Hello! This week, we are back from vacation and catching up on the only story in America, which is the mental fitness of the President. Jay is on Team “The Democrats are probably too incompetent and divided to actually run a difference candidate in time and so it might actually make sense for them to just get behind Biden and hope everything breaks correctly and they draw to flush against Trump’s made two pair.” Tyler is on Team “It is fundamentally bad to have a President who cannot do normal t...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we are extremely excited to have on John Ganz, author of the new book When the Clock Broke , a retelling of the 1990s that touches on politics, music, television, and the history of right wing cranks who ultimately would become a prelude for Trumpism. There’s a ton that we discuss: The LA riots, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, Sister Souljah, and much more. If you’re interested in how the fringe elements of the 1990s became much less fringe by 2016, this is a wonderfully written and...
Jun 26, 2024•2 hr 51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today we’re doing a Pardon The Interruption-styled show in which we go down a list of topics. We’re experimenting a bit with format these days and so please let us know if this more rapid fire version works for you! Today’s topics: Hobby Horsing as a sport? Dimension Apple from a great post from the Read Max Substack . Tiger parenting in 2024. Are you a crazy sports parent or a math/violin parent? Is there a difference? Joe Biden’s age and the promise of President Harris. The jumps in thi...
Jun 19, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we have a great conversation with Andrew Boryga, the author of VICTIM , a truly subversive and funny novel about a young writer who hustles his way through the media world by just giving it what it wants from him: oppression stories, identity trauma tales, and a lot of embellishment. We also talk about Caitlin Clark (Jay tries to do a sports talk segment) and the great novel JAMES by Percival Everett. Do books like JAMES and VICTIM signal some change in the way that the publishing ...
Jun 12, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today’s show is a talk about an exciting new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman titled “ What are Children For ?” (Release date: June 11) We talked about “slow love,” the common complaint from millennials that they do not have enough financial stability to start families, the ambivalent mother narrative, and something right in Tyler’s wheelhouse: eco apocalypse fiction. Why is the United States birthrate declining? Why are middle and upper-middle class women waiting longer to have ...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we talk about Biden’s speech at Morehouse College which should be seen as a preview for his message to Black voters amidst polling results that show he has lost a significant percentage of both the Black and Latino vote. We also talk about the passing of Bill Walton, activism in the NBA and sports, in general, and what we should think about the social justice basketball moment from 2020 in the bubble when the league and its corporate sponsors wallpapered half of Disney World with s...
May 29, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! This week, we have on David Austin Walsh, author of “ Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right ,” a new book that tracks the development and coddling of far right political figures and their co-dependent relationship with mainstream Republicans. Lotta good history here and David asks Kang whether he thinks “Rich Men North of Richmond” is still good. This is a lively one with a lot of interesting history about conservative media and how it developed through the midd...
May 22, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! This week we talk about something we meant to discuss last week — Macklemore’s new song “ Hind’s Hall ,” and politics in music and literature. There’s some Immortal Technique, the Coup, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young thrown in there too. We also talk about the pretty bad polls that came out for the Biden campaign, which showed him losing in some weird ways in battleground states and took a deeper look into the crosstabs, always the more interesting part of any poll. thanks as always ...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! This week we are happy to present one of our most requested guests, Vincent Bevins. He is a longtime foreign correspondent and the author of two books, The Jakarta Method and If We Burn . We talked about the lessons of the mass protests of the 2010s around the world, the allure and some of the downsides to leaderless/horizontal protest movements, and about how the media has covered the campus protests around the country. This is a good one so please enjoy! This is a public episode. If you...
May 08, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! This week we revived a TTSG tradition of answering your questions on the air. Topics covered range from why Tyler puts on a wetsuit and swims out to rocks to fish for striped bass, the rise in extreme sports, why standardized tests are actually good, the state of the student protests going forward and our worries about state repression, and Jerry Seinfeld complaining that all sitcoms are too woke. (One note, we recorded this yesterday morning before the NYPD crackdown at Columbia and CCNY...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we talk about everything that’s happening on campus from Columbia to NYU to Berkeley. Tyler talks about the responsibilities of faculty in these moments and what he thinks is driving a surprisingly strong faculty response to the arrests in New York City. We also talk about how to process the instances of antisemitism at these protests and Jay talks about some of the difficulties that have arisen with the leaderless activism model over the past decade or so. Also, we will be having ...
