Time To Say Goodbye: Recent Episodes
Time To Say Goodbye
A podcast about Asia, Asian America, and life during the Coronavirus pandemic, featuring Jay Caspian Kang.
goodbye.substack.com
Hello!
Today, we talk about Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan, how the center probably won’t win it’s “but the margin of victory was smaller than the polls said it would be” gambit and Kang rants about the media’s obsession with 2020 tweets and the concern trolling way in which it consistently has missed the bigger data center story when it comes to Francesca Hong.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today our guest is Adam Carlson, the founding partner of Zenith Research and a pollster who has worked for Democratic candidates and organizations for over a decade. We talk about the big race in Michigan, why certain races captivate the public’s attention, what the El-Sayed race says about the Democratic establishment, and where we’re going with the Democratic Tea Party moment.
Enjoy!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Today we talk about the worldwide online hate for Argentina, the World Cup as politics in the online age, the new senate hopeful from Maine who might just be a better version of Graham Platner, especially for the general, and then we break our rule (once) and talk a bit about college professors.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Today we talk to Grace Mausser is Co-Chair of New York City DSA, the largest chapter of DSA with over 15,000 members. She has worked on dozens of democratic socialists campaigns in New York, building robust canvassing operations, creating broad left coalitions, and raising millions of dollars from grassroots donors.
We talk about Graham Platner, vetting candidates, the need for organizations on the left, what socialists should do when they actually have some wins, a lot about Zohran, and a really interesting conversation about what really matters to voters and what does not. Enjoy!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Today we talk about Melat Kiros’s resounding win in Colorado over a 30 year incumbent, Israel as the wedge issue in places other than New York City, and the right’s freakout over the SCOTUS decision on birthright citizenship.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
This week, we have back on our World Cup and War Correspondent Patrick Hultgren to talk about sportswashing, why the USMNT hasn’t traditionally captured the public’s imagination, at least when compared to the women’s team, youth soccer in America and what Landon Donovan said, and the politics of patriotism about a sport we claim we don’t care about all that much in the States.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello! This week we have on Sam Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Power and What to do about it.We talk about how the elderly exercise their political and financial power in the country and explore some of the ideas in this book about how to get more money and political power into the hands of the young. This is a fun, heated conversation with a lot of compelling ideas and takes so please give it a listen.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Today, we talk about the LA Mayoral election, what to think of the population of professional upper middle class voters who seem to be the new vanguard of left economic policies, and we talk a whole lot about Graham Platner’s latest scandal, his big victory, and what populism means in 2026.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Today we talk about Trump’s endless and incorrigible corruption, the steady stealing of taxpayer dollars into weird slush funds, and we talk about Graham' Platner’s latest scandal and whether we might now have too much smoke to just ignore.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about A.I. (again) but mostly about what we feel might be lost in a future where everyone is writing A.I. papers and turning in A.I. work and emailing each other in friendly A.I.- ese. Is it a new problem or is it just a breaking point of a digital life where so much of our human interactions have been farmed out to one robot or another? And Jay talks about his fake writer AI game he made, which you should definitely try out!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Today we’re talking about the controversy over at Granta, who published a story from the winner of the Commonwealth Prize that appears, at least right now, to be written by AI. We talk about why this is kinda funny but also obviously distressing and whether writers should be experimenting with AI. We also talk about Thomas Massie’s election loss last night and the new crop of short form video that’s been coming out of the Washington Post and why it’s probably worse than AI slop.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week we have a fun, off-beat episode for you about fishing. Why does Tyler put on a wetsuit and go float around in rip currents to find some rock to squat on and fish? What are ethics of this sport? What land use issues effect it? Why is the future hope of the Democratic Party all these new Gen-Z Birders? We talk about all this with our guest Jerry Audet, the managing editor of the fishing magazine Surfcaster’s Journal and the co-host of the Surfcast Podcast. His writing and photography has appeared in just about every fishing publication you can name. And he is the author of Hooked, an anthology of fresh and saltwater gamefish. Most importantly he is one of the best surf fisherman in the country.
Enjoy!
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This week we are talking Data Centers, an intra-left fight in Jacobin over how to effectively harness or block AI from taking over everything, and the politics of physical space. Our guest to talk about all this is Aaron Regunberg, a progressive organizer and former Rhode Island state representative. Aaron writes regularly in The New Republic, among other outlets, and we’re having him on today to discuss a piece he recently wrote for Jacobin about the data center moratorium movement. He also co-hosts the Fighting Fascism podcast, which you should check out!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Today, we talk about the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Dinner, our continued descent into conspiracy world, and the amazing quickness with which Trump world turned it all into a handout for the President’s ballroom project. We also talk about a new law that will put AI-enabled sensors in cars to stop people from drunk driving and the civil liberties implications.
Enjoy!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Today, it’s just the two of us talking about Ivy Day, the online meme where kids share whether they got into Ivy League schools, the downfall of Eric Swalwell, and Joyce Carol Oates’s interesting tweets this past week about the Butler, Pa. assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which came after polling was released that showed an increasing number of Republicans believe it was all staged.
Enjoy!
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Hello! Today we have on Noam Scheiber of the New York Times to talk about his new book,Mutiny: The Rise of Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. We talk about the rise of unions at Starbucks, Amazon, Hollywood, and in digital newsrooms and what to make of this post-Bernie flood of left politics that feels both extremely present now as evidenced by the election of Zohran and also something that can now be dissected and discussed. Really good episode and very good book that we highly recommend!
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Hello!
This week, we have a long-ranging talk with Sara Yasin, a journalist and editor who helped oversee the growth of BuzzFeed News and then worked as the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. Today, Sara is the editor-in-chief of The Key, a magazine published by the Palestine Festival of Literature. She talks with us about her journey through new and old media, how to navigate the moment when your mere existence becomes a problem in a newsroom, and a whole lot more.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Apologies for the late episode this week. Jay was on vacation but is now back. We talk this week about the attempted cancelation of Hasan Piker, the growing irrelevance of think tank bubble DC politics, the hopes we both have for the midterm elections, and the endless depravity of Hegseth and what’s happening in Iran.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we have on a guest we’re very excited about: Molly Crabapple who has a new book coming out called Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. We talk about the years she put into this book, which required her to learn Yiddish and travel the world, the realities of identity, what lessons the Bund has for today, and then we talk about Molly’s fight against AI, which has been stealing her illustrations for years. One of the best episodes we’ve done in a while so I hope you’ll take a listen!
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Hello!
Today we’re back with our war correspondent Patrick Hultgren and we’re discussing the shocking resignation of Joe Kent, the cracks in MAGA, (do they actually exist), more on Pete Hegseth’s embarrassing turns, and what certainly feels like it will be a prolonged war in Iran. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we have on Jonathan Shainin, one of the founders of Equator Magazine, a new venture among very smart, thoughtful writers and editors that “is our collective response to a crisis that is as much spiritual and intellectual as it is political and economic. It is a venture that aims to create a more cosmopolitan home for thought and art than the one assigned to them by provincial Western periodicals. It also seeks to restore dignity to the concept of truth, and create a public space where the values of justice, solidarity and compassion can flourish.”
We talk about starting a new magazine in this media atmosphere, the need for an international perspective on the world, who their ideal reader might be, and why they still believe in the printed word. A very stirring episode and I hope you’ll take a listen.
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Hello!
Today we’re fast-tracking an episode just so we keep on pace with breaking news and bring you a talk with Robert Malley, a lecturer at the Yale Jackson School who worked as a lead negotiator on the 2015 Obama Iran Nuclear Deal, and Stephen Wertheim, a historian of US foreign policy and one of the best follows on Twitter. They discuss the recent op-ed they authored in the Times and lay out what happened a historical perspective on the past ten years of diplomacy, Trump’s turn, and pretty much everything you really should know about what’s going on in Iran. Very informative episode, take a listen.
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Hello!
Today we have back on our trusty War Correspondent Patrick Hultgren to talk about the war in Iran, the utter nihilism of Trump, Rubio and Hegseth’s justifications, and what enlisted men might be feeling in this moment as we gear up for yet another incursion in the Middle East.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about Graham Platner’s lead in Maine, the Olympics Patriotism Complex and everything Alysa Liu. Also, is the right annoying everyone away right now? That question and more in this week’s episode.
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Hello! Today, we have a big episode with two parts. First is an interview about a new book by Emily Galvin Almanza, a former public defender in California who has worked with nonprofits the Stanford Three Strikes Project and the Bronx Defenders. More recently, she is the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit creating a new collaborative model of public defense. Her new book The Price of Mercyis finally out and she stopped by to talk about the criminal justice system and a recent op-ed she wrote about free buses in New York City.
In the second half, we welcomes Bharat Ramamurti, the former deputy director of the National Economic Council of the United States under the Biden Administration and a recent college graduate and thinker named Anuraag Routray about a recent paper they wrote about how to fix the sports betting industry without going full narc on everyone. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we talk about Bad Bunny and the right’s fake outrage and then we bring back war correspondent Patrick Hultgren who is reporting live from New Jersey 11 about the primary victory of Analilia Mejia, the former Bernie campaign director and labor organizer who just upset a whole lot of big money candidates and will almost certainly be representing New Jersey in the House.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week, we’re talking about the files, the media and how they’ve handled the story, and the coming populist revolt that feels both inevitable and impossible at this point.
Also, we have a YouTube page that we’ve finally populated with enough videos to make it worth sharing. Will be posting there from now on as well. Please check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8BC6kpomORTAHDU0AJICyQ
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we talk the killing of Alex Pretti, the depravity of the administration’s response, and Tyler’s recent article about the second amendment and how it should be for everyone, not just the right. How does a society organize against tyranny and the sight of masked agents shooting someone dead in the street? Can such a vision not include an armed populace? All this and more in today’s episode.
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Hello!
Today, we are back talking about Minneapolis and ICE with Will Stancil, an attorney from Minneapolis who has been posting about neighborhood rapid response in the Twin Cities. We talked to him about a whole range of topics — what it feels like in Minneapolis, how these neighborhood watches have been organized, the resilience of the city, and, at the end, even a moment of hope that Will has seen in all this.
Very periodically, we will ask you to head over to that subscribe button and please help keep the lights on. We do not paywall any episodes and never have and that’s because we do this almost entirely as a free project that is accessible to anyone who can’t afford it. But if you can, five dollars a month goes a long way so we can keep doing this and bringing you free shows.
Please enjoy!
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Hello,
This week, we talk about ICE in Minneapolis, the killing of Renee Good, and the destruction of a whole lot of what we hold sacred in this country. Is there something to do about all this? And how much of the country do we really think is cheering on what amounts to an invasion of people’s neighborhoods?
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Hello!
Today, we have Matt Duss on the show. Matt is an executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, co-host of the Un-Diplomatic podcast, and the former foreign policy advisor for Bernie Sanders. We talked about what the hell Trump is doing in Venezuela, what Rubio’s vision for the world might be, the dangers of a fully unrestrained Trump administration, what Democrats could be doing to provide an alternative vision of the world, and also what is going to happen with Greenland. It’s a great episode and very informative and we hope you both check out Matt’s pod and take a listen.
thanks!
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Kang did a Substack Live with repeat TTSG guests Max Read and John Ganz. We talked about the Trump Reiner tweet, the Compact white men article, and the future of the news.
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Hello!
Today, we have an episode about how nobody can read anymore, AI, humans, and why we’re so afraid of the robots with Celine Nguyen, the great author of the Personal Canon substack, and repeat guest Leif Weatherby, who came by to talk about his book Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This is a good episode of the show and about something we’ve been thinking about for a while: What is the role of organized religion going forward and will we see a return to the church as the cruelty of politics, technology, and the general malaise of modern life start to overwhelm us? Our guest, Matt Sitman, has thought a ton of about this. He’s the co-host of Know Your Enemy and on the editorial board of Dissent. He’s written and thought about religion for a long time, including a big story in the New Republic from 2021 about the religious left and a very moving plea from 2017 in Dissent.
We talked about a lot: the Catholic church and its right wing converts, the alienation of tech, Tyler’s theory about whether AI was the antichrist, the need for community, and the question of how we build a moral framework in a time when everyone’s just on their f*g phones all the time.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we have back our Consultant of War and the Joe House of the podcast, Patrick Hultgren, to talk about Pete Hegseth, the war crime memes, and we go over our favorite new theory about Trump: He’s spending all his time planning his big new fancy ballroom and doesn’t care anymore what happens with the government, which is why all these cabinet dudes are just doing their own agendas and pardoning random drug lords with no comment at all from the White House. Enjoy a day early!
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Hello!
Today, we have on Bhaskar Sunkara, President of The Nation and founding editor of Jacobin. We talk about his best sports bets, the Larry Summers email scandal, and what Zohran’s early days and robust popularity might mean for the left. Very lively episode here so please give it a listen!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about the big cave by the Democrats over the shutdown, whether it actually matters and a little bit about the declining box office numbers across the country and why people no longer seem to be going to the movies.
Enjoy!
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
We went live at 9PM as the polls closed in New York City and talked about Zohran, voting demographics, Graham Platner, and the “future of the Democratic party.” Enjoy!
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello,
Today we play a game called “I didn’t read that article” in which one of us has read an article and the other one hasn’t and we ask questions about it. Today’s topics are the NBA betting scandal which made front page news last week and a new feature in Harper’s about the “Gooniverse” of young, pornography addicted young men.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
We’re both back this week to talk about the No Kings protests, the space comedians take up in political commentary these days. Do we really want Andrew Schultz and other comedians to be the new pundits?
Enjoy!
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On today’s episode, Tyler talks to Joshua Wheeler about his brilliant debut novel, The High Heaven. Focusing on a UFO cult survivor who is obsessed with NASA, the novel spans her entire life and decades of American history. Josh talks about his literary influences, how his working class upbringing in New Mexico shaped his work, and the state of contemporary fiction. Tyler also asks Josh about his obsession with Smokey Bear and his sprawling collection of Smokey memorabilia.
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Hello!
Today we’re talking the media business, the news that Bari Weiss will now be the Editor in Chief of CBS News, and what we think will happen during a period of inevitable fracturing and consolidation. Our guest is longtime listener and excellent reporter Maxwell Tani of Semafor.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we take a break from politics and talk about hobbies and a thing that Tyler coined “hobby inflation” where everything from clay pigeons to green fees to surfboards to knitting tools have all skyrocketed in price since the pandemic. What does this mean to the future of “doing fun s**t” and how does it dovetail with the never-ending rise in the amount of time we spend on our phones?
Enjoy!
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Hello,
Today, we have back on one of our favorite guests, Zena Hitz, a philosopher who teaches at St. John’s College. We talk about Kimmel’s canceling and uncanceling, the history of free speech in a conformist country like America, and the university’s place as the crucible for all discourse refereeing. Is this a good thing or is the modern university uniquely unqualified to hold such importance?
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week we talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, what he meant to the GOP and the right, in general, and the space he occupied within the broader political discourse. Our guest this week is John Ganz of Unpopular Front.
*Apologies in advance for a shift in audio in the middle — Kang’s internet kept freaking out and we had to switch from Zencastr to Zoom.
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Hello!
This week we talk about the ICE raid of the Hyundai plant under construction in Georgia, the incoherence of the Trump agenda, the threat of national guardsmen being deployed in Chicago, Ezra Klein’s op-ed about the rise of authoritarianism and the lack of preparation within the Democratic party and we even talk some Week 1 NFL. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we have on a promised guest, Jonathan M Berman, an assistant professor in Basic Sciences at New York Institute of Technology, Arkansas, the co-chair of the 2017 March for Science, and the author of a 2020 book called Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement. In light of last week’s turmoil and spate of resignations and firings at the CDC stemming from changes to vaccine policy, we wanted to invite Jonathan on to talk about the anti-vaccination movement and how it’s been turbo-charged by the rise of RFK.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we talk about Trump’s bid to create a sovereign wealth fund by investing in private companies, the parallels these actions have to his shakedowns of elite universities and Zohran’s attempt to throw up 135 on the bench press. We also talk about the “Badasses,” a group of Democrats who are trying to blend suburban mom vibes with their former careers in the CIA and military.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we have on Jessica Dai and Ben Recht to talk about AI culture, Jessica’s prescient article from 2 years ago about alignment and the priorities of AI companies. What do these companies actually want? And who will define what AI culture is going forward? A bunch of frothy people on Twitter or will it just be the priorities of companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Google? If you want to know what “alignment” is and why its so important to the idea of AI, take a listen.
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Hello,
This week, we have a long talk with an author we both have admired for a while, Jonathan Mahler. His new book, The Gods of New York: Egoists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, is a chronicle of how a four year stretch in New York City laid down the groundwork for a new city, one that fully separated itself from its working class roots and any notion of civic unity for a fractured, polarized, and atomized city that gave rise to everyone from Donald Trump to Al Sharpton to Larry Kramer to Spike Lee. Really really good book and a great guest.
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Hello!
Today we talk briefly about the Gilded Age (Jay is watching TV again) and what to make of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s statements about Gaza, America First, and foreign interventions. Is she trying to pull together the horseshoe? And will she actually succeed?
Enjoy!
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Hello,
Today, we have on Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees international and a longtime humanitarian and emergency operator. He has served in senior appointments in two U.S. administrations. He was the director of USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the Obama administration and also worked in the Biden administration.
Jeremy has been sounding the alarm about the famine in Gaza for a number of months, and has done a series of really helpful explainer threads on Twitter that have gone viral. We’ve invited him on the show today to help us understand the starvation crisis that is now in full swing.
Tyler and I both learned a ton in this episode about how famines happen, the infrastructure for aid, and the political obstructions in the way. In the end, we both came away somehow feeling both appropriately horrified but also not as nihilistic as we did before we talked to Jeremy. A really important episode of the show.
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Hello!
Today, we talk about what the hell ICE is wearing out in the streets of American cities, “operator cosplay” which is the phenomenon of yahoos dressing up like they’re in special forces, and we talk a whole lot about ICE’s policy of wearing masks in public. We also continue our long search for the pod’s Joe House and bring on Kang’s college roommate, a veteran Green Beret who explains what ICE is wearing and why.
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Hello!
Today we talk about how the Epstein story and Schrodinger’s client list has fractured the right and whether this might finally be the thing that ol’ Donny Trump can’t wriggle out of. And we talk about climate change and the floods on the east coast as Tyler puts back on his environmental studies professor hat. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talk a bit more about Zohran and go through our best and worst case scenarios for his reign in New York City. How will he deal with intensive media scrutiny? Will his immense political talent carry him through inevitable crises? And how will his victory change the Democratic party on the whole?
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we have on Leigh Claire LaBerge, a professor at CUNY and the author of Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke, a funny and touching look back at what it was like to be young, naive, and have your whole life in front of you in 1999. We talk about the late 90s, the need for a bit of humor on the left, and start off with a few Zohran takes. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we welcome a guest from across the aisle to talk about what might be happening with the anti-war, anti-interventionist right in the face of Trump’s strikes against Iran. Sohrab Ahmari is the American editor of Unherd and the author of two books and one of the main intellectual forces shaping the ideas of a new right wing. A really great conversation with some interesting insights into what might be happening within Trump’s inner and less-than-inner circles and how influence might be peddled in the White House.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about the protests in LA, give a short timeline of what’s been happening and talk about all the silly discourse about how “the protesters” should “do x” as if every person at a protest is receiving a newsletter about message control or whatever. We also talk about the very weird situation at Ohio State which just basically gave its campus over to OpenAI and had some administrator very embarrassingly say they wanted their students to be “bilingual” in English and AI whatever that means.
Also next week we will take a week off for our vacations. Enjoy the summer everyone!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about Elon being full out of government and think back on all our favorite moments, discuss the funniest conspiracy theories/rumors about his time in Washington and think a bit more about the influence of Big Tech in Washington. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we have on Alex Thompson, co-author of the new book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” and all the reasons Joe Biden decided to run for President in 2024, what happened on that debate stage, how a small group of aides working for Joe and Jill Biden kept everyone in line, or, more commonly, walled off from the President, and how it all fell apart. This is a juicy episode and we all recommend you read the book and Tyler’s essay on it.
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Hello!
Today we have on repeat guest Karen Hao to talk about her new blockbuster book “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.” It’s an amazing, deeply reported book that somehow encapsulates the history of AI, Silicon Valley, and OpenAI while also making a needed and clear argument about how we should think about this technology. Truly like if “Barbarians at the Gate” met “The Shock Doctrine” and it was about AI. We talk about the beginnings of OpenAI, how it burns a colonial path throughout the rest of the world in the form of data centers and exploitative labor, and how we might find a better alternative to Sam Altman’s plan to take over the world. Can’t recommend this book more highly — go get it!
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Hello!
Today we take a break from Trump to bring back one of our favorite guests, Andrew Boryga, the novelist behind the brilliant book Victim, and the author of a funny and incisive substack. We talk about the latest compain-fest in the literary world about white millennial men and how they’re supposedly shut out of the fruits of culture like the NYPL Young Lions Award or whatever. Then we talk a little bit about the Pulitzer controversy surrounding James and Andrew’s own thoughts on who gets to write novels and who does not.
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Hello!
Today we have on Bridget Read, the author of a great new book called “Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America.” (Out today!) We talk about the history of the MLM (multi-level marketing) from its alleged origins with the Yankee peddler and the frontier and the more insidious real story of eugenicists, scammers, and quackery. A lot of questions you might have about pyramid schemes and MLMs will be answered here: Why do they all do vitamins and supplements? Why did AmWay and the DeVos family have such a hold on Trump? Great book. Take a listen.
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Hello!
Today we’re talking about a new essay in the New Yorker that asks how we might think about knowledge, learning, and the meaning of life in a world where Chat GPT replaces a lot of our core knowledge functions. To discuss this piece and its implications (and to argue back on it) we brought on Zena Hitz, a philosopher, a tutor at St. John’s College, and a founder of the Catherine Project. We talked about great books, luddism, overblown AI doomerism and how to think. We really enjoyed this conversation and honestly was hoping it would never end bc Zena was such a fun and compelling guest. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we’re talking Pope and the odds for each of the contenders. If you want a quick way to catch up with who the choices might be and what they represent politically, please tune in! Who is the continuation candidate? Who is the lib? And who is the arch right winger who only talks like an Elon Musk reply guy?
And we talk a bit about the Trump coalition and whether or not it might be feeling a bit shaky after all this chaos. Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week we have on Zephyr Teachout, Professor at Law at Fordham University and columnist at the Nation, for a long talk about protectionism, neoliberalism, and how to capture the spirit of the country. Can liberals just sell free market capitalism and off-shoring to an angry public? Or will there have to be seem change in messaging that will allow the left to define the future of work in this country? We also talk a lot about corruption — Zephyr wrote a book about it — and the unprecedented corruption that we’re seeing now in the White House.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we talk about what the supporters of the tariffs might actually be thinking and why we might take the latest Trump gambit a little more seriously as a lasting movement/idea. What is it about the vision of a manufacturing/factory town America that seems like its so appealing to a portion of the population and how does nativism and “anti globalism” fit into the vision? Are we about to see a terrible horseshoe take hold of part of the country? All this and more this week!
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Hello!
Today we have on Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff for AOC and one of the formers leaders of the Justice Democrats. Saikat is currently running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi. We talk about the possibilities of a Democratic Tea Party, how progressives need to think about actually doing stuff, and a lot about housing. This was a great episode and one that I think should inform you on what the political landscape could look like if the Democratic Party actually has a full-on rebuild.
Enjoy!
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We talk about SignalGate, Trump’s clown show problem, and a little bit about Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and why the Alex Jones from 25 years ago might have been ahead of his time. What does “combative centrism” mean? Does anyone actually care? All these topics and more discussed in this here episode.
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Hello!
This week we talk about the growing tea party vibes around the Democratic party, Schumer’s shame, the anti-establishment energy that’s emanating from the Blue MAGA base, and the new attempts to rebrand old ideas into new ones. Will anyone in the Democratic establishment survive the next decade? Or is it all over but the crying? Also we talk about Columbia University and the cowardice of elite private colleges.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we talk with the authors of “In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us” by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. We talk about what we got wrong during the pandemic, how to battle groupthink, especially when it comes to science, and why so many people were willing to accept one version of public health without proper debate or questioning. This was an informative and thought-provoking episode, one that made us rethink a lot of what we knew about what was happening in the early months of 2020.
Thanks!
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Hello!
Today we talk about the big WWE showdown at the White House between Zelensky and the tag team of Trump and JD Vance, where our alarm meters are for “wait maybe Trump actually is going to do all the stuff he said he’s going to do,” and we talk about the Democratic plan to “play dead” and wait for the perfect moment to form like Voltron and come to save the day with their big glowing sword and tiger heads.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we talk about Elon’s gambit to get everyone to respond to a work email on a weekend, the Eagles will they/won’t they trip to the White House, the Trump administration’s vague crackdown, and we talk for a long time for some reason about leap years and how they’re weird.
ENJOY!
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Hello!
Today, Jay talks to long-time TTSG community member Kyle Paoletta about his new book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. We talk about British travel writing, the building of Albuquerque and Phoenix, climate change, Las Vegas and how the future of American cities might be found in the history of hundreds of years of people trying to live in the American desert. What does the desert signify and what can early occupants of these lands teach us about how to survive climate change? Really loved this book and hope you’ll all read it and enjoy the pod!
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Hello!
Very excited to see so many new subscribers to the podcast over the past two weeks. As a reminder, we are a fully listener supported show so if you could help us keep the lights on over here with a paid subscription, we would greatly appreciate it. Our goal is to always at least provide one show a week for free, which TTSG has been doing now for almost five years.
This week, we take a page from sports podcasts and do a fantasy draft of celebrities who should run for President in 2028. We also talk about DOGE’s moves, how we should think about the fact that some of these cuts seem relatively small when compared to the rhetoric they generate, while also being mindful that there might be a point where the dam breaks and everything gets defunded and deregulated. And Tyler gloats a little bit about the Eagles Super Bowl.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we’re talking all things Elon with Ryan Mac, a reporter at the NYT and the co-author along with Kate Conger of CHARACTER LIMITS: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Ryan’s probably reported more on Elon than pretty much anyone in the press and he gives us his perspective on what’s happened, what moves Elon has made that he also made during his career in business, and what we might expect in the upcoming weeks.
Thanks!
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Hello!
Today we have on repeat guest Karen Hao, a journalist who writes for the Atlantic and has been one of the sharpest minds on OpenAI and this emerging industry. We talk about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model that deleted over a trillion dollars out of the NASDAQ and temporarily tanked NVIDIA’s seemingly unstoppable growth and how it might change the way American banks, government, and users think about Sam Altman and his mandate of “scale, scale, scale.”
Enjoy!
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Hello!
We talk today about the Biden Crime Family, Trump’s sleepy and then not-sleepy speech, the Panama Canal, Mars, and whether Trump actually had prepared for his big (second) moment. Then we go into Elon’s salute and the eerie silence that has fallen over the “resistance” and what that might mean for the next few years.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today’s episode is a lively one! We talk about optimization, working out, RFK Jr., and how health and the woowoo New Age trends of the 1970s somehow got right-coded and then turned into a pathway to becoming one of the worst people on earth. Our guest to discuss all this is Maya Vinokour, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at NYU. Her first book, called Work Flows, focused on labor discourse in Soviet Russia came out last year.
Her thoughts on all this can be found in the Nation and Jacobin.
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Hello!
Today we have a belated 1/6 anniversary special with repeat guest John Ganz, whose great book “When the Clock Broke” can be ordered here and whose essential substack can be read here. We discuss how the public will remember January 6th and whether it might already be fading from the collective memory. What do we make of it today after last November’s election? How do we think Trump will treat 1/6, whether the people in jail who are now pleading for pardons or the lasting imprint it may have placed on the public trust?
We also talk about Trump’s “plans” to annex Greenland.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
After a long string of edifying and informative conversations with experts and thinkers, Tyler and I catch up on the big fight in MAGA world over H1B visa holders, highly skilled immigrants, and what we make of Vivek’s big tweet about… Saved By the Ball? Kids going to malls instead of studying? Really what year did he think he lives in? Anyway, all this discussed in this episode!
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Hello!
Today we have another informative and deep episode with Claire Dunning, a historian and associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Her first book, which came out with the University of Chicago Press in 2022, is a history of urban nonprofits and philanthropic organizations titled Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State. More recently she has written about what she calls the “nonprofit industrial complex” as well as the growing turn away from neoliberalism in the philanthropic sector which Claire recently wrote about in a Nonprofit Quarterly essay entitled “What Does the ‘End’ of Neoliberalism Mean for the Nonprofit Sector?”
We had Professor Dunning on to talk about the discourse about "the groups," how the non-profit industry became an industry and arguably lost its way, how to change the influence they might have in politics into something that could be good and serve more people, and a whole lot about the history of how both the term "non-profit" and the relationship these groups have with the government changed over the course of the past seventy of so years.
enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we have on Max Kim, the Seoul correspondent for the LA Times and a repeat TTSG guest to provide a worthy service. If you are interested in what's happening in Korea but don't know a whole lot about Korea history, politics, or even who President Yoon might be outside of a few viral clips of him singing and his incredibly stupid recent coup attempt, Max is here to provide his analysis and his reportage on everything from what Yoon might been thinking, how he came into power, the Korean traditions of protest, and everything else you might want to know that we could fit into an hour and fifteen minutes.
Please read Max's writing on this.
a great piece from 2022 in the Baffler about Yoon
LA Times article from yesterday on "who is running South Korea right now?"
A moving piece about the Gwangju Massacre
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This week we have on David Hill, the author of a great Rolling Stone article on the online sports betting industry. Dave is the best writer on this topic in America and we talked about his childhood in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the history behind some of these big companies like Draftkings and FanDuel and how they try to exploit players to turn a profit. We also talk about how those profits have not really materialized for these companies and how the whole industry feels like a giant bubble right now. If you want to know everything worth knowing about all these ads you’re seeing and all these bros talking about their parlays, enjoy!
Also, wanted to say that we will be having an episode on the failed coup in Korea next week. Given the fluidity of the situation, did not want to jump the gun on something that would be out of date by the time we hit publish.
And as always, if you enjoy this podcast — and thousands of you tune in every week — please hit the subscribe button and help us keep the lights on over here.
thanks!
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Hello!
Today for the holiday weekend, we have Nancy Fraser, the Henry and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at the New School. She has written widely on feminism, injustice, the problem with identity politics, and neoliberalism. Her most recent books areCannibal Capitalism and The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, both of which were published by Verso.
We revisited an extremely prescient essay she wrote in 2017 for American Affairs about progressive neoliberalism, hegemony, and how Trump both disrupted and reified the existing order. Lotta great talk in this one about whether the Democrats will ever wake up, economic populism, what Trump might do in his second term and more!
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Hello!
Today we have Jamie Lauren Keiles, the author of an upcoming book about the rise of nonbinary identity in America, back on the show. We talk about the thinly veiled post mortems by some within the Democratic coalition to abandon 'the whole trans thing,' the history of how trans rights became such a large part of the country's political conversation, and much more.
If you want to follow Jamie's very cool instagram, it's @sexchange.tbt.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we brought back our polling experts Ben Recht, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, a professor of German and the founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. We set out to really talk about one question: Can we trust these polls and were they right or wrong? Then we talked a lot about how campaigns think and how our data driven society leads to a bunch of very odd and almost random decisions but also very little reflection. Luddites rejoice, this one is for you.
Also, as always, we would really appreciate any help to keep the lights on. We give away this podcast for free every week and can only keep doing it with continued donations from you. It’s just five dollars a month, which is about what you pay in delivery fees every time you order Chipotle from DoorDash or come up with some other five dollar purchase that fits in here. We do appreciate it and thank you so much to everyone who subscribed last week!
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Hello!
Today we brought back our polling experts Ben Recht, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, a professor of German and the founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. We set out to really talk about one question: Can we trust these polls and were they right or wrong? Then we talked a lot about how campaigns think and how our data driven society leads to a bunch of very odd and almost random decisions but also very little reflection. Luddites rejoice, this one is for you.
Also, as always, we would really appreciate any help to keep the lights on. We give away this podcast for free every week and can only keep doing it with continued donations from you. It’s just five dollars a month, which is about what you pay in delivery fees every time you order Chipotle from DoorDash or come up with some other five dollar purchase that fits in here. We do appreciate it and thank you so much to everyone who subscribed last week!
