives? Global decision-making? For more, check out: * The ...
Dec 07, 2021•1 hr 20 min
Hello from the 19th century! Today’s episode features Andy in conversation with Prof. Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University . Her new book has just come out this fall, titled, The Chinese Question: the Gold Rushes and Global Politics . She takes a story we are somewhat familiar with but presents it in ambitious, new terms, tracing three major gold rushes from the 1850s to 1900s, across California, Australia, and South Africa, an...
Nov 30, 2021•1 hr 11 min
Hello from both sides of the Pacific! This week, a reunited, international podsquad talks K-quarantine, Enes Kanter’s Sinopportunism, and how the left should think about the “supply chain crisis.” * Tammy’s first few days in South Korean quarantine: * What’s going on with the Celtics center’s anti-China rants (and shoes)? * How can leftists think beyond shopping in our relationship to global supply chains? Tammy wrote about this recently for The New York Times , with a focus on port truckers. (P...
Nov 23, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Hello! Guest episode this week with Andy talking to Brian Hioe and Wen Liu , writers and academics based in Taipei, with the online magazine New Bloom . We talk about the scary headlines warning of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, why the global left seems to dismiss Taiwan in favor of romanticizing the PRC, and what is the relationship between Asian and Asian American politics (if there is any)? 0:00 - Banter 7:00 - Recent headlines over the US’s commitment to defend China + Chinese fighter planes...
Nov 16, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Hello from our election hangover! This week, we talk about last week’s mid-mid-mid-midterm results. * Did the very rich Republican win Virginia’s gubernatorial race on account of critical race theory— or not? * Are the Democrats continuing to lose the Asian/Latinx/POC vote ? * Should we take hope in local progressive wins ? (Yay, Boston, Missoula, Dearborn, Hamtramck, Cleveland…) * Whatever happened to bread and butter economic concerns like housing and healthcare? Plus: podsquad digressions and...
Nov 09, 2021•1 hr 14 min
Hello from HISTORY! This week, Tammy interviews Professor Kori A. Graves, a historian of adoption and the family at the University at Albany, SUNY. Kori’s 2020 book, A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War , explores how Black Americans came to adopt Black Korean children. Tammy and Kori talk about the history of transnational, transracial adoption — and the special place of Korea and the Korean diaspora in adoptee activism and the contemporary architecture of ...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 34 min
Note: Apologies for resending + reposting; some technical errors earlier. Hi from TMZ studio! Like all of Asian American Twitter, we’ve been talking about The Loneliest Americans quite a bit. But this week, Andy and Tammy get a full-on, personal Jay AMA. Thanks to all our new listeners and everyone who joined our Discord subscriber book club last week. Event announcement: Next week, on November 3rd, Andy will be giving a talk at NYU’s Skirball Center (via Zoom), in conversation with Prof. Charma...
Oct 26, 2021•52 min
Hello from the John Deere picket line! This week is, um, eclectic and slightly technologically challenged. Thanks for bearing with us. 4:15 – Jay’s book is out! Thursday evening, Oct. 21, Jay will be doing a Discord AMA about The Loneliest Americans . It’s for subscribers only, so if you want to ask Jay any burning questions about the book, sign up now via Patreon or Substack ! 7:13 – MSG—we all love it, even though it’s bad for us. Or is it? We discuss a recent piece (short and fun) about the h...
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Hello from a spicy group chat! This week, we begin by celebrating the release of Jay’s book, The Loneliest Americans , which was just excerpted in NYT Mag . Congrats, Kang! Order it now for yourself and family and friends ! Then, we talk the Kidneygate controversy (from the same issue of NYT Mag ) aka Bad Art Friend , the long story based on a short story that launched a million Discord chats. Who’s really “kind” ? Is the art any good ? Finally, a dip into the cancellation(?) of Bright Sheng, th...
Oct 12, 2021•1 hr 48 min
