Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast (Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em)

In 2021, actor Armie Hammer’s career crashed into the side of a mountain. The recently separated star had lined up a series of high-profile projects when an anonymous Instagram account called the House of Effie began posting eye-popping messages of violent sexual fantasy that purported to be from Hammer. “I am 100% cannibal,” read one. More women joined the fray, bringing accusations of coercion, power abuse, and eventually rape. The Internet, no surprise here, was riveted. Cue a cascade of clickbait articles and a high-profile documentary, but along the way, there was one side of the story curiously missing: Armie Hammer’s.

Journalist Jamie Kirchick changed that with his barnburner new profile, “Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence,” recently published in Graydon Carter’s magazine, Air Mail. Kirchick comes on the podcast to talk about a scandal gone wild, a media in absentia, kink shaming, the parts of those salacious messages we never got to see, the problem with the court of public opinion, and whether consent can ever be taken back. It’s a hell of a story.

In the bonus: gamifying your healthcare, Nancy reveals her big TV commercial break, how to eat a cupcake, MILF Manor gets real (silly), the brilliant and controversial third episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, and a whole bunch of hotness in our hot boxes.

The Internet knows him as “Chartthrob” and “Map Daddy,” but once upon a time, Sarah knew him as “Snackwells,” the boy-genius politics editor at Salon and sweetheart of a co-worker who bought her a daily Diet Dr Pepper and picked stray vegetables out of everything he ate. The one and only Steve Kornacki joins the pod to talk about his stratospheric popularity as elections analyst on MSNBC (“I don’t fully understand what happened”), the Super Bowl and sports betting, his #1 Spotify listen of 2022 (Bobby Vee, anyone?), his famous Gap khakis, and his fantastic new podcast, “The Revolution,” tracking the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich, whose Nineties’ tenure as Speaker of the House had an outsized influence on American politics.

In the bonus: Sarah and Nancy discuss Rihanna’s fumble of a halftime performance: the pregnancy reveal, the amazing dancers who (unintentionally?) looked like sperm, and the bizarre moment when Rihanna sniffed her own crotch. (Sarah has some hot sports opinions about that one.) But there was one performer going for broke during that show, and we adore her. Also: The Waco siege, 30 years later, and will a Netflix show make Nancy change her mind about Glass Onion?

Earlier this week, nearly 200 New York Times contributors sent an open letter to the “paper of record,” excoriating its coverage on trans issues. GLAAD followed suit, with a letter that also made clear demands. The Times responded with a cool head. The end, right?

Nope. The ensuing drama consumed journo Twitter, and by Friday, more than a 1,000 contributors signed the open letter. What’s at stake is not merely the paper’s coverage of trans issues (which is far deeper and more rigorous than the open letter suggests), but the nature of journalism itself: Should it describe the world as it is, or as it should be? What role should activism play in today’s newsroom? Are the people who signed the letter on the right side of history, or the wrong side of history? And what if history actually has no sides?

This week we devote the entire episode to this impassioned, twisty, and personally high-stakes conversation for us as journalists. We talk about fear, careerism, peer pressure, along with friends who signed the list and those who conspicuously did not. Cameo appearances by: Emily Bazelon, Judd Apatow, Michael Powell, Matt Welch (duh), Bari Weiss, Alex Pareene, Taylor Sheridan, and someone named Peppermint.

Also: Will Nancy pen the Moderate MILF manifesto? Why is Sarah on the bacon Wikipedia page? Plus, love and romance in our hot boxes.

Two recent controversies prove the power of words, and also our country’s near-hopeless division. Publishers of Roald Dahl’s children’s classics, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, were busted making edits that removed “offensive” passages for modern audiences, an effort spearheaded by a group called Inclusive Minds (“consultants and campaigners,” according to their website). Nancy and Sarah sift through the reactions and dangerous implications, and wonder: What are we asking — or rather, enforcing — that our children give up? Could it be delight?

Meanwhile, Nancy and Sarah are loving a new podcast from The Free Press, “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” Hosted by Westboro Baptist Church apostate Megan Phelps-Roper, and masterminded by exiled The Daily producer Andy Mills, the show interviews the author born as Joanne Rowling and reveals her to be sympathetic, deep-thinking, and (of course) complicated. The show has only dropped two episodes, but it’s Sarah’s current vote for Podcast of the Year. Whatever you think of Rowling (and can anyone tell us how to pronounce her last name?), this podcast is an extraordinary peek into a pressing controversy — not that such value would ever stop the haters.

Also: Sarah sings the Oscar Meyer jingle. MILF Manor gets a new MILF. Who is Nancy’s vote for the most popular humorist of the past 50 years? (Hint from Sarah: It’s not the most popular humorist.) And: Is Dave Barry funny? A debate.

We are talking feeding people this week, and Portland, and who counts as family. Yes that’s the little one in the pic, and me in the ‘stache. What a weird party that was! We wound up in a long conversation with an editor from another city, a visitor who tried to laser-beam you with his charm. “Don’t you know the effect you have on men?” he later said, to one of us, a line I found kind of hilarious, like something from a book called, “Ninety Things To Say To A Woman That Might Get You in Her Pants.” The guy’s life later went up in flames, and pretty publicly. I’m not throwing a log on that fire but will say, I was less than surprised.

We are also talking this week’s literati flare-ups (the stealth editing of Roald Dahl, the never-ending crusade against of J.K. Rowling, dust-up #609 at the Times) and their opposite, the people who come to your aid. Why not also feed them some chicken?

Episode notes:

“Taking My Ex Back In (for His Own Good),” by Nancy Rommelmann (NYT Modern Love)

I misspoke when I said You Must Remember This is Kat Rosenfield’s second book. It’s her fifth! But the second I’ve read, and which I love love love love love.

Paloma-cam during Kat Rosenfield’s party for No One Will Miss Her

My Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em partner, Sarah Hepola, went on record saying “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” will be the Podcast of the Year

I think we are all coming to realize that late 2020/early 2021 was a time when certain segments of the media and the public-at-large became absolutely possessed with a desire for the blood of their colleagues. I’ve written and talked about Donald G. [I accidentally said “J.”] McNeil Jr. a dozen times. He and Andy Mills, an original creator of the NYT’s “The Daily” as well as its once-crown jewel podcast “Caliphate,” were both ushered out of the Times in February 2021. McNeil now writes on Medium, and Andy is working with Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, including on “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” Good work will out.

And speaking of not canceling people…

Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal update the NYT flame-wars on the most recent episode of Blocked & Reported, “Times Wars, Episode IX: The Normies Strike Back.”

Signs of the tide shifting? Penguin Random House to publish 'classic' Roald Dahl books after censorship criticism, by Theara Coleman (The Week)

“NPR to Cut 10% of Its Staff,” by Katie Roberson (NYT)

Hoisin Chicken

This recipe is very easy to double or triple. Cooking time will depend on the size of the chicken thighs and how many you have in the pan.

* 8 chicken thighs, skin on

* Salt and pepper

* 3/4 cup hoisin sauce, Lee Kum Kee brand preferred, thinned out with 3 - 4 tablespoons soy sauce

Preheat oven to 375F.

Salt and pepper the chicken thighs on both sides and place them, skin side up, on a rack inside your baking pan or sheet. The rack will prevent the thighs from sitting in the cooking juices and becoming less crisp. No problem if you don’t have a rack!

Bake until chicken skin starts to brown, about 25 minutes. Pour and brush on hoisin-soy mixture. Make about another 20 - 25 minutes, until thighs are nicely shellacked.

The drippings from the pan can be poured as-is over rice or, better, heat them in a small saucepan until somewhat reduced and yummier, about 5 minutes.

Serve chicken with sticky rice and a cucumber salad: peeled and seeded cucumbers, sliced and mixed with rice wine vinegar and a large pinch of sugar and a smaller pinch of salt. Add some chopped fresh basil, mint or cilantro if you’re feeling fancy.

Three ways to make sticky rice! (Also called glutinous rice, sushi rice, and sweet rice.) I have not had great luck making sticky rice in the rice cooker, and have never tried the microwave method. Let me know if you do!

Everything is more delicious when you become a paid or free subscriber

Welcome new subscribers to Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em! We are super-stoked that Substack included our little pod as a Featured Publication. Quick lay of the land: Free subscribers get notified whenever we post an episode, and can enjoy 45-60 minutes of a free preview. Paid subscribers get our undying love and the full fig — including pop-culture recommendations and the juiciest bits of the conversation — along with the ability to comment in our active and (may we say) impressive Smoke ‘Em community, plus exclusive access to bonus episodes and solo ventures, like Sarah’s Friday-night “Smoking Diaries” and Nancy’s Sunday morning “Pie Talk.” We have Zoom hangs every first Sunday of the month for paid subscribers, where we enjoy laughter, civic debate, and (occasionally) wigs. Now, as they say, on with the show …

We start with the sad tale of Alec Baldwin and the Rust gun tragedy, then discuss a blockbuster New York Times magazine story on the inner lives and private turmoil of police in Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was killed. It’s a rich, empathic portrait that likely wouldn’t have appeared last year, just like recent stories on the probability of a lab leak in China and the futility of masking. Is culture taking a turn? Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot was ousted the evening after we recorded this episode; it could be a referendum on violent crime.

Here at Smoke ‘Em, we aim to humanize stories that get ripped of context and nuance by an ever-churning media machine and its social-network accomplice. The NYT story — which is, full disclosure, written by one of Sarah’s closest friends, journalist Jamie Thompson — gives us an opportunity to sympathize with another side, and prompts stories about lost love (for Sarah) and Portland chaos (for Nancy).

Plus: Sarah squicks out “moderate MILF” Nancy by telling her about a massage challenge on the latest episode of MILF Manor; the etymology of “cuffing season”; the secret allure of Alabama; blue eye shadow, Y/N? And much more!

Reminder: Zoom hang this Sunday, 3/5, 8pm ET/5pm PT, for paid subscribers. Link will be emailed on the day-of!

By Nancy Rommelmann

I put most of my Portland coverage on my Substack, Make More Pie, where I almost never post audio. Since you all are audiophiles, and on the chance the story is of interest, I am cross-posting the episode here - NR

The streets of Portland may be calmer than during the 108 straight nights of violence in 2020, but are things better? Or are they just as bad but in different ways?

Photographers Chelly (@hunnybadgermom on Twitter) and Michelle (@cocainemichelle) cover the city, including the current rise in homelessness and drug addiction, the uptick in crime, and the exponential shredding of the social fabric. They chronicle the deterioration of downtown, where the vacancy rate is set to hit 40%, and speak with those filling the void. Lifelong Oregonians, they see citizens variously unwilling to see these issues as problems, and fleeing the City of Roses because of them.

How did Portland get to where it is? Have decisions based on presumed compassion - to not prosecute property and some violent crimes; to provide support if not treatment to drug users — led to bad outcomes? And are better days two years away, or two decades?

Episode notes:

Video I took while driving Thomas Chatterton-Williams, February 2022

One Michelle took, January 2023

Rebranded Foster-Powell, Felony Flats was a great neighborhood name

From Measure 110, which decriminalized personal-use amounts of drugs:

“On November 3, 2020, Oregon voters passed Measure 110, approving two shifts in how the state deals with the use of illegal drugs. First, the measure reduces penalties for drug possession, making Oregon the first state to decriminalize the personal possession of illegal drugs. Secondly, the anticipated savings achieved from the current cost of enforcing criminal drug possession penalties will be combined with marijuana sales revenue to fund a new drug addiction treatment and recovery grant program.”

Emphasis mine. Oregon ranks second-highest in rate of substance abuse and 50th in access to treatment. Since the passage of 110, “funding has been slow getting out of the gate and instances of drug abuse and overdose deaths have increased,” and agencies are currently fighting over who gets to siphon off funds earmarked for drug treatment.

“A Murder in Portland,” by Nancy Rommelmann (Washington Examiner Magazine)

“Destruction and Hope in Portland,” which I wrote for Persuasion, featured North Portland resident Kurt Martig who, like Michelle, was shocked at how many people on NextDoor are willing to reimagine the destruction of other people’s property as no big deal. (NB: Martig and his family moved out of Portland last year.)

“I go on Nextdoor.com and I’m seeing things like, ‘People have insurance, things are less important than lives,’” Martig said. “I’m like, guys, you’re hurting innocent bystanders, the business owners are getting hurt, the employees are going to get hurt, the customers, it’s all the way down.”

Others disagreed. Someone at the dog park told Martig he should factor in “the decades and centuries of oppression and understand why people are doing what they’re doing.” A friend told him that the cops were always worse.

“It kind of breaks down to, you can either be one way or the other,” Martig said. “Which is a false choice.”

“Nike Offers to Pay Police to Guard Portland Store From Shoplifters,” by Mike Impelli (Newsweek)

“Portland, Ore., Once Among Safest U.S. Cities, Struggles to Cut Homicide Rate,” by Zusha Elinson (Wall Street Journal)

“We looked at Portland's crime rates. Comparatively, they're not so bad,” by Andy Giegerich (Portland Business Journal)

About that bucket of diarrhea sloshed into a police station…

The journalistas discuss whether “women writer” is a valuable identity and then welcome guest Stephen Elliott (who is many things but not a woman). Once a celebrated author and the founder of The Rumpus, Elliott is better known these days as the man who sued “Shitty Media Men” creator Moira Donegan, a lawsuit he recently settled. Elliott was raised in group homes, and he says his legal action came from a moral obligation to fight a list he characterized as a “false accusation machine.” Donegan pledged never to apologize, a promise she kept, but the eventual settlement ran into the six figures. Elliott opens up about the danger of anonymous accusations, the pain of losing deep friendships, why nobody remembers joining a mob, and the strange freedom that comes with literary exile. As he says, “You can’t be canceled twice.”

In the bonus: Nancy’s AI reads her ChatGPT. The Toronto Raptors basketball team celebrate Women’s History Month — and promise to do better. Chris Rock splits Twitter, lights up Netflix, and what does “misogynoir” mean? Sarah thinks Nancy just started a beef with Chris Rock; Nancy claims they’re all good (weigh in, commenters!). Hot boxes include a documentary on the Sarah Lawrence con man, Matt Welch’s questionable advice for dealing with a bear, and a message for the ladies on this international day in our honor.

Good morning from Chinatown NYC, where there are no avocados in my 42-square foot (including counters and all appliances, listen, it’s like walking a gang plank) kitchen, just a COVID test in-progress and some excellent coffee from Panther Coffee, based out of Miami. The owners, Joel and Leticia Pollock, are friends from the iteration of my life after Los Angeles, we met them in Portland, from whence they decamped for Miami, to open a coffee roasting business.

“Nency, Nency, can you write something for us?” This is Leticia - and here I am badly botching her Brazilian accent - asking back in 2009 that I write to the local licensing bureau explaining what coffee roasting was, the idea being totally foreign and apparently causing officials to think someone was trying to burn down the city. I did; Panther opened in 2010 and now has something like four million locations in Miami (okay, six). You should go.

We are going back further today! To 1990, when my daughter was less than a year old and I saw two young women my age pushing baby strollers past my house on the street that led up to the Hollywood Reservoir. Stay to the end for a sweet addendum.

Two corrections: Charlie’s first band was the Plugz. (The Cruzados were second.) And toward the end I accidentally say “mash the garlic” when of course I mean, mash the avocado. Also: COVID, negative.

Episode notes:

Charlie Quintana, whose first and only job besides as a drummer was delivering flowers for one day in his native El Paso. He was sixteen when the band he formed and The Plugz (video) became successful. Charlie went on to become part of the Cruzados, The Havalinas and other bands, and toured and/or recorded with Bon Dylan, Social Distortion, John Doe, Cracker, Joan Osborne and, if I am not mistaken, the Gin Blossoms. I remember (though I am finding no confirmation of) this because sometimes when Charlie played in Los Angeles he would nab me some tickets, and when the Wallflowers played at the Greek Theater, lead singer Jakob Dylan announced (I am not kidding here), “This goes out to Nancy,” before launching into, “One Headlight.” (I had told Charlie I loved the song.) Maybe I’m wrong! But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Well lookie here, I found some audio of “Meet the Neighbors.” (Or you can read it.)