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Tyler and Jay talk about the distressing results with Trump at 92% to win on the needle, what might happen for the Democrats in the future, and spend a whole lot of time talking about the "minority vote" and what went wrong. We promise we do very little "I told you so" in this episode. Honestly, it's about as morose as you'll ever hear us as we both go through what we think the next four years will look like.
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Hello!
We talk about the Trump rally in New York City, Kamala’s closing statements and why, despite months of criticizing the Harris/Walz campaign and living in deep blue states, we both ended up voting for it. We also try to tee up what the next four years might look like for the Democrats whether Harris wins or loses.
As always, this show is funded by subscriptions. We give everything away for free and don’t have any paywalls but we do rely on your generosity to keep the lights on and the Zyn stocked. If you could reach over and just hit that subscribe button, it helps us bring you these takes.
Thank you!
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Hello!
This week we are discussing the state of reading in America and the big Atlantic article that said that college kids can’t really make it through difficult books anymore and blamed woke or something. Our guest is Susannah Grossman, a veteran teacher who has been on both sides of this debate. Really good episode this week imho — lotta lively talk and perspective from someone who has been inside these classrooms.
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Hello!
Today we’re talking about Kamala Harris’s plan for Black men, crypto, one million loans for $20,000, and Trump’s 30 minute spotify playlist party which included his favorite song (Time to Say Goodbye). We also give our best case for the Harris campaign’s strategy and its endless tacks to the right. The LEAST toxic TTSG in months!
As always, we appreciate all our listeners but if you could help us keep the lights on, please reach over and hit that subscribe button for $5 a month. Thank you!
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Hello!
Today’s episode is about THE GREAT BLACK HOPE, a new book by the historian Louis Moore. We talk about the history of Black quarterbacks, both in college and the NFL, the financial and societal pressures that have both led to change and kept some things the same. On a larger scale, we talk about how sports serves both as a testing ground for ideas about race but also how racism locks in certain ways of thinking.
Thanks!
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Hello!
Apologies for the slight delay in getting this episode out but we have a great show today with the writer Jazmine Hughes. We talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book about writing, the West Bank and his travels, the writer-as-activist-celebrity, and the strange and tangled relationship that we, as minority writers, have with prestige media outlets.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week Tyler pays tribute to the great literary critic Fredric Jameson who tragically passed away recently. We talk about the importance of his work and why it will be hard to find someone like him given the state of the academy and literary culture. And then we dive into what happened between RFK and Olivia Nuzzi and how journalism ethics talk ruins every party.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
A quick note before we start: We recorded this as we always do on Tuesday for an early Wednesday release. The last part of the show focuses on what at the time was a wishy-washy and evasive response from Kamala Harris when asked about what Trump and Vance were doing to Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio. Since then, Harris has come out and called their attacks a “crying shame” and likened it to Trump’s demonization of the Central Park Five. We decided to keep the section in the show because while it’s great that Harris did finally address it, I (Jay) still find it interesting that she chose to liken it to well-worn things she’s already talked about, but decline to say anything positive about immigrants or immigration at all. This defensiveness is what we were responding to and while I think the tone we reached would’ve been muted a bit, I still think the logic is sound and relevant.
Other than that, we talked about how we now view the “fascism debate” in light of these disgusting attacks on a specific, vulnerable population who already is seeing daily bomb threats at schools, and we talked a bit about the latest assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today we have a fun conversation with recurring guest Ben Recht, a professor of computer science and machine learning at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, an associate professor of German at NYU. We talk about the article they wrote about Nate Silver’s latest book, the world of Big Data, and then we start talking about how maybe the inability for the iPhone to improve might signal a type of end of history. This was a fun one with lots of random asides with two very smart people so please enjoy!
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Hello!
Welcome back to school everyone. This week, we talk about an article in the New York Times that asks whether we infantilize students and whether we should start treating 18 year old college kids like adults. We also get into the admissions numbers out of MIT after the Affirmative Action Supreme Court and whether we might be seeing a sea change in how the public looks at prestigious Ivy League institutions (as in they hate them now).
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about Kamala’s big speech at the DNC, the cat-and-mouse game her campaign is playing with the media, why we’re probably fine with it in the end, and RFK’s 45 minute speech that outlined his new role as Trump’s new attack dog. (Mostly because JD Vance is not doing so well.)
We also talked about scandal in the English Department at Pomona College and a big story in the Chronicle of Higher Education that stars some of the most annoying people you’ll ever read about.
Also as a periodic reminder: This show is free and we love putting it out, but if you enjoy what we do and can find it in your heart to hit the subscribe button and contribute $5 a month, it really does help us keep going with this project.
Thank you!
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Hello!
We’re joined today by Matt Karp, a columnist for Harper’s, a professor of History at Princeton and one of the most intelligent and incisive writers on the left. We talk about AOC’s big night at the DNC, the somewhat moribund state of the left after Bernie’s big win in the 2020 Nevada primary, and whether the future for the left is bright or gloomy. This was a lively one and lotta good thinking from Matt here so please take a listen!
One note: apologies I think there was some street work being done towards the back end but we tried to clean it up as best as we could. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
thanks!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about the rural vote and the positioning of Tim Walz as the rural whisperer. Will it work? Is there such a thing as a “rural identity” that might look at Walz and gravitate towards him? What’s the thinking behind all that? To help us through it, we talked to Paolo Cremidis, the organizer of the recent Rural Americans for Harris Zoom call and the executive director of the Outrun coalition.
Topics covered: Ice skating rinks turned into giant Fiji water bottles, running back Obama, the Sims, how the culture warriors of the right misunderstand rural voters and what rural voters actually want.
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Hello!
This week we’re extremely excited to have on Astra Taylor, a filmmaker, author, and organizer with the Debt Collective. We talk about Walz, whether VP picks matter, good vibes and joy for once, and also what the hell was RFK Jr. thinking when he dumped that dead bear cub in Central Park. Astra also talks to us about the book she co-authored with Leah Hunt-Hendrix titled “SOLIDARITY: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF A WORLD CHANGING IDEA,” which all of you should pick up and read as it’s extremely relevant to everything we discuss on the show.
Enjoy!
Jay and Tyler
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Hello!
We brought back repeat guest and esteemed journalist Bradford William Davis to talk about White Dudes for Harris, “weird,” and Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference this week in Chicago.
Also discussed: good cringe, Cocomentum, and whether the left should just kinda let the liberals and the identity politicians cook.
Please enjoy!
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HELLO!
Today we talk about the Kamala campaign, who she should pick as VP, speculate on where Joe Biden might be, and offer a spirited defense of AOC doing politics. Gets a bit unhinged in the middle tbh but we at least had a good time with this one.
If you’d like to see Trump play the theme song, click here (Substack won’t let us embed tweets bc Elon did it first, I guess.
https://x.com/GraduatedBen/status/1815807377309864437
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Hello!
Today, we talk about what exactly is going to happen to the country just a few days after the assassination attempt of Donald Trump and whether this will go down as a turning point in the country’s history or if it might just be quickly forgotten as everyone goes deep into RNC and JD Vance talk. Jay shares his very stupid thoughts on whether Donald Trump might have seen God after a near-death experience and the chances that he might be a changed man and Tyler makes both the best case and worst case for what will happen with the Trump/Vance ticket.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week, we are back from vacation and catching up on the only story in America, which is the mental fitness of the President. Jay is on Team “The Democrats are probably too incompetent and divided to actually run a difference candidate in time and so it might actually make sense for them to just get behind Biden and hope everything breaks correctly and they draw to flush against Trump’s made two pair.” Tyler is on Team “It is fundamentally bad to have a President who cannot do normal things and needs 12 days to recover from an international flight. Also what are we doing here?!” WE DEBATE.
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Hello!
Today, we are extremely excited to have on John Ganz, author of the new book When the Clock Broke, a retelling of the 1990s that touches on politics, music, television, and the history of right wing cranks who ultimately would become a prelude for Trumpism. There’s a ton that we discuss: The LA riots, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, Sister Souljah, and much more. If you’re interested in how the fringe elements of the 1990s became much less fringe by 2016, this is a wonderfully written and engaging history that not only feels relevant and prescient, but also funny and alive.
QUICK NOTE: We will not have an episode next week bc of vacation stuff but we will have a lot of announcements about the show throughout July so please stay tuned.
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Hello!
Today we’re doing a Pardon The Interruption-styled show in which we go down a list of topics. We’re experimenting a bit with format these days and so please let us know if this more rapid fire version works for you!
Today’s topics:
Hobby Horsing as a sport?
Dimension Apple from a great post from the Read Max Substack.
Tiger parenting in 2024. Are you a crazy sports parent or a math/violin parent? Is there a difference?
Joe Biden’s age and the promise of President Harris.
The jumps in this are incredible fwiw.
Just a warning: We will be taking July 4th weekend off but should have a fun post for you that week. Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we have a great conversation with Andrew Boryga, the author of VICTIM, a truly subversive and funny novel about a young writer who hustles his way through the media world by just giving it what it wants from him: oppression stories, identity trauma tales, and a lot of embellishment.
We also talk about Caitlin Clark (Jay tries to do a sports talk segment) and the great novel JAMES by Percival Everett. Do books like JAMES and VICTIM signal some change in the way that the publishing industry thinks about race and what stories it might want to promote right now?
ALSO WE ARE NOW ON YOUTUBE. Please take the time to check out our video stuff and subscribe if you can.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today’s show is a talk about an exciting new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman titled “What are Children For?” (Release date: June 11) We talked about “slow love,” the common complaint from millennials that they do not have enough financial stability to start families, the ambivalent mother narrative, and something right in Tyler’s wheelhouse: eco apocalypse fiction. Why is the United States birthrate declining? Why are middle and upper-middle class women waiting longer to have children, or, in many cases, forgoing the decision altogether? We discuss all that with Anastasia and Rachel.
If you’d like a little preview of the show, we have it up on our BRAND NEW YOUTUBE PAGE. (PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND LIKE!)
Just as a reminder: Tyler and I will be rolling out a bunch of new features in July for paid subscribers but for now, please bear with us we add video to our show.
Thank you!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about Biden’s speech at Morehouse College which should be seen as a preview for his message to Black voters amidst polling results that show he has lost a significant percentage of both the Black and Latino vote.
We also talk about the passing of Bill Walton, activism in the NBA and sports, in general, and what we should think about the social justice basketball moment from 2020 in the bubble when the league and its corporate sponsors wallpapered half of Disney World with social justice slogans.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week, we have on David Austin Walsh, author of “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” a new book that tracks the development and coddling of far right political figures and their co-dependent relationship with mainstream Republicans. Lotta good history here and David asks Kang whether he thinks “Rich Men North of Richmond” is still good. This is a lively one with a lot of interesting history about conservative media and how it developed through the middle to late 20th century.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week we talk about something we meant to discuss last week — Macklemore’s new song “Hind’s Hall,” and politics in music and literature. There’s some Immortal Technique, the Coup, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young thrown in there too. We also talk about the pretty bad polls that came out for the Biden campaign, which showed him losing in some weird ways in battleground states and took a deeper look into the crosstabs, always the more interesting part of any poll.
thanks as always for listening!
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Hello!
This week we are happy to present one of our most requested guests, Vincent Bevins. He is a longtime foreign correspondent and the author of two books, The Jakarta Method and If We Burn. We talked about the lessons of the mass protests of the 2010s around the world, the allure and some of the downsides to leaderless/horizontal protest movements, and about how the media has covered the campus protests around the country. This is a good one so please enjoy!
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Hello!
This week we revived a TTSG tradition of answering your questions on the air. Topics covered range from why Tyler puts on a wetsuit and swims out to rocks to fish for striped bass, the rise in extreme sports, why standardized tests are actually good, the state of the student protests going forward and our worries about state repression, and Jerry Seinfeld complaining that all sitcoms are too woke.
(One note, we recorded this yesterday morning before the NYPD crackdown at Columbia and CCNY. We included a short note at the start of the episode.)
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about everything that’s happening on campus from Columbia to NYU to Berkeley. Tyler talks about the responsibilities of faculty in these moments and what he thinks is driving a surprisingly strong faculty response to the arrests in New York City. We also talk about how to process the instances of antisemitism at these protests and Jay talks about some of the difficulties that have arisen with the leaderless activism model over the past decade or so.
Also, we will be having some announcements coming up in the next weeks so please stay tuned.
Enjoy!
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Hello,
Today’s episode is our conversation with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who traveled to European Hospital in Gaza in late March. He talks to us about what he saw there and the massive humanitarian toll, particularly on children. We talked about the conditions at the hospital and the role of the doctor as truth teller in a conflict that is being obscured from view.
Dr. Sidhwa and his colleague Dr. Mark Perlmutter wrote an account of their trip which you should read here. And you can see his recent appearance on Democracy Now.
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Hello!
Today, we have a packed show with our guest Danny Bessner of the American Prestige podcast. Danny argued the other side of the fascism debate and expressed why he and others believe the word is not appropriate to describe what’s happened to the American right.
And Danny stuck around while we discussed Tyler’s debunking of the book “White Rural Rage” and why the type of liberal elite discourse we have right now might eventually be politically catastrophic (while also just being gross.)
As always, if you would like to support the show, please help us out with a $5 a month substack subscription.
Thank you!
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Hello!
Today’s guest is the John Ganz, author of the Unpopular Front substack and the upcoming book “When The Clock Broke.” We talk about the now years-long debate about whether what’s happening among the right wing in American should be called “fascism” and how such definitions should and should not be used in a political manner. We also talk about normie/resistance liberals and the concept of a popular front that needs to exist to defeat all that Trump might bring with him into office.
These links will be a helpful primer if you’re unfamiliar.
John’s latest on the debate
Andrew Marantz’s latest piece on the debate
Jay
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Hello!
Tyler is back for today’s episode in which we talk about open container laws in New Jersey, the discourse about the discourse on Kate Middleton and the Royals, and some thoughts on how to get children off their phones and the Internet, more broadly. Jay reveals that his takes are aging at a more rapid rate than he is and Tyler proves his Marxist bonafides by suggesting the most radical plan you’ve ever heard for getting kids to stop staring at some glowing rectangle for hours and hours upon end.
As always, this show only works because of your contributions. We want to keep all the episodes free so if you could find it in your heart to pay $5 a month, you can do so at goodbye.substack.com. That helps us keep the lights on here.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today a very special March Madness episode with New York Times and CNN contributor Jane Coaston. We talk about the recent ascent of women’s basketball, the gendered ways in which we always expect good, progressive behavior from women’s coaches and athletes, Caitlin Clark-as-Larry Bird and Caitlin Clark-as-baller, and a bit about NIL and the transfer portal. I’ve wanted to have Jane on the pod for a very long time and this will not disappoint if you want her very good takes on women’s sports.
Tyler will be back next week.
Enjoy!
Jay
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Hello!
Today’s episode is a talk with Vinson Cunningham about his new novel GREAT EXPECTATIONS which came out yesterday and is in bookstores everywhere.
It’s everything you would expect from Vinson: beautiful sentences, long meditations on hoops, the church, and love, and a engrossing storyline that follows a young man who goes to work on the campaign of a certain senator from Illinois during his first presidential run.
BUY IT HERE.
And if you’re in New York City, Vinson will be in conversation with Doreen St. Felix tonight at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn.
Jay
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Hello!
Today, we talk to two people who have been thinking about reporting about AI for quite a long time: Repeat guest Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley and Karen Hao, a journalist who has written an excellent series of pieces for the Atlantic. We talk to Ben about SORA, OpenAI’s video generator that only exists in trailer form so far and what might happen if it’s actually good. (We don’t think it’ll be good. At least yet.) And then we talk some philosophy.
There’s also a surprise at the start of the show.
And then we talk to Karen about the massive amount of water and energy that AI might consume in the near future and why everyone seems to want massive, cumbersome and expense-heavy giant tools and not the smaller, more streamlined tools that might actually create something of use.
Links:
SORA announcement
Karen’s articles on AI for the MIT Technology Review (really good)
…and her more recent (also really good) work for the Atlantic.
thank you!
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Hello!
On today’s episode, we talk about Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty Air Force twenty-five year old who self-immolated in Washington, D.C., the history of the act and how it has been seen in different eras and different contexts. We compare, for example, how Barack Obama talked about the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor who is credited with sparking the Arab Spring with how much of the liberal commentariat talks about Bushnell (largely in terms of mental health). And we try to make sense of what demands this act places on the public and how it could be understood.
We also talk about this:
We also talk about Jay’s recent article about Pretendianism in the New Yorker and Tyler talks about his own experiences as a minority in the academy.
Some reading:
Wapo report on Bushnell
Article Jay wrote in 2022 about the self immolation of Wynn Bruce
Pretendian article
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talked about a topic that we’ve been circling around for a while — the minority vote. We now have months of polls all pointing towards the same trends in terms of Black, Latino and Asian voters all moving towards the right for a variety of reasons, most of which are left unexamined by many in the mainstream presses.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that we don’t hear about the “Black vote” or the “Latino vote.” We do read the polling results and see charts detailing the shift. But that second part — the explanation for why — almost never gets voiced for what I imagine is the very simple reason that most campaigns, pundits, and the like don’t really know the answers.
We talk about all that on the show and give our own thoughts about why different groups of people might be leaving the Democrat Party and what implications it might have not just on 2024, but for the future of progressive politics. Can the Dems hold together their coalition by just screaming at minorities that if they don’t show up, they’re going to be living in a fascist state?
Thanks for listening and as always, if you’re receiving this email and haven’t subscribed to the show, we would greatly appreciate your support to help us keep the lights on here.
READING LIST
Article in Slow Boring about the moderate Black voter
Poll of Latino voters shows concerns about inflation and the economy
Recent research showing that Black voter concerns about Climate Change
Is Biden’s Israel policy alienating Black voters?
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Hello!
Today’s episode is an interview with Carrie Sun, whose memoir PRIVATE EQUITY came out yesterday. (Buy it here!) The book is a memoir about the time Carrie spent working as the right hand for one of the country’s most famous billionaire hedge fund managers. We talk about the allure of finance and Wall Street, Ishiguro and restraint in writing, the ways in which political awakenings can sometimes be quite mundane in their origins, and a lot more about this wonderful book. If you’re a fan of everything from Ishiguro to Michael Lewis, this book is worth checking out, especially if you want to see what its like to work in a place where there are daily exploitations, insane expectations, but also sometimes there’s a bag on your desk and there’s a $2000 pair of leggings inside.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
Today, we talk about the Apple Vision Pro and its grim vision for how you should be spending your time. Also, we talk a lot about Jaron Lanier’s most recent essay about the Virtual Reality in the New Yorker, specifically the question he poses about how technology should fit into our lives and whether tech can just create things because they’re cool without affixing their products to some greater mission for humanity.
The Apple Vision Pro doesn’t come with any story about how its going to change everything or even a particularly great series of launch apps that feel revolutionary. It just kinda is a VR headset that asks you to wear it around all the time. Lanier’s essay, as we discuss, asks whether “all the time” technology actually makes sense.
ENJOY!
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Hello!
This week we have on Musa Al-Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. We talk a lot about “kids these days” and the tendency for all sorts of reactionaries to blame them for everything that’s wrong with this country. Don’t like illiberal attitudes on campuses? Blame the kids. Do you think free expression is at risk? Blame the kids. Feel like democracy is on the brink of collapse? Blame the kids.
(As always, if you’re reading this and not subscribed to our substack or Patreon, please consider supporting the show at goodbye.substack.com. It’s just $5 a month and helps us keep it going.)
Musa’s work is a critical intervention into all this kid blaming and we talk about the actual problem: Adults these days. We also touch on teachers, peer review as gatekeeping, and much more!
Here’s some info on Musa’s upcoming book from Princeton University PRess, which I encourage everyone to pre-order.
A piece he wrote outlining the problem with people saying “the kids these days” are responsible for everything that’s wrong with the discourse.
Referenced in our conversation: Science is a strong-link problem by Adam Mastroianni
A look at the Polarizing Effect of the March for Science on Attitudes toward Scientists by Matthew Motta
A study on the difference between trust in science and trust in scientists by Marcus Mann and Cyrus Schleifer
And Musa’s recent look at antisemitism in America and a lot of the ways in which it is misunderstood.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
This week, we talk about the big Polyamory article in New York Magazine and the proposition that breaking the bonds of monogamy might be a political statement, one that frees both sides from the constraints of marriage. Are we just reinventing ways to justify selfish behavior? And why does every personal decision in the lives of upper middle class, well-educated people need to turn into some movement that promises nothing?
We also continue our ongoing talk about visions of the climate future with a conversation about “Psalm for the Wild Built” by Becky Chambers, which, in turn, led to a longer conversation about surf movies and Tyler’s hobby of fishing at 3 AM in a wetsuit in the cold unruly waters of coastal Maine.
Enjoy!
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Hello!
In today’s episode, we talk about Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower,” a science fiction novel from 1992 that unexpectedly found itself on the best seller’s list in 2020. The novel imagines a violent and grim future in which the world has warmed beyond safe inhabitation, the lucky get to live in walled off communities while the poor all kill one another in the streets. We talk about visions of climate apocalypse and how Butler, through no fault of her own, might have created a hegemonic vision of a warmed earth, one that has become almost cliche in the thirty years since Sower’s publication. Why don’t we have other, new visions for climate death? What would those even look like?
We also get a bit into a recent article in The Atlanticabout Butler and her use of “historofuturism” in her work.
And we talk a bit about the state of the Black quarterback and muse on why Lamar Jackson might get a more traditional, sports-talk-racist treatment than other Black quarterbacks in the league.
We will be continuing our look into extinction literature next week with a look at Becky Chambers’s “A Psalm for the Wild-Built.” If you’d like to read it before the show, please do so!
As always, if you’d like to upgrade your subscription and help support the show, we rely on your contributions to keep it going. Please click over and help us for $5 a month!
— TTSG
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Hello!
I’m very excited to announce that Tyler Austin Harper will be our co-host for the next month or so.
Tyler was on the show last month and introduced himself then, but for those who missed it, he’s a writer at the Atlantic and a professor of literature in the environmental studies department at Bates College. He specializes in extinction literature and film.
For the next month or so, Tyler and I are going to talk to guests and to one another about a variety of topics, including literature and movies. In this episode, for example, you’ll find a “Book Corner” at the end where we talk about the rise of true crime podcasts and a recent op-ed in the Times.
Tyler also wrote a piece about the Claudine Gay scandal at Harvard, which we discussed at some length here.
As always, if you’re getting this email and want to support the show, please subscribe for $5 a month and you’ll receive access to our Discord server, where all these things are discussed at great length.
thank you!
Jay
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Hello!
Today we have a great interview with Nithya Raman, the City Councilmember for Los Angeles’s District 4. We talk about housing, the despair around the homelessness problem in California’s biggest cities, and whether there might be a different future for the city’s political machine.
My interest in Councilmember Raman started back when I was writing the newsletter for the Times because there was an effort by some of the more powerful local politicians to redraw her district in ways that would both disenfranchise many of the people who had voted for her to be their representative but also seemed to reflect the unrelenting power of homeowners in Southern California.
You can read some of those pieces here, here, and here.
What became clear to me during the reporting of those pieces was that Mike Davis was right when he wrote “the most powerful ‘social movement’ in contemporary Southern California is that of affluent homeowners, organized by notional community designations or tract names, engaged in the defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity.”
The real battle in California, then, is between the self interests of homeowners to protect their value and the “character” of their neighborhoods and the best interests of everyone else. This is not a fight that follows basic partisan lines nor is it one that really has much coherence to it, but it’s the fight that every politician in California, especially in Los Angeles or here in the Bay Area, must navigate to get anything done.
Nithya and I talked about all that and the massive scandal in the Los Angeles City Council in 2022, where Latino members of the council and labor leaders were caught on tape making bigoted statements about pretty much every other group in the city. What those tapes revealed, at least to me, was how a type of identity politics actually functioned in the country’s second biggest city.
If you want to know a bit more about Nithya, here’s a link to her campaign page and a story about the leaked tape scandal.
thank you!
TTSG
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Hello!
In our Discord server, which you can access by subscribing to the show for a measly $5 a month, a user asked me to not do shows about sports. I took this request seriously as I generally aim to please, but am sad to announce that after much deliberation, I do think it’s worth having a conversation about a very distinct phenomenon I’ve observed over the past few years.
As recently as 2020, it was difficult to have a conversation about sports without bringing in all that “politics.” LeBron was talking about Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. The NFL, still enmeshed in the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick, put together a variety of initiatives around ending racism or whatever. The NBA had its weird bubble spectacle with all its Nike approved slogans on every surface possible, including the player jerseys.
Today, almost all of that is gone. Sports coverage, for the most part, feels explicitly apolitical. Even the NBA’s big concession post the summer of 2020 — that they would not play any games on election days and use their arenas as polling sites — came and went this year without any real interruption to what had become a non-stop In Season Tournament hype cycle.
Are we in a period of overcorrection? To discuss this question, I brought on Bradford William Davis, an investigative sports journalist and a former sports columnist at the New York Daily News.
Here is a sampling of Bradford’s work.
A lengthy investigation into Major League Baseball’s practice of using multiple balls during the season. (for my money, one of the finest works of investigative sports reporting in the past five years)
A look into injury and labor concerns in the NFL
An investigation into sexual assault and misconduct in US Fencing
TIMESTAMPS
6:02- are we in a moment of overcorrection for politics in sports media?
17:05 - OHTANI TALK and did he not come to SF because of crime, homelessness and wokeness?
28:45 - DRAYMOND TALK and “mental health” as a catch-all explanation.
45:00 - a defense of investigative journalism in sports
52:00 - JUST TELL US WHAT’S HAPPENING, REPORTERS!
ANNOUNCEMENT: We will be taking the next two weeks off for the break but will be back on Wednesday January 3rd.
Thank you!
Jay
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Hello!
Today on the show, we have Tyler Austin Harper, a literary scholar and an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College. We talk about the history of extinction literature, the books that tech moguls read and the vision it inspires, the dangers of science fiction and all that’s happening in the Ivy Leagues right now.
0:00 - Jay talks about the new direction of the show, which for now will be a “degenerate Asian version of In Our Time.”
2:40-6:00 - Jay and Tyler talk about Maine and the L.L. Bean outlet.
7:00-34:00 - EXTINCTION LITERATURE TALK
34:00- end - How to think about what’s happening on campus, the need to address concerns about double standards in speech with seriousness and good faith, and a defense of DEI programs.
You should read Tyler’s work as well. Here are some links
How Much Blood is Your Fun Worth? in the Atlantic.
I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up. in the Atlantic
The Moral Theater of Social Justice Parenting in NYT
I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions in NYT
Lastly, I wanted to put in a short message here about the future of the show. As noted, the show will still continue and while there’s no definitive plan yet on what the next months will look like, there will still be episodes and an ongoing assessment of what’s working and what’s not. Obviously, the show will not be the same without Tammy, but the community we built over the past three and a half years has always been extremely important to me and not something I take for granted. If you have any suggestions or complaints or whatever, please feel free to email me at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. I’m extremely grateful for all of your support over all these years and I want you to know that you also have a say in what comes next.
thanks
Jay
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Hello from the “White Projects”!
For Tammy’s final ep as co-host, we answer questions from our beloved subscribers. Thank you for asking us to ponder:
-
Vice, Jezebel, and the loss of irreverent digital media
-
What makes podcasting so terrifying (and freeing)
-
Biden vs. Trump in early polls + in Tammy’s reporting on young voters
-
Our worst takes from 3.5 years of blabbering
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Whether TTSG was a guerilla marketing campaign for Jay’s book
To get Tammy’s infrequent writing updates (soon replacing her TinyLetter, R.I.P.), sign up here, and find links to her older work here. You can also keep in touch via email and follow her on Instagram for eventual zine-y things!
Mai can be reached via email, but apologizes in advance for her dismal reply rate.
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join the TTSG Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
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For Tammy’s last TTSG book club as pod host (!), we welcome Jillian Tamaki, award-winning author and a key member of our early-COVID Discord crew. Jillian’s new graphic novel, Roaming, published with her cousin and co-author, Mariko Tamaki, follows three Canadian college freshmen on a spring break trip to New York. We hear about Jillian’s use of vernacular tourist archives like Flickr and YouTube to build scenes of NYC from afar; the complex dynamics among young women friends, especially when traveling; and what makes a good artistic collaboration. [Note: From 3:15 to 26:10, Jillian presents a slideshow, but the BTS is great even without the visuals!]
🎧 Heads-up: Tomorrow (Monday, Dec. 4) Tammy and Jay will record their final co-host ep, and take listener questions! Ask away here: https://forms.gle/bVtcVVyyNKz7Epe76
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Philly!
This week, Andy joins us for one of Tammy’s last eps as a host of TTSG. 🥲 After catching up on dog COVID, [6:10] we discuss how China’s historical self-identification as a vanguard of the Third World has given way, through decades of technological and economic growth, to a more general anti-West position. [29:00] We also reflect on the various pockets of U.S. public opinion on Gaza and Zionism, from Andy’s college students to our elected officials (and their press secretaries). [53:30] Finally, we debate whether the term “barbaric” has been selectively applied since October 7, along with larger questions of media bias.
In this episode, we ask:
Where does China’s relatively strong support of Palestine come from, and is it actually as strong as it seems?
How does the movement for a free Palestine fit into the idea of what it means to be a good leftist?
Should media outlets rethink when to publish gruesome images of victims of violence?
For more, see:
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Times coverage of the Biden-Xi Summit (and Blinken’s reaction to a Biden gaffe)
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More on the three young Palestinian American students who were shot in Vermont, the NYU doctor who was fired over his racist social media posts, and the friendship between a Palestinian and a pro-Israel chef in Philly that has soured
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Words from Lydia Polgreen and from Jay on the question of publishing graphic photos of children killed in Gaza
Reminder: Tammy is hosting a virtual TTSG book club meeting for subscribers tonight at 5pm PST // 8pm EST (9am in Shanghai) with cartoonist, illustrator, and Discord OG Jillian Tamaki! We’ll get some BTS insight from Jillian on the graphic novel she just published with her cousin and co-author, Mariko Tamaki, Roaming. You can find the Zoom info on Discord or in this post!
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
This week, Jay talks to a student organizer for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of seventy five student organizations who have been organizing and putting on protests on campus. Last week, the administration of Columbia University suspended two of the student groups – Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace.
The organizer and Jay talk about why Columbia made this decision, what the climate is like on campus, and what the administration has been telling students about the suspensions. We also talk about divestment, broadly, as an organizing tactic and discuss the anti-apartheid divestment protests for South Africa.
Tammy will be back next week for three more episodes!
Reminder: On Nov. 29, Tammy will host her last TTSG book club event over Zoom with cartoonist, illustrator, and Discord OG Jillian Tamaki—on Jillian’s new graphic novel, Roaming! Check out the Discord for details and a book discount.
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community. You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
This week, we’re joined by our friend Jamie Lauren Keiles, a former contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine who is working on a book about nonbinary identity in America and posting at the archival Instagram account @sexchange.tbt. [4:45] Jamie discusses his resignation from the Times Magazine, and why he signed the recent open letter by WAWOG (the Writers Against the War on Gaza) as well as an earlier letter criticizing NYT’s trans coverage. [47:40] We also talk about the process of unlearning pro-Israel propaganda and where a trans, anti-Zionist, observant Jew finds himself today, both institutionally and spiritually.
In this episode, we ask:
How is the presumed “objective” position within a media institution created and reinforced?
What good (if any) can an open letter do? And how much does it matter what an American Jew thinks about all of this?
How do people’s minds actually get changed on Israel-Palestine?
For more, see:
-
Jamie’s latest Substack post: Do I believe that there are questions that should never be asked?
-
Jamie and Jazmine Hughes on Democracy Now! discussing their resignations from the Times Magazine
-
Jay’s recent piece on the chilling of pro-Palestine speech within journalism
-
AP coverage of the Writers Bloc action in the New York Times building last week
[1:04:00] And a big announcement! Listen to the end to catch Tammy and Jay present a new phase for the podcast. (Spoiler: Tammy is moving on in early December; Jay is continuing and wants your feedback.)
As always, subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community, which we hope to continue cultivating into the future. Also: On Nov. 29, Tammy will host her last TTSG book club event with cartoonist, illustrator, and Discord OG Jillian Tamaki—on Jillian’s new graphic novel, Roaming! Check out the Discord for details and a book discount.