Apr 24, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello, Today’s episode is our conversation with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who traveled to European Hospital in Gaza in late March. He talks to us about what he saw there and the massive humanitarian toll, particularly on children. We talked about the conditions at the hospital and the role of the doctor as truth teller in a conflict that is being obscured from view. Dr. Sidhwa and his colleague Dr. Mark Perlmutter wrote an account of their trip which you should read here . And you can ...
Apr 17, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we have a packed show with our guest Danny Bessner of the American Prestige podcast. Danny argued the other side of the fascism debate and expressed why he and others believe the word is not appropriate to describe what’s happened to the American right. And Danny stuck around while we discussed Tyler’s debunking of the book “White Rural Rage” and why the type of liberal elite discourse we have right now might eventually be politically catastrophic (while also just being gross.) As ...
Apr 10, 2024•2 hr 32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today’s guest is the John Ganz, author of the Unpopular Front substack and the upcoming book “ When The Clock Broke .” We talk about the now years-long debate about whether what’s happening among the right wing in American should be called “fascism” and how such definitions should and should not be used in a political manner. We also talk about normie/resistance liberals and the concept of a popular front that needs to exist to defeat all that Trump might bring with him into office. These...
Apr 03, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Tyler is back for today’s episode in which we talk about open container laws in New Jersey, the discourse about the discourse on Kate Middleton and the Royals, and some thoughts on how to get children off their phones and the Internet, more broadly. Jay reveals that his takes are aging at a more rapid rate than he is and Tyler proves his Marxist bonafides by suggesting the most radical plan you’ve ever heard for getting kids to stop staring at some glowing rectangle for hours and hours up...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today a very special March Madness episode with New York Times and CNN contributor Jane Coaston. We talk about the recent ascent of women’s basketball, the gendered ways in which we always expect good, progressive behavior from women’s coaches and athletes, Caitlin Clark-as-Larry Bird and Caitlin Clark-as-baller, and a bit about NIL and the transfer portal. I’ve wanted to have Jane on the pod for a very long time and this will not disappoint if you want her very good takes on women’s spor...
Mar 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today’s episode is a talk with Vinson Cunningham about his new novel GREAT EXPECTATIONS which came out yesterday and is in bookstores everywhere. It’s everything you would expect from Vinson: beautiful sentences, long meditations on hoops, the church, and love, and a engrossing storyline that follows a young man who goes to work on the campaign of a certain senator from Illinois during his first presidential run. BUY IT HERE . And if you’re in New York City, Vinson will be in conversation...
Mar 13, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we talk to two people who have been thinking about reporting about AI for quite a long time: Repeat guest Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley and Karen Hao, a journalist who has written an excellent series of pieces for the Atlantic. We talk to Ben about SORA, OpenAI’s video generator that only exists in trailer form so far and what might happen if it’s actually good. (We don’t think it’ll be good. At least yet.) And then we talk some p...
Mar 06, 2024•2 hr 56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! On today’s episode, we talk about Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty Air Force twenty-five year old who self-immolated in Washington, D.C., the history of the act and how it has been seen in different eras and different contexts. We compare, for example, how Barack Obama talked about the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor who is credited with sparking the Arab Spring with how much of the liberal commentariat talks about Bushnell (largely in terms of mental health)....
Feb 28, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we talked about a topic that we’ve been circling around for a while — the minority vote. We now have months of polls all pointing towards the same trends in terms of Black, Latino and Asian voters all moving towards the right for a variety of reasons, most of which are left unexamined by many in the mainstream presses. That, of course, doesn’t mean that we don’t hear about the “Black vote” or the “Latino vote.” We do read the polling results and see charts detailing the shift. But ...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today’s episode is an interview with Carrie Sun, whose memoir PRIVATE EQUITY came out yesterday. (Buy it here !) The book is a memoir about the time Carrie spent working as the right hand for one of the country’s most famous billionaire hedge fund managers. We talk about the allure of finance and Wall Street, Ishiguro and restraint in writing, the ways in which political awakenings can sometimes be quite mundane in their origins, and a lot more about this wonderful book. If you’re a fan o...