“Charlie Quintana, drummer for the Plugz and Social Distortion, dies at 56,” by Randy Lewis (Los Angeles Times)

“Taking My Ex Back In (for His Own Good),” by Nancy Rommelmann (New York Times Modern Love)

Guacamole, adapted from Charlie Quintana

* 5 ripe avocados

* Salt

* One-half yellow onion, chopped small

* 2 - 3 jalapenos, chopped small, leave some seeds

* Handful of cilantro, chopped

* Juice of 2 - 3 limes

Mash the avocado and salt. Add onion, jalapeno, cilantro and stir. Squeeze on lime juice. Adjust to taste.

Charlie playing with Bob Dylan on David Letterman 1984

After sustaining “the atom bomb I needed to follow my passion” (her imminent layoff, her husband having an affair), Lisa Schroeder went to cooking school and, in 2000, opened Mother’s Bistro in Portland, Oregon. From day one the place was packed, everyone wanting what Schroder calls “Mother Food” – meatloaf and gravy, chicken & dumplings, and a brunch t…

Welcome to our longest episode yet! The Oscars were surprisingly good this year. We discuss the most moving moments, including the teary comeback of Brendan Fraser, the resilience of Ke Huy Kwan, the art-school weirdos who became the big winners, The Daniels, and why Lady Gaga is the Real Deal. Also discussed: The Carpenters (pro or con?), the tricky business of the American Dream, the argument for cultural appropriation, should Sarah do Ozempic, and how tall is Salma Hayek? Hint: Sarah-size.

In the bonus episode: Mysterious allegations against Michael Irvin prompt Sarah to talk about that time he stabbed his Dallas Cowboys’ teammate in the neck, why it’s hard to write about the dark side of sports, plus the notorious Jerry Jones and the NFL force field. Matt Taibbi testifies before Congress, enrages some journalists, becomes a hero to others. MILF Manor has a quality twist coming our way.

Also: Send us your letters! smokeempodcast@gmail.com. We’ll read the best listener letters and answer salient questions in an upcoming episode.

Everything everywhere all at once (possible oversell) when you become a paid subscriber.

The Oscars were surprisingly good this year. We discuss the most moving moments, including the teary comeback of Brendan Fraser, the resilience of Ke Huy Kwan, the art-school weirdos who became the big winners, The Daniels, and why Lady Gaga is the Real Deal. Also discussed: The Carpenters (pro or con?), the tricky business of the American Dream, the argument for cultural appropriation, should Sarah do Ozempic, and how tall is Salma Hayek? Hint: Sarah-size.

In the bonus episode: Mysterious allegations against Michael Irvin prompt Sarah to talk about that time he stabbed his Dallas Cowboys’ teammate in the neck, why it’s hard to write about the dark side of sports, plus the notorious Jerry Jones and the NFL force field. Matt Taibbi testifies before Congress, enrages some journalists, becomes a hero to others. MILF Manor has a quality twist coming our way.

Nancy and Sarah read letters from listeners. Topics include moral complication, British sitcoms/podcasts, the courage of Stephen Elliott, and a counter-point on Matt Taibbi. Nancy tells us about an LA journo pal who died in 2007, and Sarah wonders whether journalism is ultimately a profession of hucksters and frauds. Along the way, they discuss 12-minute naps, the celebrity they’d most like to, uhh, kiss, how big pigeons can get, who they’d call from jail, where they’d go if they had to disappear (and why Sarah won’t be informed of Nancy’s location, booo). Plus: Martha Mitchell, The Jinx, Sarah’s fake British accent sounds like Monty Python, and Nancy proclaims she’s part of Gen Z — until she learns what Gen Z actually is.

Sarah and Nancy discuss the new documentary, Jussie Smollett: Anatomy of a Hoax, about the fake hate crime of the Empire star who once dubbed himself “the gay Tupac.” The real stars are the Osundairos, two Nigerian brothers and aspiring actors hired for the bizarre stunt. Why did they do it? What was up with that bottle of hot sauce? And is celebrity culture a bigger problem than victim culture?

Also: Stanford Law School has a DEI mess following an appearance by Fifth Circuit court judge Kyle Duncan, and once more, ambition overrides judgment (a running theme). Which moment in the 2015 HBO miniseries The Jinx turned Nancy off entirely? Who is the godfather of true crime, and why is it Skip Hollandsworth? The rise and fall of PornHub; yet another glowing recommendation for Jon Ronson’s oeuvre; a fascinating convo about journalism’s working-class roots; and the mysteries of our Google searches. But don’t forget MILF Manor, because Sarah cannot.

Succession’s final season debuted, and it’s already giving us memes (all hail The Disgusting Brothers). The tragic arc of Logan (Brian Cox) makes the cruel media mogul a tad sympathetic, while suck-ups like Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Tom (Matthew McFayden) have become the show’s most lovable characters. Is Succession the best show on TV? What else could top it?

Rising star Jonathan Majors, of Creed III, was arrested for domestic abuse, but the woman in question recanted her story. Is this justice, or the power of NDAs? The case will be a Rorschach for the peanut gallery, much like Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski trial. The glamorous star/wellness guru took to court this week, and boy, do folks love to hate her. What did the queen of Goop/jade eggs/bone broth ever do to you?

Movie critic A.O. Scott makes a classy exit from the NYT film desk, prompting a discussion of Hollywood’s decline and how anger was turned into clicks. What is the 1999 film that made Scott (and Sarah) burst into tears? Does — debate alert! — There’s Something About Mary hold up? Plus: Boogie Nights, 70s vs. 90s cinema, movies as sacred texts, Lex Fridman, the allure of fashion, what the hell is an “atelier,” and more importantly: Can it really rain frogs from the sky?

Ed. note: A distracting mechanical rumble happens three times during this pod. Best guess? This is Sarah adjusting her microphone, which she will not do again.

This week only, we’re opening our boudoir to (part of) our copious episode notes, to show non-paying subscribers what they’re missing. Have at it, friends.

Episode Notes:

Correction: Kathleen McCormack Durst (left, below) was a medical student and Robert Durst’s first wife. Susan Berman (right, below) was a journalist and author. The management apologizes for not naming them in the last episode.

* Q: How to make every day better by doing one simple thing?

* A:

“How do I listen to episodes on my podcast app?” (Substack)

It will be #HotChicksColdTakes redux when Liz Wolfe sits in during Sarah’s hiatus

My Favorite Murder. Not to Nancy and Sarah’s taste but extremely popular and one of the highest-earning podcasts …

Pie Talk #7: Shortbread

“Boar on the Floor,” a classic scene of villainy from Succession’s second season:

“On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke,” by Michael Schulman (New Yorker)

“Jonathan Majors Arrested in New York After Domestic Dispute,” by Matt Stevens (New York Times)

“Jonathan Majors’ attorney claims woman recanted assault allegations after arrest,” by Christi Carras (Los Angeles Times)

“Jonathan Majors U.S. Army Commercials Pulled After Actor’s Arrest for Alleged Assault,” by J. Kim Murphy (Variety)

“With Few Able and Fewer Willing, U.S. Military Can’t Find Recruits,” by Dave Phillips (NYT)

“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Depp v. Heard,” by Sarah Hepola (Substack)

“Cowboys' Williams And Irvin Investigated,” by Sam Howe Verhovek (NYT)

“Women Recants Rape Tale” (LAT)

“In Cowboy Case, a Flagrant Foul?” by Howard Kurtz (Washington Post)

“Woman who says Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is her father now accuses him of defamation,” by Don Van Natta Jr. (ESPN)

“Mining a Few Thick Desires …” by Luke Burgis (Anti-Mimetic Substack)

“Gwyneth Paltrow ski crash trial: Paltrow testifies that the accident wasn't her fault” (NBC News)

There’s Something About Mary bears up upon repeat viewing for Nancy. Sarah, not so much. What say you, listeners?

Goop Wellness Jade Egg, $66, “final sale,” in case, you know, you were thinking of returning it …

You could buy a jade egg from Goop OR you could take that same money and buy a year’s worth of bonus episodes, Zoom hangs, premium extras, and belly laughs. Now which of these is better for your health?

Good Sunday morning from the Outer Banks. The winds blowing across Ablemarle Sound are nearly always a loud and gigantic presence; you never feel alone. But this morning? All is calm. I can hear only the birds from where I am sitting, at a dining table covered with dozens of documents I’ve numbered 1 - 17 and lettered A - P, in the hopes that such organization and annotation will help me to stitch together what needs to be stitched. That, and/or I can accept the succor offered by Rick Rubin, in conversation with Bari Weiss on her Honestly podcast: to consider, when we are creating work and trying to be perfect, that “everything we make, we’re making as an offering to God. If you’re making it for God, you’re not taking any shortcuts.” It does not matter, or does not matter to me, whether you believe in God. The idea appeals!

I am deeply fortunate to be staying in a 5-bedroom home (it’s just me!) arranged by my friends Laura and Andy, who live next door. Here is the breakfast room:

And here, a bit of that wind. I love it here so much.

As mentioned in the audio, I have been extended this invitation because of a podcast, The Fifth Column to be exact, and the community of people that has grown around them in the past seven (!) years. These people include Laura and Andy, fans of the Fifth (and twenty year subscribers to Reason, where Matt Welch is editor-at-large). Back in 2021, my last scheduled stop of a 5,000-mile road trip was Miami, to see a live Fifth show, drive the guys to Key West, hang out for a few days, then zip home solo to NYC.

I didn’t have a place to stay on the trip’s last leg, and I am not sure how it transpired, but Laura and Andy invited me to stay.with them. Their house is right on the Sound. I fell in love. I realize we often say that about places we visit, but let’s just say, I can see spending time here…

Which I did last night at Laura and Andy’s, including with their friend Kim - ooh did we have a lot to talk about, including the move, happening even in Virginia, where Kim is a juvenile court judge, to get rid of cash bail entirely. Meaning, no matter what you do, stab me in the eye, run over my kid, the judge has the option to let you go free until trial. Having written about a case in which such a practice resulted in murder, I have a problem with repeatedly setting recidivistic violent felons free, a policy on which we will never all agree. Anyway! Also there last night was Andy’s friend Sludge, a name given to him his first week in college after he drank the backwash from the keg bucket (or whatever that’s called; I don’t drink beer). Sludge is a former engineer who now works in healthcare, but what does he love more than anything? BAKING! I have never engaged in a conversation like this, the words were spilling (the margaritas helped), we talked T45 flour and canele pans; he ate some shortbread (Pie Talk #7) I’d brought as a hostess gift, he gave me English muffins he made here because, of course, he travels with his starter.

The last person I spoke baking with was… drumroll please… Alison Roman. Anyone who’s spent a few minutes here knows I am a super-fan of Roman’s, that I bake her blueberry-cornmeal tart compulsively all summer (scroll down), that it was her tweet about induction ranges that convinced me to buy one. That she wound up at my apartment last month was… it was just right. We sat for several hours with a few others, talking media and eating a pie I’d made (of course I made her a pie, and no I still cannot recall what kind it was!), and when everyone else peeled off to the living room, she and I talked crusts, and cookbooks, and whose recipes work (hers, always) and whose sometimes do not. I wish there were a video of Roman making the salted chocolate pudding, but in lieu, let her tell you about her new book:

As mentioned, I once owned more than 100 cookbooks. Alas, these were sold to Powell’s when I left Portland, all that is but five: The Silver Palate Cookbook, which I rarely use and keep, maybe, for sentimental reasons, including a note I wrote in the back when I was a few months pregnant; New York Cookbook by Molly O’Neill, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, in which I’ve tucked the handwritten thank you note Heatter sent me after I gave the book a nice review in Bon Appetit (I mean…), Tartine (are you sensing a dessert theme?), and How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, by Nigella Lawson, whose late-night snacking videos my daughter used to watch obsessively, to the point where she said, “I feel like she’s another mom to me.” More moms, more snacking, what is not to like?

I have not yet made Roman’s a bowl of salted chocolate pudding so cannot tell you what I might change (likely nothing).

I can tell you I learned, because she told me in the book’s “Ingredients” introduction, to not add more salt to her recipes; that she’s already done that, which is good for me to know as I almost always add more salt than called for; your cookies will thank you if you do. I can also tell you, her “Equipment” intro convinced me to get a kitchen scale, look, it’s nine bucks.

Because everyone has been so nice to me, and because the sky is right now pink, this Pie Talk is free for all. May you, as Roman suggests, eat the bowl of chocolate pudding communally with friends, “when the lights are low and the music is loud.” xx

Special guest Matt Welch apologizes “for being a dude, for being taller, and that I’m not from Texas.” All of which is to say he can never replace the lovely Sarah Hepola as co-host. Nevertheless! Matt, editor-at-large at Reason and true-bluest member of the Fifth Column podcast (fight me), joins Nancy to talk about the tantrum Elon Musk threw last week when Substack unrolled a new feature called Notes, which appears to be a lot like Twitter, sans ads and tribal warfare. Musk wants to make Twitter “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” but he more than blinked at the advent of competition, making a bunch of bogus claims and planting his edge-lord boot between the platforms. This led to some very staunch allies, including Twitter Files news-breaker Matt Taibbi, to vamoose and declare Musk “a hostile rival.”

Then it’s on to Portland, where Nancy lived from 2004-2019 and a city where Matt has deep family ties. Both now wonder: Why does the news media in the Rose City hedge on certain subjects? And what up with local scribes declining to appear onstage with Nancy to discuss those hot topics?

Will there be a baseball segment? You bet! Topics include: taxpayer-funded ballfields (boo!); the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum; the World Baseball Classic Ohtani-Trout nail-biter (video in episode notes), never-before-seen fan footage of Yankee Roger Maris breaking the home run record in 1961 (ditto), and Matt’s new Substack, “The View Level,” where he expresses opinions on all-things-baseball, including an iconic film that New Yorker writer Roger Angell declared his least favorite, although ballplayers loved it. “I remember coming out of a screening of that awful film and running into my friend and neighbor Mike Wallace,” Angell wrote. “‘Wasn’t that awful?’ I said, and then noticed he was weeping.”

It’s a vote for baseball, which is to say a vote for America’s old-school favorite past time, when you become a free or paid subscriber.

When Laura McKowen landed at her first AA meeting, she sobbed as she told strangers how she’d placed her daughter in danger one night. Afterward, a woman in the audience approached her. “I’m a mother too, and I want you to know, you can push off from here.”

Push Off From Here became the title of Laura’s second book, following her much-beloved 2020 memoir, We Are the Luckiest. Laura is a friend as well as an inspiration. In addition to her Substack LoveStory, she also runs an online community for folks who want to get ahold of their drinking, called The Luckiest Club.

Laura and I talk about the false binary of “alcoholism,” why 12-step programs might be the biggest pain in the ass to ever save you, whether “love addiction” is a thing, and if substance abuse problems are better understood as a disease or a disorder, or neither But we talk about more than booze: Chasing boys and attention, body-image issues, quieting inner demons. Laura’s book is fundamentally about change — how hard it is, but how worth the struggle. Her story is testimony to the quiet and profound choice of owning your own life.

The Dalai Lama did a very weird thing. Harlan Crow’s memorabilia collection causes a national scandal. Over in Dallas, Sarah drives to Crow’s mansion to confirm that rich people do indeed buy the craziest things, while Nancy jets off to good old Portland and finds: So much! (The phrase “death eaters” is used.) Also: Sober sex, fancy hotels, and which of us is more likely to dance?

In the paid-subscriber bonus: MILF Manor finale! The greatness of Succession’s Matthew McFadyen, the Fox-Dominion lawsuit, and Sarah drops her head on her lap as Nancy uses a word you’re not supposed to use anymore.

ATTENTION: There will there be an IRL Smoke ‘Em meet-up this Sunday, April 23 in NYC, starting at 6pm. Details coming soon for paid subscribers.

Rumor has it there will be dancing. Will Nancy be imbued with grace from her current Barre3 addiction? Will Sarah bust out David Lee Roth moves? Come find out!

Confirm we aren’t ChatGPT bots with a groovy meet-up, but only when you become a paid subscriber.