You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
This week, we are joined by Tania Hary, the executive director of Gisha (“access”), an Israeli legal organization that fights for the freedom of movement of Palestinians. [2:25] We discuss the restrictive status quo that was in place long before October 7, in which Israel controlled travel in and out of the occupied territories, the flow of goods and food into Gaza, and the Census-like registry of the Palestinian population (that is implicated in the questioning of Gazan fatalities). [30:45] Tania explains how political repression and compulsory military service convince many Israelis that theirs is the “most moral army in the world.”
In this episode, we ask:
How are Israelis consuming images from and narratives about Gaza?
What does it mean for politicians and media to dispute information, namely death counts, coming from sources in a besieged Gaza?
What does this war reveal about the world order, humanitarian law, and human rights?
For more, see:
-
A recent press conference on how to report accurately on Gaza, featuring Tania
-
Reporting from Haaretz on the backlash against Arab Israelis
-
Tania’s testimony before the UN Security Council earlier this year
-
Protesters braving it in Tel Aviv this past week
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community and participate in our upcoming IRLish book event. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
This week, New York Times Magazine contributing writer and repeat guest Rozina Ali talks with us about media coverage of the war in Israel and Gaza as well as the challenges faced by journalists, more than twenty of whom have been killed in the region over the past two weeks. We also discuss whether there has been a chilling of speech in the West, the history of suppressed expression when it comes to Israel and Palestine, and how all this may shake out in politics and public sentiment.
In this episode, we ask:
How accurate are the comparisons of this moment to 9/11, in terms of media suppression, Islamophobia, and our ability to parse complicated political issues?
Does social media incentivize checking certain boxes around Israel-Palestine over moving dialogue forward?
Why are U.S. elected officials so out of touch with public opinion?
For more, see:
-
Retaliation within Israel (Crackdown on Freedom of Speech of Palestinian Citizens of Israel), on U.S. college campuses (A “McCarthyite Backlash” Against Pro-Palestine Speech), at the 92Y (92NY Pulls Event With Viet Thanh Nguyen Over Criticism of Israel), and more (A Surge in Suppression)
-
A growing list of journalist casualties since October 7, from the Committee to Protect Journalists
-
Mona Chalabi’s visualization of deaths in the war versus New York Times coverage of those deaths
-
Articles on the killings of synagogue president Samantha Woll in Detroit and of Muslim six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume in Chicago
-
Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, interviewed by Piers Morgan
-
Rozi’s Times Magazine profile of Rashida Tlaib, from March 2022
-
Our first episode with Rozina, from March 2021: Kimchi nationalism, Biden on immigration and foreign policy, and Desi identities
-
Plus, our episode with Viet Thanh Nguyen, from August 2020: Ethnic Studies, Revolutionary Politics, and the Third World Liberation Front
-
A recent U.S. opinion poll on the war, from CBS News/YouGov (compared with lackluster support for a ceasefire in Congress)
-
Last week’s episode with Amjad Iraqi, a policy analyst and Palestinian citizen of Israel: The siege in Gaza and Israel’s end game
If you’re a writer, journalist, or media worker who has faced retaliation for expressing your views on the war in Gaza, you can reach out to the National Writers Union for support by filling out this survey.
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to keep us going and join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
This week, we’re joined by Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 Magazine and a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaka. Since Hamas’s brutal attack and Israel’s declaration of war, thousands of people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel have been killed. More than a million people have been ordered to leave the northern Gaza Strip; more than two million Gazans are being denied food, water, electricity, and fuel. [3:10] Amjad, a Palestinian citizen of Israel based in London, explains what’s different about this moment for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. [32:30] He also untangles the international context in which Hamas operates, both in relation to its Arab neighbors and global powers like the United States—the only country, he believes, with the power to stop Israel from committing genocide. [47:20] Finally, Amjad highlights the need to reject colonial and statist frameworks in fighting for Palestinian liberation.
In this episode, we ask:
How was Israel able to manufacture a forgetting of occupied Palestinians by Israeli Jews?
How has the politics in Israel shifted following Hamas’s attack?
How should we understand this latest wave of violence, given the violence required to maintain Israel’s “status quo”?
What are the freedom dreams of Palestinian people?
For more, see:
-
Amjad’s writing in the wake of Hamas’s attack in southern Israel—‘Get out of there now’—and an older piece he wrote about “the worn-out aphorism of a ‘cycle of violence’” in Israel-Palestine
-
A useful conversation with Tareq Baconi, Amjad’s colleague at Al-Shabaka
-
Our previous TTSG conversations on Israel-Palestine:
-
Embracing U.F.O.s and rejecting Zionism, with Arielle Angel (August 2023)
-
Loving Palestine, with Esmat Elhalaby (May 2021)
-
Sheikh Jarrah and What Feels Different This Time about Israel/Palestine, with Josh Leifer (May 2021)
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from yet another devastating news week!
[0:30] We begin by addressing Hamas’s recent attack on Israel, to which Netanyahu responded with a declaration of war. (We’ll have an area expert on the show next week to talk about all this at greater length.) [12:10] In the second half of the episode, we discuss the new U.S. Senator from California, Laphonza Butler, and how her appointment by Gavin Newsom (following Dianne Feinstein’s death) factors into next year’s race for that seat. We explore the organizer-to-politician career path and ponder how labor-y a labor candidate has to be.
In this episode, we ask:
What would unbiased media coverage of Israel/Palestine actually look like?
Has the (online) left overcorrected on identity politics and started to judge “diverse” figures too harshly?
For more, see:
-
More on where Laphonza Butler fits into the California Senate race and her labor-world connections
-
An excerpt from Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag
-
Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the Condé cafeteria!
This week, our guest is Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a writer and editor and the former executive editor at Teen Vogue. [5:30] Samhita’s personal essay in The Cut explores how being prescribed the new weight-loss drug Mounjaro, not long after her father died of complications from diabetes, challenged her thinking around health and body image. [36:00] We also discuss the decline(?) of the girlboss—Samhita is writing a book on women and work culture—and the enduring power of individualistic corporate feminism. Plus, we hear about Samhita’s tenure at Teen Vogue as the outlet expanded its political coverage and tried to change the culture of fashion magazines. (Apologies for the slightly worse-than-usual audio quality on this ep.)
In this episode, we ask:
Has the body image discourse around Ozempic and Mounjaro limited the drugs’ real, life-changing possibilities?
What does it mean for both weight-loss culture and health access that these are pricey prescription medications?
When is hating on girlboss culture classist and racist?
For more, see:
-
Samhita’s essays on the weight-loss drug Mounjaro and The Demise of the Girlboss
-
Jia Tolentino’s take: Will the Ozempic Era Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin?
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community and to hear about IRL hangouts with Jay, Tammy, and other listeners! You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the negotiating table!
This week, it’s just us, talking more hot labor summer and a bit about poetry (Tammy recommends the work of Mai Der Vang!). [9:00] After 146 days on strike, the Writers Guild of America, which represents about 11,000 screenwriters, announced on Sunday that they’d reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP studio group. (Forgive the timing of this ep: the WGA released details of the tentative agreement on Tuesday night, after we had recorded; members will still have to vote on the deal.) [23:00] Meanwhile, as one strike (maybe) ends, another expands! Nearly 20,000 United Auto Workers members across 40 states have walked off the job to demand a fairer share of record profits from the Big 3 automakers, seeking to reverse Great Recession-era losses and prove the might of a new and improved UAW.
In this episode, we ask:
Why does so much of the public support the WGA strike, a white-collar union whose ranks include very highly paid (less sympathetic?) members?
How sturdy is the very new, seemingly democratic operation of the UAW under Shawn Fain?
Can this union wave bring back American manufacturing, or are we just buying time before another big offshoring push?
What’s with EVs and the enviro dimensions of car-making?
For more, see:
-
Tammy’s dispatch on the WGA strike and animation labor for the New York Review of Books
-
An In These Times podcast that touches on UAW’s unionization push within higher ed
-
Previous TTSG convos we reference in this ep, about the WGA, UAW, Labor Notes unionism, deaths of despair, and more:
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Listener Qs: Barbenheimer, hot labor summer, & white-Asian relationships in film (July 2023)
-
A.I. scab-bot$, with Max Read (June 2022)
-
Is it finally Strikevember?! (November 2022)
-
Inflaaaation, cool unions, and "We Own This City" (June 2022)
-
SCOTUS trouble, working-class white people, and Taiwan's military (October 2020)
-
Some background on Walter Reuther’s UAW, from 2009
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community and meet us IRL. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. And if you’re a freelancer, consider organizing with Tammy & the Freelance Solidarity Project!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from karaoke!
This week, we bring you more Olivia Rodrigo content–with Karen Tongson, USC professor, podcast co-host, and lover of all singable musics! [28:50] Jay and Tammy go deep with Karen on her childhood with musician parents, AzNs in California’s Inland Empire, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), transpacific music circuits, and why it’s racist to pile on a twenty-year-old Pinay pop star. [3:25] But first, some takes on Hasan Minhaj’s “emotionally true” standup act. (Sorry for Tammy’s absence partway, then fully halfway, through the ep… and all the water noise, lol. NY apartment life, what can you do?)
In this episode, we ask:
-
Why are Filipinos so often accused of copycat artistry?
-
How does Filipino music resist the long tail of American colonization?
-
What makes Olivia’s music so delectable (and so suburban Asian American?!)?
-
When is race comedy funny?
For more, see:
-
A 2021 TTSG episode about the Inland Empire (Environmental justice, Amazon logistics, and immigrant workers, with Andrea Vidaurre)
-
Bruno Mars doing Pandora on SNL (at 23:50)
-
Jay’s review of “GUTS” on behalf of Gen X dads
-
Karen’s newest book, out this November, Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us, and an earlier exploration of her namesake in Why Karen Carpenter Matters[excerpt here]
-
More on Filipino performance and colonial histories in Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire, by Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns
-
Clare Malone’s story on Minhaj and his slippery “emotional truths”
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from British Columbia!
This week, [4:15] we start with the latest concerning video of Mitch McConnell and whether the conversation around fitness for office can (and should) cut across party lines. [21:45] Next, we talk about the Korean fine-dining wave in NYC, the effect of soft power, and why you won’t see us at Naro anytime soon. [45:05] In our final segment, we discuss the Serial podcast “The Retrievals,” which explores questions of gendered pain and corrupt healthcare through the true stories of women deprived of pain medication during IVF. Jay takes us BTS of this caliber of narrative podcast.
In this episode, we ask:
Is it reasonable to expect basic verbal competency from our elected officials?
If you’re a leftist, are there some luxuries (like dining at $$$$$ restaurants) that should be off-limits? Or is that a needlessly moralistic stance?
Why is women’s pain continually dismissed, and what’s the right punishment for the infliction of non-lethal harm?
For more, see:
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The older and more recent videos of Mitch McConnell, and some doctors’ hypotheses about the cause
-
Pete Wells’s article about How Korean Restaurants Remade Fine Dining in New York
-
The Times investigation into A Deadly Epidural, Delivered by a Doctor With a History of Mistakes
-
Books on pain and how it’s addressed: Sick: A Memoir, by Porochista Khakpour, and The Body in Pain, by Elaine Scarry
-
Past TTSG episodes we refer to:
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A recent discussion on Asian food trends in the U.S., from June
-
Lux magazine and lockdowns with Sarah Leonard, from December 2020
We’ll be off next week as our hosts attend to other business (their full-time jobs), but watch out for a non-audio note!
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community to chat about “authentic” Asian food, and to see footage of the noraebang you heard at the end of today’s episode! You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from three far-flung cities!
This week, we’re joined by our pal Vinson Cunningham, staff writer and theatre critic for The New Yorker.
After briefly interrogating Jay’s recent pivot to dad-hiker fashion (pic for subscribers only), we hear Vinson’s take on the Trump mugshot. [4:05] The image gets us talking about aesthetic self-perception, the celebrity accused in popular culture, and the lack of a good analysis of Trump’s true appeal. [41:45] Next, we discuss last week’s G.O.P. primary debate, which causes Jay to confront what fascinates him about Vivek Ramaswamy, Tammy to question her EMILYs List impulses, and Vinson to call b**t on right-wing claims of populism.
In this episode, we ask:
How does the Trump mugshot, a visual anomaly in the history of presidential imagery, reflect on our political system? What’s the value of similar pix in countries where former leaders are regularly imprisoned?
Is there any ceiling on this Trump thing?
Why didn’t the G.O.P. primary debate feature more culture-war talk?
For more, see:
-
Vinson’s recent piece about the Trump mugshot, plus older ruminations on presidential imagery:
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From 2017: Pete Souza and the Politics of Looking at Barack Obama
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From 2018: The Politics of Race and the Photo That Might Have Derailed Obama
-
Jay’s recent articles about integration in Shaker Heights, Ohio and Vivek Ramaswamy’s debate performance
-
A Q&A by Isaac Chotiner (apols for the New Yorker plugs) about the constitutional case for barring Trump from the presidency
-
Previous TTSG episodes featuring Vinson:
-
“Tár,” a film for the chattering class (February 2023)
-
"Mare of Easttown" special impromptu episode! (May 2021)
-
Vinson Cunningham on the NBA, Yang, and IRL theatre (May 2021)
And pre-order Vinson’s forthcoming novel!
- Out of respect for our many repeat guests, we note that this episode marks Vinson’s fourth TTSG appearance, which ties him with Hua Hsu and Jenny Wang Medina.
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community (and see photo evidence of Jay’s newfound style). You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a Cessna!
This week, it’s just us, on a grab-bag anthropological journey. [2:55] First, Jay unpacks his recent trip to Martha’s Vineyard and what he learned about the academic elite on a panel about affirmative action. [23:35] Next, we discuss Season 4 of “Love After Divorce”, in which Korean-American divorcees shack up and speak subpar Korean. [42:30] Then we catch up on the sad saga of former NFL player Michael Oher, who has claimed that the film purportedly based on his life, “The Blind Side,” misrepresented his story and unethically enriched his white "adoptive" family. [55:10] Last, we talk about the U.S. soldier who crossed into North Korea, allegedly because he was “disillusioned at the unequal American society,” and the trilateral summit at Camp David.
On this episode, we ask:
Is it wrong to eliminate legacy admissions just as Black students and other students of color stand to benefit?
Are people becoming more tolerant of gyopos and their (our) broken Korean?!
Will the Michael Oher claims force writers to be more critical of savior stories?
What do we make of the U.S. perspective on Asia as a theater of war and deterrence?
For more, see:
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The panel Jay participated in last Thursday: ‘The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action’ - The 2023 Hutchins Forum
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Michael Oher’s claims against the Touhy family, and Blind Side author Michael Lewis’s subsequent comments defending the family
-
Coverage of Travis King, the U.S. soldier who crossed over into North Korea, and the recent U.S.-Japan-Korea summit at Camp David
-
The latest TTSG appearance by K-drama expert Jenny Wang Medina, from July: K-content spectacular
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to support the show and join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter (RIP), and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello again from the ongoing climate crisis!
Kaniela Ing is a Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) organizer and former state legislator who now works as the national director of the Green New Deal Network. Kaniela joins us just days after a fire ripped through the island of Maui, decimating the town of Lāhainā and killing a yet unknown number of people. (10:40) Kaniela tells us about his relationship to the affected area and community; (13:55) the systemic causes of this tragedy, including aging infrastructure, theft of land and water, and climate change; and (24:25) what needs to happen to both support people in acute crisis and put those same people at the center of our fight for a better world.
In this episode, we ask:
Is this a climate turning point in Hawaiʻi?
Why is a narrative of resistance, not resilience, more appropriate to this moment? What is the role of Native people in this resistance?
For more:
-
Donate to the Maui Fire Relief + Recovery Fundraiser
-
Watch Kaniela’s interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!
-
Listen to a parallel TTSG discussion about Guam with writer Julian Aguon, from March 2021: Loving Guam, fighting empire
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to support the show and join our Discord community. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from an East Bay movie theatre!
This week, it’s just us, trying to dodge yet another COVID surge. (A note from our producer, Mai: Lots of people are getting sick, and testing is hard to come by and not always accurate. It’s never too late to mask up again—if not for yourself, then for your more vulnerable neighbors!)
(3:25) Jay went to see “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” with his daughter, Frankie. We talk about the film’s pleasing animation style and nostalgia-packed soundtrack. (24:45) Next, we address a recent New York Times investigation into lefty tech millionaire Neville Roy Singham’s ties to China and consider, yet again, how a good leftist should avoid both McCarthyism and Tankieism.
In this episode, we ask:
Has Madeline (of the Madeline children’s books) been canceled yet?!
Should Jay spend hours systematically indoctrinating his kids into musical connoisseurship?
Is it possible to critique U.S. hegemony without being called a brainwashed propagandist?
For more, see:
-
CoComelon, or the stuff of every parent’s nightmares
-
Why Neil Diamond is cool Dad Rock, by Tammy
-
Previous episodes on the tankie problem, from June 2020 (Tankies! with Brian Hioe, New Bloom Magazine) and November 2020 (Vaccine apartheid, tankies redux, and the TTSG manifesto)
Thanks to everyone who’s come out to recent meet-ups in NYC and Chengdu! Check out the Discord for upcoming events in Texas and other IRL hotspots.
Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord community, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. You can email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a freezer full of “non-human biologics”!
This week, we speak with Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents and known alien stan. (3:30) We get her thoughts on last week’s Congressional hearings (nothing a true believer like Arielle didn’t already know) and what aliens are up to when they visit Earth. (26:15) In our main segment, we discuss the democratic crisis in Israel spurred by Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and (34:00) what this moment could mean for the Palestinian national movement, both in Israel/Palestine and the U.S. diaspora. (43:00) We also hear how Arielle arrived at her current politics.
In this episode, we ask:
If aliens are real, why didn’t Trump tell us?!
Have the centrist protests against the Israeli government made BDS seem less extreme?
What can the Jewish left teach us about doing identity-based organizing while simultaneously denouncing the validity of identitarian nationalism?
For more, see:
-
The 2017 Times story that convinced Jay that aliens are real
-
Some background on the Roswell incident from the History Channel
-
Ezra Klein’s interview with U.F.O. reporter Leslie Kean
-
Explainers from Jewish Currents on the ongoing judicial crisis in Israel (by Elisheva Goldberg) and the Israel-Palestine rift within DSA (by Alex Kane)
-
A forced apology from Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal after she called Israel “a racist state”
-
Arielle’s article on grievance politics from last fall, and our episode discussing the piece: Grievance politics, why we love “Mo,” and the YYYs’ return
-
Our previous conversations with the lovely folks at Jewish Currents, from May 2021:
-
Sheikh Jarrah and What Feels Different This Time about Israel/Palestine with Josh Leifer of Jewish Currents
-
Jewish Currents in Conversation with Time To Say Goodbye!
If you’re feeling extra inspired, you can read Arielle’s fiction, Jay’s novel, and Tammy’s poetry.
Thanks for listening! Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit goodbye.substack.com
Hello from Jay’s final week in paradise!
In this bonus episode, we answer questions from subscribers.
Hello from the diasporic battleground!
This week, we’re joined by investigative journalist and filmmaker Anjali Kamat to discuss Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s red-carpet state dinner and the spread of his Islamophobic, anti-democratic Hindutva ideology. (1:45) We start with a short history since Modi was elected in 2014, (12:20) dig into the conspiratorial lynchings that mirror right-wing campaigns in other countries, and (26:15) consider how Indian diasporic communities help maintain (and challenge) Modi’s power. We also track the responses of U.S. politicians, from Trump’s “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas, celebrating the Prime Minister’s reelection in 2019, to progressive Representative Ro Khanna’s unwillingness to critique and Obama’s surprising willingness to do so.
In this episode, we ask:
What differentiates the last nine years under Modi from previous periods of large-scale sectarian violence in India?
Why do the myths around Modi persist, despite cracks in the facade of him as an efficient and non-corrupt leader?
What was the dream of Indian multiculturalism?
How do Indian diasporic communities influence Modi’s ability to consolidate power?
For more, check out:
-
Aparna Gopalan in Jewish Currents, on how Hindu nationalists are using the pro-Israel playbook
-
An opinion piece by Maya Jasanoff: Narendra Modi Is Not Who America Thinks He Is
-
Background on the rise of Hindu nationalism in the U.S.
-
The first installment in our White House State Dinner critique series, from May: Karaoke soft power + left media cowardice
🎧 Heads-up: Next week’s episode will be a subscriber-only listener Q&A! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to ask a question and hear the episode.
Thanks for listening. As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Honolulu!
It’s just us this week, trading places: Tammy is home in humid Brooklyn, and Jay is on the road, visiting family in Hawaii! (6:00) First, we discuss the planned release of 500 swimming pools’ worth of radioactive(?) wastewater from Fukushima, which has spurred lousy takes from Beltway types and a run on salt in South Korea. (19:10) Next, we look at Vivek Ramaswamy’s long-shot candidacy for President and try to discern what the entrepreneur brings to a flailing Republican Party.
In this episode, we ask:
Was “Mad Men” a good show?
How does the Fukushima conversation serve as a barometer for China–Japan–South Korea relations?
Is Trumpism analogous to Modi-ism?
Are we doomed to have an amoral, debate-brained candidate in every Republican primary?
For more, dig into:
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Regional reactions to the wastewater plan at Fukushima
-
Images of Vermont’s floods and the proximate climate apocalypse
-
Sheelah Kolhatkar’s jealousy-inducing profile of Vivek Ramaswamy for The New Yorker
-
DeSantis’s jump-the-shark hate ad
-
Our May ep about the American Prospect’s Tucker Carlson piece (and its backlash): Karaoke soft power + left media cowardice
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the South Korean Ministry of Culture’s Brooklyn satellite office!
This week, Tammy welcomes back Jenny Wang Medina, our resident scholar of Korean cultural exports and semiotics, for a record-tying fourth appearance on TTSG / third-anniversary spectacular! We talk about a few recent Korean/Korean American/Asian American productions: (8:30) the Netflix hit “Beef,” with Ali Wong and Steven Yeun; (31:40) the new transnational A24 flick “Past Lives,” starring Greta Lee; and (1:03:00) Hansol Jung’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, featuring an all-Asian American cast (which recently had a run in NYC). We tried to avoid spoilers, but couldn’t avoid some “Past Lives” reveals!
In this episode, we ask:
What makes “Beef” feel so authentically West Coast Asian American?
How do you know when Shakespeare is Asian American?
Who’s behind today’s transnational TV and film productions?
What will the next “untranslatable” Korean concept be?!
For more, see:
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Jenny’s previous TTSG appearances: Korean wig stores (October 2020), A feminist(?) K-drama about abortion (June 2022), and Fantasies of progress on K-TV (September 2022)
-
The sexual assault allegations against “Beef” actor David Choe and a look at his cult-like online community
-
Jenny’s latest K-drama rec: Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938
Also, Tammy highly recommends “Behind Every Star,” the Netflix K-drama remake of the excellent French comedy “Call My Agent.”
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the East Bay!
It’s just Jay this week, chatting with friend of the pod Darrell Owens, a Berkeley-based housing expert. We discuss a new study from the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF on the causes and consequences of homelessness in California.
In this episode, we ask:
Can the revelations in this study—or any new evidence, for that matter—finally move the needle on reducing homelessness?
How do “Housing First” advocates address the desire for immediate solutions to a crisis that has been decades in the making?
Why are people who are older, disabled, and from certain racial and ethnic groups so vastly overrepresented among the homeless population?
For more, see:
-
The full UCSF study, Toward a New Understanding: The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness
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Our previous episode with Darrell, from July 2021: The Fight to End Single Family Zoning and the YIMBY/NIMBY/PHIMBY War
-
The book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern
-
California YIMBY’s December 2022 report on Housing First policies
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the Hill!
This week, we’re joined by Ligia Guallpa, executive director of Workers Justice Project (WJP), a group that organizes low-wage, immigrant workers in New York City, including the app-based delivery workers who call themselves Los Deliveristas Unidos. WJP and the Deliveristas just won the passage of a mandatory minimum wage, a huge improvement for e-bike and car delivery workers on GrubHub, Uber Eats, and other platforms. (13:30) Ligia details the unique dangers that spurred the emergence of the Deliveristas as COVID hit New York and (31:00) offers some lessons learned from going against these big-tech titans and their algorithms.
In this episode, we ask:
How substantial was the shift towards app-based gig work during COVID, and what did that mean for workers?
Is it necessary to focus on fighting worker misclassification?
How did delivery workers overcome the immense challenge of organizing in a disparate, deliberately siloed workforce?
For more, read:
-
A 2021 piece in The Verge about the early days of organizing among Los Deliveristas Unidos
-
Another horrific fire this week that may have been caused by improperly maintained e-bike batteries
-
A report on the backlash that threatened to derail WJP’s minimum-wage fight
-
News that the NLRB recently reverted to an Obama-era test that could make it easier for gig workers to organize
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from clear-skied Brooklyn!
Thank you to everyone who attended our (first) third-anniversary TTSG summer picnic! And thanks to all who subscribe, listen, spread the word, and otherwise support the show.
It’s just Tammy and Jay this week, unpacking some complex cultural shifts in Asian American food and education. (5:15) First, Tammy guesses which Asian cuisines dominate Asian restaurants in the U.S. (according to a recent Pew Research Center study). We also discuss what it means for food to be “elevated,” Americanized, kept “authentic,” or gasp made into some kind of “fusion.” (24:40) Next, we go cynical on the likely end of affirmative action and debate the merits of other methods of increasing diversity at universities and beyond.
In this episode, we ask:
Why has Thai food proliferated in the U.S. while other Asian cuisines trend and fade?
What’s behind the idea that “authentic” Asian food should be cheap?
What does the lack of energy around affirmative action tell us about racial solidarities and class recognition?
For more, see:
-
A dispatch from last week’s apocalyptic smoke in NYC
-
The full Pew study about Asian restaurants in the U.S.
-
Zak Cheney-Rice on affirmative action's past and present, plus Jeannie Suk Gersen on The Secret Joke at the Heart of the Harvard Affirmative-Action Case
-
An older piece from Jay about the long, slow death of affirmative action
-
Tammy on the recent Supreme Court ruling that could dampen workers' right to strike
And, if you find yourself in Portland, visit some of Tammy’s favorite authentic(?) Thai spots: Eem and Hat Yai!
Support TTSG on Patreon or Substack to attend future subscriber events like last weekend’s picnic! Keep in touch via Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Montréal!
🥳 Reminder: Join us THIS SATURDAY, June 10th, in Brooklyn, for our subscriber picnic! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for more details.
This week, we welcome back our friend Max Read—dad, Twitter lurker, hat seller, and creator of the incredible Read Max newsletter—for an anniversary chat. (12:30) We speculate about the next phase of A.I. ascendancy and (28:25) large language model pioneers, and (44:00) unpack the labor dimensions of these technological shifts. Speaking of labor, (45:30) we get Max’s inside perspective on the WGA strike (in which, again, A.I. …) and express solidarity with the Insider journalists who just went on strike for a fair contract!
In this episode, we ask:
Will the next generation be expected to know how to write?
Who will ChatGPT threaten to (awkwardly, inadequately, terrifyingly) replace?
Is A.I. doing to writing what earlier technologies did to the music industry? Are we getting schooled in notions of collective authorship?
For more, see:
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Max’s newsletters on the WGA strike and A.I.:
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Why I'm on strike
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I cannot believe the s**t that morons are getting up to with ChatGPT
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Yet more of what I'm reading about A.I., a great mixed-reality TV show, and a great new music newsletter
-
His previous TTSG appearances!
-
Crypto fraudsters with Max Read
-
TTSG disinformation campaign with Max Read
-
John Herrman’s New York piece about Google’s in-search generative A.I. experiment
-
Our last episode about A.I., in which Ben Recht gets skeptical: What can’t A.I. replace
Thanks for listening! Keep in touch via Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Jay’s dried-out basement (finally)!
This week, writer Hua Hsu joins us for a record fourth appearance on the pod as part of our neverending anniversary celebration. In a wide-ranging chat, we touch on (7:08) how podcasting has influenced our interview styles, (16:55) the "Succession" series finale [SPOILER ALERT], and (27:30) Tammy’s accidental encounter with edibles. (38:22) We also look back at a previous conversation with Hua, from January 19, 2021, and reflect on major changes in Asian American media representation.
In this episode, we ask:
Which “Succession” character deserved to win?!
Whom has the Internet erased from Asian American art?
Who is Jay's (extremely specific) target audience?
For more, see:
-
The full episode we excerpted, from January 2021: "That identity s**t, that’s old news, man": belated Capitol takes + "Chan is Missing" with Hua Hsu
-
Our longer convo (and Jay’s full rant) about drugs, from July 2022: More Dem failings + a shifting drug culture
-
Hua’s piece on Frank Chin and “Aiiieeeee!”, plus his profile of Maxine Hong Kingston
-
Jay’s profile of Zappos executive Tony Hsieh
-
A 1993 performance by Lynbrook’s local ska band, Janitors Against Apartheid
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The 1990s Godzilla collective
Join us on June 10th, in Brooklyn, for our subscriber picnic! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for more details.
Keep in touch via Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Mai’s COVID den!
It’s just Jay and Tammy this week. (3:25) First, we chat about a mini-generation of Asian women named after Connie Chung and the news anchor’s professional legacy. (22:18) Then, we discuss the public killings of Banko Brown in SF and Jordan Neely in NYC—and the disturbing turn against poor (particularly Black) people in our cities.
We ask:
Has America so devalued the lives of homeless people that any offense now seems to warrant vigilante murder?
How do these conversations play out on the West versus the East Coast?
Does urban topography affect these dynamics?
For more, read:
-
Reporting from the S.F. Chronicle: Banko Brown: Video shows what led to S.F. Walgreens shooting; D.A. won’t file charges
-
Jay’s recent New Yorker piece on Jordan Neely’s death and an older article that discusses California’s housing-first approach to homelessness
-
Friend-of-pod Darrell Owens’s take on homelessness and vigilante violence on public transit
Some TTSG housekeeping: First, we’re having a subscriber picnic on June 10th in NYC! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for more details.
Second, get a TTSG tote for yourself and all your pals! You can either get it shipped to you directly or select "Ship to TTSG" and pick it up at the June 10th picnic. If you’re shipping internationally, use this link instead. Order by this Friday and rep the pod wherever you go!
Thanks as always for listening! Keep in touch via Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the vault!
In the first of a series of episodes commemorating TTSG’s third anniversary, OG Andy Liu returns. 🎉
We look back at the first episode we ever released, on April 13, 2020, and ask:
(9:30) Was Andy right to attribute both the spread of the coronavirus and the backlash against Asian Americans to China’s growing power?
(34:30) Has COVID diminished the concept of U.S. exceptionalism—if not within the U.S., at least in the rest of the world?
(56:30) Is it possible for leftists to embrace national industrial policy without replicating the same kinds of neoliberalism that led us here?
For more, see:
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That fateful first episode, Pangolin Panic and Why the West Said "No" to Masks
-
Our episode analyzing Dan Wang’s U.S.–China 2020 newsletter, plus his 2022 assessment
-
Commentary on recent China-related legislation and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s speech, outlining a new Washington consensus
A couple big TTSG announcements! First, we’ll be having a subscriber picnic on June 10th in NYC to celebrate our anniversary and Jay’s “American Son” premiere (movie tix here!). Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for more details.
Next, we’re finally releasing TTSG MERCH, starting with a PMC staple: a TTSG tote! When you place your order, you can either get it shipped to you directly or "Ship to TTSG." Please only select the latter option if you plan to attend the NYC picnic on June 10th! (Apologies to all non-locals.) Buy one (or two or three) to rep the pod, and share the link with friends & family!
As always, keep in touch via Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the start of AANHPIXYZ Heritage Month!
It’s just Jay and Tammy this week, going long on two of our favorite topics: U.S.-Korea relations and progressive media. [3:15] First, we address the carefully crafted viral moment from Korean President Yoon’s debut at the White House, and the sanitizing of human rights realities in Asia. [17:30] Next, we discuss the controversy over an article about Tucker Carlson published by the American Prospect—and mea culpa’d by the top editor following online criticism. We touch on [28:10] virtue-signaling disclaimers and [38:55] the tiptoeing endemic to our fractured news industry.