Feb 14, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today, we talk about the Apple Vision Pro and its grim vision for how you should be spending your time. Also, we talk a lot about Jaron Lanier’s most recent essay about the Virtual Reality in the New Yorker , specifically the question he poses about how technology should fit into our lives and whether tech can just create things because they’re cool without affixing their products to some greater mission for humanity. The Apple Vision Pro doesn’t come with any story about how its going to...
Feb 07, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! This week we have on Musa Al-Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. We talk a lot about “kids these days” and the tendency for all sorts of reactionaries to blame them for everything that’s wrong with this country. Don’t like illiberal attitudes on campuses? Blame the kids. Do you think free expression is at risk? Blame the kids. Feel like democracy is on the brink of collapse? Blame the kids. (As always, if you’re reading this and not subscribed to our substack or Pa...
Jan 31, 2024•2 hr 37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! This week, we talk about the big Polyamory article in New York Magazine and the proposition that breaking the bonds of monogamy might be a political statement, one that frees both sides from the constraints of marriage. Are we just reinventing ways to justify selfish behavior? And why does every personal decision in the lives of upper middle class, well-educated people need to turn into some movement that promises nothing? We also continue our ongoing talk about visions of the climate fut...
Jan 24, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! In today’s episode, we talk about Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower,” a science fiction novel from 1992 that unexpectedly found itself on the best seller’s list in 2020. The novel imagines a violent and grim future in which the world has warmed beyond safe inhabitation, the lucky get to live in walled off communities while the poor all kill one another in the streets. We talk about visions of climate apocalypse and how Butler, through no fault of her own, might have created a heg...
Jan 17, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! I’m very excited to announce that Tyler Austin Harper will be our co-host for the next month or so. Tyler was on the show last month and introduced himself then, but for those who missed it, he’s a writer at the Atlantic and a professor of literature in the environmental studies department at Bates College. He specializes in extinction literature and film. For the next month or so, Tyler and I are going to talk to guests and to one another about a variety of topics, including literature a...
Jan 10, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today we have a great interview with Nithya Raman, the City Councilmember for Los Angeles’s District 4. We talk about housing, the despair around the homelessness problem in California’s biggest cities, and whether there might be a different future for the city’s political machine. My interest in Councilmember Raman started back when I was writing the newsletter for the Times because there was an effort by some of the more powerful local politicians to redraw her district in ways that wou...
Jan 03, 2024•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! In our Discord server, which you can access by subscribing to the show for a measly $5 a month, a user asked me to not do shows about sports. I took this request seriously as I generally aim to please, but am sad to announce that after much deliberation, I do think it’s worth having a conversation about a very distinct phenomenon I’ve observed over the past few years. As recently as 2020, it was difficult to have a conversation about sports without bringing in all that “politics.” LeBron ...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello! Today on the show, we have Tyler Austin Harper, a literary scholar and an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College. We talk about the history of extinction literature, the books that tech moguls read and the vision it inspires, the dangers of science fiction and all that’s happening in the Ivy Leagues right now. 0:00 - Jay talks about the new direction of the show, which for now will be a “degenerate Asian version of In Our Time.” 2:40-6:00 - Jay and Tyler talk about ...
Dec 13, 2023•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello from the “White Projects”! For Tammy’s final ep as co-host, we answer questions from our beloved subscribers. Thank you for asking us to ponder: * Vice, Jezebel, and the loss of irreverent digital media * What makes podcasting so terrifying (and freeing) * Biden vs. Trump in early polls + in Tammy’s reporting on young voters * Our worst takes from 3.5 years of blabbering * Whether TTSG was a guerilla marketing campaign for Jay’s book To get Tammy’s infrequent writing updates (soon replacin...
Dec 06, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