Every affair has its origin story. At “Smoke Em,” ours began when Sarah wrote an article Nancy appreciated so much she called her on the phone. One year later, they’re together in Nancy’s Chinatown recording studio, teeing up episode 68, including:

* Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon getting the heave-ho on the same day and what this might portend for TV news

* You gonna trust Ben Dreyfuss?

* Blue checkmarks: Who cares?

* “Blocked and Reported” makes a case for why you might care

* Podcast names that (thank God) didn’t make the cut

* Amanda Fortini, awesome writer

* Cokie Roberts gives marriage advice

* Nancy’s fave part of “Smoke” so far (hint: it involves Sarah’s writing!)

* Meanwhile Sarah reminisces about … Pop Rocks?

* Nancy makes kick-ass fake animal noises

* What did we teach each other?

* That time David Sedaris tried to avoid writing in the first person

* Nancy’s least favorite words are …

* FIRE is the new ACLU

* Sarah gives Nancy an anniversary gift, firmly establishing who the wife is in this relationship, and who the husband.

And much more!

We’re sharing this entire episode with our listeners, whether they pay or not, but if you’d like to give us a gift, we have some ideas:

Thank you for coming along with us. Let’s keep going.

* Who wore it best? Jared Leto’s catsuit, Chrissy Teigen’s negligee, Kendell Jenner’s bathing suit and other appropriate/inappropriate attire at the Met Gala and the Washington Correspondents’ Association Dinner

* The decline of BuzzFeed and Vice, and some love for Traffic author/media columnist Ben Smith

* The problem with women’s magazines, including the time Marie Claire inserted something disturbing into Sarah’s, um, opening

* The time Gene Simmons told Nancy he wouldn’t pay her

* Is Robert Kennedy Jr. a rancid narcissist or a troubled addict who deserves sympathy. And by the way, who is he?

* Some Robert De Niro love, and the dress Sarah wants to buy after watching Casino

* A lesson from Succession on undermining someone’s confidence at the last minute

* Sarah’s triumphant appearance on House of Strauss

And so much more!

Don’t forget (what we forgot to mention): This coming Sunday is the First Sunday Zoom! Deets sent to paying subscribers day-of. It’s not too late!

Become a paid subscriber, and find out who will show up to our Zoom hang in a cat suit.

In what might be Nancy’s favorite Smoke ‘Em episode to date, she and Sarah discuss:

* The mass shooting on May 6 in Allen, TX, where Sarah drove the next morning to check out the scene

* The problem of guns and the moral dilemma of violent real-life pictures: Do they numb us to reality or push us toward action?

* The subway killing of Jordan Neely, including attempts to paint his killing as racially motivated and politicians “gravestanding” for political goals

* Sebastian Junger on “Why Men Seek Danger” and maybe why you should, too

* Our coronation correspondent wonders: What up with Michael Strahan’s lisp?

* When you write something controversial and the subjects who once derided you start looking to you for answers

* The best survival movie Sarah has seen in years

* What is the sexiest quality in men?

* Sarah squirms in her chair as Nancy tells a near-death driving story from Panama

* How we deal with geniuses

And much more!

Also: Mail-call! Send us your compliments, criticisms, suggestions, and desires, and we’ll read them on an upcoming episode. smokeempodcast@gmail.com

We believe in reporting that is calm and compassionate and following our curiosity and our guts. Doing this podcast gets easier when you become a paid subscriber

In this exclusive North American interview, Wallis covers the following:

* The nature of false accusations, borderline personality diagnoses, and whether “mutual abuse” exists

* How live-tweeting the UK trial “fed a rapacious audience” that went tribal during the pandemic, and how his tweets got more than 10 million views

* Why “believe women” clashes with a journalist’s mandate to question everything

* Can you ever accurately litigate something that happened behind closed doors?

* How one bad marriage wound up in two different legal judgments

* Is the court of public opinion more important than real courts?

* Curious encounters with American food, including Blondies (“what are they?”) and half-and-half (a big thumbs-down)

* Jimmy Saville, Britain’s #MeToo poster boy

* The best Australian comedy series right now

* Period drama, by which we mean menstruation

* The greatness of Eurovision

* How many inches is Sarah’s integrity? The answer may surprise you!

We hustle out of love, but it never pays the bills. Consider becoming a paid subscriber.

The writer/podcaster/documentarian Jon Ronson joins Nancy and Sarah, and they could not be more excited. Highlights include:

* Jon compliments Sarah, Sarah swoons

* The podcast inspired when Jon’s 11-year-old son asked if he knew PornHub

* Jon’s pronunciation of porn (“pohhhhhn”) and the strange spectacle of adult entertainment, including two-camera orgies and bespoke porn

* The sin of “both-sidesism”

* The hardest story Jon ever had to report

* Why Jon turned down Piers Morgan

* Jon’s new Audible podcast “The Debutante” about the mystery of Carol Howe, who may or may not have been able to prevent the Oklahoma City bombing

* Dial-A-Racist?

* Informants get $25 a day??

* “Things Fell Apart” season two on the way!

* The problem with defining people by small slivers of their lives

* A judge caught masturbating during trial and other untold stories

Go see Jon in London! He’ll be appearing at two events later this month, a May 24 “Things Fell Apart LIVE!” and a non-fiction writing workshop on the 28.

Things fell apart, but we try to put them back together. Why not become a paid subscriber?

Topics covered:

* Which American cities have the highest percentage of people wanking at work, and evidence that we've entered “a golden age of masturbation” for better or worse

* Is Ozempic also an anti-addiction drug? The secondary benefits are compelling

* How is the Martin Amis novel Money like foie gras?

* Amis, who died last week, joins the list of voices we miss: Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens

* How Anna Nicole Smith shape-shifted into the American dream, and what it cost

* The documentary scene about Smith’s life that super-disturbed Nancy

* That time Sarah almost got plastic surgery

* The men in our hot boxes

And much more!

Atlantic writer and essayist extraordinaire Caitlin Flanagan joins Smoke ‘Em to discuss:

* Who saw the ending coming?

* The “failson” that was Kendall, and why does Sarah want to fix him?

* The louche character of Roman, nihilist

* Shiv meets the fate of her mother, her worst fear

* Why the Greg theory of victory was never gonna wash

* A father’s love: The real narrative drive of the show

* “It takes three generations of American life to make a Shakespeare scholar”

* Freud’s repetition compulsion

* The funeral episode and the speech that was Nietzsche meets The Fountainhead

* Shiv and Tom: “A change has come / she’s under my thumb”

* That nasty Jeremy Strong profile in the New Yorker

* Why “privilege” is a shallow metric to talk about a human life

Good Saturday morning, or I guess Sunday for you, from Buena Park, California, where the Knott’s Berry Farm rollercoaster shushes past every few minutes, accompanied by screaming. It’s like being in a Jordan Peele movie!

Being in Los Angeles reminds me of coming to Los Angeles, which reminds me of Tim and what, as a rural Oklahoma boy, he wanted with every meal, an item a New York City ate maybe twice a year, at the holidays, namely: Gravy.

But not this kind!

Cleaning out my mom’s pantry earlier this year I found a can of this and, more as a science experiment, decided to see what might be done with it. After adding salt, pepper, a splash of sherry and some butter, my best solution was to pour the stuff down the drain, really, save yourself the trouble (and the money!) and make homemade, recipe in episode notes.

As I relate in the episode, I met Tim Sampson on the PBS miniseries Roanoak, about the lost colony thereof. I am not sure whether this opening canoe scene is the same one I tell you about, the one where Tim saved me from drowning. But maybe!

I mention here that, after Tim and I fell in love, I followed him out to California. I bought a used station wagon in upstate New York and slept in truck stops on my way west. My first stop was somewhere west of Pittsburgh. It was late, and the all-night diner was open. I sat at the serpentine counter and ordered a grilled cheese and watched the waitress pout coffee for a man in a Carhartt (or similar) jacket and watched them quietly talk, watched as she lingered holding the coffee pot. My impression was that there was intimacy here, maybe not a relationship so much as a conversation picked up each time he stopped in. Or maybe it was just this one time. Maybe this was her gift, her job. I am sure I had some sort of reading material that I ignored as I watched them.

It was not until four years later that I wondered whether I always somehow knew the work I was headed for. By that time, the drive cross-country yielded what’s below.

Episode notes:

“The neighbors at Curson Avenue in West Hollywood were mostly Armenian, including the dozen or so housedress-clad older women in the apartment complex next door, women who would verily ululate at our fence when they realized we were having another get-together for two hundred. On the other side was a two-story complex where my brother’s friend Todd lived. Todd was a plumber who shared an apartment with his mother-in-law, an Armenian widow in black, and his SoCal, short-shorts-wearing wife. At twenty-four, Todd already had two kids, the first born blind. Todd spent every afternoon in our yard smoking pot, and that’s where he was when his wife banged open the screen door and stood on their balcony. 

“TAHD!” she screamed, “I’M PREGNANT AGAIN!” 

“Cool,” Todd squeaked, trying not to exhale. - “Meet the Neighbors,” from Forty Bucks and a Dream, Stories of Los Angeles, by Nancy Rommelmann

Dances With Wolves was a pretty massive cultural event, especially so for Native actors, as many more historical westerns were about to be made and provide employment.

Many of these young actors started down to LA from the rez, some of whom wound up hanging at the home in Hollywood where Tim and I lived with our baby girl.

These included Rodney Grant and the late Steve Reevis. Tantoo Cardinal had appeared in an earlier movie with Tim called War Party.

Will Sampson talking about how all the Indian heroes for kids are dead.

I’ve told the story (scroll down) of how my daughter Tafv wound up playing the part of “Gram” on Reservation Dogs. The below does not include her opening scene with Lily Gladstone:

Tafv went on to set decorate an independent film called Fancy Dance, which also stars Lily, who also stars in another movie you might have heard of.

You see this trailer, and her appearance in Rez Dogs, and it does not need to be explained that her acting is otherworldly.

Writing about Josh Drum and all the other young Native actors who passed through our home and whom I cooked and cooked and happily cooked for, in 1990-1992.

“Taking My Ex Back In (for His Own Good),” by Nancy Rommelmann (New York Times “Modern Love”)

I cannot carve out the video of Tim going “Mmmm!” but it’s here, scroll through. The second to last image is from our daughter’s wedding day, when we knew Tim was terminal.

Okay okay, let’s make some gravy. It’s flexible, just remember the ratios and up them depending on how much you want to make:

2 tablespoons fat or meat drippings, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 CUPS stock or other liquids. (I accidentally said tablespoons in the audio.) You can play with this in any number of ways; add some wine or sherry or fresh-chopped herbs. It’s super-easy and makes dinner festive!

Gravy

Add chicken fat or beef drippings to a frying pad. Heat over medium heat until bubbly. Using a rubberized whisk, add flour. Cook two minutes, stirring constantly, until flour takes on a bit of color. Add about a 1/4 cup of liquid and whisk, Mixture will seize up. Add another 1/4 cup and keep whisking until gravy loosens. Continue adding and whisking until you have a smooth gravy. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Gravy is very flexible! Using cream for up to half your stock in a beef gravy is lovely.

And please, I beg of you, send me your best biscuit recipes xx

Nancy has messy beach hair, and Sarah is expanding her yin, so this week we tackle:

* The meltdown at CNN

* Who is Chris Licht, and no, it’s not L-i-c-k-e-d. (Note: This episode was recorded before Licht resigned on June 7.)

* Can cable news be saved?

* FAIR vs. FIRE, and the push from the center

* Walking is not exercise?!?

* A New York Times arts critic skewers Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso show

* Sarah and Nancy take the over-under on said show’s popularity

* The sleazy 90s bad-good thrill that is HBO’s The Idol

* The line between women’s sexual agency and women’s sexual exploitation

* The joys of local news

And much more!

This week, we tackle:

* Elizabeth Gilbert’s para-social relationship with her fans

* Victimhood as status, online campaigns as feel-good mirage

* Will Sarah defend Elizabeth Gilbert? Yes, she will.

* Our Moderate MILF watched “The Idol,” and she has thoughts!

* Is HBO’s new show a critique of our hyper-sexualized world, or a victim of it?

* Which Britney Spears was the hottest Britney Spears?

* Tom Wolfe gives a wedgie to the world

* The greatness that is Rick Rubin

Good morning from the Delta Lounge at LaGuardia airport. Got here from the pad in Chinatown and through security (thanks, Clear!) in 25 minutes, a record. En route to Oklahoma, where this happened yesterday.

Also in Texas, where I’ll be headed Monday or Tuesday, and eventually on Thursday to Dallas, for an on-stage event with the University of Austin (yes in Dallas, though apparently there are more local digs in the works) with Hepola and Meghan Daum. The event is for students-only but UATX is growing - check them out.

I interrupt the usual Pie Talk by reading an essay as, alas, I have not been making much pie or anything else, the only thing in my refrigerator are condiments and Diet Coke and maybe a half-bottle of wine. At least Cameron Diaz’s has some salad…

So I mention in the episode a short book/manual/pdf thingie written by two genre authors about 15 years ago, about the ways and whys of self-publishing. I thought it was called “Be the Monkey,” and maybe it is, but alas, I cannot find it. What I can find are oodles of other books about self-publishing as it’s gone so mainstream and become for many so lucrative. I mean, hello Colleen Hoover, who knows the trick to success (and practices it better than any of us) is to write write write; there lies the radiance.

I did yesterday, over on Make More Pie, and the response has been gratifying. It’s the piece I read for you here. Go ahead and subscribe over there if you have not already, and thank you.

Onto the deliciousness! Do try this one, which is just in time for zucchini season, which lasts at least a week (though it won’t) and, I am told, freezes beautifully.

Must-Try, Super-Moist Zucchini Bread from Alexandra’s Kitchen

* Scant 2 cups (227 g) flour

* ¾ teaspoon baking powder

* ¾ teaspoon baking soda

* 1 teaspoon cinnamon, optional

* 1 teaspoon kosher salt

* 1 cup light (213 g) brown sugar

* ½ cup (100 g) granulated sugar

* ¾ cup vegetable oil

* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, optional

* 2 eggs, lightly beaten

* 2½ cups grated zucchini (12–16 oz.)

* Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Grease a 8.5 x 4.5-inch loaf pan or a 10 x 5-inch loaf pan if using as much as a pound of zucchini (see notes above). For easy removal, line the pan with a sheet of parchment paper that hangs over the edges. 

* Whisk together first five ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk remaining ingredients except zucchini. Add zucchini to the flour mixture and toss to coat. Add dry to wet and stir till until combined. Pour into pan. Bake until toothpick comes out clean, about 45 minutes to 1 hour. If you have an instant read thermometer, it should register 205ºF or above. (Note: Every oven is different, and different pans conduct heat differently —  be patient with the cooking. It may take 20-30 minutes more. With the longer cooking time, the bread shouldn’t burn, but if you are noticing the bread getting too brown, cover it with foil.)

* Let bread cool for 15 minutes in pan, then transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely before slicing. 

She also offers a step-by step video!

Nancy reports from storm-strewn Tulsa while Sarah reports from the future, where they discuss:

* The worst storm in Tulsa since 2007, not that the news is covering it

* Sarah has a new boyfriend, and he is exactly one day old

* The predictive genius of the movie Her

* Is it cheating if you’re fooling around with an AI?

* Do we have to tell our partners everything?

* The future where Siri becomes personalized, and we all get AI assistants

* The difference between “falling in love” and “being in love”

* A new season of The Bear is coming

* Is Nancy’s Native American accent offensive?

* Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

* Black Mirror is back, baby!

* UATX event with Nancy, Sarah, and Meghan Daum

The hosts behind the podcasts The Unspeakable and Smoke ‘Em were just sitting around being all heterodoxy when lo! The call came from the newly formed University of Austin: Want to come to Dallas to discuss the current state of media, whether feminism has impacted the desire to raise children, how we treat the work of artists whose behaviors we don’t agree with, and to answer student questions along the lines of, for instance, how are you a “feminine woman”? Yes please!

And so Meghan Daum, Sarah, and Nancy took the stage last Thursday at Old Parkland, an eye-popping and glorious campus founded in 1984 and now owned by real estate billionaire Harlan Crow (yes, that Harlan Crow). The conversation was hosted by the Mill Institute, an initiative that works in “educational settings to explore and challenge the entrenched thinking that leads to a breakdown of conversation on contentious issues.” Our moderator was Ilana Redstone, the faculty director of the Mill Institute and associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

See if you can guess which one of us remembered to take pictures!