In this episode, we ask:
Why did a misogynistic, anti-labor president get such a glowing White House welcome?
Do we agree with the central argument of the Prospect article: that there is some value to Tucker Carlson types’ espousing of “populist” views on Fox News?
Is Jay less cancellable because he’s not white?
For more, read:
-
“South Korean president sings ‘American Pie’”
-
About Korea’s legislative and symbolic agenda on this U.S. trip
-
Background on President Yoon when he first entered office, by Tammy
-
The American Prospect article: “The Smuggest Man On Air”
-
David Dayen’s editor’s note and the response by two other Prospect writers: “The Real Tucker Carlson”
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
Join us at the premiere of Jay’s movie, “American Son,” at the Tribeca Film Festival, in NYC, in June! Purchase tix here!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a cruise ship!
This week, we welcome book critic and Philly basketball devotee Jennifer Wilson back to the show. We discuss [1:00] the epidemic of belligerent airline passengers; [6:25] the surprising (and not so surprising) firings of Tucker Carlson from Fox News and Don Lemon from CNN; [15:10] Jen’s favorite 76er, James Harden, and his ejection for nut-punching; and [27:40] journalist Lauren Oyler’s recent piece on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cruise and the sexist genre of wellness writing.
In this episode, we ask:
Why do so many basketball players punch and kick one another in the crotch?
Are the Tucker Carlsons and Don Lemons of the world easily replaceable?
What (besides capitalism, duh) makes us so obsessed with wellness?
How is vulnerability (especially in women) used to sell products, activate people online, and smooth out social relations?
For more, see:
-
This week’s viral airplane video (baby screams; man yells)
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A breakdown of James Harden's and Joel Embiid's fouls
-
Lauren Oyler’s dispatch from the Goop Cruise
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The David Foster Wallace cruise piece that the Goop story references
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Oyler’s 2021 essay on writer W. G. Sebald
-
How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
-
The TikTok influencer video that led to the intense doxxing of two young women
-
A rumination on the rise of astrology among millennials by Christine Smallwood
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a 90-degree day in New York!
This week, we’re joined by Alex Han, executive director of In These Times and a longtime organizer based in Chicago. Alex previously worked for Bernie’s 2020 campaign and SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana. We get into the context behind the surprise mayoral win by former teacher and organizer Brandon Johnson, over “corporate reformer” Paul Vallas. We discuss [15:45] the values (neoliberal versus progressive) at stake in this race, [25:08] which strategies can, and can’t, be reproduced by other candidates, and [1:01:30] the role of left-labor publications like In These Times in counteracting corporate media.
In this episode, we ask:
What made the Chicago Teachers Union become such a central player in city politics?
How has “defund the police” evolved, rhetorically, on the left?
How do you build a coalition that’s led by progressives but populated by centrists?
What should left media do to engage young people and other big yet hard-to-reach groups?
For more, read:
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Alex’s post-election editorial for In These Times
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This reflection on bargaining for the common good and the influence of the CTU
-
More on the deep, grassroots organizing behind Johnson’s victory: 'It Was 100-Percent People Power' (Block Club Chicago) and Chicago’s Rich Organizing Tradition Paid Off (The Nation)
-
An interview with Alex on the past and present of In These Times: What Do Movements Need from Progressive Media?
-
The book Jay mentions, After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle, by Cedric G. Johnson
-
Horrifying news of the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in Kansas City
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Jay’s COVID den!
Mai would like you to know that she begged Jay to skip recording and rest after he tested positive for COVID, and did the same with Tammy a few weeks ago. They did not listen. Please don’t follow their bad example!
This week, Tammy and Jay chat with repeat guest Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network and longtime organizer for immigrant rights. [1:45] We start, though, with a discussion of “Veep,” which Jay has been rewatching—a show that continues to be relevant and prescient ten-plus years on. [14:40] Then we talk about Biden’s disappointing policies on immigration, including the continuation of Title 42 and other policies designed to exclude asylum seekers, [50:00] and reflect on some small wins that follow years of organizing by groups like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON).
In this episode, we ask:
How do anti-immigration policies actually worsen the same border conditions that some claim to be fighting through deterrence?
What makes immigration intersectional?
How might the immigrant-rights movement adopt a broader framework of immigrant justice?
For more, see:
-
More on the Biden administration’s anti-immigrant moves, including a potential reinstatement of family detention
-
Hannah Dreier’s NYT report about migrant child labor in the U.S.
-
The fire at a Juárez migrant detention center that killed dozens
-
A glimmer of good news: DHS expands protections for whistleblowers
-
The Tennessee GOP’s attack on two Black legislators
Plus, listen to Silky’s August 2022 TTSG appearance, Immigration’s “catalyst moments,” and a September episode where we discuss Ron DeSantis’s migrant-busing stunt: GOP cruelty gone wild.
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the Bay Area!
This week, it’s just Jay speaking with Malcolm Harris, the author of the recently published Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. We talk about [5:40] why Malcolm wrote a 600-plus-page epic instead of a shorter, more personal book; [27:25] Palo Alto’s origin story, including Leland Stanford and immigrant labor on the railroads; and [43:20] what mainstream histories get wrong about the New Left and Silicon Valley’s development. (Heads-up: There is a brief discussion of suicide between 11:30 and 14:10.)
In this episode, we ask:
Why does Palo Alto give off such a weird vibe, and how does Stanford University's approach to real estate contribute?
What did Jay and his daughter learn about the exploitation of Chinese rail workers at the California State Railroad Museum?
Is Malcolm worried that AI could take his job?
For more, read:
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Malcolm’s colossal Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
-
An archetypal business book: Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
-
Mae Ngai’s book on Chinese migration and the gold rush, The Chinese Question—and listen to Andy’s episode with Mae! 'History is not a straight line': on the Chinese Question with Prof. Mae Ngai
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. And email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Jay’s flooded basement! (Apologies for our less-than-ideal audio.)
This week, our guest is Bryce Covert, a writer who covers the culture and work of child care (and its increasingly dire state) in the U.S. Bryce tells Jay and Tammy [14:50] what she’s been hearing from providers as pandemic-stimulus funding dwindles; [27:55] why care workers haven’t been able to win better pay, even in a strong labor market; and [52:25] how private-sector incentives might help—but don’t go nearly far enough. (A lot of our references are to hetero nuclear families, but the pain is universal!)
In this episode, we ask:
Why do Jay and Bryce have to apply to 94 summer camps to make sure their kids aren’t marooned?
What would an ideal child care system look like? At what age would public care and schooling begin?
What can we learn from previous U.S. policy and experiments elsewhere?
Why does an adequate child care system feel politically impossible?
For more, see Bryce’s writing…
In The Nation:
The Childcare Crisis Is Getting Worse
Child Care Providers Are Organizing, Demanding More, and Winning
In Early Learning Nation: "I Can't Compete": Child Care Providers are Losing Staff to McDonald's and Target
In Lux: Child Care: The Radical is Popular
Also read:
-
James Butler on the social care crisis in the U.K.
-
Dana Goldstein on child care and private equity
-
The ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ Effect (i.e. wealthy parents’ version of this crisis)
-
More on the childcare provision in the CHIPS Act
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. And email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Tammy’s COVID bunker!
This week, after a short tribute to Montana’s “dean of journalism,” Chuck Johnson, R.I.P., Tammy speaks with Kshama Sawant, the three-term socialist Seattle City Councilmember who recently announced that she will not seek reelection after this year. Instead, she has launched Workers Strike Back, “an independent, rank-and-file campaign” to support organizing nationwide. We discuss [9:42] the Amazonification of Seattle, [31:05] a historic municipal bill banning caste discrimination, and [38:28] critiques of Sawant’s approach to politics and organizing. Plus: Tammy and Kshama debate union strategy.
In this episode, we ask:
Does socialism provide answers to today’s woes?
What did the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 reveal about identity politics?
How might the Dobbs ruling and other failures of Democratic leadership help us envision a new political party?
What does DSA get right and wrong?
For more, read:
-
Tammy’s 2019 mini-profile of Kshama
-
Kshama’s labor history fave: Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs
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A Kentucky worker on “How We’re Fighting for a Union at Amazon’s Biggest Air Hub”
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Kshama’s recent bill, making Seattle “the first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination"
And some extras from the TTSG team:
-
Tammy and Mai recommend the French-German-Belgian film, “Return to Seoul,” currently playing in some U.S. theaters.
-
Tammy semi-recommends the return of the LA-catering comedy “Party Down” (though the first two seasons remain vastly superior) and really recommends these sly, tingly novellas, translated from the Japanese, by Yoko Ogawa.
-
A happy follow-up to the housing episode with Ritti Singh and Navneet Grewal, reported by TTSG guest Wilfred Chan: “‘It’s legal, there’s just no precedent’: the first US town to demand a rent decrease”
-
More news in racial impostors, via Andy: “Raquel Evita Saraswati pretended to be a woman of color. Her deception traumatized the communities she claimed to help.”
-
Some devastating TikToks by college applicants, courtesy of Jay
Thanks for listening! As always, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Jay’s tradlife mancave!
It’s just us this week, dissecting all the ways our culture has gone too far. We begin with [0:20] a debrief of the most Asian (American?) Oscars ever. Then, updates [20:40] on feminism in South Korea and [40:38] the Stepford wives of TikTok.
In this episode, we ask:
Are Asians now overrepresented in Hollywood?!
What happens when electoral politics revolves around gender relations? Why doesn’t anyone want to give birth in South Korea, despite myriad family supports?
How much of the “tradwife” lifestyle movement is about aesthetics, as opposed to a particular politics?
For more, see:
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Anna Louie Sussman’s article about the 4B movement in Korea
-
An interview with Hawon Jung, author of Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide
-
Zoe Hu on the tradlife movement and its “central hero,” the tradwife
And revisit these TTSG episodes:
-
"Everything Everywhere All At Once" deep dive
-
“Tár,” a film for the chattering class, with Vinson Cunningham
-
On Korean feminism—
-
Fantasies of progress on K-TV, with Jenny Wang Medina
-
A feminist(?) K-drama about abortion
-
Harper's, Boba Bros, Korean Feminism, and the NBA bubble
If you’re in NYC this Sunday, come to BAM for a screening of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” with Q&A by Tammy! Info and tix here: https://www.bam.org/film/2023/parasite
Thanks for listening. As always, you can subscribe on Patreon or Substack, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a D.C. hotel!
This week, our guest is Ken Chen, writer, professor, and former director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW). We discuss [6:45] Ken’s recent piece for n+1, about photojournalist and activist Corky Lee and the deep histories of class, race, and violence woven into his work, centered in Manhattan’s Chinatown. [1:03:20] We also chat about writing, publishing, and Asian American literature as a social-realist project.
In this episode, we ask:
When does a photo achieve representation?
What if we thought of Corky not as a photojournalist, but as a durational artist?
Can an identity be created through accumulation and aspiration, even through economic shifts?
Why are there so many books by Asian Americans coming out now, compared to a few decades ago?
For more, see:
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Ken on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée
-
Repeat guest Hua Hsu on Maxine Hong Kingston, author of the classic novel, The Woman Warrior
-
Ryan Lee Wong on Corky Lee’s photos of protests against police brutality
And revisit these TTSG episodes:
-
Our book club with Lisa Hsiao Chen, wherein we discuss the work of performance artist Tehching Hsieh
-
Working-class unity, with organizer JoAnn Lum, the director of NMASS (the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops)
-
"I want you to care when people are still alive," with Yves Tong Nguyen of Red Canary Song
Our first-ever TTSG Movie Club is happening THIS FRIDAY, March 10th, at 8pm ET / 5pm PST! We’ll be watching "Better Luck Tomorrow," and you can join our TTSG Discord to attend the viewing by subscribing on Patreon or Substack.
Thanks for listening! As always, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from our normal, boring lives!
Tammy returns from her reporting trip out West, and Jay is back at work after taking half his parental leave. It’s just us this week, talking through [3:20] the political disaster that has unfolded around the derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio. Plus, [28:25] a new Intercept interview with D.E.I. consultant Tema Okun, about her viral paper “White Supremacy Culture.”
In this episode, we ask:
Have we learned anything since the 2016 election about the risk of ignoring working-class communities?
How should the Democrats have responded to the derailment?
Why are people so obsessed with the term “white supremacy”? What anxieties does it mask?
Are diversity trainings really necessary?
For more, see:
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Our recent episode with train conductor Nick Wurst
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Field trips to East Palestine, Ohio, by Senator J.D. Vance and Trump
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Tema Okun’s interview with Ryan Grimm of The Intercept
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Okun’s original paper, plus the updated website
For our first-ever TTSG Movie Club, happening March 10th at 8pm ET / 5pm PST, we’ll be watching "Better Luck Tomorrow"! Join the TTSG Discord to attend the viewing. You can subscribe on Patreon or Substack.
Thanks for listening! As always, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a sci-fi future!
Tammy’s on a reporting trip this week, so it’s just Jay talking to our guest Ben Recht, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. We talk about the history of artificial intelligence, the new bots from Open AI (ChatGPT) and Microsoft (Bing A.I.), and share some of the reasons why they are both skeptical but also kinda impressed.
In this episode, we ask:
Well, what really is A.I., and how does it differ from machine learning?
Is this Silicon Valley hype cycle any more believable than those we were sold on crypto, Web3, and the metaverse?
What is the actual technology behind ChatGPT? What’s so special about it?
Where do we get our doomsday fantasies from, and how worried should we really be?
Is the remedy for bad AI takes just better science fiction?
How is A.I. Doomerism like Scientology?
To read more, see:
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Ted Chiang on super intelligence and capitalism
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Maciej Ceglowski with a funny and comprehensive breakdown of why people talk about A.I. in the way they do. As well as the case for better science fiction.
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A compelling history of A.I. by Stephanie Dick
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James Vincent on the idea of A.I. as a mirror
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. As always, feel free to email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from an ongoing ecological disaster!
Our guest this week is Nick Wurst, a freight-rail conductor and a member of the SMART-TD union, who joined Tammy and Jay after an overnight shift. Nick is also a socialist and a member-organizer with Railroad Workers United, a cross-union solidarity organization. He was featured in Tammy’s recent New Yorker piece about the state of union power in the U.S.
On Friday, February 3, a train carrying volatile chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing dangerous fumes and forcing the town to evacuate. State and federal authorities encouraged residents to return to their homes after a “successful” controlled release of the substances, but many are skeptical that the air is safe to breathe, given reports of animals dying en masse, highly acidic rain, and the post-industrial area’s baseline pollution levels.
Nick explains how corporate avarice—encapsulated in the ideology of “precision scheduled railroading”—and government complicity led to this dangerous derailment. He tells Jay and Tammy how railroad companies successfully lobbied against common-sense safety regulations, and what feels different about this disaster, despite rising rates of train derailment. Nick connects the accident in Ohio to last year’s threatened rail strike, a fight which was widely mischaracterized and eventually squashed by Biden and a Democratic Congress. How drastically has precision scheduled railroading changed conditions on the railroads? What can be done to rein in this greedy industry and the existential dangers it poses to us all?
Thanks for listening. Subscribe on Substack or Patreon to join our Discord and participate in an upcoming movie night with Jay, Tammy, and fellow listeners, and to vote on the movie pick! As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Juilliard!
This week, our friend Vinson Cunningham, award-winning critic at The New Yorker, joins Tammy and Jay to discuss 2022’s wokest(?) film, “Tár.” (Spoiler alert!)
[1:00] Before we get into it, we address Kyrie Irving’s request for a trade from the Brooklyn Nets… and what makes him so annoying. (We recorded before Irving’s move to the Dallas Mavericks was announced.) Plus: What does his situation say about workers’ rights, in the context of highly-compensated NBA players?
[12:50] In our main segment: “Tár,” the dark portrait of a high-powered orchestra conductor’s fall from grace, starring Cate Blanchett. How does the film see the dangers of artistic personas (with a #MeToo plotline reminiscent of James Levine’s abuses), “cancel culture” (per Richard Brody’s review), and labor relations? And how do the movie’s heavy-handed academic scenes compare to Vinson’s experience as a college teacher?
[33:40] The film also critiques a specific type of (aging? resentful? arrogant?) second-wave feminist, as Zadie Smith argues in her illuminating piece in the New York Review of Books. We also discuss Becca Rothfeld’s analysis of “Tár” and the obsession with reputation management. Plus: the orientalist narrative of a Western (anti-)hero finding herself in the East.
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord and participate in an upcoming movie night with Jay, Tammy, and fellow listeners.
As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from our culture of violence!
This week, Tammy and Jay talk through some painful questions following the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers.
For more on the cases and reports mentioned in this episode, see:
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San Francisco’s attempt to expand police surveillance: Breed and New DA Jenkins Pushing Hard to Expand Police Access to Private Security Cameras All Over Town
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Accusations of racism in the prosecution of NYPD officer Peter Liang
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More people killed by police in 2022 than in any other year in the past decade, according to Mapping Police Violence
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Oakland’s Anti Police-Terror Project
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Cultures of violence in police departments and special units:
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Rise Of The Warrior Cop by Radley Balko
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The Riders Come Out at Night by Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham
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We Own This City by Justin Fenton
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The killing of Amadou Diallo, which led to the disbanding of NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit
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The L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy-Gang Crisis
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Similar dynamics within the military (correction: from NYT, not ProPublica): Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs
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The Oakland Police Department’s extended recruitment video
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A worker shortage across government: It’s Not Just a Police Problem, Americans Are Opting Out of Government Jobs
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Jeet Heer’s take in The Nation: The Killing of Tyre Nichols Is an Indictment of the Entire Political System
And revisit these TTSG essays and episodes:
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Racial dynamics in recent mass shootings: Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay, and who owns a tragedy
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Police killings across race, a provocation by Barbara Fields and Adam Rothman in Dissent, and discussed in “SCOTUS trouble, working-class white people, and Taiwan's military”
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Abolition as practice:
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How not to think like a cop, with Naomi Murakawa
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"I want you to care when people are still alive," with Yves Tong Nguyen of Red Canary Song
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"A world where prisons serve no purpose," with Kony Kim of the Bay Area Freedom Collective
As always, please subscribe via Substack or Patreon to support the podcast and access our listener Discord. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Tammy’s dark apartment!
This week, Jay and Tammy are joined by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel, with Artie Vierkant, and co-author, also with Artie, of the new book Health Communism, a manifesto that reimagines our systems of care.
[2:00] But first, we try to process the horrific mass shooting at a dance studio in Monterey Park, California, in which eleven people were killed on Lunar New Year. We discuss Asian America’s reactive hyperfocus on racial identification and hate-crime designations and ponder alternatives. (We recorded on Monday evening, just before news broke of yet another mass shooting—this time, in Half Moon Bay, killing seven people.) How should the left respond to violence that doesn’t fit into a predetermined, racialized narrative?
[18:00] In our main segment, Beatrice takes us through the theory of Health Communism and its promise to save us from our financialized care nightmare. We discuss the transformation of “health” into an aesthetic commodity and the dogma of personal responsibility that keeps us from making population-level change. Though the book does not discuss COVID-19, Beatrice explains how our pandemic response has highlighted the left’s blind spots with respect to disability. She endorses a "margin to center" / “edge case” method, drawing on Black feminism, and a global approach to social determinants of health. Plus: how mainstream talk of Medicare for All falls short, a Supreme Court case about nursing homes, and the meaning of “extractive abandonment.”
Speaking of communism: On Tuesday, January 31, at 5pm EST, Tammy joins sci-fi novelist and activist China Miéville for a conversation about “contemporary capitalism’s rapidly multiplying crises and the Communist Manifesto’s enduring relevance,” in celebration of his new book, A Spectre, Haunting. Register here!
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. As always, feel free to email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from rental hell!
This week, Tammy is joined by two friends of the pod who work in housing: Ritti Singh, a tenant organizer in Rochester for Housing Justice for All (and a TTSG Discord leader), and Navneet Grewal, a longtime attorney currently working for Disability Rights California.
[5:30] Ritti breaks down the role of a housing organizer, particularly in a majority-tenant city, and Navneet explains her role as a lawyer supporting on-the-ground groups. We discuss the momentum against the commodification of shelter over the past decade, plus organizing successes at the state and local levels regarding rent stabilization, funding for affordable housing, and tenant protections.
[34:02] Both guests emphasize the need to diversify the types of housing that exist outside of the private market. We also discuss the various strategies needed to to get out of this crisis—from robust tenant protections to social housing, coops, community land trusts, and tenant purchases of property. What are the connections between housing activism and the environmental justice movement? What if everyone who lives in a place, not just homeowners, could decide what happens to their homes?
[41:10] Ritti and Navneet also say what they make of NIMBY-vs.-YIMBY activist fights and the horrific policies being implemented against our homeless neighbors (CARE Court in California and Eric Adams’s increased use of forced institutionalization in NYC). How should we address this aspect of the housing crisis? (Hint: Definitely not like that!)
Get involved in the fight in New York!
If you want to hear more, we’ve previously talked housing with Darrell Owens, on the fight to end single-family zoning; Paul Williams, on social housing; and Jia Tolentino, on the nightmarish rental market in NYC. We also asked Mike Davis about housing back in 2020, inspired by input from Navneet (who wrote about Mike just before he died).
Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord and participate in our ongoing chats about housing, organizing, and more. As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a Berkeley basement!
This week, Jay takes a break from being his daughter’s personal helper to catch up with Tammy.
[5:25] We start by discussing right-wing obsession with gender and sexuality. What do recent attacks on librarians tell us about older moral panics and Republican strategy? (Check out this Vice News video of a librarian in Michigan, a ProPublica piece from June about the targeting of an educator in Georgia, and a New York Times piece on a Hamline University adjunct’s firing.) We also touch on [21:32] the circus surrounding the votes for House speaker and [23:30] Jay’s short-lived boycott of Twitter following Elon Musk’s suspension of journalists.
[34:25] Next, we talk about Biden’s recent move to expand Title 42, the Trump-era policy that limits immigration under the guise of COVID prevention. Tammy relays what she’s heard from people in the immigrant-rights space, who have been continually disappointed by Biden’s policy choices, and speculates on the intractability of U.S. politics around immigration and labor. [43:25] Jay offers some free advice to the Dems about the mendacious Republican representative-elect George Santos.
Thanks for listening! Please subscribe on Patreon or Substack, stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from what feels like the distant past!
This week, erstwhile co-host Andy Liu joins Jay and Tammy to look back on 2022. (A note from Mai, our producer: Paid subscribers can get the full version of this ep, with some bonus banter about gambling, parental virtue signaling, etc.! Also, we recorded a week ago, so please forgive dated references to Morocco in the World Cup, Elon, and Jay’s not-yet-born second child.)
Twenty twenty-two was big for TTSG’s resident parents. Andy and his wife Reiko had their second kid in May, and Jay and his wife Casey just welcomed their second child this week!
Speaking of kids, [14:10] Andy gets the podsquad to analyze Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1989 study of U.S. middle-class identity and the “professional managerial class.” We dissect Ehrenreich’s theories about educational capital, anxiety over class decline, and how this feeling of precarity animates many Americans’ concepts of the family. Plus: Malcolm Harris’s contribution to the discourse; and [31:30] Andy’s take on labor unrest in academia and a less exploitative vision for higher education.
[41:10] Next, Tammy talks geopolitics and the bellicose, paranoid shift spurred by the war in Ukraine. Have we moved past the era of “stateless” threats (i.e., the War on Terror) and returned to a global order that pits the U.S. against China and Russia? What of the super-statist international cooperation we imagined in our youth, and what does the Ukraine war mean for small countries? We also talk about the ever-increasing (and rarely disputed) defense spending in the U.S. as well as Korea's rising profile as an arms dealer to the world.
[52:50] Last, Jay observes that race and identity have recently come to feel less central to our national discourse. Why the lackluster defense of affirmative action? Why is there so little public anger over police killings? We try to unpack the many possible causes—anxiety about the midterms, inflation, media skew—and ask whether the shift is ultimately good or bad.
Subscribe via Patreon or Substack for access to the full conversation and to join our Discord. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, or email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. Thanks for a great year!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from somewhere other than Jay’s basement!
This week, we’re excited to release the episode we recorded in New York with Hua Hsu, as part of Tammy’s residency at the A/P/A Institute at NYU. Hua is a TTSG regular and the author of a new memoir, Stay True.
The book focuses on Hua’s friendship with Ken, a classmate at Berkeley who was killed the summer before their senior year. We probe the book’s depiction of Asian male friendship, or, as Hua experienced it, “two Asian American people working through stuff.” We discuss questions of craft, how to assemble two decades of documentation, and the intense highs and lows of young adulthood.
Plus: Hua on pre-Internet zine-making and private worlds, emulating Maxine Hong Kingston (who’d emulated Walt Whitman), and the joy of putting his parents and Ken in textual proximity to Aristotle, Jacques Derrida, and Charles Taylor.
You can also watch a video of our conversation, professionally produced by A/P/A, here:
Big thanks to Amita Manghnani, Crystal Parikh, and Laura Chen-Schultz!
And thanks for your support. We were psyched to see TTSG on Slate’s list of best chat podcasts of 2022! Please share the pod with anyone who might enjoy “a solid balance between the troubling and the absurd.” ☺️
You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and subscribe via Patreon or Substack to join our Discord, where you can be a part of our conversation about TTSG merch! As always, feel free to email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from South Korea’s sad World Cup cheering section!
This week, we talk about the unrest in China with Dr. Ting Guo, a scholar at the University of Toronto who studies religion, politics, and gender in transnational Asia. Ting is also great on Twitter and co-hosts a Mandarin podcast called "in-betweenness" (@shichapodcast).
[7:50] The protests in mainland China—and, in solidarity, throughout the world—began late last month, after an apartment fire killed ten people in the city of Urumqi and workers at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou scaled the factory fence. Protestors have expressed anger and grief about the country's Zero-COVID policy and much else besides. Ting situates this movement(?) within a long history of resistance—from Tiananmen to the Toilet Revolution to Bridge Man—while explaining why it also feels so unprecedented. We talk about the leadership of feminists and queer activists in recent mobilizations, the emblematic struggle of migrant laborers in China’s surveillance system, solidarity with Uyghurs, and the long-held anguish that imbues every white-paper gesture. (Check out Eli Friedman’s terrific Boston Review essay for more context.) How has transnational and intersectional support helped to widen the protestors’ aims?
If you’d like to follow the protests, Ting recommends:
公民日报 Citizens Daily CN
Chinese queers will not be censored.
和姐妹们颠覆父权暴政 We Are All Chained Women
北方广场 Northern Square
女权中国 Feminist China
As Jay mentions at the end of the episode, he and his wife are expecting a second kid any day now (yay!), so we may be off the air over the holidays. We’ll make sure to keep you posted here, in Discord, and on social media.
Thanks for your support. Please subscribe on Patreon or Substack, stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and follow us on Twitter—and now Instagram and TikTok!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the picket lines!
This week, Jay and Tammy report on labor actions on the streets of Berkeley and Seoul.
[4:30] First, Jay tells us what he’s heard from striking student workers at the University of California. More than forty-five thousand UAW union members are drawing attention to their financial precarity and austerity in academia. We parse the possible fault lines among this remarkably large group of workers: the relative resources and prestige of different UC campuses, disciplinary biases, and disparate access to jobs after graduation. Why should we believe universities’ pleas of poverty, when their money so clearly goes to bloated administrative positions, campus police, and extravagant sports facilities?
[38:58] We also discuss strikes at Starbucks, The New School, and HarperCollins, and the revived possibility of a rail strike next month. Something’s clearly in the air—will US labor law and the NLRB limit or bolster worker power?
[45:27] Next, Tammy fills us in on the annual labor rally in Seoul, which, this year, targeted President Yoon Suk Yeol’s malfeasance and the mass deaths in Itaewon. As the new administration promises to concentrate wealth even further and avoids interacting with the public, how should the Korean working class respond? What kind of government is the Yoon administration, and what is the government for, anyway?
[53:02] Lastly, we remember Staughton Lynd, a key leftist intellectual and organizer who passed away last week. Lynd and his wife, Alice, were key figures in movements for civil rights and labor and against incarceration and war. RIP.
Next week, we’ll be taking a break from recording. Our next episode will be a live recording with Hua Hsu, so be sure to pick up his book—and please join us in person next week, if you’re in NYC!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the Matt Levine fan club!
This week, the writer and editor Max Read returns to discuss the disintegration of the tech world.
2:45 – First, Max and Jay explain what happened to cryptocurrency exchange FTX, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), and how its calamitous end has eroded people’s faith in crypto. We marvel at FTX’s narrative arc (“Star Wars” and a Bahamian polycule!), the social network that enabled SBF’s messianic rise, and the material conditions in tech-business journalism. Plus: Did SBF’s obsession with effective altruism (or, as Tammy puts it, the Davos-ification of philosophy) inoculate him against criticism?
38:50 – Speaking of Silicon Valley founder fetish… we then turn our attention to the train wreck of Twitter under Elon Musk. Could this disastrous moment in tech workers’ rights shift the industry’s (and especially Twitter’s) stance on unions? Or will downsizing keep workers in their place? Which of the Max’s predicted paths will Twitter take, and what would its death mean for the left and for journalism?
Support TTSG by subscribing via Patreon or Substack, following us on Twitter (lol), and sharing the show with friends. You can always reach us by email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the decline of the West!
This week’s episode features a wonderful conversation with Minh-Ha T. Pham, a professor at Pratt who researches fashion labor under global capitalism and digital capitalism—and whose new book, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, is out now.
3:45 – We begin by reminiscing about the era of the fashion blogger (including Minh-Ha herself) and the role that young, transnational Asians played as cultural intermediaries for historically exclusive, white brands. Is there a link between them and Asian garment workers? How did those unpaid “creatives” pave the way for the continued casualization of fashion labor on social media?
31:50 – We also discuss the problem of fast fashion and the racialized way it’s often discussed. The Chinese company Shein is widely portrayed as the worst offender, as was the Korean-American-owned Forever 21 in its heyday. Minh-Ha questions that framing: In a global fashion economy that requires low wages to boost profits and encourages insatiable consumption at great environmental cost, does it make sense to zero in on these budget (Asian) brands? And do these narratives assume that some countries can only “develop” if their workers are underpaid to produce our clothes?
Plus, an answer to the question you didn’t know you had about Prada and sequins.
Subscribe (via Patreon or Substack) to join the TTSG Discord and to attend Tammy’s upcoming meet-up with listeners in Cambridge, Mass.! And don’t forget to RSVP for our December 1 event in NYC with Hua Hsu. As always, you can reach us on Twitter or by email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Jay’s trick-or-treating route!
This week, Jay listened to hours of affirmative-action arguments from the Supreme Court so that you (and we) didn’t have to. He recounts Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sharp line of questioning and lays out the progressives’ Catch-22. Does a third path reveal itself if we deny Harvard and its peers their institutional, “meritocratic” power? Is it true that Asian Americans are actually given a leg up in some academic environments?
Next, we hear from Tammy, in Korea, following the horrific crowd crush that killed more than 150 people in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood over Halloween weekend. We discuss the role of government negligence and the rage and grief reminiscent of the Sewol ferry disaster. Tammy explains what makes Itaewon such a special neighborhood, especially for young people and minorities in Seoul. What will it represent going forward?
Finally, we honor the great people’s historian Mike Davis, who died on October 25. We revisit his classic, “Fortress L.A.,” which appears as Chapter 4 in City of Quartz (currently available as a free Ebook from Verso or, if you prefer to listen, as an audiobook through your local library on Libby.) We also discuss his more recent pieces on foreign policy and organizing, and the huge gap that he and the late Barbara Ehrenreich leave behind. We’ll continue to learn from Mike and follow his advice to take to the streets.
Join us on December 1, in NYC, for our TTSG + Hua Hsu live recording at NYU! It’s free and in a large theatre, so bring your friends and fam. RSVP here!
If you want to support our show, you can subscribe via Patreon or Substack and follow us on Twitter. You can also reach us by email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit goodbye.substack.com
Hello from Tammy’s mysterious trip to Korea!
In this bonus ep, we answer questions from our beloved subscribers. Thank you for getting us to ponder:
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The political dimensions of K-12 school lotteries
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A post-affirmative action world
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Midterm election hotspots (plus: the effects of labor power and anti-Asian sentiment)
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What Tammy and Jay have learned from ea…
Hi from the science desk!