No paywall because we love you AND because we trust you to become a paid subscriber right… now!

Nancy here. It was 15 minutes before sound check when my daughter and I decided to scoot around Old Parkland for a few minutes. I mean, the place is crazy gorgeous, very grand, we get a few steps out of the building and …

“Is that a bar?” my daughter asks. It is, right there on campus and a stone’s throw from where we will be speaking, and I mean, we do have 15 minutes.

It’s a Negroni for Tavie, a glass of rose for me, which we might have had plenty of time to sip but for the bartender, a guy who had many many stories to tell before making the drinks. Which was fine! He was entertaining and sweet and very funny, and if I had to lay money, I’d say he might also do stand-up (or should). As he went finally to grab the drinks, Tavie looked at who was at the bar with us, maybe 15 people, all dudes, in button-down shirts but not fancy.

“These guys are probably younger than me,” said Tavie, who is 33. Maybe so. Also, we were definitely not in Fort Greene.

“I like preppy guys,” she said. Me too.

We brought our cocktails with us for sound check. The camera guy told me I better keep my legs crossed, because the way the cameras were positioned, below the stage, made it, um …

“It is kind of Sharon Stone,” said Sarah, referring to the then-scandalous scene in Basic Instinct, and you know what? She was right!

Anyway, Stone is not the beautiful girl I referred to above. That would be my girl. Thanks for subscribing!

In this week’s episode:

* Nancy’s pro tips on trying to stitch herself

* The TikTok lady on the plane who claimed “that m***erfucker isn’t real” prompts a talk on the dangers of mixing Ambien and alcohol, the nature of religion, and what technology is doing to our sense of reality

* The New Yorker’s story on penis enlargement surgery makes Nancy yelp

* The REAL reason men want larger penises is…

* What is tetanus anyway?

* Nancy makes squoogy food sounds while talking about The Bear

* Sarah has a new reality show addiction

And much more!

Nancy here. Among the things I learned reading Sophie Scott’s fabulous, super-smart and sexy new book, The Brain: 10 Things You Should Know: The brain itself has no feeling, I could be poking your exposed brain with my fingers (though I wouldn’t!… I don’t think) and you’d be like, “Pass the salt, please.” That everything we experience is the brain’s best guess at what is out there. And that while your body constantly renews itself - the lining of your gut in 2 - 4 days; all your red blood cells in 40 - there is one and only one body part you keep from birth to death.

"I am also interested in the expression of emotion in the voice, especially laughter,” writes Scott, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Institute for Cognitive at Neuroscience at University College in London, who joins me to talk about:

* “The good glue” that is laughter

* Why left-handed people pay attention to the world differently

* “Synaptic exuberance,” or humans’ terrific inventiveness and flexibility in adapting to different environments, all of which relies on our brains’ ability to change

* The endorphin rush that made Scott fall backwards into a bath while attempting to take off her coat

* The reason my brain once created the sound of a hard hat striking cement

And much more!

Intro/outro music: “Sleeper Awake” by Kelly Hogan

On the docket this week:

* Nancy has crisis-of-masculinity fatigue

* Jonah Hill and what do people expect from posting private encounters

* Lost Girls, the Gilgo Beach serial killer, (not) understanding sadism

* The unlikely origin story of Barbie

* Is Barbie “everything the feminist movement was trying to escape from,” as Gloria Steinem said, or is she actually a feminist success story?

* The question of Ken’s bulge

* Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach take on Barbie, because why not?

* George Michael, rats, and a new book Nancy cannot tear herself away from

* Don’t sleep on a new Smoke ‘Em interview series, which launched on Wednesday with Sophie Scott, professor of cognitive neuroscience and author of the new book, The Brain: 10 Things You Should Know, which in addition to being brilliant, is a sexy little size that fits in your purse

* Plus, since “Choose Your Own Adventure” comes up several times in this episode, Nancy thought she’d show you hers:

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We Barbenheimer-ed! And we weren’t the only ones: Sarah found a 20-minute concession line in Dallas, the loo in NYC was out of toilet paper, and the two films took in more than $500 million globally. Still, would America have cared as much had the cinematic landscape not been so scorched-earth? Would Oppenheimer have been better as a mini-series? Did a Ken doll get more screen time than all the women in Oppenheimer’s life combined? We ponder these questions, as well as:

* That time Tony Bennett wrote a hate letter to Sarah in the New York Times

* Nancy has “guy-dar”

* The Oppenheimer supporting actor who captivated Nancy

* The problem with biopics

* Which is scarier: the atom bomb or AI?

* How seriously should we take the gender politics of Barbie?

* How great is Ryan Gosling?

* Did one of us cry during Barbie? Hold on, did both of us?

* X marks the Twitter?

* The Eddie Murphy sketch that Nancy swears she’s never seen (but how?)

* The WWII book that made a bigger impact on Sarah than Oppenheimer

What’s cheaper than a movie with much shorter lines? Becoming a paid subscriber!

“They tried to bury me,” Sinead O’Connor said in the 2022 documentary about her, Nothing Compares. “They didn’t realize I was a seed.” We look back at the life and legacy of Sinead O’Connor, who died this week at the age of 56. Sinead was a firebrand onstage, but her 2021 memoir Rememberings reveals her to be funny and unpretentious and not very interested in fame. She was a protest singer cast in the role of pop star. Topics discussed:

* Ghosts in the piano, writing songs to the rhythm of a rocking chair

* Why do some children of abuse mourn their parents so deeply?

* That time she shaved her head

* A bizarre anecdote about Prince, who wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U”

* How she managed to sneak the Pope moment onto “SNL”

* Four children with four different fathers

* Morrissey gets the last word

* Pivot to Israel: What is going on?

* Kevin Spacey exonerated, but huh, there’s a pattern here

* Graphic novels are cool

* Wait, Lizzo wants that dancer to eat a banana from where? We look at the lawsuit filed against Lizzo by three dancers that includes many wild details, but Sarah is suspicious of that “fat-shaming” accusation

* How did Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey, two alt-journalism pioneers and heroes, get smeared by government lawyers as “child sex traffickers” and have their assets, their reputations and their freedom taken from them? We talk about the fight over Backpage.com, and the tragedy this week of Larkin’s suicide

* Why alternative newsweeklies matter(ed?)

* Joe Biden finally acknowledges his seventh grandchild (sigh of relief)

* Nancy’s got a new nickname

* Sarah’s finds a narrative podcast fix

* The sweetness of the county fair (and piglet races!)

Don’t forget: FIRST SUNDAY ZOOM this Sunday, August 6, 8pm ET / 5pm PT, for paid subscribers. Come hang! We’ll send out a link on the day-of.

Nancy ate six zeppole at the Ulster County Fair yesterday. Become a paid subscriber and she’ll double that!

Up for discussion this week:

* The mysterious “TMFINR” woman on the plane is found, and it turns out she was Sarah’s neighbor!

* Is it wrong to reveal the identity of someone who accidentally became famous?

* Florida school officials fear Romeo and Juliet may make teenagers horny

* Sarah celebrates with some of Shakespeare’s dirtiest lines

* Nancy was a soft-core pornographer???

* A new law has Pornhub shutting down in certain states

* Would you give your driver’s license information to a porn site? Neither would we.

* Billie Eilish says watching porn at 11 destroyed her young mind

* Could online porn ever become unfashionable like teen smoking?

* An outro ode to the late Robbie Robertson

CALL FOR LETTERS! Send any burning questions to smokeempodcast@gmail.com

Shall I compare thee to a paid subscriber? No even better, just BECOME one

Our guest today is the remarkable Jennifer Senior, who won the 2022 Pulitzer for Feature Writing for her Atlantic essay “What Bobby McIlvane Left Behind,” written on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. She’s been a book critic and columnist for the NYT, a staff writer for New York magazine, and her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. She talks with Sarah and Nancy about her past work and her moving recent Atlantic essay about an aunt who was institutionalized, “The Ones We Sent Away.”

* What does a Pulitzer look like, anyway?

* When NYT wanted Jennifer to be “the Terry Gross of the op-ed section”

* The importance of writing without judging your subjects

* The “yearning and searching” part of grief

* “We are always inventing and reinventing the dead”

* The aunt Jennifer didn’t know she had

* When children were sent away “for their own good”

* The hell hole that was Willowbrook

* Arthur Miller and psychologist Erik Erikson both had children in institutions?

* The sinister tale of Rosemary Kennedy

* How much power do we actually have over our children’s development?

“You guys have the best podcast name,” Jen said just after taping. And the best guests! Become a paid subscriber and miss not a one

* Porno chic = a real moment in American culture

* A NYT column introduces a great question about sex, but the advice? zzzzz

* Jesse Singal on sex drive differences between men and women

* That time Sarah’s boyfriend lost his attraction for her

* How often do married people actually have sex?

* The problem with sex statistics: Everyone lies

* Could extramarital sex be a marital aid?

* Why is Nancy glowing?

* New Depp-Heard docu-series is like a greatest-hits record of a six-month trial

* Nerds + fandom in one bang-up (and short) documentary

* Tell us why we should do a live show in your town!

Ethan Strauss, the wunderkind of the House of Strauss, joins groupies fans Sarah and Nancy to talk about …

* Nike ads and the failure of trying to sell what does not resonate

* Sports in an era of “toxic masculinity”

* The atomization of men?

* The podcaster/comedian Ethan and Sarah bonded over

* Ethan’s 2 + 2 magic formula for success

* Why football’s downfall was greatly exaggerated

* Why we love old men in coffee shops and their fart jokes

* Aspirational groupies are a thing

* Ethan’s favorite sports movie

* That time Sarah made Ethan cry

* Why The New Yorker no longer excites us

* The MSNBC anchor in an Under Armour scandal?

And much more!

Don’t forget: First Sunday Zoom hang happens this Sunday, September 3, where we talk Shattered Glass! We’ll send the link to subscribers on the day-of …

The thrill of victory will be yours when you become a paid subscriber

Nancy and Sarah are joined by Chaya Leah Sufrin, one-half of the wonderful “Ask a Jew” podcast, to talk about a subject she’s mostly avoided: Weight and her own body. Chaya Leah recently lost 45 pounds, which coincides with a season when Sarah was shedding weight too, making for one big conversation about diets, discipline, self-care versus self-neglect, and the mental health savior that is exercise. Topics include:

* The forbidden TV show Chaya Leah used to sneak-watch as a young girl

* The secret to weight loss is deciding to do it

* How do you balance body positivity with, umm, reality?

* Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, Scarsdale, etc etc.

* The Jane Fonda workout and the 80s VHS fitness craze

* Vitamin B12 shots, yea or nay?

* Everyone thinks Chaya Leah is on Ozempic (she’s not)

* Nancy and Sarah share a fantasy and it involves … pills?

* Chaya Leah’s crush on Elon Musk

* Did the ADL go to the way of the ACLU?

* Who Nancy wants to play her in the movie

And much more!

It’s September 11, and what does it say that neither of us recalled the date the minute we woke up? And what would it be like to wake up and find you are, perhaps, being made an example of? Danny Masterson, star of That 70s Show, found out last week, as did former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, each receiving what seem to be outsized sentences, in Masterson’s case, 30 years to life for rape, in Tarrio’s 22 years for seditious conspiracy. Were the men’s long sentences affected by their affiliations to Scientology and the Proud Boys, respectively, and a public hunger for a whipping boy? And what do Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have to apologize for? (Hint: nothing.)

Also discussed this episode:

* What it was like for Sarah to be in Bolivia when the towers came down

* An alleged LAPD/Scientology conspiracy seems unlikely …

* But how did Scientologists thwart the victims in the Masterson case (in one case charging $15k for auditing)?

* Thing we really didn’t want to know about Mackenzie Phillips

* How “intentional” was January 6?

* Men are turning away from college: Could the “bro-chure” bring them back?

* The debut of Beauty Bump, a regular tidbit wherein Nancy and Sarah share the products/gizmos/routines that keep them soft and lovely (please do not disabuse us of this notion).

* Gen Xers dig Olivia Rodrigo

Also, tonight, September 11, Nancy will be reading at P & T Knitwear Bookstore, 180 Orchard St, 6:30-8pm. Come by and say hi!

And don’t sleep on heading over to Apple podcasts to rate and review ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️!

We become ever softer and lovelier when you become a paid subscriber

This guy was just sitting in Nancy’s apartment, so we invited him into the studio, and by “guy,” we mean Michael Moynihan, co-host of “The Fifth Column” podcast, former Vice correspondent, and favorite big-brained raconteur. And what did Michael — did we all! — want to talk about but the attempted LA Times takedown of this week’s Bari Weiss debate, a piece so deliberately rancid, we decided to read it aloud, with commentary!

“We should be welcoming debate in all its forms,” says Michael, who referred to the Times’ piece as “the pyromaniac in the straw-man debate.”

NB: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is one of our favorite organizations, and we support it wholeheartedly (and not only because we get to doll up and go their swank events). Of all the snark in Ali’s piece, this one really stinks.

Also:

* Sarah becomes the 85th woman to call Michael Moynihan an asshole

* Why Michael is such a keen student of history and how this relates to WWII and being very cold while walking to school

* Why we’d never recommend journalism school

* Christopher Hitchens’ rule on when to stop listening to someone

* Bill Maher and Drew Barrymore take heat for going back on-air

* A new podcast revisits the 80s New York crime wave

* The greatness of Shane Gillis

This week Nancy and Sarah butter up the prolific and enviably clever journalist/novelist Kat Rosenfield. Kat takes us back to the days of writing $15 posts for MTV News and through the confounding episode of her cancellation in the young-adult fiction world, which led to a stellar career as, among other things, a culture columnist at UnHerd and co-host of the podcast Feminine Chaos. She writes compulsively readable thrillers, too! Also discussed:

* That time Kat was suspended from Twitter for telling someone to …

* The YA lit dogpile that Kat wrote her way out of

* Why she thinks most cancellations are “an overcoat over some personal beef”

* Her obsession with the loss of social trust

* Our conflict between wanting women to have the agency of their own choices and wanting to keep them safe

* Ahhh, Howard Stern memories (and how apparently no woman should be over 120 pounds in the 90s)

* The disappointing reveal of the Lauren Boebert footage

* How to solve a problem like Russell Brand?

* Age of consent and 16 year olds

* The podcaster that makes Kat bite her lips

* New Beauty Mark recommendations to make you smooth, soft and sleepy

And much more!

Nancy is transmitting from the Mojave Desert, Sarah is staring at the same old closet wall, and they’re glad to be reunited to talk about the other pizzagate, this one between the Washington Post and Dave Portnoy, certified douche-bro of Barstool Sports who nonetheless came out the winner in this week’s viral standoff. Other topics discussed:

* The way the desert smalls you

* The cringe factor of Portnoy’s phone call

* The response piece the Washington Post SHOULD have written

* Did Sarah dump a drink on Nora Ephron’s head?

* Is it better to get married, and other unanswerable questions

* What Dr. Joyce Brothers told Nancy

* Single mothers, single women: the discomfort of being someone’s poster child

* Gamify biology? How’s that working out?

* Holy smokes, the cost of egg freezing

* Sonic bad-assery

Nancy and Sarah talk with Marisa Meltzer, author of the new book “Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier.” The pretty-in-pink makeup brand Glossier became a phenomenon after it debuted in 2014, and the book tracks the rise and not-exactly-fall of its founder Emily Weiss — telegenic, driven, an MTV star at 22 — who built a billion-dollar company that exploded on Instagram and defined the effortlessly chic life young women coveted, at least for a time. How did she do it? Weiss has a “WASPier version of chutzpah,” as Meltzer puts it, and she somehow managed to survive the “Girlboss gotcha” purge that ousted other female CEOs.

Also discussed:

* The verboten intimacy of people’s make-up rituals

* “Emily the super intern” on “The Hills”

* How is makeup actually made?

* #girlboss blah blah

* The higher the pedestal, the longer the fall

* The “zest for blood” that was 2020

* Which actor is making Marisa hornier than she’s been in a while?

* Nancy’s energy fields

* Breast milk soap anyone?

Nancy and Sarah dig in to the ever-so-complicated Savior Complex, a new HBO docu-series about a young white missionary in Uganda who may or may not have been responsible for the deaths of young children in her care. Is Renee Bach a murderer, as the activist group No White Saviors insists, or a do-gooder who got in over her head? This is a cautionary tale about missionary zeal on both sides. Also discussed:

* An activist stabbed in random street violence, and some people … celebrate?

* Baseball player Trevor Bauer gets dragged for two years following accusations of violence and sexual assault, but apparently, that was not the whole story

* Why even the mention of false accusations makes the media queasy

* The discomfort of withholding judgment in the outrage media cycle

* When the kids at Sarah’s school went on mission trips and milked her for money

* The particular wrath of former evangelicals turned activists

* America’s mayor on the skids: Rudy Guiliani’s drinking problem

Plus: The sensuous pleasures of an old-fashioned newspaper and, a true-crime bonanza

Good morning Pie Talk listeners. Waking up to the news that Hamas attacked Israel and that the country is now at war. I immediately texted my friend Yael Bar tur, who lives in NYC but is home in Tel Aviv visiting with family, a family I know and love.

I had not yet read anything else, but for her tweet below. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow Yael, who will assuredly be posting updates.

Ten minutes before I checked in with Yael I’d gone through the handwritten recipes I have sitting on top of the microwave, to choose what I would write about today. It would be kugel, because it’s delicious and easy; because October is a month of Jewish holidays, and because I had a funny story about the first time I ate it and got the recipe. Also, the last time I made one, it was for a Passover this spring hosted by Yael and her parents. Today, I told Yael I was sending all love and courage and faith, and that overnighting cookies seemed beside the point but…

“Can I have the cookies when I get back?” she wrote.

Of course, I told her, that today’s Pie Talk would be kugel, at which she responded with today’s subtitle: “Pies for peace!”

Episode notes and recipe:

The Bad Mother: A Novel, by Nancy Rommelmann

Michael Moynihan, yours truly, Yael Bar-Tur and Matt Welch at Israel Supreme Court, 2022

The light in Israel, plus Michael shows appreciation for the Israeli military

Reporting from Israel 2022:

* T-1: Israel

* The Rabbi Offers His Broccoli

* 15 Meals in 36 Hours

* The Olive Trees

* Hebron

* You Don’t Know Anything

* Yad Vashem

Bill Schulz reads at Yael’s family Passover in NYC, 2023

American Playhouse’s Roanoak, on which I met my daughter’s dad. We built those villages in swampland, weathered one hurricane and 10,000 chigger bites; I crashed a truck into a tree and got chased up a different tree by a wild boar. Two marriages ended, one baby was born, and I fell in love so hard I thought a train had fallen on me. Tim is not in any of the scenes of this clip (which I’ve never before seen), but during the opening scene (or one like it), he and two other guys in the longboat fished me out of the river when my over-the-shoulder hip-waders filled up and pulled me under. At 2:43 you can see, rear right carrying the wounded man, the man who would become my daughter’s godfather, and at 3:03, Tim’s dad and my daughter’s grandfather Will comes in, as the Chief, always cast as the Chief, both because that’s where Natives in film were back in 1985, and also, maybe, because he was 6’7”.

Just after Tavie’s baptism, with her two non-Catholic godmothers

I misspoke when I said, the priest pressed $220 into my dad’s hand. It was of course the other way around!

Alison Segan’s Mother’s Kugel

* 1 12-ounce bag egg noodles

* 8 ounces cream cheese, softened

* 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter softened, plus more for buttering the pan

* 1 cup milk

* 4 eggs

* 1/2 cup white sugar

* 1 teaspoon vanilla

* 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

* 1/2 cup white raisins

* Frosted Flakes cereal

Boil noodles in boiling salted water until just cooked. While noodles are cooking, with a hand-mixer or standing mixer, blend the cream cheese and butter. Add all remaining ingredients (except noodles and Frosted Flakes) and blend until smooth. Combined drained noodles and cream cheese mixture, toss, and pour into an 8 x 12 (or so) buttered dish. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 350F. Unwrap noodles, sprinkle with a generous amount of Frosted Flakes, and bake for 1 hour, 15 minutes. Serve warm or cold.

Our guest is Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and author of the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind, which he wrote with Ricki Schlott. The book is a “walk down trauma lane” of the past several years, covering the feeding frenzy to go after people with views other than your own — and how we get out of it. Greg can chart when this mess began, late 2013 and 2014. But why? And what monster has been created now? (One answer might be found in a bunch of college groups publicly supporting the mass murder of civilians in Israel.) Also discussed:

* People who say cancel culture isn’t real

* What is the actual scope of the problem?

* “The horrible phenomena of Tumblr, out of which all terrible mental health ideas seem to have arisen…”

* Yale University has one administrator for every four students. “That’s the same ratio the government recommends for childcare of infants under twelve months.”

* What is the worst college for free speech?

* The link between wealth and performative justice

* People telling Greg, “We do not hire elite college graduates anymore…”

* Matt Welch gets name-checked as “an autodidact”!

* Steven Pinker, too big to cancel?

* Book banning and other problems with the right

* Why you want to send your kid to U of Chicago and UVA

* What Taylor Swift and the Pope have in common

Nancy and Sarah chat with the charming Bridget Phetasy, host of the podcast Walk-Ins Welcome and the YouTube show Dumpster Fire, her weekly take on the news-and-nonsense cycle. Bridget is ten years sober (tomorrow!), and we revisit her reckless youth with a discussion of her essay, “I Regret Being a Slut.” She also explains how motherhood snuck up in her 40s after she’d come to peace with not having kids. Also discussed:

* What age does the good-time van start to break down?

* The days when Sarah’s first morning question was, “Do I recognize this ceiling?”

* Bridget asks of her daughter, “I have to serve you three meals a day for how long?”

* Why Nancy is the Jane Goodall of sexual encounters

* Bridget coins a term, “wasted womb syndrome,” and no one is happy about it

* On second thought, let’s not smash the patriarchy

* Why do celebrities go from making movies to making tequila? Hint: it’s the money

* We don’t want to close our eyes to the horrors in Israel and Gaza, but when does bearing witness tilt over into rubbernecking?

* Are buffaloes kind of sexy?

* The most underrated season of The Wire

And much more!

Nancy and Sarah are here to talk about beauty and wonder and love and heartbreak, from a wave of Natives in film to a new twist on an old reality show. But first, they discuss the utter failure of media outlets covering the missile strike on a Gaza hospital, most likely a misfire from a Palestinian group that was initially reported as an Israeli rocket because, well, Hamas said so. We hope the journalistic fails of the past week prove a corrective, as there are grave consequences to misreporting when the situation is this hot.

Onto beauty and wonder! Namely the release of Killers of the Flower Moon, the three-plus-hour Scorsese adaption of David Grann’s 2017 book, which Sarah and Nancy saw on opening day. Discussed:

* How Scorsese changed the screenplay after meeting with Osage members

* The greatness of Leo and the luminosity of Lily

* We will not spoil the movie, but we will say: It has big twists!

* That time Charlton Heston played Geronimo, and other historical absurdities

* Why “The Bachelor” franchise is the hunger games of love

* Is “The Golden Bachelor” the most transgressive of the “Bachelor” shows?

* What films Sarah has still not seen, for god’s sake!?

Plus, a memoir on the Cultural Revolution, revisiting a journalism fraud - and Nancy and Sarah discover they have the same crush! Photo reveal in final episode note.

An air raid siren went off the moment we sat down to interview Yael Bar Tur. “Give me five minutes,” said the co-host of the “Ask a Jew” podcast. “I have to go to the bomb shelter.” An Israeli who lives in New York City, Yael was visiting her family in Tel Aviv when Hamas massacred 1400 Israelis and kidnapped 220 others on October 7. She has so far decided to stay, documenting the conflict and terror on her Twitter feed, which has become a must-read of incredible human drama and, sometimes, the world’s horrifying response to that. “The thing about antisemitism is, there’s something for everyone,” she said. She also talks about:

* The eerie quiet of Tel Aviv

* Are Israelis united? You bet. Do they agree politically? Not so much.

* The Twitter story on Yael’s feed that brought Nancy and Sarah to tears

* WTF with people tearing down Israeli hostage posters?

* BDS should not be confused with BTS, the K-Pop band

* Viet Nguyen, an Open Letter supporting Palestine, and literary chaos at 92NY

* Should colleges even make public statements of political support?

* The celebrity who likes every one of Yael’s tweets

* Papa Joe, the most popular man in Israel

Also: Thomas Sowell is suddenly everywhere, a must-listen podcast, and a documentary that dares to humanize insurrectionists

This week has left many of us on a razor’s edge, watching posters of the Israeli kidnapped torn down,* protesters banging on the glass of Cooper Union’s library while Jewish students hide, and all variety of, “Did someone really say that”!? A “Flood Brooklyn for Gaza” march takes place tomorrow, the Sabbath, in a heavily Jewish section of Brooklyn (and if you think the “flood” allusion is arbitrary, think again); meanwhile, Israeli air strikes have hit more than 7000 targets in Gaza, killing thousands of Palestinians, and the ground invasion is only just starting. Things are tense, and we are worried, but mostly, we want to be prepared.

And to speak to/hear from you this week about:

* The chaos at Cooper Union

* The campus fight to be seen as “oppressed”

* Someone actually said, “The Holocaust wasn’t special”

* Israel has lost the battle for TikTok

* Schlubs dressed as Nazis at the Torchy’s Tacos in Fort Worth, Texas

* Radicalism without consequences

* Geopolitical tragedies as opportunities to advance your personal brand

* Has Hasan Minhaj redeemed himself?

Our guest is the “Long Island-accented, turbocharged” Mike Pesca, host of The Gist. We begin — and end! — with fabu tech failure, but along the way, we talk to the intrepid podcaster about getting thrown on the funeral pyre at Slate, why he can’t stand slow talkers, Israel-Hamas press coverage and culture clashes, and his high metabolism for information. Also discussed:

* Pesca’s podcast listening hack

* When is a testicle like avocado toast?

* The Jeopardy! question that cost Pesca the championship

* How NYT journalist Donald McNeil Jr. got fired and won a Pulitzer the same year

* Which publications are failing in their coverage of Israel-Hamas, and which might be getting better?

* Is there any proper context for the tweet, “How great you are Hitler”?

* Pesca suggests new Smoke ‘Em segment: “Kneejerk Nancy”

* Is “from the river to the sea” the new “All Lives Matter”?

* Wiccan priestesses at NPR? Bring ‘em on

* Is Sarah crazy to think Joe Biden’s kinda rockin’ it these days?

* Can anyone beat Donald Trump?

* Our “I ❤️ Mike Pesca” tattoos will be inked soon …

* Let’s not over-catastrophize about the world right now

* Sarah remembers Matthew Perry

Plus a cavalcade of hotboxes, and even Sarah is following the World Series.

It’s our 100th episode! Time for a pop quiz, then on to the following:

* HBO president caught secretly striking back against critics

* But is working on HBO’s The Idol grounds for any lawsuit?

* Love for Alan Sepinwall, fastest TV critic in the West

* Behind the scenes at Tucker Carlson’s exit from FOX

* The “c-word”

* “She said Tucker Carlson is a messenger from God, and he said nope.”

* The word Nancy cannot stand, and the phrase that makes Sarah blush

* Can The Real Housewives ever be a moral enterprise?

* How RHONY’s Leah McSweeney became “Hurricane Leah” and the lawsuit she recently filed

* Drinking and reality TV

* “If you go to a whorehouse, you’re gonna get fucked”

* Wild, hopeful, morally fraught stuff in the fertility industry

* A baby made with the DNA of three people: Wait, what/how?

* We cannot countenance an image of the Fleshlight, but if you must

Plus, a “pretend-ian” scandal and a smoking-hot sports star in the hot box

After an update about how mice might have gotten into Nancy’s apartment (human trafficking, anyone?), she and Sarah discuss the 44 minutes of footage Nancy recently saw at a screening in New York, “Bearing Witness to the October 7th Massacre.” Nancy wrote about it in a recent essay, “This is Terror,” and they talk about the carnage, sorrow, and soul murder that is war.

Protests are the gift of a free society. But also: Annoying! We talk about three recent stories on the explosion of activism over the Israel-Hamas war, and when “building a better world tomorrow” ends up tearing apart the community today.

* Nancy stans Dave Barry; Sarah needs convincing

* Humanity is hard. Protesting is easy.

* Why has the 21st century seen a threefold increase in protests?

* What would you do if your kid tore down posters?

* “We need to stop acting like these are serious people.”

* The moral rot of anti-Semitism

* Political cartooning as latest culture war battlefield

* Ayaan Hirsi Ali is down with Jesus

* Do you feel comfortable in church?

* A Beach Boys confession

* We ❤️ Jeff Tweedy

Where else are you going to hear about Home Goods, Philip Roth, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Rammstein in one convo? Plus a listener request (in episode notes), and what’s in our hot boxes!

Good morning! There are five days to Thanksgiving and a lot of us are already making shopping lists, if as yet for me only in my head. I love grocery shopping, a love I passed down to my daughter, and somewhere on the interwebs is a short video of her surfing her shopping cart through Fred Meyer market in Portland saying, “Wheeeee!” I love New York City, but the grocery shopping experience after nearly 30 years of well-lit, wide-aisled west coast supermarkets? Abysmal.

As I mention in the audio, my plans this year got a little kiboshed. But! From adversity, opportunity, and I’ll now go to two Thanksgivings, one day-of event with a lot of people I don’t know and to whom I will get to feed pie, and a smaller one with family, for which I am not going go the whole 9 yards, there will be only 5 or 7 of us, a number likely to swell. We will not have turkey at this one but a roast goose, because one of the guests ate it once 30 years in Prague and remembers it fondly. I have never roasted a good but did watch some YouTubes and scanned for recipes and feel pretty confident, though will be very happy for your tips, and especially for a not-too-sweet glaze with which to baste the bird. I like sweet-and-meat but others do not so, hit me up.

I am also going to be making a change to a standard recipe, if not a change this horrific. As I mentioned yesterday on the Twitter* machine, the correct number of eggs in mac-and-cheese is zero.

What a I changing? The stuffing. Let me be clear: THIS WOULD NEVER BE THE CASE WERE I MAKING THE TURKEY. Stuffing, the kind I learned from my mom, is my favorite food, and while this means I should make it more than once a year, maybe just to stick in a chicken, I do not. A lack of at-hand giblets (which I knew meant the whole mess of innards you find in the bird; in the audio I meant gizzards, which I think is probably a fake word but anyway) might contribute, but mainly it’s because to my mind you need to make vat of stuffing because it’s so delicious and you want to feed it to many people and, if you are me, you need eat a great deal of it for yourself, before it goes into the turkey, and while you’re stuffing the turkey, and at the dinner (three helpings), and cold from the fridge. I already look forward to 2024’s repast.

This year, along with the goose - and the potatoes that will be roasted in the goose fat - I will try a new stuffing recipe, one from my girl Alison Roman. As mentioned in the audio, I am already making changes to the recipe in my head. Here she is making it.

Food is love (say it with me), and we’ve had a lot of both in this apartment these past few weeks, dinner parties and late-night hangs, including a few nights ago with a lot of the Reason mag peeps as well as the Fifth guys and their most recent guest, the awesome, funny, super-cute, whip-smart Mary Katherine Ham.

Then two two nights ago - I am typing this at 8:39am on Sunday, hoping to get this up in time! - we welcomed our beloved Yael Bar Tur back from Israel. She was on the pod last month and in our hearts always.

We ate all the food and drank all the wine and sang some songs and gave each other shirts we picked up in war zones. These friends, this life, I love it so much.

A few links mentioned in the audio:

“Sam Harris: The Bright Line Between Good and Evil,” Honestly podcast

And the recipe! This, too, I love to much, and am sending all buttery love to you and yours xx

Thanksgiving Stuffing

* 3 loaves white bread, supermarket variety, not too dense. I am liking potato bread these days.