Jay and Tammy chat this week with a very special guest, eco-apocalypse reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis. Her work has appeared on the How to Save a Planet podcast (RIP) and in The Atlantic and The New York Times, among other places.
Kendra tells us about her non-traditional path to journalism, the trouble with climate journalism in many newsrooms, and the burden and opportunities of being a Black reporter on the “gloom beat.” How do we make environmental collapse feel real and personal to ordinary people? What is the shape and utility of climate protests, from the “eco-terrorism” of the ‘80s and ‘90s to the high-profile actions of the past few weeks? Plus: Pitbull’s eco-anthems, the climate B plot on “Partner Track,” and why Kendra continues to abhor mayonnaise.
A sad note: the incredible Mike Davis has passed on. We were lucky to know him a bit and have him on the show. What a life.
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RSVPs open this afternoonfor the TTSG + Hua Hsu live recording at NYU, December 1! It’s free and in a large theatre, so bring your friends and fam. Whoo!
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A bonus ask-us-anything ep is out later this week! Mai makes her debut appearance, and Jay and Tammy reveal all their secrets. Subscribe via Substack or Patreon to get it in your feed.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Tammy’s surfing hagwon!
This week, we’re celebrating 1 MILLION DOWNLOADS! Sounds fake, we know, but Substack doesn’t lie. Thanks for tuning in to our ramblings for the past two and a half years—long live TTSG!
At the top of the show, we listen to a posthumous podcast with New Yorker editor John Bennett and several of his writers. We reflect on “Bennettisms” about the editor-writer relationship and how writers can help their readers.
Next, Tammy reports on the heightened military tensions in Korea and across Asia. What makes this moment feel different in a region accustomed to confrontation and nuclear threats? How has the mainstream response to these threats shifted? And what does the war in Ukraine mean for state sovereignty and Cold War alignments? Plus: Korea’s most economically valuable young men (BTS) report for mandatory military service.
Last, we go long on the L.A. City Council mess. As we discussed briefly last week, three council members and a union leader were caught making racist remarks in a closed-door discussion last year about redistricting. We dig into the deeper political arrangement in L.A. and the good and bad of ethnic solidarity. Could this incident, which has confirmed some cynical suspicions about local politics, be an earthquake moment that leads to stronger coalitions along race and class lines? Will this turn Jay and Tammy into Republicans?
Next week, we’ll be recording a 🎉BONUS EP 🎉 for paid subscribers where we answer listener questions. Subscribe via Patreon or Substack to submit your questions and hear the episode!
Also: Tomorrow, 10/20, at 6:30pm ET, Jay will join historian Erika Lee, New Yorker editor Michael Luo, and NYU’s Rachel Swarns to discuss anti-Asian violence and the complexity of America’s racial divide. Register here!
As always, you can follow us on Twitter and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a U.S. neocolony!
It’s just Tammy and Jay this week, trying not to obsess over surfing and wallpaper.
We talk about the new Netflix show, “Mo,” which, despite its marketing, avoids many pitfalls of the mainstream immigrant tale. The show succeeds on account of its main character: the very flawed yet charismatic Mo, a Palestinian-American man with a pending asylum case, played by comedian and show creator Mo Amer. We also dig into what makes the city of Houston such a compelling and complex co-star. (Jay wrote about “Mo” for The New Yorker.)
Next, Tammy reveals her steadfast love of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and mini-reviews the band’s new album (tl;dr: <3). We use Karen O’s return as an occasion to talk Asian American rockers, from the Smashing Pumpkins, Linkin Park, and DJ Honda to Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Thao Nguyen, and the Linda Lindas.
For our main segment, we discuss today’s grievance-driven identity politics, as analyzed in two recent pieces: Arielle Angel’s “Beyond Grievance” in Jewish Currents, and Brian Morton’s “Against the Privilege Walk” in Dissent. Are we stuck in an Oppression Olympics that undermines coalitional politics? How do these anxieties manifest online and in mainstream political reporting (versus IRL)? Can we combat such narcissism while taking grief seriously?
We also touch on the racist remarks from L.A. City Council members and a union leader that leaked this week.
Tune in this Thursday, 10/13, to hear Tammy talk about the U.S. military presence in Asia, along with journalist and unionist Jonathan de Santos in the Philippines, and author Akemi Johnson (on Okinawa) in California. Register here!
If you want to support our show, you can subscribe via Patreon or Substack and follow us on Twitter. You can also reach us by email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Mexico City!
This week, we talk about the Iranian uprising with Kiana Karimi, a scholar, writer, and friend of the pod who has been active in the fight for women’s rights in Iran and its diaspora.
But first, in other feminist news, Jay catches Tammy up on the latest high-stakes poker controversy, with its wonderful 🤢🤑 mix of money and misogyny.
Kiana begins by reading from an essay in progress about the current unrest in Iran. Thousands of people across the country have been protesting since mid-September, after the morality police allegedly killed Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman taken into custody for improperly wearing her hijab. Kiana explains the political history of such rules, the government's idea of a modern Islamic utopia (which has led to fairly frequent periods of rebellion), and the complicated position of Muslim feminists in regards to the wearing of hijab. Also, what else are the protests about? And what does it mean that so many conservative Muslim men have joined fearless young people in the streets?
Thanks as always for your support! Please subscribe on Patreon or Substack, stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and follow us on Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a Korean sublet!
This week, our friend Jennifer Wilson joins us to discuss the art of cultural criticism and test out some takes on James Harden, Gramsci, and Russia.
First, we discuss Boston Celtics coach Ime Udoka’s suspension and the ongoing fallout. What can fans’ reactions teach us about today’s top sports commentators and the proliferation of meme culture?
Then, we glide seamlessly into a discussion of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Jen talks about furthering his mission to decode capitalist values in mass culture, and argues for the return of the true pan. We also explore the restraints of representation, the joy of grappling with stuff in messy ways, and what it means when POC content is a hit with privileged white audiences (the “Get Out” effect). Jen also discusses her Indian husband’s lack of interest in “Indian Matchmaking” and her interview with ”Luster” author Raven Leilani.
Finally, Jen, a Ph.D.-holding Russianist, briefly discusses what she’s hearing about this stage of the war.
We have a few fun events coming up for TTSG listeners and subscribers:
This Saturday, October 1st: TTSG subscriber picnic in Seoul! Subscribe via Patreon or Substack to join our Discord and get the details.
Thursday, October 13 (see below): A virtual talk on the U.S. military presence in Asia with Tammy in Korea, journalist and unionist Jonathan de Santos in the Philippines, and author Akemi Johnson (on Okinawa) in California. Register here!
Thursday, December 1: TTSG LIVE with Hua Hsu, in NYC! The free RSVP will drop soon, but in the meantime, save the date.
Also: Pre-order the paperback of Jay’s book, “The Loneliest Americans.” And as always, feel free to email us (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and follow us on Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a beach in Busan!
It’s just us this week, talking through the good, bad, and ugly of this week’s news cycle.
Just before we recorded, the news dropped that Adnan Syed, the subject of the first season of the hit podcast “Serial,” was released from prison with a vacated conviction after 23 years. We grapple with the opportunity and ethical risks of narrative podcasts, especially when it comes to true crime. We also discuss the railway-union strike that was temporarily averted, thanks in part to the Biden administration, and the brutal conditions imposed by a consolidated freight system and billionaire bosses. Union members will vote soon on what to accept. (Looks like train workers in the UK could go on strike very soon, too.)
In our main segment, we discuss Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s latest stunt: coercing asylum-seekers in Texas to board a plane headed to Martha’s Vineyard, a vacation spot for monied liberals that has no infrastructure to help migrants. How does such an obviously cruel maneuver fit into the right’s Twitter-focused political strategy, centered on “owning the Libs” and diverting attention away from substantive issues and toward a “culture war” (as Tammy witnessed in the Ohio Senate race)? How should the left respond to this type of political theater?
Plus: Jay lends some pointers from his quarter-life crisis (spent surfing unrideable waves in NorCal) to Tammy as she navigates a crisis of her own (sublimated through surfing lessons in Korea); and math professor Michael Thaddeus proves the glories of tenure as he knocks Columbia University down a few pegs.
Thanks for your support. Please subscribe on Patreon or Substack, stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and follow us on Twitter!
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Hello from Tammy’s apartment! (Please forgive the less-than-stellar audio quality on this one.)
For our latest TTSG book club meeting, Tammy is joined by the wonderful Lisa Hsiao Chen to discuss her debut novel “Activities of Daily Living.” The book follows Alice, a Taiwanese American living in Brooklyn in her late thirties, as she simultaneously obsess…
Hello from Seoul (both real and fictional)!
This week, we welcome our friend and K-drama expert Jenny Wang Medina back to the pod to discuss the new Netflix hit “Extraordinary Attorney Woo.”
The legal-procedural K-drama follows an autistic attorney, Woo Young-woo, who joins the ranks of a high-powered law firm and quickly proves herself invaluable. It’s wholesome, marginally sea-themed, and set in a fantasy playground of the professional sphere.
We discuss the hot-button issues in Korea that form the backdrop of the show, like children’s rights, Buddhism versus Christianity, North Korean defectors, and eminent domain, just to name a few. We reflect on the rise of multiculturalism and minority rights in Korean society, TV, and film, which has led to the increased visibility of people with disabilities. Woo has also sparked a specific discourse around the portrayal of its autistic protagonist. Will the show also inspire a generation of women lawyers to move to Korea, expecting a feminist haven, or convince Korean parents to ease up on their kids’ time at hagwons? Only time will tell.
If you plan to watch the series, we should warn you that Jay drops a couple of pretty extreme spoilers towards the end of the ep!
Later this week, we’ll be releasing a bonus recording of our book club with Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of “Activities of Daily Living,” for paid subscribers. We’ve also been using our TTSG Discord to plan subscriber meet-ups with Tammy in Seoul. If you’d like to join in, subscribe via Patreon or Substack. And you can always email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from three time zones!
This week, Tammy is joined by Debt Collective organizers Ann Larson and Eleni Schirmer to reflect on the movement that won historic relief from student debt.
But first, we remember the great Barbara Ehrenreich, who passed last week. Ehrenreich was an author and activist best known for her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed, a hard-hitting yet beautifully written dive into the low-wage economy.She also made incredible contributions to leftist movements, from DSA to domestic workers, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and In These Times, as well as her often-misunderstood warning about the “professional–managerial class.” And Ann reminds us that Ehrenreich wrote about more than just labor!
In our main segment, we celebrate and dissect a rare victory on the left. Ann and Eleni talk about their personal journeys toward calling b**t on all kinds of debt—and trace Biden’s recent debt-cancellation announcement to its Occupy Wall Street origins and a decade of painstaking organizing. We reflect on the path forged by the Corinthian debt strikers, the public sector’s broader reliance on debt, the “proof of concept” in Biden’s nowhere-near-enough cancellation policy, and the way that framing debt as a shared economic condition opens up new organizing opportunities. (A real-life case study in solidarity on the basis of class!) Plus: how all of us can get involved to make the debt announcement a reality.
Thanks for listening. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, and follow us on Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Washington state!
This week, we’re joined by Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network and repeat pod guest, to chat about immigration (and, briefly, Nathan Fielder’s bizarre new show, “The Rehearsal”).
We start by diving into Caitlin Dickerson’s exhaustive report, in The Atlantic, on the Trump administration's family-separation policy. We reflect on the unique horrors of that period, while locating them in a longer history of cruelty toward immigrants, up to the present.
Silky also outlines the current immigration landscape, including Biden’s continuation of Trump’s Title 42 policy (which blocks migration ostensibly on public-health grounds). She explains how the misguided theory of deterrence has governed immigration policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations, aided by skewed media narratives, and suggests what the immigrant-rights movement should do to prepare for the next mass-organizing moment.
As always, please subscribe via Patreon and Substack to support the show and gain access to our Discord. Our global, 24/7 community of listeners is currently discussing Leo’s 21-year-old girlfriends, basketball, Seoul fashion, “The Rehearsal,” immigration policy, food in the PNW, and so much more. You can also follow us on Twitter and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Philly!
We’re lucky to be joined this week by former podsquad member Andy Liu, for an in-depth chat about his three favorite things: sports, history, and Taiwan.
First, we review the new Netflix documentary about Manti Te'o, the college-football star who fell from grace after being catfished a decade ago. We discuss the many failures that led to Te'o’s ostracization, as well as the role his race may have played in the way the media treated him.
Next, Andy catches us up on the latest Twitterstorian goss: the fight over a blog post on “presentism” and identity politics by American Historical Association president James H. Sweet. We interrogate Sweet’s arguments and the coded language that got him in trouble.
Lastly, Andy answers our questions about Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. Did the House Speaker’s trip escalate tensions between Taiwan and China, or was it all bluster? Is the Democrats’ “tough on China” posturing an effort to wear populist politics? Why are people outside Asia so invested in a story about confronting China?
Stick it out til the end to hear Jay and Andy bicker about Kevin Durant.
If you’re a paid subscriber, come to our book club this Thursday, 8/26, at 8pm EST, with Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of “Activities of Daily Living” (Zoom info in our Discord). As always, you can subscribe via Patreon or Substack, follow us on Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Mai's high-speed European train!
This week, Tammy and Jay watch “Free Chol Soo Lee” and speak with Julie Ha, who co-directed the film with Eugene Yi. The new documentary follows Chol Soo Lee, a Korean man in San Francisco who was wrongfully convicted of murder in the 1970s, highlighting the pan-Asian movement for his release and his troubled readjustment to life outside. Julie discusses her admiration for the pathbreaking investigative journalist K.W. Lee, who brought public scrutiny to the case; the importance of non-canonical archives; and how stories like Chol Soo Lee’s complicate prevailing immigrant identities.
The hosts also dig into the Asian American Disinformation Table’s new report on the proliferation of disinformation(?) in immigrant communities. But what's the difference between unsavory conclusions and lies? Is the report yet another elite dismissal of impolitic concerns?
As always, please subscribe via Patreon and Substack, follow us on Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. When you become a paid TTSG subscriber, you get access to our lively Discord, where you'll find information about next week’s book club with Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of “Activities of Daily Living” (Thursday 8/26 at 8pm EST).
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the miserable gap between episodes of “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”!
This week, Jay and Tammy are joined by the great Jia Tolentino, a writer at The New Yorker and the author of Trick Mirror.
We start by talking about Jia’s recent piece on housing (= the rent is too damn high) on the worker-owned site “Hellgate”—and her dreams of organizing her building (not Tammy’s “white projects”) in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York.
Then, we discuss two provocative essays Jia wrote on abortion after the Dobbs decision: first, on surveillance statism; and second, on the moral (especially Judeo-Christian) sacrifices inherent to pregnancy and human existence, not just to abortion.
Plus: Jay and Tammy review Las Vegas's Sino-Korean noodles.
As always, thanks to our wonderful producer Mai and all of our subscribers (Jia included!) for keeping the show alive. On Thursday, August 25th, we’ll have our next book club meeting with Lisa Hsiao Chen, the author of the novel Activities of Daily Living. Subscribe via Patreon or Substack to join.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Tammy’s undisclosed location!
The hosts start with a brief discussion of Leanna Louie, a law-and-order Democrat running for District 4 Supervisor in SF. What might she represent for the future of Asian-American politics?
Then Jay and Tammy are joined by investigative journalist Ali Fowle to discuss Myanmar. The country’s military regime recently killed four prisoners, including well known pro-democracy activists Phyo Zeya Thaw and Ko Jimmy. These judicial executions, the first since the 1980s, shocked even those inside Myanmar, where extrajudicial murders and widespread arrests have been commonplace since the February 2021 military coup.
Ali describes her experience reporting from Myanmar in the decade leading up to the coup, the culture of fear and violence used to suppress last year’s popular uprising, and what the resistance movement looks like today. We ask why the coup in Myanmar has not broken through internationally in the way Russia’s assault on Ukraine has, and what message the recent executions are meant to send.
Be sure to watch the short documentary Ali produced last year with Al Jazeera (warning: graphic content), and give a listen to Phyo Zeya Thaw’s music.
Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, follow us on Twitter, and feel free to email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a walk-up apartment!
This week, Tammy and Jay invite food-and-culture writer Wei Tchou to discuss trends in plant-based meat and beverages. Wei has written beautifully about fermenting tempeh, making her own soy sauce, and learning to love baijiu.
In our first investigative segment (lol), we send Jay out on the streets of Norcal. The U.S. chain Peet’s Coffee has proclaimed this the “Summer of Jelly,” dropping a new “boba-like” drink addition that’s been deemed cultural appropriation by some, harmless bobafication by others. Jay ventures to the original Peet’s in Berkeley to find out: Is the jelly any good?
Then, Wei shills for Big Fake Pig! Could Impossible Pork be the answer to her tireless search for a veg alternative in cooking Chinese? How do new vegan meat products fit into food landscapes that have long used plant-based substitutes? Could vegan pork be an ecological and ethical cure in regions where meat consumption is still on the rise? Plus: David Chan’s unique brand of service journalism and Wei’s problematic cookbook fave.
Check out our subscriber Discord for bonus items from Jay’s Peet’s odyssey and Wei’s kitchen.
And, on August 25, we’ll be having a subscribers-only book club with the great novelist Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living. Come on through!
Thanks as always for your support! Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, follow us on Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from mild SF and summerpocalypse NYC!
This week, Jay and Tammy discuss what’s been on their minds this week: the state of the Democratic party and the shifting culture around drug use in the United States. Plus: Jill Biden on tacos and bogadas!
We read New York mag columnist Jonathan Chait’s critique of Biden and ask why the administration has such a failed legislative strategy. What, if anything, is keeping Democrats from taxing the rich? What does a recent poll tell us about the party as the midterms approach?
Then, inspired by “How to Change Your Mind,” a new show (and book) from Michael Pollan that explores the history of psychedelics, we consider society’s reassessment of so-called “hard” and “soft” drugs. Have we fully disavowed the War on Drugs? What should we make of this increased acceptance of drug use in a time of huge numbers of opioid and fentanyl overdoses?
Thanks as always for your support! Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, follow us on Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
This week, Tammy and Jay remember John Bennet, a former New Yorker editor and Columbia journalism professor who passed away this week:
They are then joined by policy analyst Paul Williams to discuss the concept of social housing and its potential in the United States. How did we arrive at a political consensus so averse to public housing of any kind? Can other countries’ programs help us reclaim housing as a social good rather than a market commodity? What can we learn from current social-housing proposals across the U.S.?
For more, read Paul on “Public Housing for All” and the California bill that made it further than expected, as well as the initiatives being floated in Rhode Island and Seattle and the project underway in Maryland.
Thanks for your support. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and follow us on Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Resending because of a tech glitch. Thanks for your patience.
Hello from Cleveland!
This week, we speak with friend of the pod Danny Bessner, an historian of U.S. foreign relations and co-host of the podcast American Prestige.
Danny discusses his new Harper’s essay, which argues for a departure from American exceptionalism, once and for all. He lays out the two main camps in U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalists, who advocate for the maintenance of U.S. global hegemony, and restrainers, who argue that the country’s influence should be reduced.
We also explore how war and politics have changed since the 1950s, the decimation of academic history and other disciplines in the humanities, how the U.S. regulatory apparatus insulates elite decision-makers from public opinion, and what’s needed to fight back.
Thanks for listening, and stay in touch via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Hello from Jeju-do!
This (harrowing news) week, the podsquad welcomes repeat guest Jenny Wang Medina—Emory professor, TV addict, literary translator, and hallyu expert—for a discussion of Jay’s favorite recent K-drama, Our Blues.
We talk about abortion, matriarchal haenyeo, regionalism, debt, and goose fathers. What makes Jeju-do such a compelling site for fiction? How are dreams deferred in the East Asian Tigers and other sites of rapid capitalist development? Plus: Jenny’s analysis of the Korean linked-novel form (연작 소설), Chevy product placement, and Tammy’s crush on Kim Woo-bin:
If you’re in NYC, come to OG TTSG Discord member (and ceramicist) Stephanie Shih’s art opening on the LES tomorrow night:
Thanks for listening! Please subscribe and get in touch via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Hi from Chicago!
This week, Jay and Tammy talk about a rising tide of worker organizing, rising gas prices (ugh), and a new, very timely TV show.
Tammy reports back from her trip to Labor Notes (along with pod listener Matt), starring Amazon Labor Union, Starbucks Workers United, and Tío Bernie. What kind of union moment are we in?
Then, what’s the relationship between inflation and the labor market, and what does it mean for electoral politics in the US (and around the world)? How can the left, or even liberals, frame inflation in terms of corporate theft instead of punching down the working class?
And we’re starting to watch David Simon’s new show on HBO, based on Justin Fenton’s book of the same title, “We Own This City.” What are cops for?
Finally, a quick update on the future of the pod. (Sorry about Tammy’s sound this week; she didn’t have her usual equipment with her on the road.)
A couple other things we’re watching:
The WTO met recently and quashed any hope of getting generic Covid vaccines, tests, and medicine distributed around the world.
Very cool about the new Colombian president and vice president!
IRL fun: We’re gonna have a send-off for Andy this Sunday in New York. If you’re a subscriber, log into the Discord to get the details and RSVP!
Thanks for listening! Please subscribe and reach out to us via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Hello from Andy’s couch!
We take a break from the NBA finals to record Andy’s last ep as co-host : (
Per his request, the podsquad talks Amy Chua’s now decade-old book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—and argues about everything in it. Is the Chinese Tiger Mother actually a thing? Does it matter that Chua is an upper-class second-generation parent? What kind of Asian America does the book describe? Can the satirical bent of the book erase its meanness and cultural essentialism? (Note: we focus pretty narrowly on the memoir and don’t get into her husband’s suspension from Yale for sexual harassment or her own professorial misconduct… but yeah, a lot there.)
Then, we send Andy off with thanks and <3 notes from our listener community. Thank you, Andy, for an amazing two-plus years!
And thank you for listening. Spread the word, and reach out to us via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod! Jay and Tammy will see you next week.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a 24-hour layover!
Tammy returns from her travels and tells us about hanging out with cool Asians at the International Federation of Journalists conference in Oman.
Then, we discuss the latest on the Uvalde shootings and the increasingly outrageous reports that local police officers and government officials are bullying parents and evading even the tiniest bit of accountability. How does the Uvalde massacre bolster arguments for police defunding and abolition? Where does abolition intersect with calls for gun control? How pessimistic should we be about the right-wing deadlock of the national government?
Finally, an announcement from Andy and some reflections on the two years since the podcast began, roughly 133 episodes(!) ago.
Thanks for listening! Please subscribe and reach out to us via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Tammy’s off for the week!
Jay and Andy are joined by The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner to talk about his viral interrogations of subjects from John Mearsheimer to Amy Wax to that unhinged Covid conspiracy theorist from spring 2020; checking in on the bleak pessimism surrounding last week’s horror in Uvalde, TX; and a wide discussion of this year’s NBA playoffs featuring the Boston Celtics and the Golden State Warriors, tipping off this week!
Thanks for listening! Please subscribe and reach out to us via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Hello from the Betaverse!
This week, we briefly touch on headline news from Asia: that a jet-lagged Biden pledged military support for Taiwan against China—a comment the State Department is now trying to walk back, lol.
Then, onto the main event: a deep-dive on the new film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, starring Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu, directed by the Daniels. And yes, we spoil it!
Why did one of the hosts hate it? Were the martial arts any good? Was the ending satisfying? And is EEAAO an “Asian American” movie? All this and more in a very long, very in-depth episode.
Thanks for listening! Please subscribe and reach out to us via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Hello from Prague!
Tammy tells us about her travels through Czech Republic, and Jay describes his favorite cioppino recipes. Then, a few items from the news:
The US is experiencing a critical baby-formula shortage. We get into the political and economic factors behind this crisis; discuss the role of formula and the US’s regressive family leave policies; and dabble in a bit of libertarian pro-free trade contrarianism. Also, Andy recs a book, Lactivism by Courtney Jung, for the history and debate over formula vs. feeding + a segment comparing children strollers.
Then we talk about the horrific shooting that took place in east Buffalo over the weekend. What is the history of “replacement theory,” can we do anything about these shootings, and how does this intersect with the Democrats’ recommitment to policing?
Finally, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has won the Philippines presidential election, 36 years after his authoritarian father was exiled by a popular coup. We get into disinformation, historical whitewashing, US influence, dynastic families, and the false trade of authoritarianism for growth and stability. Scary times in the Philippines going forward.
Thanks for listening and supporting the pod!
Thanks for listening, and stay in touch via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a million-person protest!
We wish…
This week, we speak with a brilliant friend of the pod, Kate Redburn, a lawyer and legal historian.
Kate takes us through the leaked Supreme Court draft decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and explains how decades of organizing and legal scheming by Christian conservatives got us to this point. They also predict how the expected ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could affect the rights of people who use contraception, queer and trans people, and people of color—and exacerbate a chaotic interstate patchwork of abortion laws.
Plus: the state of abortion rights today, judicial activism, weaknesses in the feminist movement, and the need for a mass mobilization to advance our collective well being.
Thanks for listening, and stay in touch via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Happy belated May Day!
We celebrate international workers’ day by discussing a newly remastered version of the 1979 documentary The Wobblies (directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer), now showing in theaters and online. We discuss the continuing relevance of the Industrial Workers of the World for today’s labor movements, its universalist vision (in contrast to that of the AFL), the role of the Pacific Northwest in labor history, and continuities in the organization of labor and business ever since. Plus: a controversy over the screening at Metrograph in New York.
Then, we get back to the pod’s roots to talk about what’s next in the pandemic, in a United States that seems increasingly ready to get rid of all of its mandates. What do we make of data suggesting that even the vaccinated are at risk of dying? Are our pandemic responses doomed to be privatized and individualized?
Thanks for listening, and get in touch via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a reunited podsquad, each back in their natural habitat!
This week, taking off from an essay by Jamelle Bouie, we discuss the right wing’s composite attack on queer educators and racial-justice curriculum as an attack on public goods. How should the Democrats—and the left—respond?
Plus: notes on and from the lockdown in Shanghai and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Thanks for listening, and ping us via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Hello from the Staten Island Ferry!
This week, the podsquad reunites for all kinds of $$ talk. We begin with a chat —occasioned by a book prize Andy received — about how to balance leftist politics and theory in journalism and academia. Then, our main topic: the historic victory by Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at the JFK8 warehouse!
We discuss Tammy’s reporting in The New Yorker, traditional/large versus small/independent unions, and the links between Amazon, the Democrats, and labor.
How did the ALU do it? Is it okay for the left to make celebrities out of Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer? How do multiracial, immigrant politics intersect with class politics? What’s the next step, both for Amazon and US labor in general?
Also, we unpack Ohio politician Tim Ryan’s pathetic new “workers first” ad, which scapegoats China. (If you want to take action, check out the responses of Asian American Midwest Progressives and OPAWL.)
Thanks to TTSG Discord member, Lance, and the NBA Dark Web channel for the new theme music :)
Thanks for listening!
Please get in touch via timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or https://twitter.com/ttsgpod.
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Hi everyone:
Today it’s just me, Andy, talking with guest Adolph Reed, Prof. Emeritus at University of Pennsylvania, about his new book The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives. Drawing from personal experience, he argues that racial segregation cannot be fully explained through abstract ideas about white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It was a coherent social order animated by ruling class power.
We talk about what he calls “neoliberal race politics,” the charge against him of “class reductionism” (NYT), and the broader usefulness of this analysis to contexts across the US and the world. Also, a bit of NBA banter.
See: our conversation with Merlin Chowkwanyun (2020) on his work with Reed on racial disparity discourse (their piece on Covid reporting here)
Also: Adolph’s new podcast Class Matters
and Adolph’s essays on nonsite.org
0:00: The premise of the book and its reception (The New Yorker, Common Dreams, Harper’s podcast). Adolph periodizes Jim Crow from the 1890s-1960s, and he speaks about his formative years in Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Atlanta. He first drafted the book in the 2000s after realizing his would be the last generation with clear memories of the Jim Crow order. Jim Crow, he argues, has been conspicuously overlooked in contemporary discussions about race and slavery, which flatten history (“the bad old timey-times”).
20:20: An aside on Adolph’s polemic (2013) on Hollywood “race movies” such as Django Unchained and The Help.
28:30: Adolph describes the Jim Crow racial order as a practical and pragmatic strategy of class power over all workers, rather than an abstract hatred of one group. And why it is counterproductive to frame it as a binary story of all white versus all Black people.
It’s not like white people had a meeting around the campfire and said, “let’s go put some Jim Crow on some Black people”
36:30: Framing Jim Crow as unrelenting oppression in fact mirrors, ironically, the very vision laid out by segregationists themselves. This view, found today in liberal anti-racism discourses, attributes everything to an abstract “white supremacy” and “anti-Blackness.” Class is disavowed. The effect is to help sustain an elite stratum of racial spokespeople. But also, why does this race-first worldview have such broad appeal?
53:15: Adolph responds to charges that his argument is class reductionist. We reference an older exchange with the late political theorist Ellen Meiskins Wood (2002) to clarify the distinctions in Adolph’s arguments (see the original text here, esp. the “Rejoinder”). Race, he argues, is one of many ideologies to sustain accumulation and class power that rest on “ascriptive differences,” or, putative ideas about the natural differences between people: if not race, then sex, gender, religion, caste, tribe, mental and physical abilities, etc.
Also see Adolph’s concise summary in New Labor Forum (2013).
1:03:50: Wrestling with common objections, such as, “ethnocentrism predates capitalism, so race is autonomous from class”; or, “upper-class Black people are subject to police violence too, so class doesn’t explain racism.”
1:14:20: Adolph on the broader generalizability of his analysis for other groups, in the US and globally (see Clare Kim on comparative analyses of Asian American/Black racial ideology). And where Adolph got his Marxism.
I wouldn’t say I’m the most cosmopolitan world traveler. But the thing I will say is that, in every place that I’ve been, what I’ve noticed is that most people are scuffling trying to work for a living. It doesn’t matter what kind of food they eat or the music they listen to. I mean that’s all interesting, more or less. But the basic human condition is that, right?
1:30:30: NBA banter.
Thanks for listening! Please get in touch via timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or https://twitter.com/ttsgpod
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Hi from multi-culti Toronto! (We wish.)
This week, Jay and Tammy discuss the urban housing crisis, the weird and embarrassing SCOTUS confirmation hearings of (Future Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the lovely new animated film, “Turning Red” (which Tammy womansplains to Jay). (Andy will be back soon.)
Thanks for listening, and K.I.T. via Substack, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, https://twitter.com/ttsgpod, and/or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod!
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Hello!
This week just Jay and Andy and with guest Max Read. We talk about all things “disinformation.”
First up is Andy’s n+1 essay last week on the lab-leak Covid conspiracy, what it says about the world’s ideas about China, and the plausibility of conspiracies today. Then a wider discussion about whether the Ukraine invasion and competing claims of “disinformation” have presented a new crisis for media and the framework of fake news installed the last few years.
Jay’s got a few recent pieces on disinformation and media coverage of Ukraine.
And here is some of Max’s recent commentary on media:
“Mapping the celebrity NFT complex”
“Is web3 b**t?”
“How to have a career as a journalist in 2022”
Consider subscribing to the newsletter!
Back next week with the full gang!
Please get in touch via timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or https://twitter.com/ttsgpod
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Hello from New York!
This week, Tammy interviews the playwright and TV writer Hansol Jung. They talk about Hansol’s childhood in South Africa and South Korea, the feeling of being 70% fluent in both Korean and English, religion and structural sexism in the recent Korean presidential election, race in theater and TV, building queer characters, and how Rent changed everything.
Hansol’s latest production is Wolf Play — at the Soho Rep, with Ma-Yi Theater Company. She was also a writer on the forthcoming Apple TV+ series, Pachinko, based on the novel by Min Jin Lee.
(Sound note: Snippets of live theater from Wolf Play and Cardboard Piano woven into the episode; also, Tammy has a sore throat!)
Thanks for listening. Please donate to the Red Cross to help people in Ukraine, and stay in touch with us via Substack or:
timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
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https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod
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Hello from a South Korean ballot box! (Tammy wishes.)
This week, Andy and Tammy talk to the political scientist Neta C. Crawford* of Boston University (soon, Oxford University) about the human and ecological costs of the war in Ukraine, the China dimension, and what a global movement for peace should strive for.