* 2 good-sized yellow onions, small dice

* 6-8 stalks celery, small dice

* 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter

* salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, thyme if you have it

* 6 - 8 cups turkey stock, plus the giblets you’ve simmered in the stock, chopped

A day or two before you plan to make the stuffing, let bread slices dry out a bit. Turn then a few times so somewhat evenly dried but don’t stress. Once semi-dry, cut bread into cubes.

In a large heavy-bottomed pot, melt the butter. Add onions and celery and cook, stirring frequently, until translucent and onions are starting to brown just a bit. Add your chopped giblets.

(You are of course welcome to add the meat you chop off the turkey neck. I eat the neck, sending all squeamish people running from the room.)

Unless your pot is massive, remove half of the onion mix; you’ll be making the stuffing in two batches.

Add half your cubed bread to onion-mix, stir to start coating the bread, sprinkling with salt, pepper, poultry seasoning and some thyme. Stir stir. Now start adding your stock, a cup at a time, until stuffing is moist but not wet.

Stuff your turkey - or not! Any that does not fit in the bird, and there will be plenty, you can put in a buttered dish, maybe drizzle a little melted butter, and bake at a 350F oven until crisp on top.

*And some outro love from the original X (man). Would that I could, I would feed him a wheelbarrow of stuffing and it would not give him half the joy he’s given me. Happy Thanksgiving John Doe!

The Fall of Minneapolis is a crowd-funded documentary that raises serious questions about the George Floyd trial. Was officer Derek Chauvin actually following protocol? Why didn’t jurors see critical body cam footage? And what was going on with that autopsy? Buuuut the documentary comes from a Minnesota group with right-wing politics, so you likely won’t read much about it outside Fox News. Too bad, because one of the biggest news stories of the decade deserves real scrutiny. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the documentary, plus:

* Minneapolis as special source of white guilt

* Revolution is not getting with the season of gratitude

* When evidence doesn’t fit a public narrative

* Are protests getting more violent, or is Nancy cherry-picking?

* Did the sexual revolution mostly serve men?

* Attachment-free sex is not a good end point

* A new beauty box (or, as Sarah calls it, “dirty hair ahead”)

* Albert Brooks (and Tom Arnold?) love

* An outro song that captures what it means to make a place at the table, to know that “everyone's a little broken, and everyone belongs.”

And much more!

Sarah and Nancy are together in New York, along with a pink tree and some confusing Christmas lyrics. In this season of love and war, we discuss:

* Which holiday standard will make us millions?

* What is “parse and brown” and what does it have to do with Christmas?

* What was Nancy’s Not Finest Hour and does it involve yelling at protestors on the Manhattan Bridge?

* Macy’s Day Parade protesters apply Super Glue directly to their hands

* Your hosts decline to “pick a lane”

* Susan Sarandon says a dumb thing, gets the boot

* Matti Friedman educates us

* Is Nancy the last person to realize her unconventional reporting from Portland might have impacted her career?

* The steep decline of family dining and the rise of solo-everything

* The younger the woman, the more they report “disrespect from the opposite sex”

* Who’s lonelier: Boomers or Gen Z?

* Sarah mixes up Leonard Cohen and Leonard Bernstein

* Nancy mixes up the actress from The Gilded Age with the actress from Deadwood

Plus, delightful new hot boxes, and a sultry money pitch you won’t want to miss.

Amid the protests that have shut down more than one New York bridge, we take time to celebrate our rizz, explain why the term “tipflation” won’t catch on, and invent an entirely new word. Also on tap:

* Word of the year

* What happens when the right to free speech clashes with your right to get to work?

* Philadelphia pro-Palestinian protest gets ugly

* Columbia School for Social Workers are not sending their best

* The ambient anger over tipping

* Europe brings tipping to the New World, leaves it behind like trash

* That time Nancy bribed the guy performing her daughters’ baptism

* The lameness of Hot Topic

* Nancy kneejerks! Sarah slut shames (but only because she loves sluts)!

* Is The Golden Bachelor sadistic?

* Has a man ever lied and told you he loved you?

* “Who’s the boss?! Who’s the boss?!”

* Buffaloes are sexy

Sarah and Nancy dive into that mess of a Congressional hearing on college antisemitism. Did the three presidents — Claudine Gay from Harvard, Liz Magill from University of Pennsylvania, Sally Kornbluth from MIT — step up to the moment? They did not. But were the questions unfairly stacked? Did they make fair points about “context”? Is part of living in a diverse society the privilege — yes, privilege — of being offended? We answer these questions, as well as:

* Did the Swiss Family Robinson live in a tree?

* Is “It’s a Small World” the most annoying song ever?

* Are the ideological chickens coming home to roost on college campuses?

* Can Nancy successfully include two audio clips in one episode?

* Why are so many women leading Ivy League universities?

* What’s going on in the field of social work?

* Which cat made CAT HISTORY this week?

* What literary tragedy is Sarah currently obsessed with?

And much more, including darkness and life lessons in our hot boxes and a banger of an outro by some lady with a cat.

Writers write. And sometimes talk shop! This week, Sarah and Nancy chat with one of the best: Kerry Howley, essayist extraordinaire and author of the superlative and unclassifiable Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, a book about “the deep state,” according to its cover, though Kerry admits, “I don’t know what this book is about.” Bottoms Up is unsettling, quietly profound, introducing us to whistleblowers like Reality Winner (yes, her real name) and how technology has us flattened us into data that can be harvested to create whatever story the Powers That Be want to tell. Good times! Also discussed:

* Is Monster energy drink a tool of the devil?

* Why Kerry thought the subject of her book sounded boring, too

* Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning are not the heart of this book

* Reality Winner is a hell of a character

* The Intercept’s fateful mistakes

* Do you have to interview a person to profile them?

* When the “compulsion to help” leads to dangerous places

* Why a bad memory is the key to good writing

* Empathy for Britney Spears’ father Jamie

* Profiles on Larry Nassar, whistleblower Daniel Hale

* The argument for reading celebrity memoirs

* We love a journalism assignment!

* The first pages of Moby Dick are … funny?

* The writers we turn to for inspiration

* Kerry and Nancy each have a daughter named Tavi

* Why writing is like a possession

We interview Sherman Alexie, Native American author and top-tier Substacker, about Pretendians like Sasheen Littlefeather and Buffy Sainte-Marie, who steal trauma for their own status. We also discuss:

* The ruse of the word “indigenous”

* How inclusivity plays out in a younger generation of “defendians”

* “I grew up in hell”: hard life on the rez

* The genetic link of blackout drinking

* You wake up naked on the top of a hill, what do you do?

* You should be so lucky to have an ancestor named Thunder Meatflayer

* Will the current surge in Indian film and TV creation continue?

* The “shocking and amazing” classic novel Sherman just re-read

* Scorsese Scorsese Scorsese

We’ve reached that joyous time of year when Sarah listens to the 22-episode podcast about the 2020 Harvey Weinstein trial, an annual tradition. Nancy takes a break from baking to tell us about peeing in the woods and the giant stuffed hedgehog (maybe? see photo below) she just (kinda) wrapped. But the centerpiece of our celebration is sex scandal. First, a discussion of the Weinstein trial, because even three years later, it’s hard to get your head around it. Then we’re on to a veritable holiday calendar of misbehavior, starting with January poster boy Paul Haggis and ending with December’s … listen to find out!

Good New Near’s Eve morning! I did not make that cake, a glacage miroir brilliant au chocolat but if you read French, have at!

My better half Sarah Hepola is expecting me on-air within the hour so quick notes today… I was about to write, and then remembered what the gypsy lady told me…

The voice of Ken Layne is something everyone should have in their life in 2024.

I used to write fiction (and maybe there’s one more novel in me, the beginnings of which, genealogy charts and architecture books and 150 handwritten pages, are on a shelf behind me...) Become a subscriber and I’ll send you a book!

The piece I read, “Three Sets of Keys,” is over on Make More Pie, where I hope to plunk a lot of reporting - written, audio and video - while in Israel. Go subscribe!

The essay by Benjy I referenced. Gosh he can write.

The 6-inch springform pan you will need if you decide to make yourself and your loved one(s) a sexy little cake.

Petit Gateau au Chocolat, adapted from Maida Heatter

* 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate

* 1/2 cup sugar, divided

* 6 T. (3/4 stick) butter

* 2 T. flour, plus flour for dusting pan

* 2 eggs, separated

* Pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter a 6-inch springform pan, line it with parchment paper, butter that and dust with flour, shaking out any excess. (You can use pan spray instead of butter; I won’t tell.)

Melt chocolate over low heat or in the microwave. Allow to cool several minutes. Stir in the butter, all but 2 T. of sugar, the flour, sugar, salt and then egg yolks, one at a time.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with the remaining 2 T. sugar until they form soft peaks. Fold whites into chocolate mixture, then turn into prepared pan.

Bake 30 minutes. The cake will look soft. That’s fine. Cool on a rack until it’s warm, remove springform ring and invert cake onto a serving plate. If you are being fancy - and why not? It’s New Year’s Eve - place four strips of wax paper around the edges of the cake to catch the icing drips.

If you want a mirror like glaze: In a small saucepan, melt three ounces bittersweet chocolate with 2 T. sugar and 2 T. water. Whisk in 2. T butter until smooth. Allow to cool, stirring occasionally, about 30 minutes, then pour slowly over the cake. Remove the wax paper and, look how pretty!

You can also ice with ganache, which is ridiculously easy to make, just chopped chocolate and heavy cream. I will let Sally of Sally’s Baking Addiction - one of my two favorite baking sites, the other is Smitten Kitchen - show you how easy.

Happy New Year everyone, I love you all. This post is free today so feel free to share xx

Whose DNA does Sarah want to roll around in? What does “uncanny valley” mean anyway? Whose music did Sarah find “a beautiful Frankenstein amalgam”? What podcast helps us move out of the wood-chipper of the culture wars? Is 2023’s worst political story also its best? Plus, hot guys, SO many hot guys, and Sarah reveals the good thing about comedy!

Nancy and Sarah welcome their first-ever repeat guest, Kat Rosenfield, and the result is a hot and steamy conversation about beauty standards, fatphobia, plastic surgery, sexual awakenings (and creep-outs). Along the way we discuss:

* What rhymes with “potsticker” AND is a symbol of the worst of mankind?

* The time Sarah was doxxed by the White Pages

* Is “fat postivity” a fantasy? If so, is it a good one?

* “Him-pathy”

* Growing up under the lash of Kate Moss

* Is Martha Stewart going for for “Russian Oligarch’s Fourth Wife”?

* Madonna going for … something

* Zee French, zey ahh diffuh-runt

* Sarah does TWO Monty Python accents (both lousy)

* The Jeffrey Epstein “molestation Ponzi scheme”

* You can at least buy us a drink first, Rob Henderson!

* Who wants to sit in the melty lap of Stephen Hawking?

* Sarah tries to get cancelled, again!

* What is society supposed to do with dirty old drunk men? (Gerard Depardieu edition)

* We will never get a Honey Baked Ham sponsorship

And much more!

The Bill Ackman-Neri Oxman-Claudine Gay-whoever else storm continues to rage. How does anyone get work done? We sort through the madness, and along the way:

* Sarah gets a curious invitation …

* Nancy is the “Epstein Island” of the Illuminati

* Did Sinead die of a broken heart?

* Bill Ackman’s tweets are longer than the Bible

* How is Claudine Gay’s op-ed like Amber Heard’s?

* What constitutes cheating, and should the rules be clarified?

* The ethics of stealing from Tom Waits

* The new Atlantic writer who’s captured our hearts

* Who is Jo Koy, and why do we hate him?

* The Golden Globes monologue wasn’t that bad

* Margot Robbie and Jennifer Lopez in pink gowns: Who wore it best?

* Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein ad ha-cha-cha

* Succession, Succession, suhk-sesh-SHON!!!

* Wait, who kissed Sarah?

Our MLK Day episode kicks off with stories about the chain-smoking, philandering civil rights leader who is also one of the founding fathers of the American Dream. We discuss the terrific new movie American Fiction, and somehow segue to a discussion about Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes. Which one of us will be guilty of “contempt prior to investigation”? Take a guess. Also discussed:

* How is Sarah like Ron DeSantis?

* Nancy’s creepy close encounter with an Amazon delivery guy

* Sarah tippy-toes to the razor’s edge of being a Crazy Cat Lady

* MLK Jr. had a letter opener lodged where?

* When Gawker writers become movie-makers …

* American Fiction is the first great woke satire

* The hotness of Issa Rae

* Love for Push by Sapphire and Precious, the movie it became

* Sterling K. Brown is the best part of The People vs. OJ Simpson

* Why Nancy called the TV station during the slow-speed OJ chase

* OMG the new Truman Capote vs. the Swans television show OMG

* What is “Taliban glamping”?

Plus a plane crash in the Andes, a gripping new French film, and Sarah and Nancy discover who is the wife in this relationship and who the husband, the litmus test being …

With Nancy off in Israel, Sarah sits down with Matt Welch, crackerjack co-host of The Fifth Column — not to be confused with Matt Walsh, conservative commentator, or Matthew Welch, everyone’s favorite bagpiper. Matt is editor-at-large at Reason, whatever that means, and a long-time journalist, musician, and libertarian, a term Sarah tries to pin down (good luck with that). Also discussed:

* Matt’s blood-boiling anger for bagpipes and pan flutes

* That time during the pandemic when we all lost our minds

* 1968 or 2020: Who wore it best?

* Did you know Matt spent time in Czechoslovakia?

* Media integrity: Going, going, gone

* Why Matt doesn’t own a gun

* Is it embarrassing to still love Hunter S. Thompson?

* Trade secrets of appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show

* Q: “Does Bill Maher still date exclusively black women?”

* Public schools might be fucked

* Steel-manning the case against Israel

* The question about Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan Matt refuses to answer

* Who would win in a fist-fight between Fifth Column co-hosts?

* Who would win in a fist-fight between Sarah and Nancy?

* Why “One in a Million” by Guns N Roses is a work of art

* Who will be president in 2024?

Nancy and Sarah get down (!) to the serious business of ethical non-monogamy, thanks to the cover story in this week’s New York magazine. Is polyamory really a trend? Does opening your marriage ever work? Sarah finds this subject (professionally) fascinating; Nancy thinks it all ends in tears and grubbiness somewhere in Park Slope. Also discussed:

* 2024: The Year of More Punching

* Axl Rose was once an Indiana kid named William Bruce Rose

* Nancy’s squeaky little voice vs. Nancy’s va-va-voom photos

* Nancy’s reasonable objections to sex writing

* Sarah’s reasonable arguments FOR sex writing

* Stats, stats, we need stats

* New lingo alert! “comet partner,” “metamour,” “one-penis policy”

* Obviously Burning Man is involved

* We design our perfect ethical polycules

* Amazon employees are mad about moving to Austin?

* Love for Israel during hard times

Plus, the many haircuts of Camille Paglia, our new Fight Club, and how a persimmon is like a penis.

The Oscar nominations dropped, and folks are MAD. Despite breaking box-office records, Barbie failed to get the nod for Best Director or Best Actress. Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, foiled again! As our friend Ben Dreyfuss tweeted: “The Other Genocide: The Oscars Treatment of White Women.” We talk about who really got snubbed, and why some people will never stop complaining about the treatment of women. Also:

* Sarah has a scary stalker (no really)

* More polyamory talk? We got you!

* Did Barbie even make sense?

* But the Ryan Gosling dance sequence!

* … so mad we got our periods.

* Saltburn burned again

* “Do you lick the equipment?”

* Moms and technology <3

* Hear us out: The show opens with hummus being rubbed on her breasts …

* Nancy is the fake Joan Didion

* Vince McMahon allegations are not safe for work — or home, really

* Is it even possible to p**p and have sex at the same time?

American Nightmare is a docu-series on Netflix that has everyone talking. Sarah and Nancy are no exception! They discuss the case of the “real-life Gone Girl” who became a 2015 media sensation after her boyfriend reported a home invasion and a kidnapping with details so bizarre they couldn’t be real … or could they? (Conversation contains spoilers.) Also:

* AI Nancy: Nicer and prettier than IRL Nancy?

* Glamping in a cave

* Nancy is the Energizer Bunny of air travel

* Sarah recommends Nancy’s writing from Israel, though she’s read none of it

* Matt Welch interviews Bill Maher, need we say more?

* High-functioning daily pot smoker: Hot or not?

* Sarah’s least favorite Taylor Swift song

* Taylor Swift’s boyfriend is named … Chad?

* Knockers, milkers, fun bags, “cowboy pillows”

* Fight! Fight! (Not really a fight, but a debate about journalism)

* Lie detector tests: Mostly accurate or junk science? Yes!

* Take it from a detective: Cops do not throw chairs when questioning suspects

* Swiping right on that serial rapist

* Wait, which college scandal?

* Sarah’s journey to learn more about Vince McMahon other than the detail that he might have pooped on a woman’s head during sex

Plus: Super Bowl speculation, Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, Ben Affleck rescues hostages — and more!

Jon Ronson’s 2021 podcast Things Fell Apart was that rare example of journalism that explains our current divisions without getting dragged down by them. A journalist and storyteller, Ronson’s documentaries, books, and essays have taken him into strange worlds — porn, the paranormal, neo-Nazis — and he’s always kind enough to bring us along with him, though it often feels like he’s leading us back to each other. The second season of Things Fell Apart takes place during the pandemic, particularly the volcanic year of 2020, and it’s a humdinger.

Also discussed:

* Is Jon Ronson related to Mark Ronson?

* The astonishing true-life tale of Jon’s Aunt Mavis

* Alex Jones can’t help himself

* The problem with Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger

* The Great Reset?

* Is narcissism an epidemic? Is loneliness? What’s our epidemic?

* Speaking of: Plandemic!

* How to tell a new story about George Floyd?

* Nancy and her “excited delirium”

* The dangers of connecting the dots wrong

* The CNN anchor who got ticked off at Ronson

* Activist journalism vs. evidence-based journalism

* When the right lies, they go big (Pizzagate). Lies from the left are subtle (“bigot”).

* An update on Justine Sacco

* Living with our trolls and their addiction to trolling

* Sarah and Nancy pick the same hot box, and it’s an important one about cancel culture and, inshallah, its demise

Plus, Nancy and Sarah debate the hottest guy on Friday Night Lights, a brilliant podcast re-telling of a media shitshow, and more!

Actual footage of Jon Ronson avoiding cancellation:

Fall down the rabbit hole of becoming a paid subscriber.

On Jan 2, a writer named Celeste Marcus published an essay entitled, “After Rape: A Guide for the Tormented” in the free-speech literary journal Liberties, where Celeste is managing editor. She wrote about an incident in 2021 with a close male friend as they slept beside each other in bed. She called it rape; he did not. The man remained unnamed until February 4, when Celeste posted an email exchange to Twitter with Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. In one email, Marcus had written, “The rapist was Yascha Mounk. You have a rapist on the staff of your illustrious publication.”Mounk is an Atlantic contributor who specializes in free-speech issues. He’s the founder of the journal Persuasion and host of The Good Fight podcast. On Sunday, the Atlantic announced they’d cut ties with Mounk, who has mostly stayed silent.

We brought on criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield to discuss this thorny situation. Greenfield is a straight-shooter who wrote about the case in a recent blog post called “The Atlantic Caves to #MeToo.” To question a victim’s story has become taboo, but to interrogate every story has been a necessary tradition of justice, journalism, and rational discourse. Greenfield is not a fan of what he calls “the sex police.”

Can we ever be sure what happens in other people’s bedrooms? And why has it become so popular, even noble, to try? Gird your loins for a conversation about #MeToo and its aftermath that is frank, illuminating, and challenging — possibly to listeners, definitely to the narrative. Notable talking points:

* “Am I allowed to say, ‘I call bullshit’ on this pod?”

* When did people go from being the heroes of their own stories to the victims of their own stories?

* Why drinking matters in sexual assault cases

* “A lot of the campus policies under Title IX are unlawful.”

* The clear bright line of “no means no”

* Plot twist! Leon Wieseltier, #MeToo casualty, is the editor of Liberties journal

* How feminist activists bypassed the dead-lock of “he said/she said”

* “You can’t call a woman crazy. But what if they are crazy?”

* Felicia Sonmez, remembered

* How do Atlantic writers feel about Goldberg kicking a contributor to the curb?

* What should Yascha Mounk do now?

* Let’s built tolerance for ambiguity!

* The bravery of journalist Emily Yoffe

* The sadness of “compare and despair”

* Can we ever walk this back?

* Advice to parents!

* “Hot box???”

It’s Valentine’s Day, like it or not. To celebrate, Nancy and Sarah brought on Dan Savage, the most influential sex expert of the past 30 years, and he did not disappoint! Savage is the man behind the long-running Savage Love column and its audio sibling, the Savage Lovecast, but he’s no longer with The Stranger, the Seattle-based alt-weekly he ran for a long time (and there’s a story behind that).

Savage came on to offer a counter-argument for polyamory after listening to our recent pod on the subject. The conversation that followed is a banger. Also discussed:

* Welcome to all our new Sam Harrises!

* Valentine’s Day rule #1: No flash mob proposals!

* Savage is a pothead?

* How a cultural firebrand writing about dildos became The Man

* Savage does not do dick jokes on command

* “The Tear Veto”

* Sarah wonders if she’s a conservative, and also what does that mean?

* Neologisms of Dan Savage: “monogamish,” “tolyamorous,” “pegging”

* We never talk about the relationships saved by non-monogamy

* Why poly-prosthelytizers are the worst

* Sorry, kids: Polyamory is not an orientation

* The good ole days when straight men went to gay men for blowjobs …

* Nancy learns the term “down-low”

* Marriage for women up until the Seventies: Musical chairs meets Squid Game

* Of course your wife wants to fuck her personal trainer!

* “Sexual desire and lust are chaos agents”

* Are men and women ultimately sexually incompatible?

* Watching trash TV with your husband’s boyfriend

* Dan Savage, how was your #MeToo?

* Asking for what you want in bed: You gotta do it!

* Why gay men are better at sex (not because they’re magic)

Plus, the reason Savage watches True Detective, a collective disappointment over Capote vs. The Swans, and how straight people can vastly improve their sex lives with four magic words.

Walter Kirn sees the world with a spooky clarity. He’s an acclaimed novelist, podcaster, and the editor-in-chief of the print-only publication County Highway, a reading experience that could also be called, What We Lost in the Clickbait Era. Kirn joins Nancy and Sarah to discuss the absurd pageant of politics and media, domestic censorship and curated …

This is a hot one! Nancy and Sarah fundamentally disagree about Emily Gould’s viral essay on the lure of divorce. Nancy compares the story to the rot in France before the formation of the Vichy regime. Sarah believes personal essays like this help people feel less alone. Can she change Nancy’s mind, as Walter Kirn did on the most recent episode? (Fast-track to 33:08 for that 🔥 exchange.)

Also discussed:

* Should we start texting our vote for president, and does that mean Taylor Swift wins?

* The $125 divorce? It’s a thing.

* Anti-depressant-induced hypomania. It’s a thing.

* Eat, pray, sell: The divorce memoir industrial complex

* Sarah is a gender essentialist on the topic of raising kids

* Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath is not THE divorce memoir (according to Nancy)

* FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! (30-minute mark)

* The problem with “brave”

* Awkward pause while Nancy searches for a passage to prove a point while Sarah claims she’s addressing a different point

* “Maybe it was possible to be married and not married at the same time.”

* The best essay Sarah knows about writer’s envy is by Jonathan Franzen’s girlfriend

* The writer’s monstrous ego

* The conflict between women as a protected class and agents of their own destiny

* “Mr. Piss” rips that financial scam essay a new one

* Have we ever fallen for a scam?

* That time Sarah was robbed at gunpoint

* That time Nancy talked herself out of getting robbed at gunpoint

* Send us pictures of your pets!

* Love to the family of David Frum

* NANCY AND SARAH STAY FRIENDS

Plus, Sarah accidentally scams her own father, Nancy offers a public service announcement, and “Smoke ‘Em” names its 2024 presidential pick AND comes up with its campaign slogan!

AND HEY! Look at this brand spankin’ new “Smoke ‘Em” Instagram account our intern CJ built for us. COME PLAY.

Vote Smoke Em 2024. Become a paid subscriber.

Nancy and Sarah discuss male nudity: Barry Keoghan going bare for Vanity Fair, shirtless men in public, and which of them actually enjoyed getting a dick pic, though that’s NOT an invitation. Also discussed:

* Sarah gets a new gig, and it’s a good one.

* Did Shane Gillis bomb on Saturday Night Live?

* “Our love, Mike Pesca”

* Sarah will be barefoot at your party

* Nancy learns the meaning of “spank bank”

* Cinema’s famous moments in penis

* Nancy does a racism?

* Sarah’s strict rules on sexting

* A story about a stripping nun

* Actually Max Tani is a good reporter

* A man is sexiest when he is … working.

* Impeachment is a great series, but …

* Monica Lewinsky’s size-12 blue spooge dress

* Lily Gladstone is the real girl boss

Plus, the NBA star you might run into at a Dallas supermarket, 80s wrestling greatness, big-ass Trans Am love, and more!

“I Was a Heretic at the New York Times,” an Atlantic essay by Adam Rubinstein, exploded on the old Twitter/X/Hate Machine. The story opens at a staff orientation where Rubinstein expresses love for Chick-Fil-A’s spicy chicken sandwich and gets rebuked. Did it happen? Can we know? What sauce goes best with a spicy chicken sandwich ? That one we know: Honey-roasted BBQ.

So what is this journo-kerfuffle about? Why should we care? Nancy and Sarah get down and dirty about this week’s lightning-rod essay, and along the way …

* Nancy goes viral …

* We’re hawking Fifth Column merch, because Nancy needs closet space

* Shane Gillis sighting! Shane Gillis hug!

* Throwdown! Chick-Fil-A vs. Shake Shack

* “Running this puts Black @NYTstaffers in danger.”

* Sarah takes out her personal-essay scalpel, slices carefully

* Who is Michael Hobbes, and why did he block you?

* Southern writers are like chicken sandwiches (we swear)

* Nikole Hannah-Jones = untouchable?

* Jesse Singal = always hungry

* Why are people fighting so hard over this?

Plus: Do French fries need ketchup? Does Nancy’s face look and different after the treatment she got yesterday? Should we sell merch?

“I need to be clear that I don’t want to like Tucker Carlson,” Sarah says, right before going to the mat with Nancy over the controversial news host’s recent appearance on The Lex Fridman Podcast. Fresh from his Putin interview and his discovery of coin-operated shopping carts, Carlson gave a three-plus hour interview with Fridman, whom Nancy and Sarah both like. But Carlson? That’s a tough one. Carlson is the kid in school everyone hated, with the Kennedy-esque hair and the sports car at 16. And Sarah — though she really wishes this weren’t the case — defends some of Carlson’s more piquant opinions on beauty and architecture, power and corruption (and Navalny), feminism and beauty.

Also:

* Sydney Sweeney’s boobs, smoke ‘em

* OnlyCans page: Yea, or nay?

* Does Nancy know the dirty phrase “vinegar stroke”? She does not.

* Sarah’s crush on Lex Fridman

* Sarah’s (former) crush on Jon Stewart

* Sarah’s crush on The Rock, hmm, Sarah needs to get out more …

* Yes, but who built the beautiful Moscow subway?

* Nancy and Sarah get heated over … architecture?

* Don’t worry, kids, your mommies are not getting a divorce

* Tucker Carlson vs. Jon Stewart, two shadow sides of each other

* “Don’t listen to the critic, listen to the man in the arena.”

* Nancy and Sarah really only admire two politicians. Now, they’re running against each other.

* The vocal stylings of a blobby loser

* Pro-Palestine protests inch toward violent Altamont territory

* The time the 1960s ended as The Rolling Stones sang “Under My Thumb”

Plus, Nancy explains Oregon’s messy drug laws, we debate which American city has the prettiest buildings, why Catherine Deneuve chose her face over her ass, and more!

It was Hollywood’s big night! Oscars 2024, a spectacle Nancy hadn’t seen in years (ed: she watched it last year) and Sarah found exhilarating, especially the Oppenheimer sweep (ed: her quote was, “It’s so boring”). But both found plenty to love — mostly Ryan Gosling burning down the house and reminding us this is fun.

Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough is a modern classic. Nancy gushed over it so often Sarah finally read the thing, and damn, Nancy was right. Burrough is a longtime Vanity Fair contributor whose seven (!) books cover oil tycoons, Fortune 500 companies, and true crime, but we’re here to talk about his 2015 epic on 70s radicalism and political violence, which was criminally under-rated upon its release but has become a cult classic.

Trigger warning: This episode drips with fan-girling.

Also included, in TIME-STAMP FORMAT (possibly for the last time):

* Buc-ee’s: Pro or con? (7:30)

* George Mitchell, father of fracking, HL Hunt and Clint Murchison. (7:53)

* How Days of Rage came about, and why Burrough wouldn’t do it again. (12:30)

* When the media ignores your politically inconvenient book (19:50)

* Weather Underground (29:30)

* How journalism fell apart (31:00)

* Bernadine Dohrn: Radical-era bomb-thrower turned law professor (35:40)

* Protests were about race: “We didn’t really care about the war” (44:29)

* BLM activism compared to 70s: “This is kiddie college” (49:30)

* The Capitol was bombed by leftist activists?? (52:50)

* “More people in the FBI went to jail because of the Weather Underground than people in the Weather Underground went to jail” (1:00:00)

* “Our jobs are so much fun” (1:09:00)

* The heist book Burrough just inhaled (1:10:00)

Plus, why oil tycoons are low-hanging fruit, a podcast debate about George Floyd, the writer Burrough most wishes he could emulate — and more!

Want more conversations like this? So do we. Become a paid subscriber, because things that matter are never free.

Leigh Stein worked at Richual, a fast-rising women’s wellness company, when she was fired for posting about the company’s colon hydrotherapy requirement. *Actually, this did not happen to Leigh Stein, it happened to a character in her 2020 female empowerment satire SELF-CARE, which Stein has been promoting in a gonzo PR campaign on Instagram, delighting fans and confounding casual followers, who’d grown accustomed to her tart publishing advice (her official lane). 

Nancy and Sarah talk to Stein about the absurdities of wellness and modern feminism, the circular firing squad of women’s-only spaces, and whether MFAs make any sense (mostly no). Also covered:

* “Does Mike Pesca know we think he’s cute?”

* Leigh Stein, book crisis expert

* A famous writer (among others) falls for Leigh’s Instagram satire

* Why TikTok/IG videos get filmed in cars

* Women Full of Binders / Binders Full of Women / Full Binders of Women What?

* That time Sarah ruined Leigh’s life

* Save the world every time you take a bubble bath!

* When Leigh’s husband wouldn’t call himself a feminist

* Woke Leigh delves on why feminism and social justice mattered so deeply

* The MFA racket

* What today’s cancel mobs have in common with Renaissance poisoner Lucrezia Borgia

* Leigh wrote a poem for Lip Smackers magazine

* Nancy wrote an ode to peanut butter

* Sarah is sexting with the Fletcher’s corny dog account

* “We get these mixed messages, like, we should help each other; do it for the sisterhood; are you lifting up other women? If not, you’re a bad woman. And then you do that and everyone destroys you.”

Plus, a poetry tempest in a teapot, the times when Sarah vacuums in a wig, why women don’t want to be objectified (until they do), and much more!

Want to meet your heroes the second-best host of this podcast AND Mike Pesca in person? If you’re in NYC this Thursday, you can! Details after the break.

Gratuitous hot pic of Nancy that Sarah found while recording:

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Christine Blasey Ford is back with her memoir One Way Back, and Nancy took one for the team and read it. Sarah, meanwhile, re-watched the eight-hour 2018 trial, because she’s insane. The Kavanaugh trial was a real moment: squee, boof, “I like beer.” Beyond the memes, however, it was more: a reckoning, a moral panic; an education, a national disgrace. Five years have passed. What can we see — or say — that we couldn’t back then? A lot!