Plus: Andy discusses his review essay on Chinese economic history and neoliberalism in The Nation; Tammy freaks out over the imminent South Korean presidential election and reflects on outgoing leader Moon Jae-in; and Andy reveals his secret recipe for Whole Foods salmon poke (YouTube).
Some links:
Brown’s invaluable Costs of War project, co-directed by Neta
Neta commenting on war crimes against civilians
Neta’s forthcoming book, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War
Rohini Hensman on the long history of Russia–Ukraine
Isaac Chotiner’s interview with John Mearsheimer
Tammy’s profile of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
- Apols for mispronouncing “Neta” at the top of the show. It’s NEE-TA.
Also: stripe twins!
Thank you for listening. Please donate to the Red Cross to help people in Ukraine, and send us feedback via Substack or:
timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
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Hello from our doomscroll…
Today we talk about—what else?—the events in Ukraine this past week :-(
We chat with Sophie Pinkham, an essayist, reporter, and expert on the region. In 2016, she published Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (read an excerpt in Dissent). She has written about politics after the Maidan protests (The New Yorker), the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky (The New York Review of Books), and, just yesterday, Zelensky and the war (New York).
We discuss our initial reactions to the news of invasion, why so many people didn’t expect it to happen, U.S. jingoism, the impact of social media and propaganda, criticisms of “the left,” speculations about the future, and the comparability of China–Taiwan.
Some stuff we’ve been reading:
“Ukraine: What Russia wants, what the West can do,” Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft
“A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv,” Taras Bilous, Open Democracy
“News from Natoland,” Tariq Ali, New Left Review
Background on history and political economy in Adam Tooze’s newsletter
Friends of the show Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu on reactions to Ukraine from Taiwan.
Thank you for listening. Please donate to the Red Cross to help people in Ukraine, and send any questions or comments via Substack or:
timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
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Hi from the United States of empire!
The podsquad reunites in Amurica. This week, we talk about the murders of two women in New York City and the recall of school board members in San Francisco.
Christina Yuna Lee and Michelle Go died in nightmarish attacks. We process our feelings and explore how Asian Americans, policymakers, and members of the general public are interpreting/using the women’s deaths. Why do we always fall back on law-enforcement responses? How do stigmas against people who aren’t housed, or those who have mental illness, affect our analysis of “hate crimes”? How are Asian communities in New York and New Jersey responding? What does women’s safety mean? What’s the abolitionist horizon?
San Franciscans recently voted to remove three people from the school board—and Asian Americans were a big part of the action. Jay wrote about how this all boils down to anxiety over admissions to a selective high school. But the recall might also be seen as a tech-funded campaign against all things “woke.” What’s going on? How do immigrant politics graft onto the US’s left-right spectrum? Are Asian voters basically social Darwinians? What does this mean for criminal-legal policy, specifically the upcoming Chesa Boudin recall? For Asian-American organizing?
Thanks to the PNW listeners who came to our IRL lunch over the weekend. And thanks to all of you for supporting the pod. Stay in touch via Substack or:
timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
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Today’s episode is a conversation with Eugene Lim, the author of the novel Search History. Eugene’s one of our favorite writers. We talk about experimental fiction, Asian writers, Eugene’s life as a school librarian, what constitutes good and bad writing, identity questions in fiction, and we even take questions from the audience who watched this talk on Discord.
If you’d like to be part of our next BOOK TIME, please sign up for our newsletter subscription at goodbye.substack.com for $5 a month and you can join our discord community.
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Hi from Seoul!
The podsquad returns for a wide-ranging chat on all things, sort of, broadly, sometimes diasporically China.
Awkwafina made the rounds on social media, with a screenshot semi-apology(?) regarding her use of Black speech. We offer a hermeneutic reading.
It’s the 10th anniversary of Linsanity. What did, and what does, Jeremy mean to Asian America? Jay and Andy revisit analyses from the time.
Chinese government bros have upped their game, offense and defense, on English-language Twitter. What’s the use of an official reply guy?
And finally, we’re watching the Olympics in Beijing! Yes, all Olympics are terrible (insert leftist critique), but so are the short track judges, says Tammy. Plus: Andy on the opening ceremonies and Jay on Eileen Gu.
We have an IRL picnic coming up in Seattle and an ongoing book club. Subscribe and join our Discord community to find out more.
Thanks for hanging with us! Please share, subscribe, and ping us via Patreon and Substack; email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and Discord!
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Hello from a crypto farm in rural China!
This week Andy talks with the director (Jessica Kingdon) and producer (Kira Simon-Kennedy) of the new film Ascension, a documentary about working life in contemporary China. Ascension has received critical acclaim and garnered major awards and nominations, including being shortlisted for the Academy Awards!
The film features scenes of quotidian working life in a period when the government has begun to promote the “Chinese Dream,” spanning textile and sex doll factories to etiquette school and social media influencers all the way to luxurious water parks and tropical vacation resorts. Together, these scenes raise provocative questions about China’s blindingly rapid development, the uneven pace of upward mobility, and whether China is an exotic outlier or a recognizably modern society, comparable with life in the US and other societies worldwide (all to music by Dan Deacon).
Jessica and Kira took the time to chat with us and many from our Discord community about the film’s initial conception, the origins of the title and Jessica’s own exploration of family history, the strangeness of the major award circuit, and the ethics of making a commercial documentary. They also break down many of the more memorable scenes, including a dinner party among the ultra-rich and a crypto farm in the middle of the countryside.
You can look for ways to watch it on the film’s website, the linktree, and its IG account.
But for most of us, the easiest way to watch it at home is to subscribe to and stream from Paramount+ (look for trial offers!).
The second half of this episode consists of questions from our Discord members. If you’re interested in joining the conversation with us and tons of other cool people, please think about subscribing! Check us out via Patreon and Substack, contact us via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and the Discord!
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Hi from a Korean hot-stone bed!
It’s Jay and Tammy this week, talking trash about Andy.
Plus:
Pandemic alcoholism and human bonds: We read and discuss an essay in Jezebel, “I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life.” What has this tragic time clarified and obscured? What’s the off-ramp?
Does a day-trader’s lunch budget say anything about inflation? People were mad about this New York Times story, but the Big Mac Index remains durable (Tammy gets the description about half-right). The tech stock market (read: Peloton, Netflix, Amazon) seems less durable.
The Supreme Court will hear the Harvard / University of North Carolina case on affirmative action, with Asian American plaintiffs front and center. We assess the history of race and class in admissions and consider the wedge that is Asian America.
Thanks for hanging out! Please share, subscribe, and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack; email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and Discord!
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Greetings from the Philly planetarium!
This week, we discuss academic tenure, “disgusting” ideas, and left foreign policy.
0:00 – A troll-y tenured law prof at UPenn is back on her race-science kick—this time, arguing on Glenn Loury’s interview show that, “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.” What to do about Amy Wax and the Amy Waxes of the world? Should her tenure be repealed, as local politicians are demanding? Who and what is tenure for? Is it about free speech? Workers’ rights?
58:30 – Does this issue intersect with tech companies’ censorship via terms of service?
1:08:00 – If you’re on China/international relations/war/basketball/tech Twitter, you’ll have seen that Chamath went full-on tankie… which relates to the debate over a recent article in The Nation: “What Should the Left Do About China?” by David Klion. The piece explores the lefty political spectrum, and features input from Andy and several friends of the pod. We dig in on the question of how complicit we are as “Americans.” In a time of (cold-)warring hegemons, what kind of dissenters should we be?
Thanks for being in dialogue with us! Please share, subscribe, and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack; email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and Discord!
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Hello from pandemic year 3!
There seems to be a panic over school closures—and a backlash against teachers and their unions. But how many US public schools have had to “go remote” because of Covid? Are these physical closures reasonable? Why are people blaming educators for everything from “learning loss” to the downfall of the Democratic party? What “shock doctrine” tactics do we need to look out for?
Check out:
Jay in The New York Times, on the value of public schools and a post-Hurricane Katrina cautionary tale
A common, cynical take in The Atlantic
Arguments for parent-teacher solidarity in The New Yorker and Jacobin
An explainer on the teacher shortage and our stingy approach to public K–12 education, at Vox
We really appreciate your listening and spreading the word. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter! See you in the Discord.
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New year, new pod!
“Same pod, though…”
0:00 – We discuss various New Year’s Day soups and East Asian black beans.
7:50 – Many influential writers died at the end of 2021. We explore the legacies of Joan Didion, bell hooks, and historian Jonathan Spence.
44:40 – Why is the Netflix climate change film, “Don’t Look Up,” so polarizing? Written by Adam McKay and Bernie pal David Sirota, and starring basically all of Hollywood, it has inspired a lot of commentary. Is it a good leftist film? Is it funny? Effective? What about its portrayal of the media and academia? (Check out these think-pieces from “Money on the Left” and Current Affairs.)
Thanks for listening and spreading the word. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
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Hello from a pandemic bungalow!
This week, we are joined by Gary Shteyngart, creator of the brilliant new novel, Our Country Friends. We talk about immigrant fiction, elite high schools, exile feelings, the Asian pop-cultural future, and Gary’s run-in with a fascist elementary school teacher.
Gary is the author of the memoir Little Failure (2014) and four previous novels: Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Lake Success (2018), Absurdistan (2007), and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002). Also check out his recent essay in The New Yorker, “A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath.”
Photo credit: Tim Davis
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Hello from the Quiz Bowl room!
Today we’re talking with Democratic pollster and Andy’s high school friend Brian Stryker of ALG research.
Recently, the Democratic Party circulated a memo Brian wrote about the Democrats’ poor showing in some of the November elections and their uneven prospects for the 2022 midterms. You can read his interview with The New York Times here.
The main topics we hit on are: how much do cultural wedge issues like critical race theory matter over bread-and-butter questions like jobs, wages, and inflation; the balance between a focus on economic versus social issues; whether emphasizing “social justice” concerns could (ironically) deter Asian and Latino/a voters; and Brian’s crystal ball for the 2024 election.
0:00 – Tammy in Korea update
6:40 – Brian explains his polling research on the Virginia elections and what it tells us about the state of the Democrats: CRT, school closures, the economy and Covid stimulus plans, and supply chains.
17:40 – The prospect of Asian and Latino voters going Republican (see Jay’s pieces on this topic) and why the Democrats struggle to convey economic messages.
34:30 – The gap between the Democrats’ “white woke consultants” and the reality and diversity of “voters of color.” Is there common ground between patriotic Democrats and the left?
45:30 – How can the Democrats speak to different racial groups in a more nuanced way? What’s the role of organized labor in the Party? Is the future of the Dems just a lot of moderate POC candidates? Is the average POC more conservative than the average wealthy white liberal? And some scary thoughts about Trump 2024.
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Hello from a blockchain!
This week, Jay and Tammy talk with Alex Rivera, a filmmaker, media artist, immigrant rights activist, and MacArthur genius, about crypto.
What is crypto currency? How does it work? And why is it often cast as a right-wing, libertarian, carbon-depleting project?
Can the left reclaim crypto for the people? How might decentralized financial networks power social movements? Post-national transactions? Worker cooperatives? Global decision-making?
For more, check out:
The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (Donate and get yourself some merch!)
Alex and Cristina Ibarra’s film, The Infiltrators
Alex’s film, Sleep Dealer(pictured above)
Jay and Aaron Lammer’s podcast, “CoinTalk”
Jay on his toad NFT
Alex on border technologies, via “Tech Won’t Save Us”
Crypto Communism by Mark Alizart, translated by Robin Mackay
Murtaza Hussain on crypto remittances
Crypto POC economies
Thanks for your support. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
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Hello from the 19th century!
Today’s episode features Andy in conversation with Prof. Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University. Her new book has just come out this fall, titled, The Chinese Question: the Gold Rushes and Global Politics. She takes a story we are somewhat familiar with but presents it in ambitious, new terms, tracing three major gold rushes from the 1850s to 1900s, across California, Australia, and South Africa, and along the way, the origins of Chinese communities in the Anglo-American world:
The gold rushes occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Unlike other encounters in Asian port cities and on Caribbean plantations, they met on the goldfields both in large numbers and on relatively equal terms, that is, as voluntary emigrants and independent prospectors. Race relations were not always conflictual, but the perception of competition gave rise to a racial politics expressed as the ‘Chinese Question.’
This is a history of labor and migration, but it is also a book about race and racial ideology. Ngai traces the origins of politics organized around Chinese, and eventually Asian, exclusion at the turn of the twentieth century in the world’s white settler colonies. It’s a story most popularly known by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in the US, but it also had many parallels worldwide — a “global anti-Chinese ideology” that “gave rise to a global race theory,” as Ngai puts it.
We discuss the fine details of her research and then try to tease out some bigger implications of the “Chinese Question” for today.
(0:00): Mae’s own trajectory in migration and Asian American history and how she came to undertake this project.
(15:30): We dig into the Chinese Question: how did Mae wind up writing about Australia and South Africa? what was the “coolie myth” that dogged Chinese migrants in the 19th century? how did “free soil” and “anti-slavery” politics dovetail with racist exclusion laws? if Chinese migrants were not “coolies,” then what was life really like on the gold mines?
(44:15): The theoretical stakes of the Chinese Question: how to think about ‘race’ historically and the political value of doing so; Mae’s intervention into the headlines about anti-Asian violence during Covid; thoughts on the “racial pessimism” trend in academia and popular media and the relationship between “anti-Black” and “anti-Asian” racism; the “Chinese Question” today, e.g., the China initiative at universities, ongoing US-China tensions, and the flexible class politics of its racial ideology.
Thanks for listening and supporting us via Patreon and Substack! Stay in touch by email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) or Twitter.
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Hello from both sides of the Pacific!
This week, a reunited, international podsquad talks K-quarantine, Enes Kanter’s Sinopportunism, and how the left should think about the “supply chain crisis.”
Tammy’s first few days in South Korean quarantine:
What’s going on with the Celtics center’s anti-China rants (and shoes)?
How can leftists think beyond shopping in our relationship to global supply chains? Tammy wrote about this recently for The New York Times, with a focus on port truckers. (Photos below by Sean Rayford.)
More on the transport workforce here—by longshore activist Peter Olney, friend of the pod Charmaine Chua, and logistics scholars Jake Alimohamed-Wilson and Ellen Reese.
While recording this episode, the Korean media reported the death of the murderous dictator Chun Doo-hwan. Here’s cartoonist Kim Wan’s take: “karma” on the left; “Gwangju massacre” on the right.
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Hello!
Guest episode this week with Andy talking to Brian Hioe and Wen Liu, writers and academics based in Taipei, with the online magazine New Bloom. We talk about the scary headlines warning of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, why the global left seems to dismiss Taiwan in favor of romanticizing the PRC, and what is the relationship between Asian and Asian American politics (if there is any)?
0:00 - Banter
7:00 - Recent headlines over the US’s commitment to defend China + Chinese fighter planes in Taiwanese air space + what is life like for regular Taiwanese people as a chip between two global superpowers + why New Bloom is skeptical about the probability of Chinese invasion.
22:00 - Why the western left reflexively dismisses Taiwanese concerns. We explore a few: PRC romanticism, anti-Republican Party liberalism, anti-US imperialism (esp. among Asian Americans), all kinds of weird racial assumptions, horseshoe anti-war politics, etc. And what Brian and Wen say in response to these.
58:30 - Some takeaways: what distinguishes a “leftist” position on Taiwan? what is the ideal relation between Taiwan and China? what can people in the rest of the world “do”? what is the role of Asian American and Asian diasporic politics for Asia, and vice versa?
Stuff mentioned/reference materials:
Brian’s recent piece on Taiwan for Spectre journal
John Oliver’s recent 20-minute history + summary of Taiwanese politics
The Intercept’s recent weird piece on Taiwan
Brian interviews Wen about activism and the 2014 Sunflower Movement
Last June, we first talked with Brian about the “tankie” phenomenon
Thanks for your support! Be sure to sign up via substack or Patreon. Find us on twitter (@ttsgpod) or email timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com!
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Hello from our election hangover!
This week, we talk about last week’s mid-mid-mid-midterm results.
Did the very rich Republican win Virginia’s gubernatorial race on account of critical race theory—or not?
Are the Democrats continuing to lose the Asian/Latinx/POC vote?
Should we take hope in local progressive wins? (Yay, Boston, Missoula, Dearborn, Hamtramck, Cleveland…)
Whatever happened to bread and butter economic concerns like housing and healthcare?
Plus: podsquad digressions and a Taiwan preview.
See you at the subscriber-only Ishiguro book club tomorrow!
Thanks for your support. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
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Hello from HISTORY!
This week, Tammy interviews Professor Kori A. Graves, a historian of adoption and the family at the University at Albany, SUNY.
Kori’s 2020 book, A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War, explores how Black Americans came to adopt Black Korean children.
Tammy and Kori talk about the history of transnational, transracial adoption — and the special place of Korea and the Korean diaspora in adoptee activism and the contemporary architecture of family.
For more on this subject, Kori recommends:
Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America by Catherine Ceniza Choy
Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging by Eleana J. Kim
Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States by Kimberly D. McKee
“Side x Side” (documentary film project) by Glenn Morey and Julie Morey
To Save the Children of Korea by Arissa H. Oh
Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire by Susie Woo
Tammy adds:
All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung
Interrogation Room (poetry) by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War by Thomas Park Clement
“Made in Korea: A One Way Ticket Seoul-Amsterdam?” (film) by In-Soo Radstake
Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption(graphic novel) by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
The Language of Blood: A Memoir by Jane Jeong Trenka
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoirby Jenny Heijun Wills
On November 16, Also-Known-As will host an event with deported adoptees. Register for free:
Tomorrow, November 3, catch Andy at NYU’s Skirball Center (via Zoom; register for free), in conversation with Prof. Charmaine Chua of UC-Santa Barbara. He’ll revisit some themes in his “‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market” essay from March 2020 in n+1 — twenty months later, twenty months into the pandemic!
We appreciate your support! Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Note: Apologies for resending + reposting; some technical errors earlier.
Hi from TMZ studio!
Like all of Asian American Twitter, we’ve been talking about The Loneliest Americans quite a bit. But this week, Andy and Tammy get a full-on, personal Jay AMA.
Thanks to all our new listeners and everyone who joined our Discord subscriber book club last week.
Event announcement:
Next week, on November 3rd, Andy will be giving a talk at NYU’s Skirball Center (via Zoom), in conversation with Prof. Charmaine Chua of UC-Santa Barbara, Global Studies. He’ll revisit some themes in his “‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market” essay from March 2020 in n+1 — twenty months later, twenty months into the pandemic!
We appreciate your support! Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the John Deere picket line!
This week is, um, eclectic and slightly technologically challenged. Thanks for bearing with us.
4:15 – Jay’s book is out! Thursday evening, Oct. 21, Jay will be doing a Discord AMA about The Loneliest Americans. It’s for subscribers only, so if you want to ask Jay any burning questions about the book, sign up now via Patreon or Substack!
7:13 – MSG—we all love it, even though it’s bad for us. Or is it? We discuss a recent piece (short and fun) about the history of the seasoning, the veracity of “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” and MSG’s rebranding as umami.
27:49 – TTSG labor reporter Tammy Kim updates us on “Striketober.” From John Deere to Hollywood to healthcare, we are seeing record unemployment (quitting! switching sectors!) and labor militancy. Tammy is here to break it all down for us.
56:40 – Joe Manchin is holding up the Biden infrastructure bill and gutting our hopes for a livable climate. WTF?!?!
Thanks for listening and supporting the pod. Please stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a spicy group chat!
This week, we begin by celebrating the release of Jay’s book, The Loneliest Americans, which was just excerpted in NYT Mag. Congrats, Kang!Order it now for yourself and family and friends!
Then, we talk the Kidneygate controversy (from the same issue of NYT Mag) aka Bad Art Friend, the long story based on a short story that launched a million Discord chats. Who’s really “kind”? Is the art any good?
Finally, a dip into the cancellation(?) of Bright Sheng, the composer and music professor at the University of Michigan who got in trouble for showing a film featuring blackface in class.
Reminder to catch Tammy in conversation with Noam Chomsky tomorrow, Wednesday, October 13:
Thanks for supporting the pod. Please stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
Kindly,
The TTSG Podsquad
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Hello from Capitalist Playground of Death!
This week, we talk 100% “Squid Game.”
Warning: Don’t listen until you’ve watched it all.
Does the show constitute anti-capitalist critique? Why does the ending suck? Did Park Chan-wook make the West permanently love K-horror? Will Asian art soon displace Asian American art? What’s with the weird ‘noble savage’ thing going on in the show?
Plus: the dialogue genius in “The Wire”’s writers’ room, fantasy basketball, Gary Shteyngart (i.e., three Asian Americans trashing neoliberalism), and solidarity with subtitle translators.
Thanks for supporting the pod. Please stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Stuart’s Coffee in Bellingham!
This week, we welcome a special guest to talk about the immigrant rights movement and immigration policy. Plus, Andy and Tammy channel Jay Energy and answer listener questions.
(0:00): Andy and Tammy discuss Japanese food and our favorite chaebols.
(6:50): Listener Questions! What’s up with the “PI” in “AAPI?” listener SansMouton asks. We discuss the awkward origins of AAPI and why Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians shouldn’t be lumped into Asian America (cf. this random feature on Asian feelings in the NYT this weekend). But is there anything redeeming about a “Pacific” frame? And what would be the Pacific version of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic?
Thanks to friend of the pod Amita Manghnani for talking through the local politics of “A/P/A” and recommending “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific Question,’” by Wesleyan anthropologist Kehaulani Kauanui.
(25:00): How should academics balance institutional responsibilities (and annoying prestige stuff) with teaching? listener Robi asks. Andy tries to punt the question to Tammy before laying out his own materialist approach.
(31:44): Silky Shah, friend of the pod and executive director of Detention Watch Network, explains all things immigration:
Her Truthout article on the dramatic increase in immigrant detention under Biden
How her corner of the immigrant rights movement become abolitionist
Why borders are b**t
The We Are Home coalition
Links between immigration and foreign policy
The Dems’ obsession with “deterrence”
Myths about immigration
Why “Abolish ICE” isn’t nearly enough
Recommended reads by Harsha Walia and Todd Miller.
For more on immigration policy, tune into this book event on Tuesday, Sept. 28, at noon EST, moderated by Tammy:
Thanks for listening and supporting the pod! Please keep in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Zuccotti Park!
Lots of leftist nostalgia and reminiscence about Occupy Wall Street this week — and the podsquad joins in! Then we talk Vietnamese American Republicans in Orange County and rising COVID numbers in Vietnam.
(0:00): Marshmallow test
(10:50): Does Occupy Wall Street have an anarchist or socialist legacy? Why, even though it was “annoying” at times, does it still matter? Lots of personal anecdotes and reflection, plus a tangent about the suburbs.
(1:02:20): Why did Vietnamese American Californians, who vote heavily Republican (even for Trump), vote against Gavin Newsom’s recall?
(1:16:00): Vietnam recently went from having almost no coronavirus cases to an out-of-control epidemic. What happened, and what does it say about China and vaccine supply chains?
Thanks for listening and supporting the pod! Please keep in touch through Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Pod squad assemble!
0:00 – Tammy catches us up on the latest in Asian Americana aka “Shang-Chi.” Jay and Andy remain skeptical of all things MCU.
12:30 – We talk about the new vaccine mandate and the current discourse around “the unvaccinated.” Are we too un/sympathetic to the material constraints of poor and working-class people who haven’t been vaccinated? Is vaccine skepticism a reflection of the US’s unique political polarization? And what to make of demographic trends by race, education, political party, and class?
43:50 – We mull Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s recent piece, “Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?” Should the left stake out a position on behavioral genetics, which the right has already done? Is all “genetics” talk doomed to slip into “race science”? Is race an inescapable way to think about the world?
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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(Audio fixed and updated Sept. 7 afternoon. Thanks for your patience!)
Hola from the Inland Empire!
This week, we bring you Tammy’s IRL interview with Andrea Vidaurre, a policy analyst with the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, in San Bernardino, California.
Andrea talks about the meaning of “environmental justice,” local manifestations of global warming, working-class immigrant life in the desert, labor violations at Amazon, organizing outside the nonprofit industrial complex, and green futures in logistics.
Some recs from Andrea:
Support PC4EJ’s work!
Read The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese.
Jam to Milpa, a musical collective in the Inland Empire, and oldies by The Chosen Few and Los Mirlos.
Read Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co., a novel by María Amparo Escandon.
The pod squad will reunite ASAP. Until then, thanks for listening and supporting us via Patreon and Substack! Stay in touch by email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) or Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the West Coast!
It’s just Jay and Tammy this week, on everything from backyard farming to Barbara Ehrenreich.
Jay advises Tammy on late-season tomato growing. 🍅
What to make of SCOTUS’s awful (but anticipated) decision to end the COVID eviction moratorium? Where will it hit worst?
Why are so many more people (nearly triple!) identifying as mixed-race in the US Census? Does it have anything to do with 23andMe?
Tammy asks Jay about the latest installment of his NYT newsletter: on what we might learn from the media misfires of 1968.
Who is teen TikToker Charli D’Amelio, and why does her whole family now have a Hulu reality show? Is it too late to get in on this hustle?
Andy will be back soon. Until then, thanks for listening and supporting us via Patreon and Substack! Stay in touch by email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) or Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a reunited pod squad!
This week, we gab about a welcome court ruling on California’s Proposition 22 gig-work law, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Sandra Oh’s new Netflix show.
(0:00): Tammy on why Prop 22 was ruled unconstitutional and what it means for workers’ rights across the US
(7:10): How to understand what’s happening in Afghanistan in the context of our long wars in the region
(44:45): What “The Chair” says about Asian American TV, austerity politics in higher ed, race and generational divides, and the (cancel) culture wars.
Thanks for listening and supporting us via Patreon and Substack! Stay in touch by email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) or Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from a Chinese ghost city!
It’s just Andy this week, speaking with my friend academic-activist Jake Werner (@jwdwerner) on how to make sense of the current ideological shift in US and global politics and especially the hostile rhetoric between US and Chinese elites.
(0:00) We talk about the recent spate of “big spending” bills pushed by Biden and the Democrats, supporting infrastructure (“hard” and “soft”) and industrial policy. Is this a break from “neoliberal” ideology? And also, what was “neoliberalism” about anyway?
(17:40) Some of the biggest proponents for new, big-government programs are also the loudest critics of China and Chinese competition. What’s going on with purported leftists who supported Bernie but are hawkish on China? And is that really so bad?
(45:40) We discuss a different way of thinking about China today on its own terms, reviewing its tumultuous 40-year encounter with a US-centered global system and what changed in 2008. How can we eschew approaches centered “national” and “cultural essence” and instead look at shared global dynamics between China, the US, and the rest of the world? (Jake outlined these ideas recently in this talk).
(1:13:20) Finally, Jake’s pitch for “progressive globalization,” something he is fighting for through his organization Justice is Global (along with friend of the show Tobita Chow!). Why is the US-China relationship so crucial for the next phase in world history, from climate change to Covid to equitable growth? What’s the response in DC? How can listeners become more active? (also: tankies catching strays)
Some pieces by Jake:
“Only the Left can Save Globalization Now,” with Eric Levitz, New York Magazine (2021)
“U.S.-China: Progressive Internationalist Strategy Under Biden” Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung with Tobita Chow (2021)
“Why Confrontation With China Threatens the Progressive Agenda,” The Nation(2019)
“China is cheating at a rigged game,” Foreign Affairs (2018)
And recommended reading from Jake: “The US-China Rivalry Is About Capitalist Competition” by Ho-Fung Hung, Jacobin (2020)
note: I tried to edit out the sounds of sickness throughout, but some had to be left in, sorry! It’s not Covid, I swear!
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Hello from back in July, when Tammy recorded this special live episode in Portland, Oregon! The occasion was the new album, “1975,” by No-No Boy.
No-No Boy is Julian Saporiti, a folk and rock musician from Nashville whose PhD dissertation has taken the form of an extended song cycle about Asian America. Julian and his partner, Emilia Halvorsen, an aspiring lawyer who co-produced and sings on “1975,” talked with Tammy about the folk tradition, US empire, travels in the Mountain West, ethnomusicology, the struggle for immigrants’ rights, Asian-American and mixed-race identities, John Okada, and Jens Lekman. They also performed two brand-new tunes.
The songs you’ll hear in this episode:
“Imperial Twist,” No-No Boy, 1975(Smithsonian Folkways, 2021)
“St. Denis or Bangkok, From a Hotel Balcony,” 1975
“Yuiyo Bon Odori,” Nobuko Miyamoto, 120,000 Stories (Smithsonian Folkways, 2021)
“The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming,” 1975
“No No Boy,” The Spiders (Philips, 1966)
“Disposable Youth,” No-No Boy, 1942(2018)
“Pilgrims,” 1975
“St. Michael,” Little Monk Panda Scout aka Julian and Emilia
“Panda Scout,” Little Monk Panda Scout
Thanks for listening and supporting the pod through Patreon and Substack! Get in touch by email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) or Twitter, and props to all the Angelenos who came to our recent Discord-goes-IRL picnic!
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Hello from Tammy’s DIY SUV camper!
This week, we bring you talk of Korean archery, feminism, and misogyny. Plus, the terrifying end of the US eviction moratorium and what politicians and activists are doing about it.
An San, South Korea’s triple gold medalist in archery, has been attacked by men’s rights activists for… having short hair. Why are so many young men so misogynistic? So mixed up in right-wing politics? What is the character of new Korean feminism and its homegrown #MeToo movement?
US politics, a case study: Cori Bush and The Squad (who actually seem to care about tenants’ rights) vs. Nancy Pelosi (who just found out that the eviction moratorium was about to end).
Thanks for supporting the pod through Patreon and Substack! Please be in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Philly, Berkeley, and Pasadena!
This week, we talk about the Tokyo Olympics, food appropriation in Oregon, and Raoul Peck’s film The Young Karl Marx (2017).
What are people protesting in Tokyo? In this pandemic moment, who are the Olympics for? Plus: props to young women weightlifters and skateboarders.
Why are Asian Americans so mad about congee? (And why are white restaurateurs in Oregon so prone to getting in race trouble?)
What did “The Communist Manifesto” mean in the time and place it was written? Does its analysis apply today? Why did Peck make this movie? (good film review here). Bonus: brief comparison to another origin-story biopic Amadeus (1984).
(For more on the women’s work around these famous men, Tammy recommends biographies of Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, and the French film Mozart’s Sister.)
(And Andy laoshi suggests reading the original Marx from the film: Engels’s Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), Marx and Engels’s The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (1846) on the “young Hegelians”; The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Proudhon; and ofc what we simply call “The Manifesto” (1848)).
We were stoked to meet so many of you at our recent IRL in Berkeley. If you want to take part in such events and our raging Discord, join our membership club at Substack or Patreon. And please get in touch via Twitter or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com).
Thank you!
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Hello!
This week: two pressing topics from the news and listener questions.
First, we talk about the political crises in Haiti and Cuba and questions of U.S. empire and intervention. Though military invasions have become less savory, on Monday, U.S. officials still informally dictated Haiti’s choice for interim president. We place the news in geographic and historical context and draw connections to East Asia. Also: the hallowed place of the Haitian and Cuban revolutions for leftists (and academics), the logic of anti-imperialist and “decolonial” politics (think Latin American tankie-ism), and how best to understand the Caribbean today.
Second, we discuss the spiraling numbers of Covid infections and hospitalizations among unvaccinated people in the U.S., especially in Black and Latino communities. How do these numbers square with mainstream media coverage of the unvaccinated? Is race the best framing? How bad will things get in the next few months?
Not to mention how horribly things are going in the Global South, thanks to vaccine apartheid.
Finally, some listener questions:
Brinda asks for reading recommendations. (Andy’s is a follow-up on the CRT episode: a feature on Chris Rufo in The New Yorker).
Daffodilly asks about “the academy” and “academia.”
And So Long, Lillian asks about intra-Asian (inter-Asian?) matrimony. (There are some studies!)
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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Hello!
A guest episode today: Andy talks with U Chicago historian Gabriel Winant (@gabrielwinant) about his new book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. We discuss capitalism and neoliberalism, what’s going on with the U.S. socialist movement, and class fissures within the professional ranks.
Check out Gabe’s other writing in many places, including Dissent, n+1, The Nation, and Jacobin!
0:00 – Pittsburgh, discussions of class, Gabe’s journey, Marxism, and the rumored “history of capitalism” trend in the academy.
20:00 – We dig into The Next Shift: steel in non-nostalgic terms, the difference between steel and healthcare (or manufacturing versus service), how nursing homes became so marginalized, and the strategic sectors for struggle today (healthcare? education?).
1:04:50 – Gabe’s 2019 essay on the “professional-managerial class”: revisiting Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s invention of the term in 1977, how it applies today, and why the only people who talk about the PMC are themselves the PMCest of PMCs?
Watch out for bonus content later this week! The podsquad will be back again soon.
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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Hello, and welcome to Asian American Sports Talk radio—from the site of the 2032 Olympics!
Three topics today:
First, the Chinese Communist Party held a massive centennial celebration last week (here’s Andy talking about it), and China-watchers pounced on one phrase from Xi Jinping’s speech: that haters would suffer “broken heads and spilled blood” (頭破血流). Hey, imperialist pigs, nothing to see here!
(8:20) Second, we discuss the racist origins, wasteful history, and cruel policies of the Olympic Games, ahead of the Tokyo games this month (and LA 2024, baby!). Also: some nostalgia for the 1988 Seoul Games, less so for Beijing 2008, and some proposals for how to continue watching some people run really fast in the future—but sustainably!
(53:10) Finally, we weigh in on revelations that ESPN journalist Rachel Nichols criticized the promotion of colleague Maria Taylor on “diversity” grounds, as detailed by Kevin Draper in the Times. We talk about the meaning of “hard work,” private conversations, media no-nos, and how to talk about diversity (or not) in 2021.
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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Hello!
Today’s episode is about housing, the fight to end single-family zoning, YIMBYs, NIMBYs and PHIMBYs. Our guest today was Darrell Owens, a housing activist and policy analyst. We went through a lot — Berkeley’s recent unanimous initiative to end single-family zoning, asked the inevitable questions about whether this would actually help make Berkeley more affordable, talked a bit about the PHIMBY movement (Public Housing in My Backyard), the pragmatic limitations of all housing work, and much more. Give it a listen!
- Jay
Related Reading:
Darrell’s Twitter: @idothethinking
How Berkeley Beat Back NIMBYs in NYTimes Opinion
Who are the PHIMBYs? in LA Mag
An interview with Ananya Roy
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Hello from Tammy’s 104-degree podcast studio!
This week, we talk about the nightmare of piled-up container ships on the West coast, why Covid has triggered these crises along the global supply chain, a bit of logistics history, and the dire ecological future that awaits us.
Also, for the first time in a while, some listener questions:
Are there racial aspects to Yang’s mayoral downfall? Or do Yang’s two campaigns tell us something about the difference between appealing to Asians versus a wider public?
More on the “Asian pessimism” discussion from last week?
Any social-justice wins to be happy about?
Thanks to Stephanie, Sam, and Cliff for their questions! And thanks to all of you for listening and subscribing. Stay cool!
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Hello from I-5!
Today: another round in our long-simmering, passive-aggressive professional feud (journalists vs. historians), occasioned by two new pieces on how we talk about and apply the lessons of U.S. history.
First, UCLA historian Robin D.G. Kelley in conversation with George Yancy in Truthout. They talk about the recent surge of interest in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and what’s lost in our narrow focus on “Black Wall Street.” What does the Hollywoodification of race politics mean for working-class stories?
Second, Princeton historian Matt Karp’s “History as End” in Harper’s. Karp argues that U.S. history, typically the domain of the patriotic right, has been taken up increasingly by left-liberal journalists and historians, and in a noticeably pessimistic register.
Is public history too obsessed with “origins” and analogies? What are its dominant politics? Do stories of upward mobility play out differently for different groups? Do history and journalism inhibit forward thinking? Or should journalists and historians spend even more time talking about history?!
Finally, we weigh in on a new decision by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous ruling, the justices found in favor of college athletes in their case against the NCAA, paving the way for better compensation of student workers. Jay fantasizes about bribing players to join the Tarheels, Tammy comments on labor and antitrust politics, and Andy draws a—surprise!—historical analogy.
This Saturday, join Jay, Andy, and Tammy (and other friends of the pod) for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Page Turner conference! Register here, and use discount code: FRIENDOFAAWW!
Thanks for listening and reading! Help keep our mikes hot (and join our Discord!) at Patreon or Substack, and send questions and comments to Timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGPod.
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Note: The following is an unlocked episode originally released on May 7 for our Patreon and Substack subscribers. Enjoy!
Hi everyone,
Today, a more scholarly episode: Andy speaks with Prof. Iyko Day of Mount Holyoke College’s English program, discussing her book Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke, 2016).
In the book, she analyzes different moments in the history of Asian migration to North America and their attendant racialization. In particular, we discuss the association of Asian immigrants with "excessive economic efficiency." That is, the basis of anti-Asian racial sentiment has been the idea that Asians represent a hyper-efficient economic threat. Anti-Asian racism, then, is a sort of misplaced, reactionary revolt against capitalism itself.
Examples span from the 19C. "yellow peril" of Chinese miners and railroad workers, culminating in Chinese Exclusion; fears of Japanese property ownership, buttressing WWII internment; and even now, the "model minority" stereotype of post-1965 Asian immigrants ("high-tech coolies" in white-collar jobs, engineering, tech), who are both revered for their efficiency but also scapegoated for the abstract and destructive ills of globalization.
I see Day's work as contributing to literature on the history of racial ideas specific to the history of capitalism. Most famously, we have books and essays on how slavery and segregation turned the social categories of "White" and "Black" into biological ones by the nineteenth century. But of course, her intervention is to theorize the specificity of Asian racialization.
Thus, Anti-Asian racism is not simply analogous to anti-Black racism, for instance, which centers on ideas of biology and inferiority, but rather represents something abstract and threatening, personifying and embodying the destructiveness of capitalist value. In this sense, it is closer to modern anti-Semitism.
Ultimately, Day returns to the bigger question of how Asian racialization fits alongside other racial forms in North America, such as indigenous, Black, Latinx, etc.
Other topics include: the politics of being a PMC Asian, fears of "alien capital" around the world, locating the role of literature and art, the relationship between borders and prisons, and joining reading groups for Marx’s Capital.
Also, a quick note: this episode’s format is a bit different. Alien Capital was actually chosen for the inaugural session of the TTSG Discord’s new monthly (?) book club back in April/May. We discussed the book one week before this episode, and later, Andy spoke with Prof. Day online, with listeners in attendance.
The first half is our interview; the second half (49:30) features questions from the Discord community themselves (one calling in from a van full of listeners) either spoken directly or read out loud by Andy.
Finally, a few works referenced in the conversation:
Colleen Lye, America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature
Moishe Postone, "Anti-semitism and National Socialism"
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination
John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear
Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the USA"
Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from Tammy’s fantasy vacation house! It’s just the three of us today, with two important topics.
First, the renewed media and political interest in the Wuhan “lab leak theory,” which had previously been treated as a conspiracy. This essay, published last month by science journalist Nicholas Wade, made a stink by arguing that a lab leak was a reasonable possibility. China’s renowned virologist Shi Zhengli (aka, “bat woman”) responded just this week, in an interview with the NYT, and Biden has promised to lead an international effort to reinvestigate Covid’s origins in China.
We review the “wild” vs. “lab leak” theories, fears of anti-Asian backlash in the US, anti-China geopolitics, the need for greater transparency among all nations for the sake of global public health and science (read this, by friend of the pod Yangyang Cheng), and the political backlash that may await experts and scientists who dismissed the lab theory (read Thomas Frank and Matt Yglesias on technocratic libs and social-media bubble-ology).
Second, we revisit the classic documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987, dirs. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña). We talk about the murder case, the film, and how these real-world and on-screen histories resonate today. We also discuss the recent controversy around, and cancellation of, a star-studded Vincent Chin podcast and new representations of Asian stories (including rumors of green-lit film and TV projects). Why do Hollywood Asian Americans keep forgetting (or willfully neglecting) to do their homework?
Reminder: If you’re into storytelling across media, join Jay, Andy, and Tammy (and other friends of the pod) on Saturday, June 26, for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Page Turner conference! Register here, and use discount code: FRIENDOFAAWW!
Thanks for listening and reading! Please help keep our mikes hot (and join our absurdly lively Discord!) at Patreon or Substack, and send questions and comments to Timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGPod.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hi all:
Today’s episode is a conversation with Andy’s friend and classmate Chelsea Szendi Schieder, historian of Japan at Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo).
Chelsea was involved in compiling the empirical case against Comfort Women denialism, which we covered in an episode back in February. She’s now also written a reflection piece on the experience for The Nation.
We talk more about Comfort Women denialism, the Japanese online right (netto uyoku ネット右翼), and the history and present state of Japanese studies and east Asia geopolitics. How did the U.S. encumber a reckoning with the Japanese empire? How are Comfort Women and the war in China (1937-1945) taught in Japan today? How do these issues reflect shifting power struggles between Japan, Korea, China, and the rest of Asia?
We then talk about Chelsea’s recently released book Coed Revolution, focusing on the role of women students in Japan’s “new left” but also asking questions about the legacy of the “new left” and its place in the pivotal 1970s/80s transformation of politics and society, in Japan and around the world.
Also: Japan’s COVID and vaccine situation and “why the f-ck” are we still holding the Tokyo Olympics this year?
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
It’s just us three this week, talking recent news (and some hot goss).
First, we discuss the suppressed vigil for the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre (6.4.1989) in Hong Kong. When thousands of police officers cordoned off the usual gathering place, Victoria Park, Hong Kong residents came up with creative ways to demonstrate, using cell phone flashlights and much else. (Remember: “Be water.”) We talk about contemporary meanings of Tiananmen in Asia and the rest of the world, the chilling effect of HK’s National Security Law, and the 1989 protesters’ demands not only for democracy but also a better life for Beijing’s working class (h/t Zhang Yueran). Bonus content: “A Day to Remember,” a short film on the suppression of public discussion about Tiananmen in China.
Second, we unpack the right-wing bogeyman of critical race theory, legislative attacks on free speech in schools, and awful stories out of Kansas, Montana, and Pennsylvania. What’s the right’s bigger strategy here? Has the U.S. left failed by ceding “free speech” to conservatives? How dangerous are these currents, and what is to be done? Plus: white tears in Tammy’s middle-school social studies class.
+++
Tammy and Jay’s former comrades at The New Yorker are getting close to a strike. Please learn more, reach out to management, and sign up for news alerts!
+++
Friend of the pod, Jay, with Justice is Global, invites you to a free screening and discussion of “Call Her Ganda,” a documentary about Jennifer Laude, a Filipina trans woman who was murdered by a U.S. Marine—and the crew of activists who fight back.
The Zoom discussion will take place on June 10, with filmmaker PJ Raval, Filipino trans rights advocate Naomi Fontanos, and representatives of Malaya Movement and GABRIELA. (The film will be made available 24 hours beforehand.)
+++
If you’re into storytelling across media, join Jay, Andy, and Tammy (and other friends of the pod) on June 26 for the Page Turner conference at the incredible Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Register here, and use discount code: FRIENDOFAAWW!
Thanks for listening and reading! Please support us (and join our absurdly lively Discord!) at Patreon or Substack, and send questions and comments to Timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGPod.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Special guest this week. Ocean Vuong, a poet, novelist, essayist, and the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Ocean has won the Whiting Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and was recently a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient.
Jay and Ocean talked about Mixed Martial Arts, Ocean’s novel, and whether one can be a writer and a Buddhist at the same time. The conversation went to completely unexpected places — lots of discussion about Wang Wei, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, and Anderson Silva.
Ocean’s novel is out in paperback this week, so pick it up!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Andy talks with Vinson Cunningham (New Yorker) and Jane Hu (UC-Berkeley English and Film) about the HBO show Mare of Easttown -- a.k.a. “Murder Durdur” -- which concludes its run this Sunday. We’re hooked, and we can’t figure out why!
*Warning: this episode includes spoilers!*
Why are we all obsessed with this show about “specific whites” in the downwardly-mobile Pennsylvania suburbs?
Why the appeal of regional accents?
(Philly accent Youtube recs: Tina Fey, James McAvoy, Kate Winslett)
Does the show have clear politics? Does it redeem the police?
How successfully does it blend multiple genres (cop show, family sitcom, YA romance) into one?
Does the show say something interesting about race and gender?
Comparisons to The Wire, Twin Peaks, Law & Order, The Undoing &c.
Finally, we reveal who actually killed Erin McMenamin??
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
Email: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
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Hey, sports fans!
A break from the news cycle with our friend, Vinson Cunningham, a theatre critic at The New Yorker, playwright, novelist, and all-around lovely guy.
We talk about the NYC mayoral race (race/authenticity politics), basketball (the architecture of MSG; the LeBron effect; Jokic, Luka, and European style), and how the theatre world has survived the pandemic (read Vinson on virtual theatre and his recent review of a piece in Tammy’s neighborhood).
Speaking of incredible performances:
Thanks for listening and supporting the pod! Please stay in touch, and see you in the Discord!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
We’re back in a new arrangement (Andy and Tammy this time) for our second of two episodes on what’s happening in Palestine. Our special guest is Esmat Elhalaby, a post-doc at UC Davis who will soon join the faculty of the University of Toronto.
Esmat tells us about his family ties to Palestine, especially Gaza, the scope of recent bombings by Israel, and what is excluded and silenced by the US media’s framing. He also places US actions—and Americans’ evolving views—in the context of broader global support for the Palestinian people and explains why we should revisit and revive histories of internationalism.
Finally, we discuss the poet Rashid Hussein, the late Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism, the metaphor of Palestine for “the east,” and the historical possibilities and limits for pan-Asian + Asian-American + anti-colonial solidarity — all covered in + inspired by Esmat’s recent essay about the new biography of Edward Said.
Some recommendations from Esmat for more reading:
“This time it’s different” by Ahmed Abu Artema Electronic Intifada
“Protests by Palestinian citizens in Israel signal growing sense of a common struggle,” Maha Nassar The Conversation
Teach-in “Palestine in Resistance: Voices of Anticolonial Mobilization”: https://www.facebook.com/ArabStudiesUH/videos/753092018711925
An account from Haifa, by Muhannad Abu Ghosh: https://ctjournal.org/2021/05/20/haifa-war/
Coverage of Gaza from the Middle East Research and Information Project: https://merip.org/2021/05/revisiting-merip-coverage-of-gaza-jerusalem-and-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/
@JehadAbusalim on Twitter
Thanks for listening. You can support us (and join our thriving Discord!) at Patreon or Substack, and send questions and comments to Timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGPod.
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Hello!
This week we talked with Joshua Leifer, an editor at Jewish Currents, about the ongoing military violence against Palestinian communities in Gaza this past month (for those keeping track, Josh helped organize that Jewish Current-TTSG webinar from two weeks ago!)
(Tammy unfortunately had to sit out today’s episode with a last-second conflict 😔 )
We talk to Josh about his recently co-authored explainer on the clashes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, resistance from Palestinian groups and the Israeli Left, and the role of Biden and US (and international) solidarity.
We also discuss his colleague Peter Beinart’s essay “Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return.”
Also: does 2021 represent a turning point in debates over Israel/Palestine in the US? Comparisons and connections to BLM and other protests against settler colonialism worldwide? And Josh’s personal experiences navigating Jewish-American debates, Zionism and anti-Zionism, and diasporic internationalist organizing.
Other links from the conversation + recommendations for further reading:
+972 Magazine: https://www.972mag.com/
Nathan Thrall NYTon the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Democrats
The late Palestinian writer Edward Said’s prescient (1999) essay on “The One-State Solution”
Human Rights Watch’s Apartheid Report on Palestine (2021)
Peter Beinart on Biden's Israel record
Tareq Baconi's writing at the New York Review of Books
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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credit: @penpencildraw
Hello!
Andy here with a Friday episode in discussion with historian Meghna Chaudhuri (NYU, Boston College) on the COVID disaster currently unfolding in India: the officially reported death count is 240,000 but may actually be more than one million.
Meghna and I talk about what everyday life has been like for her, quarantining with family in Kolkata during this second wave, which broke out last month -- from the free-for-all search for treatments and hospital supplies to navigating misinformation around vaccines and medicines.
We also assess the past year of governance by the ruling party BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi; why this wave is not just a natural but also political disaster; the BJP’s longstanding “anti-science” stance and the appeal of the BJP’s perverted anti-imperialism in an economically stagnant India; misinformation in both corporate and social media (“Whatsapp Uncles”); and why we should probably not expect an international panacea to save India in the short-term (e.g., the TRIPS waiver) and instead focus on some very basic questions about competent local governance.
Some further reading:
“India’s COVID-19 Emergency” in The Lancet
“A Report Card on the End Times Brought Upon Us by Hindutva” by Meena Kandasamy in The Wire (India)
“Parking Lot Crematoria Burn Through the Night as Covid-19 Overwhelms Delhi” by Fahad Shah in The Nation
And for those looking to contribute from abroad, Meghna suggested some avenues for (more) direct assistance could be found at Mutual Aid India
*Had a few audio issues with this one — sorry! I tried my best to edit out the weird feedback noises but not all could be fixed.**
Please share, contact us, and subscribe!
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Hello!
A long but focused discussion this week—on two new essays that attempt to write recent history.
First, Tobi Haslett’s “Magic Actions” (n+1), recovering the explosive potential of last year’s George Floyd uprising, institutional attempts to domesticate it, and ongoing struggles for abolition and Black liberation.
Second, Brendan O’Connor’s “When the Party’s Over” (The Baffler), a look at social-democratic politics after the thrill and demise of the Bernie campaign, the drudgery of party work, politician fandom, and finding a (new) base for socialism in 2021.
ICYMI: Our conversation with the good folks at Jewish Currents, archived on YouTube:
Thanks to everyone who came to our picnic in Brooklyn on May 2! And thanks also to our listeners who gathered for a hike, book chat, and carbs in Los Angeles this past weekend!
Support our pod (and join the Discord!) at Patreon or Substack, and be in touch with questions and comments via Timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGPod.
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Hello!
This is Jay. This week, we have my conversation with sociologist, writer, and data artist Tamara K. Nopper. She’s been an invaluable resource for me for years now — if I ever actually sound like I know what I’m talking about, it’s likely because of something Tamara sent me to read over the years. Today, we talk about this moment that I’ve been fascinated with for years — what happened after ‘92, not just in terms of what happened on the ground in Black and Korean communities, but also within the academy, where a seemingly new type of scholarship emerged to make sense of it all.
We talk about that, Korean banks, “the secret history” of Third Worldism, and a whole lot more. There’s a lot we agree about but also a lot we disagree about on these topics.
Tamara recently did a great talk with our friends at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Watch it!
Tamara also edited ‘We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice,’ a book of Mariame Kaba’s writings and interviews (Haymarket Books), and researched and wrote several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series.
——
Thanks to everyone who made it out to the inaugural TTSG picnic this past weekend! We had a huge turnout. And thanks again to everyone who joined in our first book club, where we discussed Alien Capital. The building of the community both on the discord and on social media has been really overwhelming. If you’d like to join, please either subscribe to the newsletter on Substack or on patreon at patreon.com/ttsgpod.
thanks!
Jay
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Hello from the AAPI Oscars!
This week, we begin with a guessing game from George Mason University’s “Speech Accent Archive” (thanks, listener Jai Kang!). Join us and guess along as we make horribly essentialist assumptions about Asian accents (h/t danyo and sansmouton!).
In our main segment, we dig into the murderous policy of global vaccine apartheid. We first discussed this topic back in November, and things have only gotten worse, with India being the most visible site of a world-historical crisis.
To guide our conversation, we rely primarily on a recent piece by Alexander Zaitchik at The New Republic that explains how Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation, Big Pharma, and global intellectual-property rules have brought us to this point. How should we understand this moment in the context of the last 30 years? Can ordinary people defeat supra-state oligarchs?
Links:
Contrary to what Gates has said, there are, in fact, many capable vaccine factories around the world waiting to be mobilized (thanks, listener Stephen Buranyi).
The WTO is debating a temporary waiver to the IP regime known as TRIPS. Will the Biden administration listen to the will of the people?
SAVE THE DATE!
On Monday, May 3, at 7pm ET, we’ll be doing a free event with our friends at Jewish Currentsmagazine (we subscribe!).
Please register here and join us in exploring the possibility of diasporic internationalism against the backdrop of US imperial decline!
And, as always, support our pod (and join the Discord!) at Patreon or Substack. You can send questions and comments to Timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGPod.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
We spoke with special guest Michelle Zauner aka Japanese Breakfast about her memoir, Crying in H Mart; her forthcoming album, Jubilee; her life as an artist; and how to cook with Maangchi.
Enjoy!
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Hello,
A special episode this week with filmmaker Ursula Liang about her new film Down a Dark Stairwell. It’s out now on PBS and we hope everyone who listens to the show watches this nuanced, thoughtful and brave film. I (Jay) first saw Ursula’s work in 9-Man, a film about sports in Chinatown. Since then, I’ve followed her career carefully because what she does — deep community reporting, thoughtful portrayals of the concerns of all types of people, and the care with which she makes her films — exemplifies everything good about journalism and documentary filmmaking.
This is a film about many things, but at it’s core, it’s about how two communities deal with a police killing. And through verite footage and intimate interviews, it shows how people both come together and split apart while trying to navigate problems that fall well outside the easy consensus. On the show, we talk a lot about the need to go beyond rigid identity categories and simple, doctrinaire explanations. If you want to watch what that looks like, watch this film.
The film is available in both Chinese and English — both versions available to stream here.
—
As always, thanks for supporting the show. If you’re new to us, you can sign up at goodbye.substack.com, where there’s an option to subscribe for bonus episodes and access into our chat community. Or you can do the same at patreon.com/ttsgpod.
Thanks!
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Greetings from Substack hell!
It’s just the three of us this week, talking about the union defeat in Bessemer, Alabama, labor history, and the future of organizing in an Amazon economy.
We discuss labor expert Jane McAlevey’s tactical post-mortem on the RWDSU campaign (rebuttals here and here), Tammy’s critique of McAlevey from last year, and Andy and Jay’s critiques of Tammy!
Plus, the divergent strategies of Amazonians United and Athena; media influence (or interference?); and how the PRO Act, some decent regulation, and a huge investment in organizing could transform the labor movement.
And finally, the economics of unionization in US history, the racial and geographic specificity of Bessemer, and the paradox of our current moment: a broad sympathy for labor paired with an almost unprecedented concentration of power by tech monopolies like Amazon.
Recommended: Lauren Kaori Gurley on Vice News Reports podcast, with an in-depth look at the union drive and the history of Bessemer.
Comments and questions!
Email timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
Twitter @ttsgpod
Join our Patreon (and discord) community!
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Hello!
Today’s subscriber episode is a wide-ranging conversation Asad Haider, one of the founding editors of Viewpoint Magazine and the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. Jay talked to Asad about his concept of “depoliticization,” his book on identity politics, and political exhaustion.
- note from Jay: When we started the podcast, Asad was at the top of the list of guests I wanted to invite onto the show. I was really excited to talk to him at length. Mistaken Identity* was a very eye-opening book for me to read and everyone should read it, although with these recent pieces.
On Depoliticization, in Viewpoint.
Emancipation and Exhaustion, in Saaganthology
Dismissal, in The Point.
And a little housekeeping: we tried something different with the audio levels for this one, so please let us know if it sounds better.
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Hello from Jay’s backyard Easter egg hunt!
It’s just Andy and Tammy this week, with special guest Naomi Murakawa, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
Naomi talks with us about her J-A roots in Oakland, how her dad’s career in the criminal-legal system got her thinking about carceral politics, why police reform has long been a trap, and the history of hate crimes legislation in the US. She shares her observations on Black Lives Matter, the emergence of abolitionist thinking, and the discourse around “anti-Asian violence.”
What can crime statistics tell us about the world? How do we stop ourselves from thinking like cops? Which groups are pushing Asian America in a more punitive direction? And how should “Asian American history 101” inform our analyses of recent violence?
“The we-ness is something we make through struggle.”
Naomi shouts out:
– Mariame Kaba’s new book, We Do This ’Til We Free Us (foreword by Naomi; and check out the rest of the abolitionist series Naomi curates for Haymarket)
– Victoria Law’s new book, “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration
– Christina B. Hanhardt’s Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence
– Chandan Reddy’s Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State
– Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order
– The work of Dylan Rodriguez and Ruth Wilson Gilmore
– The abolitionist organizing of Incite!, AAAJ-Atlanta, and Red Canary Song and allies
Thanks for listening, supporting, and spreading the word. Stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and/or Patreon—and see you in our Discord!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
This week, your intrepid hosts had the pleasure to speak with journalist Daniel Denvir and his podcast “The Dig,” with Jacobin Radio.
Daniel engaged us on a number of topics we’ve touched upon recently, including: the Atlanta shootings and the question of anti-Asian violence; the connection between anti-China foreign policy and domestic anti-Asian racism; the potential for an Asian backlash against liberalism and the Democratic party; affirmative-action fights and the enduring mythology of “model minorities”; and the coherence and usefulness of “Asian” identity.
If you’re curious, please check out The Dig’s other podcast episodes, found here:
https://www.thedigradio.com/
As always, please reach out to us with comments and questions:
timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
@ttsgpod on twitter
and you can support us through:
https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod
https://goodbye.substack.com/p/support-the-show-through-substack
Addenda: some sources referenced by Andy.
1) Alien Capital by Iyko Day, named on the show.
2) On the link between Japanese and US “comfort stations” in Asia, see Sara Kang’s work in this article last week (Harper’s Bazaar).
3) On the role of Asian American ‘model minority’ fantasies in the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report on “the Negro family,” see Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success.
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Hello at the end of a sleepless week.
In this episode, we analyze the many responses to the murders in Atlanta — in a spirit, of course, of solidarity.
Should the murders be viewed as a white-supremacist hate crime? An occasion for more policing? Or less?
Are we guilty of assimilating the Atlanta shootings to general headlines about anti-Asian racism? Do we risk losing the specificity of class, gender, and the massage industry in particular?
Were the killings rooted in misogyny and fetishization? In histories of empire?
Are there too many historians on twitter? (yes)
And are geopolitical and economic tensions between U.S. and China in the mix? Is this a moment for solidarity between Chinese, Korea, and other Asian diasporas, or a moment of splinter?
Plus: Tammy reflects on a rally in Brooklyn (thanks to the Patreon Discord chatroom).
Thanks for listening, supporting, and spreading the word. Stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and/or Patreon.
Quick plug: This Friday morning NY time, join Tammy and a stellar group of labor leaders for a mini conference on the present and future of workers’ rights. Register for free here.
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In light of the harrowing news out of Atlanta this week, we spoke with Yves Tong Nguyen, an organizer with Red Canary Song 红莺歌 (@RedCanarySong), a grassroots collective of Asian sex workers & allies who push for for migrant justice, labor rights, and full decriminalization.
Extended show notes after the break. First, here are some groups to learn about and support:
Red Canary Song, New York City
Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Network, Toronto
SWAN, Vancouver
Massage Parlor Outreach Project, API Chaya, Seattle
Make the Road, greater New York
Sex Workers Project, Urban Justice Center, New York City
0:00 – Yves tells us about herself and Red Canary Song, and why they push for decriminalization rather than legalization. Plus: the material conditions, transnational history, and political rights of massage workers, sex workers, and other low-wage workers; and Red Canary Song’s connection to Song Yang, a Chinese migrant sex worker killed during a police raid in Flushing in 2017.
18:15 – Yves’s criticism of anti-trafficking NGOs, most of which partner with the police; why arguing over the labels “sex worker,” “massage worker,” etc. distracts from a broader assessment of criminalization policies; the respectability politics of separating and ranking workers; and why massage workers have common cause with other low-wage migrant Asian workers in food, nail salons, and service and manufacturing.
“Whether or not they are sex workers, they were harmed by the criminalization of sex work”
29:30 – Long before Atlanta, workers in the massage industry experienced violence from neighbors, ICE, police, savior-complex NGOs, and clients. Yves responds to the argument that we need police to “protect” Asian communities.
“The system itself protects itself. It is white supremacy itself, and it is made to protect white supremacists.”
38:30 – What does “justice” look like in Atlanta? Is calling murder a “hate crime” or “terrorism” helpful? Plus: how migrant workers and sex workers have reacted to the news this week.
“I know that people really want to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, if we put them in prison, it’ll be justice. But then are we also owning that every member of our community put into prison is also justice?’”
43:30 – Yves’s surprise at the media attention this week—and frustration about the status quo of ignoring this industry. And how we should all do better.
50:50 – Does this week connect anti-Asian stigmatization during the pandemic? Plus: why blaming Trump and racist rhetoric is mostly unhelpful.
“People want to say that that is the problem, that that is the root. But really it is a symptom. Trump’s rhetoric and people saying this and doing this is a symptom of things that have existed for such a long time. But people want to say that Trump is the problem, because then they can be like, if we can get rid of Trump then it’s good.
“Which is partially what I fear. I think that people might stop caring and think that we’ve solved it until the next awful thing happens.
“When you asked me about what I would tell people to take away from it, I want us to stop building and organizing in reaction to when people die. I want us to organize to keep people alive.”
Thanks for supporting Time to Say Goodbye. Please stay in touch:
timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/ttsgpod
https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod
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Happy belated Pi Day (3.14)!*
Also Stephen Curry’s birthday and the anniversary of Marx’s death! (Guess who’s drafting today’s notes?)*
0:00 – Seth Berkman’s NYT article on Subway product placements in K-dramas (don’t forget: Subway is evil!), Fatima Bhutto’s book on non-Western entertainment gone global, and whether Taylor Swift listens to BTS.
16:00 – The $1.9 trillion “American Recovery Plan,” or ARP, was signed last week. Is it a new era of Keynesian governance (Zach Carter in NYT) and/or a reversal of a half-century of austerity (Eric Levitz in NY Mag)? We talk: $1,400 checks, childcare credits, and, boo, the failure of the $15 federal minimum wage, and what all this could mean in the long run. (Also, is the new paradigm shift partly a nationalist response to the threat of China?)
44:00 – Covid reflections. What were we doing one year ago when Rudy Gobert’s positive Covid test shut down the NBA (and Tammy’s neighborhood library closed)? Plus: Covid Asian nationalism, loopholes in the vaccine rollout, and retrospectives on last summer’s protests.
Thanks for listening! Please write in with questions and comments, and join our growing community: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, @ttsgpod (Twitter), https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod.
==
P.S. – If you’re free Thursday night U.S. time, come to Tammy’s presentation on Camp Humphreys, the U.S.’s largest foreign military base, with poet and translator Eunsong Kim, sponsored by the Heung Coalition, UC Berkeley, and U Mich.
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Hello from the imperial U.S.A.!
Our special guest this week is the CHamoru activist attorney and writer Julian Aguon. Julian calls in from Guam to talk about his new book, The Properties of Perpetual Light, which comes out at the end of the month. (Pre-order it for you and a friend!)
Julian reads from the book and talks about:
Developing his voice as a writer and mixing genres: from poetry to political commentary to personal essay;
Guam/CHamoru identity and attempts to build solidarity with other colonized and indigenous peoples across the world;
His work as a lawyer with Blue Ocean Law;
Guam as a hotspot of climate change and militarization;
How Guam, as a U.S. colony, is often stuck in the old and ongoing U.S.-China conflict.
For more, check out:
Julian’s 2017 piece (In These Times) on Guam in the crosshairs of U.S.-North Korean saber rattling;
Julian’s recent book talk at American University;
Reporting by Chris Gelardi and Sophia Perez (The Nation) on how people in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are fighting U.S. militarism.
Thanks for listening! Please write in with questions and comments, and join our growing community: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, @ttsgpod (Twitter), https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod.
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We discuss the unfolding row over an academic article by Harvard law professor Mark Ramseyer, who argues, without evidence, that “comfort women” across Asia were not coercively indentured by the Japanese imperial army in World War II, but had legally consented to sex work. (For background on this debate, check out Tammy’s paper from 2006!)
Though typically irrelevant to the rest of society (lol), Ramseyer’s is the rare academic paper to invite public attention and, subsequently, outrage. His bizarrely unsourced work has triggered questions about Japan’s wartime responsibilities, unfree labor, sexual slavery, and ongoing geopolitical tensions in East Asia. And also, as Jeannie Suk Gersen, Ramseyer’s colleague, wrote last week in The New Yorker, the struggle at Harvard?