The new HBO docuseries about Nickelodeon’s dark side, Quiet on Set, reveals the bad things that can happen when kids do adult work while actual adults behave like (troubled) kids. Child stars can be ultra-performers: Michael Jackson, Judy Garland, Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, Olivia Rodrigo. But at what cost? Let’s ask Amanda Bynes and Drake Bell. (Or the cast of Diff’rent Strokes.) How many child stars will lose their marbles before we agree that a heady mix of celebrity, toxic task-masters, freeloaders, and easy money isn’t wise for a demographic that would otherwise be hanging at the mall? So much to discuss.

Correction to this episode: In our discussion of the late comic Ed Piskor, accused of sexual misconduct, we conflated the accounts of two women, both of whom happened to be named Molly. In the first case, 17-year-old Molly D. never claimed a physical relationship with Piskor, only messages she exchanged with the artist. In the wake of this accusation, an older woman, Molly W., added her own story, framing a past sexual relationship with Piskor as exploitive, a charge Piskor addressed in his suicide note, claiming they’d had sex twice, and that both times were consensual. The age of consent in Pennsylvania is 16.

* First Sunday Zoom

* Earthquake. Steve Kornacki.

* Eclipse mania

* Jennifer Senior wins award, keeps kicking ass

* “Harmonica virgins”

* Sarah’s new car, picture for paid subscribers only

* Lessons of Isuecardealers.com

* “The True Cost of the Church Going Bust,” by Derek Thompson (Atlantic)

* The Matt Welch

* Everyone meets at Paloma/Nancy’s apartment

* “My Mom Has No Friends,” by Monica Corcoran Harel (The Cut)

* Sarah’s first act of civil disobedience

* “Nut pick” definition

* The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm

* Ed Piskor Comics Beat

* “Don’t give me a gun and tell me not to use it.”

* Bananas bananas bananas

* The best musical of all musicals told at the twilight of the Americane experiment

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Participants in April’s First Sunday Zoom kindly submitted to being recorded while discussing the 1973 film version of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, which we watched as a group. How did people feel about Elliot Gould playing the classic 1940s gumshoe? What about all those naked women (too much, too little)? And was it possible to appreciate director Robert Altman’s update only once you’ve gone through the looking glass of post-Helter Skelter Los Angeles?

Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin launched Phoenix New Times in 1970. Working out of a closet in a women’s clothing store, the paper covered stories most media at the time would not, including then-Arizona senator John McCain’s involvement with the Charles Keating Savings & Loan scandal, McCain’s wife Cindy forging subscriptions and stealing pills from a children’s charity she’d founded, and the humanitarian horrors associated with Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“You get paid for castrations,” Lacey would tell the makers of HOLD FAST, an Audible podcast that covers New Times’ salad days and what came later, including the fateful turn when people the paper had once gone after went after them, including the McCains, Arpaio, and then-senator Kamala Harris.

As Sarah recently wrote for the Dallas Morning News:

“Things don’t turn out well for Lacey, or his more copacetic business partner Larkin, as they get dragged through two federal trials on charges of money laundering and (buried the lede) sex trafficking, thanks to the adult ads that were once the lifeblood of alt-weekly revenue and which the pair spun into the notorious Backpage.com, prompting the Justice Department to label them the biggest pimps in the history of the world. Whether these two men are free-speech champions, or smug bastards hoisted on their own petards, will be for the listener to decide.”

HOLD FAST, named for the words Lacey tattooed across his knuckles, is created by former New Times writers Trevor Aaronson (also behind the podcasts “American ISIS” and “Alphabet Boys”), Sam Eifling, and Michael J. Mooney, who joins Nancy and Sarah - who spent a combined 25 years in the alt-weekly trenches - to talk about working for New Times during its heyday. “It was a meat grinder of employment, but also, the Shangri-La of journalism,” he says. “It was both things at once.”

Also discussed:

* Eclipse!

* postrate not prostate

* Post Malone does a chicken commercial

* “We don’t get the free speech warriors we want, we get the free speech warriors we deserve”

* Erotic cake toppers, anyone?

* Does Sarah love Mike Lacey? Does she hate Mike Lacey? Maybe both?

* Who did — and who did not — get those $5000 checks

* Reason magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown does heroic journalism

* A gift from Wallace leads to the tiniest Viking burial?

This episode of Smoke ‘Em, dealing with the threats to journalism and free speech, is, maybe not paradoxically for former alt-weekly scribes who covered the “freak beat” (Mooney), interviewed serial killers (Nancy), and walked around the office barefoot (Sarah), also one of its funniest.

HOLD FAST is available on Audible.

Nancy’s still pissed they interrupted the 1994 Rockets-Knicks NBA finals to show the slow-speed OJ Simpson chase on every LA channel, and Sarah is driving through Texas in, yes, a Bronco, as the gals talk OJ Simpson, who died yesterday of cancer at age 76.

Where were they heard about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and that OJ was the main suspect? What were the factors behind the nation’s lurid fascination? Did the OJ case spell the end of mono-culture as the internet splintered our fascinations? Has the nature of fame changed? Have we?

Also discussed:

* Seeing the sky turn black from the 968 concurrent fires during the 1992 LA riots

* Some background on Al Cowling

* The note Nancy’s daughter’s preschool sent home on the eve of the OJ verdict

* The greatness of “The People v. OJ Simpson,” including the jacaranda, the pepper trees, the bad beige 90s furnishings…

* David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian: yea or nay?

And much more!

Michael Moynihan, FIFTH COLUMN co-host and man about town, joins Nancy and Sarah to discuss The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, the new PBS documentary about conservative firebrand William F. Buckley. They discuss his eloquence, mistakes, and political evolution, and Sarah calls the old Firing Line episodes “a call to civility in a time of chaos.”

Also discussed:

* Sarah puts her vibrator on time-out

* The unfortunate rise of “churnalism”

* AJ Cowling? Tacos anyone?

* The Big 5-0 murder-suicide plan

* That time Tracey Ullman talked to Michael about Morrissey

* The affliction of presentism

* Ronald Reagan as “the pretty ship of ideas that Buckley could load up and push out to sea.”

* What did Hitchens think of Buckley?

* Gore Vidal, dragged

* James Baldwin, praised

* The Buckley biography 20 years in the making

* Are WE the new conservatives?

* Don’t cancel Milk Duds!

* “Free trade is a net gain for people, but there are going to be losers”

* “Technology made us rougher people when it came to politics”

* Who will lead a new campus movement. Could it be… Michael Moynihan? (If you let him do it over Zoom?)

Also, why we watch documentaries we disagree with, Nancy’s kind of town, and more literary and video links than you can shake a Rabbit vibrator at.

Also: CALL FOR LETTERS! You have questions? We have answers! smokeempodcast@gmail.com

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Episode Notes:

Japanese Maple, by Clive James

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.So slow a fading out brings no real pain.Breath growing shortIs just uncomfortable. You feel the drainOf energy, but thought and sight remain:Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever seeSo much sweet beauty as when fine rain fallsOn that small treeAnd saturates your brick back garden walls,So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?Ever more lavish as the dusk descendsThis glistening illuminates the air.It never ends.Whenever the rain comes it will be there,Beyond my time, but now I take my share.My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.What I must doIs live to see that. That will end the gameFor me, though life continues all the same:​Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,A final flood of colours will live onAs my mind dies,Burned by my vision of a world that shoneSo brightly at the last, and then was gone.--New Yorker, September 15, 2014

“Go Back to the Cold!” Clive James on John Le Carre (New York Review of Books)

Best of Enemies documentary about Buckley and Vidal

A Traitor to His Class by H.W. Brands (about FDR)

Letters to a Young Contrarian by Hitchens

Nearer My God by William F. Buckley

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley

Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription by William F. Buckley

Reagan in His Own Hand by Kiron K. Skinner

Overdrive: A Personal Documentary by William F. Buckley

Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America by Ted Morgan

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus

“Firehose #84: Did We Really ‘Mostly’ Endorse ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’?” by Matt Welch (Fifth Column Substack)

What’s in your hot box?

Sarah:

Nancy: A love of Chicago and, in anticipation of the 2024 DNC in that big-shouldered town, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko

Michael:

“The Secret Army: The True Story of a Lost Documentary”

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and The Snakehead, by Patrick Radden Keefe

Unanimously chosen outro:

Eli Lake is a longtime journalist, but we know him best for the tremendous “Re-Education With Eli Lake” podcast (Nancy’s #1 pod pick in 2023). Lake has recently become a contributor to the Free Press, where he writes about this world as it explodes. Nancy and Sarah talked with him about the paradox of anarchists attending meetings, why writers can be precious little bitches, the upcoming DNC in Chicago, and how he made our outro song, or at least instructed the robot to do so.

* “When I kiss you on your mask you understand”

* What does PEN America do?

* Eli and Nancy’s Wikipedia pages are full of lies

* “You’re not the boss of me” as the spirit of America

* Will things go full Baader-Meinhof at the Chicago DNC?

* Don’t go to journalism school, kids

* Some love for Tom Wolfe, Bryan Burrough, Ask a Jew

* Newsroom is the Jay Rosen of TV shows

* “Norman Finkelstein is the Jew-y Jew who performs for anti-Semites”

Plus, Lenny Bruce as a podcaster, Menachem Begin as OG punk rock, and is marijuana the Jewish kryptonite?

Send us your letters! We want them!

We’re not the boss of you, but we’d still like you to become a paid subscriber.

Title IX started as a modest part of the Education Amendments of 1972; it was the part that prohibited sex-based discrimination in education programs. In the 50+ years since, it’s become shorthand for many things: Women in sports, a sexual reckoning, a cultural over-correction, a legal shitshow. What no one ever seems to ask is: Why are colleges adjudicating sexual matters between students anyway?

Our guest KC Johnson, a tenured professor at Brooklyn College, began his Title IX education back in 2006, when the Duke lacrosse team was accused of rape. The case became a national scandal, pulling in faculty, administration, lawyers, and the government, with the accused students at the center, though they were eventually exonerated. It’s a case Nancy and Sarah discussed way back in episode 10 (“Fabulists!”), and one Johnson spent years investigating and eventually co-authored a book about.

Since then, Johnson has become the go-to guy on this topic. Who better to explain the new Title IX guidelines from Biden? Don’t forget: Biden is the original crusader behind Title IX’s more recent iteration as a way to address campus sexual assault.

Coleman Hughes was still an undergrad at Columbia in 2018 when the Quillette contributor landed a high-profile appearance on Sam Harris’ podcast. Since then, his own podcast Conversations with Coleman — along with his writing on race, tribal politics, and free expression — have made him one of the country’s most important commentators. He’s also a very talented musician and rapper and, as of this year, an author, with a new book called The End of Race Politics. He recently appeared on The View to promote that book, and the result was a viral clip that demonstrated the barbed agenda of co-host Sunny Hostin and the calm, rational demeanor of Hughes. His is the kind of grace in the face of unreason that could actually save the planet.

Also discussed:

* So how are things at Columbia University these days?

* Did you know if you read the word “SHAME” 1000 times in a row, it changes minds?

* What does “Zionism” mean?

* Suddenly discovering the virtues of unbridled free speech on campus the moment you want to denounce Israel

* Neo-racism and its cultural moment

* “Lynching is the natural state” of humanity, but we create necessary edifices to control our baser instincts

* If the DEI bureacratics didn’t show up to work, would anyone notice?

* What is a “conservative,” anyway?

* How Coleman maintains his super-power

* Fighting words: “John Wick sucks”

* The Cat Rapper, the C-A-T Rapper, people there is a CAT RAPPER

Plus why Benny Morris is such a good ambassador for Israeli history, meditation app recs, and can Coleman finally solve Nancy and Sarah’s Knives Out: Glass Onion debate?

Send us your letters! To smokeempodcast@gmail.com, and let us know if you do/do not want your name read on-air

Free speech isn’t “free.” It takes a fight. Consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Married journalists Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer are the forces behind “The Harvey Weinstein Trial: Unfiltered” podcast, in which actors read daily excerpts of the courthouse testimony verbatim. Released during the trial in 2020, it’s an extraordinary document of a cultural flashpoint, providing a far deeper and more troubling portrait than most media coverage did at the time. Nobody was shocked when Weinstein was slapped with a 23-year sentence, but it seems many people were when that conviction was overturned on Thursday, April 25.

Not Ann and Phelim. “This is of course not any surprise at all us, and to any of you who’ve been listening,” McElhinney said during the “special news breaking episode” recorded yesterday, “We Were Right - Weinstein Case Collapses.”

Catherine A. Christian, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, was also unsurprised. “A number of us were expecting that it probably would be reversed if there was some sort of intellectual honesty,” she told Politico Magazine.”You don’t want to make bad law for bad defendants.”

Few people followed this case as closely — or produced the kind of hard-hitting journalism as Ann and Phelim. Listeners may recall Sarah’s beloved holiday tradition for three years running: She listens to all 23 episodes of the podcast, which is very weird, although Ann called it “the most precious compliment I’ve ever had.”

McElhinney and McAleer join Nancy and an awestruck Sarah to discuss “the silence of the laptops” in the courtroom, why actress Annabella Sciorra should never have been on the witness stand, the transactional nature of Hollywood relationships, and whether Weinstein will be tried again in New York. Strap in!

Support Ann & Phelim at The Unreported Story Society.

Anyone in or around New York City is invited to McElhinney and McAleer’s latest project, October 7: In Their Own Words. Tickets at www.october7theplay.com

And don’t forget to send your letters to smokeempodcast@gmail.com. We’ll read them on-air in an upcoming episode.

The media has snoozed through some of the day’s most important stories. Meanwhile, we’re not sleeping (literally), so please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Episode Notes:

“Harvey Weinstein Conviction Overturned by N.Y. Court of Appeals” (New York Times)

The Molineux Rule, explained

“What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial,” by Ronan Farrow (New Yorker)

“‘Hindsight Is 20/20’: Why Harvey Weinstein’s Conviction Was Overturned,” Nick Reisman (Politico)

“Harvey Weinstein’s Rape Conviction Overturned by New York Appeals Court—What’s Next?” by Savannah Walsh (Vanity Fair)

“Why Harvey Weinstein Might Walk,” by Joann Wypijewski (The Nation, 2020)

“The New Truth: When the moral imperative trumps the rational evidence, there’s no arguing,” by Jacob Siegel (Tablet)

“Asia Argento’s Time Is Up,” by Nancy Rommelmann (Reason)

April 22, 2022 will go down in the history books — for some reason, surely, though it’s also the date of our first Smoke ‘Em podcast. We celebrate our second year on the books with a pop quiz, some serious giggles, and (of course) Kegels for Peace.

You may not recognize Andy Mills’ name, but you likely know his work: He co-created The Daily podcast for The New York Times, where he also produced Rabbit Hole, a fantastic series on the internet, and – quite fatefully! – the war on terror podcast, Caliphate. Shit happened. It was complicated. Andy is no longer at The New York Times. 

But he’s struck out on his own. Last year he gave us The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, one of 2023’s best podcasts, and now he’s back with a new podcast, Reflector, which tells “stories about the strange experiences of being human — sparking wonder, unveiling complexity, and igniting curiosity.” The first episode tackles a familiar topic, over-drinking, and centers on an unexpected subject: Katie Herzog, the very funny host of Blocked & Reported, who shares her experience with the anti-drinking drug Naltrexone. Nancy and Sarah chat with Andy about addiction, storytelling, faith, and how to push back on the media’s excesses.

Also discussed:

* The burden of knowing who is going to hell

* The Bible, it has slow parts

* The love of God is a very hard thing to lose

* Drinking as a spiritual experience

* How the social justice movement is deeply Protestant

* The Caliphate scandal

* About Andy’s exit from the New York Times …

* Sarah, the black belt of dumping beer on people’s heads

* Jealousy’s role in the media meltdown

* More on Donald McNeil Jr. ouster, and Nancy could not be happier/angrier

* Did Infinite Jest predict social media?

* Naltrexone: Miracle drug, or “quick fix” that doesn’t address what’s wrong?

* “You’re a smoker? Lucky you.”

* A civil war on the movie Civil War

* “I wanna listen to a podcast that’s just Nancy saying, ‘William Langewiesche.’”

* The Harry Potter of adult romance novels

Plus, video texts equal love, why no stories are actually neutral, why alcohol is an “analog drug,” and much more!