Thousands of scholars have spoken out against the article, including five historians of Japan (and friend of the show Chelsea Szendi Schieder) who compiled an extensive list of Ramseyer’s errors and mistakes—far longer than the original paper! (N.b., economists have denounced the piece, as have groups at Harvard.)
History of the ‘comfort women’ question 101, starting in the 1990s, thanks to the public testimony of survivor Kim Hak-sun and the support of historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki
What does this story mean, especially, to those in Korea and the Korean diaspora?
What does it tell us about legal academia, the prestige of Harvard, and how TF it could get published in the first place?
What is going on with the far-right in Japan? (cf. friend of show Adam Bronson’s piece on Abe Shinzō in Dissent)
Why should people in the US, or around the world, care about a story seemingly confined to South Korea and Japan?
Good materials on the comfort women:
Embodied Reckonings by Elizabeth Son
Lolas’ House by M. Evelina Galang
Grassby Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
A Cruelty to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon
Silence Brokenby Dai Sil Kim-Gibson
Comfort Women by Yoshimi Yoshiaki
The Comfort Women by George Hicks
Comfort Woman by Nora Ojka Keller
Some prints inspired by stories of the comfort women, by Tammy:
Thanks for tuning in. To further join the TTSG community, check out our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod.
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Hello from a Chinese banquet! (If only…)
0:00 - “주먹만한 얼굴” (tiny face obsession)
2:48 – Reply All
We discuss the story buzzing throughout media: the hosts of the Reply All podcast, while reporting on the exploitative labor practices at Bon Appétit, had their own exploitative, anti-union activism exposed last week. What does this say about class versus race politics and the unionization movement in media? Plus, thoughts on the podcast-industry bubble.
(By the way, we are aware of the irony of talking, on a podcast, about another podcast that got canceled after talking about yet another podcast, so don't bother pointing that out!)
38:15 – “Minari”
Writer/director Isaac Chung’s “Minari,” starring Steven Yeun, has just been widely released. Is it a story about successful US assimilation or migrant ambivalence? Is it a universal or specific Asian-American tale? What is the state of Asian-diaspora storytelling in 2021, and when is the Forever 21 saga going to be made into a television movie?
1:01:00 – Three listener questions
On ableism in our discussion of Covid-19 and “working women” (from Reena)
Mixed feelings about the “decolonizing food” movement (from Jackie)
On academics tweeting about political causes (from Jenny)
Thanks for listening!
Email us your questions: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
DM us here: https://twitter.com/ttsgpod
Become a patron! https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod
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Hello!
Special unlocked bonus Patreon episode today with entrepreneur, TikTok cook, and hip-hop head Jaeki Cho. He and Jay talk about Jaeki’s quick rise to TikTok fame via his Korean cooking videos, Asian-American hip-hop in the 90s and 00s, and the ways in which immigrants acquire, imitate and then incorporate language.
You can find Jaeki’s TikTok here.
And a Friday throwback video for all of you.
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Hello from the angry depths of our work-from-home souls!
This Valentine’s Day week:
0:00 – Big, hearty thanks for subscribing and supporting us through our Patreon. Don’t miss the raucous Discord chat or bonus episodes with Anakwa Dwamena and Jiayang Fan.
4:40 – Why are women shouldering the extra work of the pandemic? Why are they the first to lose their jobs and get stuck with multiplying jobs at home? We talk about the NYT’s “Primal Scream” package of stories, the neoliberalism/second-wave-feminism debate between scholars Nancy Fraser and Melinda Cooper, and the radical, unfinished challenge of the welfare rights and Wages for Housework movements.
44:50 – More discussion of recent street violence in the Bay Area, thanks to solid reporting through a partnership between The Oaklandside and Oakland Voices. (+ part two here). Is this a Black–Asian thing? What’s the economic/pandemic backdrop? How do we avoid carceral thinking? (link to Oakland Voices piece here.
1:11:11 – Thanks to Stephanie for her question about identity-obsessed East Coast Asians versus “gentle, confident” West Coast Asians (lol). We talk about ethnic enclaves like Cerritos, the making of Flushing, and Andy’s time in Plano, TX.
Thanks again for listening and sharing. Reach out anytime at @ttsgpod or timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
Plugs!
Read Oakland Voices!
On Wednesday (4.17) at 1230P ET:
And on Thursday (4.18) at 8P ET:
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Hello!
This week, fabulous guest Darren Byler. Plus, three questions from our very smart listeners.
0:00 – Friend of the show Darren Byler returns (don’t miss his earlier episode, from July, where he discusses his research on Xinjiang with Tammy and Andy) to reflect on what he (and Andy) heard on Mandarin Clubhouse over the weekend. There was a brief burst of discussion among Mandarin speakers of various ethnicities around the world, including many in the PRC, about what’s happening to Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Clubhouse has since been banned in the PRC, but the rooms continue to operate.
Those interested in Darren’s work should read this recent piece on surveillance capitalism in Xinjiang. Darren had also written about the types of stories told by Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang, which are similar to those that emerged on Clubhouse this weekend.
39:40 – As promised, we answer listener questions about:
– Anti-Asian violence in the Bay Area (Cathy) +
– Asians and the return-to-school debate (Matteo) +
– How to push the Biden administration left? (Milos)
Stay in touch! timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com / TTSG on Twitter
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Good snowy morning from Andy and Tammy, while Jay wears shorts!
This week, we talk about cultures of luck, public schools, tankieism, Myanmar, and Corky Lee.
2:15 – Andy explains the freaky, punny “Bling Empire.”
12:12 – Our inevitable takes on GameStop, Robinhood, and the global, neoliberal casino of our financial system. For more: stories by Noah Kulwin, Kate Aronoff, and Doug Henwood. Andy recommends this episode of Slate Money podcast.
46:58 – David Brooks gives us hives, but so does most of the coverage of school reopenings. Why this anti-union, anti-parent campaign—and in the name of “Black and brown kids”? For more: a sharp analysis by Rachel Cohen; NYT’s recompense for Brooks’s editorial.
1:07:10 – We respond to listeners who think we’re too dismissive of pro-China takes as tankieism.
1:16:11 – In Tammy’s sad news corner: What’s happening in Myanmar?
1:21:31 – Another preventable COVID-19 death hits close to home. Rest in peace and power, Corky Lee! For more: Hua Hsu’s tribute and the NYT obit.
* 1:24:43 – A way to help us keep going—and with better sound: We’re launching a* TTSG Patreon*! Please sign on as a supporter, and tell all your friends! *
Thanks for tuning in and supporting us.
timetosaygoodpod@gmail.com
@TTSGpod
Quick plug: Andy helped organize a series of talks this month by professional historians but intended for public audiences. The theme is “decolonizing decolonization”: extending discussions about decolonization from Euro-America to looking at experiences in the “rest” of the world.
Tomorrow (2/3) at lunchtime (ET) is Adom Getachew from U. Chicago, talking about Black internationalism from the 50s to 70s (apropos Black history month). Register and check it out!
Next week (2/10): Turkey and Latin America and China
Following week (2/17): China, India, Xinjiang, and Kashmir
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Bonus ep!
This past week, the Asian Arts Initiative in Philly (AAI) hosted a short conversation about the question of representation in media and politics.
AAI’s exec. director Anne Ishii (@ill_iterate) MCed the event, which featured myself (Andy) and Bakirathi Mani, a fellow academic in the region (Swarthmore college, check out her new book Unseeing Empire, with the discount code E20EMPR).
We talk:
Kamala and Andrew
south and east Asian comparative diasporas
Asian versus Asian American studies
why the search for representation is always just a little bit “off”?
(there’s also a Youtube version of the in-person conversation here!)
Check out AAI on twitter: @asianartsphilly
As always, follow us @ttsgpod and email us at: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com!
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Hi from Obama’s third term!
This week, we welcome the wonderful, brainy Rozi Ali, a journo friend who writes about Islamophobia and the US “war on terror.” We also dish about basketball and a kimchi-based spat between South Korea and China.
1:10 – Why Rozi gave up on the Warriors.
3:35 – Korea and China are fighting again. Over kimchi.
Not sponsored content: the offending Li Ziqi video (kimchi at the 13:20 mark: judge for yourself!)
17:45 – Biden started his presidency by reversing Trump-era actions on immigration, including the Muslim ban. Rozi puts these moves in context of foreign policy and the forever wars. Shout-out to the Quincy Institute and anti-war activism; plus: Jay and Rozi still don’t know who Fran Lebowitz is.
54:30 – The South Asian diaspora in the US tends to vote very Democratic, but some of its members have big blind spots around class concerns as well as the government in India. We discuss all this in the context of Arun Venugopal’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “The Truth Behind Indian American Exceptionalism.”
If you’re free tonight, Tuesday, Jan. 26, join this US–Canada event on transnational “movement lawyering,” organized by TTSG friends. Tammy is in the mix: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/asian-american-asian-canadian-perspectives-on-movement-lawyering-tickets-135937527805
Thanks for tuning in and supporting us. Next time: lots of reader questions!
We’re on Twitter way too much, at @ttsgpod. And on email: timetosaygoodbye@gmail.com.
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Greetings from the deep state in our heads!
This week, we talk some oldish politics (January is moving so fast…) and welcome back our first repeat guest, Hua Hsu, to dig into classic Asian-American cinema.
0:00 – Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York City. Last we saw him, he was buying Ito En green tea at a bodega and calling the worker “bro.”
8:20 – The better Asian Andrew, our Andy, wrote about the 1.6.2021 Capitol attack in our newsletter last week. We talk fascisms and how to combat right-wing extremism without further expanding our military-police industrial complex. Plus: this short Samuel Moyn essay in The Nation.
41:00 – In part two of our film club, scholar and critic Hua Hsu joins us to discuss director Wayne Wang’s classic, Chan is Missing(1982). (Check out Hua’s essay from way back when.) Wang is better known for The Joy Luck Club and Maid in Manhattan (J.Lo, anyone?), and more recently made a documentary on Cecilia Chiang, the godmother of stateside Chinese haute cuisine, as well as an adaptation of an essay by Chang-rae Lee. But Chan is Missing is totally weird and singular—and changed Jay’s life, he explains. Bonus: check out “Juke and Opal,” a sketch by Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin that Tammy sees as a precursor of a key scene in Chan is Missing. (Hilton Als has written beautifully about it.) And here’s A.K.A. Don Bonus, a Spencer Nakasako documentary Hua loves.
Thanks for supporting and tuning in. Send us your questions and comments, as audio or text, to timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGpod.
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This week’s theme, courtesy of Tony Soprano: “Is the U.S. over?”
Both Tammy and Jay have new pieces out on our failure to curb the spread of Covid-19 in nursing homes. The country has seemed unable to tackle complex problems. Have we learned anything? What now?
0:00 – We talk about the vaccine rollout in the U.S. and our ominously poor start to distribution. Tammy hates on federalism and the States counterplan (debate joke). Plus: should health care workers have the right to refuse the vaccine?
23:45 – At the end of 2020, Beijing-based economic analyst Dan Wang offered this year-in-review newsletter full of global, historical observations of the U.S., spurring much chatter on China Twitter.
Is Chinese society experiencing the equivalent of the U.S.’s “golden age of capitalism”? How do most Americans imagine the life of an “average” person in China—you know, like Pangzai? And is the U.S. in a “declining empire” / “rentier” stage of its history?
1:09:30 – A listener question from Swoo: What were some of your favorite reads in 2020?
Tammy: James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” (essay)
Andy: Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History” (paper)
Jay: Greg Kot, I’ll Take You There; Mark Kram, Jr., Ghosts of Manila
Thanks for tuning in.
Please subscribe and spread the word!
Keep in touch via @TTSGPOD and timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
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HNY from the heart of Times Square!
0:00 – This week, we welcome JoAnn Lum, the director of NMASS (the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops), a “multi-trade, multi-ethnic workers center” located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Though COVID-19 has recently shone a light on horrifying working conditions in healthcare, nursing homes, restaurants, and delivery, JoAnn describes how “essential workers” have faced steadily worsening prospects for decades, and relays her members’ disappointment in the government response.
She also talks about how immigration law has been used to divide workers, and explains NMASS’s “Ain’t I a Woman” campaign, which is challenging the 24-hour workday for home care attendants. (Tammy wrote about this around-the-clock work for Businessweek two years ago [a sobering read!].)
Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has only exacerbated the urgency of NMASS’s organizing. Learn more and contribute here!
34:30 – In the second half, we discuss a bundle of listener questions about “diversity:” employment initiatives, diversity statements, even children’s books! How do we navigate between “good” and “bad” versions of diversity? What are the right categories to describe them?
Thanks to Adriana, Amy, and Helen for the excellent questions!
Keep your queries and comments coming! We’d love more recorded audio bits, too, which you can send by email: timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. On Twitter, we’re doomscrolling at @TTSGpod.
Finally, pass the podcast onto your friends!
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0:00 — We welcome friend of the show Tommy Craggs, enterprise editor at Mother Jones magazine. We first get Tommy’s thoughts on last summer’s inadvertent strike in the NBA and assess the future of our favorite beleaguered sports league.
25:10 — We discuss Tommy’s new piece, “What’s the Matter with Cultural Politics?,” in which he interrogates the “culture contra” stalemate: the idea that what the Democrats need to do is drop the “culture” and “identity” stuff and get back to (white) meat and potatoes.
Should we defend “woke” culture? How to distinguish between “good” (materialist) versus “bad” (coopted) identity politics? Can we even tell the difference?
Send us your comments and questions!
Timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
On Twitter @TTSGPOD
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Today, Doctors Liu, Kang, and Kim are joined by Doctor Sarah Leonard, publisher of the soon-to-launch Lux magazine (named after socialist extraordinaire Rosa Luxemburg).
0:00 – We respond to accusations of COVID-19 denialism by comparing the US’s lockdown + welfare policies to those of the rest of the (Euro-American) world: Tammy on Canada’s robust wage subsidy and deficit spending; Andy on Sweden’s controversial decision to do voluntary lockdowns (even leftists are fighting over it); and Jay on the German advantage of strong infrastructure.
39:45 – Sarah talks about why she created Lux magazine, a socialist, feminist glossy! (Think: Marxist Vogue.) We discuss girl-boss corporate feminism, why there should be more than one socialist outlet, the virtues of social reproduction theory, and who deserves pleasure. Preview issue one here! Subscribe here!
Subscribe to TTSG here: https://goodbye.substack.com/about
Send audio questions and regular-old comments to timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com and @TTSGpod!
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Hello from Neera Tanden’s shoe closet!
0:00 – The gang’s back together, with geographic and pandemic updates.
10:00 – Data recently compiled by National Nurses United tell us that nearly a quarter of registered nurses in the US who’ve died from the coronavirus are Filipino. Why this outsized fraction? Can histories of colonization and migration, as well as labor economics, help us make sense of the numbers?
49:07 – In the first of what we hope will become a recurring a segment, we talk about a classic Asian American film: Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow.” Does it hold up? Why did Roger Ebert once defend it so vigorously? And how does it compare to Lin’s more famous franchise (“Fast and Furious”)? To “corny” immigrant literature?
Our next movie talk, a few weeks from now, will be on “Chan is Missing.” Watch along with us!
Thanks, as always, for listening and spreading the word. Please send feedback and audio questions to timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @ttsgpod.
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Hello!
This week we have another part of what can now be called a series on the AAPI voter with our guest Taeku Lee, a professor of law and political science at UC Berkeley and the author of several books, including Asian American Political Participation, which he co-authored with Janelle Wong, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Jane Junn.
There’s few people more qualified to talk about the enigma of the Asian voter — Taeku has been researching and studying trends in voting since 1988 and was one of the first people to really study and then also generate polling information within AAPI communities. He has also been involved in the Asian American Voter Survey, which you probably saw on social media through this slide.
We talk about everything from the history of the Asian vote, the Reagan years in the 80s, the swing towards the Democratic party, the impact that geography has on voting patterns (for example, people who immigrate to Orange County, California or Florida will certainly trend more Republican than people who immigrate to New York City or the Bay Area because their neighbors are more GOP friendly), and how an immigrant, who generally arrives in the United States with a limited understanding of the country’s politics, develops into a voter.
Please give a listen!
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Happy birthday, Jay’s sister!
Tammy checks in from a motel in Kennewick, Jay remembers his lost novel, and we talk turkey.
8:30 – On the global vaccine race. The “good” science (from Sarah Zhang), the “bad” vaccine apartheid (Jayati Ghosh, economist at JNU), Macbook vs. Chromebook, and the politics of glorifying private drug companies (as in the NYT).
Also, check out this cool new vaccine data center from Duke Global Health Innovation Center: https://launchandscalefaster.org/COVID-19
41:00 – A listener question from Kurt: Are tankies real or just an online phenomenon?
49:55 – Our first audio listener question! Listener Cody Wilson asks about Jay’s recent NYT op-ed / TTSG manifesto on the value of disaggregating “POC” communities, and offers an explanation for why the Rio Grande Valley went crazy for Trump in 2020 (cf. The Texas Tribune).
Thanks for hanging with us. Have a safe, socially-distanced Thanksgiving, and send us your questions and comments! @TTSGPod / timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
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Hello from White House transition headquarters!
This week: literal housekeeping, “students of color” and “students of poverty,” coronavirus nightmares, how not to expect too much from Biden, and a Southeast Asian trade deal.
4:30 – Dads Jay and Andy review right-wing children’s books.
9:30 – Asians get lumped in as white again—this time, in the Thurston County, WA public schools. Why does this keep happening, and why do we care? Should the left abandon race-based sorting and affirmative action?
30:20 – The coronavirus is spiking all over the country. Why aren’t we talking about it more? Will Biden do better than Trump did?
38:45 – Student debt, the climate catastrophe, foreign policy, immigration, labor rights… What can we expect from Biden?
55:30 – Tammy’s “What you should know” corner: the ASEAN+5 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Is it a big deal or not? How does it compare to the TPP and the CPTPP? And when will we Americans have the energy to start caring about stuff like this again? Plus: Jay promises to manage Tammy’s Fox News career.
Thank you for listening! Please spread the word, and stay in touch: @ttsgpod (Twitter) / timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
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Hello,
Today we have something a bit different for you. TTSG goes a bit Melvyn Bragg with a history episode about Bay Area Filipino DJ culture. Our guest today is Oliver Wang, professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach, one of the co-hosts of the Heat Rocks podcast, and the author of Legions of Boom, a fascinating book which tracks the history of Filipino immigrants into the Bay Area after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act — first into San Francisco and then out into suburbs like Daly City, Fremont, and Vallejo.
If you’ve ever wondered why so many of the top DJs in the word are Filipino and want to know the creation story behind legends like DJ QBert and the Invizibl Scratch Piklz, this is well worth your time. We discuss the mobile DJ scene in the 90s, the class dynamics of post-1965 Filipino immigrants versus the manongs who came over in the early 20th century and settled in San Francisco, and how music and a party scene can create a sense of cohesion and true identity.
Here’s some of the music these DJ crews created so you can play it as you listen along. Enjoy!
Spintronix Imagine #8
X-Men vs the Invizibl Skratch Piklz set in 1996
Generations: a 25 minute documentary about Spintronix and the mobile DJ scene.
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Hello from a USPS mailbag!
This week, before getting into your letters, we reminisce about Saturday’s election news a.k.a the international dopamine-flood event. We “wow just wow” at the Democratic establishment’s (ridiculous and ridiculously premature) punch left, and swoon over AOC’s punch back in an interview with the New York Times. We also dissect a viral video of Tucker Carlson explaining why Butler, PA, and so many other places in the US (will) remain loyal to Trump.
Listener Questions
@irl_neil asks how “small business owners” fit into a broader progressive agenda. How should we confront the bootstraps values so popular with immigrant communities?
@hasui_SEA asks what the Biden administration might mean for the US–China Cold War-style tensions we often discuss on TTSG?
Listeners Henry and Cathy H. ask about the utility of the “Asian American” (or Asian Canadian) category from the perspective of South Asian and Southeast Asian immigrants.
M. asks about the racial landmines, circa 2020, that await her young hapa (mixed-race Asian) child.
Finally, Adriana and Ellen ask about the black–white binary in academia—within both the “diversity” bureaucracy complex and the ethnic-studies classroom.
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Hello from Philly, Berkeley, and Missoula!
In this #2020 special, we share our jaundiced views of the U! S! A! and the election as of Wednesday night, 24 hours after polls closed.
Discussed:
Tuesday night’s emotional roller-coaster
Post-vote explanations based on racial and ethnic checkboxes
“Jay Kang, (G.O.P.) political consultant”
Propositions 22 and 16 in California
Tammy’s feel-good corner a.k.a local measures to give us hope going forward
Links to stuff we mention:
Exit polls (with the usual caveats) showing Trump’s gains with POC voters
Jennifer Medina, of The New York Times, on the macho appeal of Donald Trump
Aída Chávez, of The Intercept, with a pre-election look at Latino/a progressive organizing in Arizona, as well as her write-up on election night, with Ryan Grim
Congratulations to TTSG friend Nikil Saval! He’s a progressive Democrat success story, the first Asian American member of the Pennsylvania State Senate, and we couldn’t be more proud! (ICYMI: our interview with Nikil)
How was Election Day/Night/Week for everyone else??? Terrible? Sleepless? Blasé? Send your comments, questions, and reactions to timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or via DM @TTSGPOD!
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Hello from Tammy’s snowbank!
This week, we welcome TTSG friend Hua Hsu, a professor at Vassar and a staff writer at The New Yorker, who just wrote an excellent pre-election story: “Are Asian Americans the Last Undecided Voters?” The piece digs into stuff we’ve been obsessing about, on and off the air, including the fuzziness of the Asian American label, the rise of East Asian Republicans, organizing on ethnicity-specific chat apps, the OC, and Asian-Latino “immigrant” identities. Our discussion also complements Andy’s bonus episode with Bernie folks, Brooke Adams and Tobita Chow, from last week. Then, a quick look at the global crisis playing out in Vietnam.
A long episode, but a good one. Big props to listeners who make it all the way through!
0:00 – Why does Hua eat “adult pouches”? Can he bring Jay and Andy over to his side?
13:00 – California Governor Gavin Newsom “tiniest dog-whistled” Asians in the early days of the American pandemic, by blaming transmission on nail salons. Who’s Janet Nguyen, and how did she fight back?
41:00 – “Education and opportunity” are Asian values, right? But are they a sufficient basis for organizing? And are they liberal or conservative, right- or left-wing?
1:05:00 – Do Asian American voters care about foreign policy?
1:26:55 – Maybe Asian American politics can just be, well, politics. How do we make a universalist political program our own?
1:37:55 – You still with us? Tammy gets the guys to talk about the historic, deadly floods in Vietnam, and what they tell us about climate change. What are the overlaps with the Vietnamese economy and the coronavirus? Could the climate catastrophe replicate Asian refugee routes once caused by war?
Get woke:
Tomorrow! “Anti-China politics in the US election” (Register here.)
Tomorrow! “Uprising in Thailand” (Register here.)
Thursday! “The Gwangju Uprising and Its 40-Year Global History” (Register here.)
Jay, on musical labor and 30 years of repetition, on This American Life
Andy, on the “China Virus,” in Feral Atlas
Tammy, at a Montana gun range, in The New Yorker
Thank you, thank you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your comrades and frenemies to subscribe.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Bonus pre-election episode!
Two weeks ahead of the last judgment, Andy talks with two organizers about the “existential battle” over the soul of the Democratic Party. Brooke Adams, a second-generation Taiwanese Seattleite, worked for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign in Iowa, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania before joining People’s Action this summer. Tobita Chow, a Chinese-Japanese-Canadian-American (not making this up, we swear) Chicagoan, is director of “Justice is Global,” part of the People’s Action network.
0:00 -- Brooke and Toby discuss their respective experiences organizing while Covid hit the US in March, then we speculate why Sanders was so successful among Asian and Latino groups. Andy has dark fantasies of seeing Trump win again and discrediting the Democratic leadership, while Brooke and Toby think more productively about how progressives might shape a (potential!) Biden-Harris presidency. A WWII analogy.
37:20 -- Toby expounds on moving politics in a more internationalist direction, i.e., don’t do a trade war with China. Also, how Toby and others pushed back on Biden’s bad China ad this spring.
59:20 -- We look ahead to the election. If (!) Biden-Harris win, how will progressives and centrists square off over the future of the party? Over climate? Covid relief? Electoral strategy?
More links and plugs
Brooke and Toby talked “deep canvassing” strategies. Learn more here and here
More from Brooke: People’s Action will hold a deep canvassing event on October 27, featuring appearances from AOC, Bernie, IL state senator Robert Peters, and artist/activist Vic Mensa. If interested, click here!
Justice is Global’s deep canvassing experiment talking to voters about China
Toby and friend-of-show Jake Werner’s nerdy memo on the US-China trade war
Hear Toby and Jake and other great speakers at this Critical China Studies event on October 28, 7-8:30 ET: “Anti-China politics in the US election” (direct link to registration here)
Tammy has a new feature out on the crucial Montana senate race (and she tells us that anti-China politics are alive and well there). Will labor unions and Native Americans make the difference for the state and, by extension, the body politic? Check it out in The New Yorker.
Andy has a new academic/public piece riffing off the “China virus” stuff in the springtime and tracing Covid’s spread from China to the rest of the world. Some talk about “just-in-time” / “lean production” models, from 1960s Japan to China to the US, from the auto industry (think that “American Factory” documentary) to grocery stores and hospitals. Here on Feral Atlas, a new digital humanities project on human-nature-infrastructure relationships. Anthropocene. Synergy.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to the Terrordome!
This week, we have a brilliant guest, TTSG pal and Korean literature scholar Jenny Wang Medina, who grew up in her family’s beauty-supply store, to guide us through a mini-PhD on Korean hair, the Black hair market, and Cold War commodity history. Then, a brief look at the ongoing democratic uprising in Thailand.
0:00 – HAIR! * The New York Times’s coverage of the Na family and their Black hair shops in Chicago, one of which was destroyed in the recent Black Lives Matter uprising, launches us into an exploration of harvested hair, nation building, migration, and race relations, from Hong Kong and South Korea to India and Sacramento, CA, where Jenny’s brother now runs her parents’ 40-year-old wig-turned-beauty-supply stores. To enrich our discussion, we draw on a very sharp “commodity history” of Korean hair, by Jenny and Andy’s friend, Jason Petrulis.
How did Jenny’s family, and so many other Korean immigrants, come to dominate hair and beauty-supply markets for Black American women? And how does the intimate nature of hair and beauty products shape race relations?
What role have hair exports played in the developmental economics of Hong Kong, South Korea, and, more recently, India and Indonesia? How did US Cold War policy shape these markets?
1:14:30 – THAILAND! * In a new segment called “Something you should know,” a.k.a. “What Tammy forced Jay and Andy to talk about,” we bring you an update from Thailand, where a democracy movement that began in 2014, after a military coup, has recently exploded on the streets.
We discuss the aims and culture of these Thai protests, the nature of Thailand’s (ostensibly) constitutional monarchy, the economic effect of the pandemic on the nation’s tourist economy, how the current prime minister and monarch are different from those who ruled a decade ago, and the Milk Tea Alliance—the pro-democracy bonds among Thai, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese youth online. (Thanks to TTSG friends Reena and Nick for their insights.)
Big thanks for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your comrades and frenemies to subscribe.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
A bonus deep-dive episode into the culture and politics of Big Tech and Silicon Valley!
Today Andy chats with the writer Wendy Liu (no relation) about her recent book, Abolish Silicon Valley.
A programmer, former Google intern, and startup founder, Wendy has written on a host of political-economic questions swirling around Silicon Valley today: how to organize contract workers in Silicon Valley; Andrew Yang and UBI; and why we should socialize Amazon.
Above all, she is interested in spoiling the myths that Silicon Valley tells itself and sells to the public. This episode focuses on her individual reckoning with the reality of Big Tech and capitalism: her distaste for corporate identity politics, how her social position (second-generation Chinese-Canadian woman) shaped her growth, the contrast between STEM and political education, and the mythology of meritocracy.
0:00 – Wendy’s own trajectory from youthful adherent of the cult of Silicon Valley (Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes) to disillusionment and critique.
19:30 – Wendy’s thoughts on entering the tech world as a woman and an Asian-(North) American—from minimizing her feelings of difference in order to fit in to gaining a structural understanding of gender and race. Some choice words for White Fragility-style corporate diversity measures. And a brief discussion of the mind-blowing history of Chinese labor migration to the West Coast.
41:30 – Our thoughts on a previous listener question: why so many Asian-Americans opt for STEM education and career paths. Parental pressure? Culture?
48:00 – We discuss friend-of-the-show Immanuel Wallerstein’s classic, Historical Capitalism (Verso, 1983), and his criticism of the concept of meritocracy. Why is Silicon Valley’s cult of meritocracy a “sham”? How should the rest of us try to process and make sense of this critique?
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the National Speech & Debate Tournament!
This week, we unpack the idea of court packing, look for common cause with working-class whites, and ask what’s up with the Taiwanese military.
0:00 – Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation proceedings began Monday. Will the questioning be more Acoustic Lindsey Graham or Lindsey Graham Unplugged? Inspired by a recent episode of the Dig podcast (Hi, Dan and Amna!), we wonder: Why does the US democracy—or, why do ACLU-cheering liberals—depend on an institution as ridiculously undemocratic as the Supreme Court? Should leftists support court packing or other legal reforms? Plus: Jay’s double-SCOTUS-clerking high school nemesis.
36:48 – At the height of the opioid epidemic, and right after Trump’s election, we seemed to talk incessantly about the “white working class.” Not so much anymore. Who are these people, and how can we build a program of social change that benefits everyone? We read Helen Epstein’s analysis of despair and death among “non-BA whites” and a piece by Adam Rothman and Barbara Fields, arguing that “a successful national political movement must appeal to the self-interest of white Americans.” Can we replace our oppression olympics and racial whataboutism with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition or William Barber and Liz Theoharis’s Poor People’s Campaign?
1:04:18 – So many anxieties, real and imagined, in the Taiwan Strait. How imminent is the threat of military action by China, and will Taiwan continue to spend billions on its armed forces? Why do younger generations of Taiwanese men resent their mandatory military service? We talk about Taiwan and South Korea’s grudging reliance on the US military and the persistence of neocolonial camptown relationships. Bonus: Andy introduces us to 高粱酒 / 고량주.
1:17:05 – Outtro recap: Do we care if people have “racism in their hearts”? And why must Asian Americans borrow other people’s “whatabouts”? Mike Davis continues to school us.
Very cool digital conference alert!
Join our friends at New Bloom, New Naratif, and Lausan for “Transnationally Asian,” Oct. 19 through 22, which takes its title from an article Tammy wrote over the summer. The sessions will consider postcolonial solidarity, local and global labor movements, and the role of the media in political activism. Tammy will moderate the opening panel, so please tune in. You can register for free here.
Many, many thanks for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your comrades and frenemies to subscribe.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Happy belated Mid-Autumn Festival!
We pried Andy away from doomscrolling 45 to bring you this late-night episode of semi-coherent thoughts on the American regime, post-wet market theories of Covid-19, and listener queries on class.
0:00 – What is, even, anything? The big, maskless T has Covid, as does everyone around him. We talk conspiracies and sad, middling fantasies of functioning government. Is it time to give up on electoral politics? Will there ever be another Bernie?
28:30 – Twitter warrior and coronavirus prophet Zeynep Tufekci is out with a provocative new piece at The Atlantic. We reminisce about the bad old days at the start of this podcast, which we nearly christened “Pangolin Power Hour.” What does it mean for Covid-19 to be an “overdispersed pathogen”? Who is Pareto, and why does nationalized health care matter?
55:40 – We address a composite (brilliant! erudite!) listener question about class and class cosplay. Why do upper-class wokesters downplay their families’ money? Do upper- vs. upper-middle-class distinctions even matter in elite spaces? Should our class backgrounds influence our career choices or social politics? And why do we tell and retell Asian American immigrant tales of overcoming? Thanks to Janis Jin, @Soledad_Kyrie, and Lisa.
And thanks to all of you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com). Please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your friends and enemies to subscribe.
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Hello from Andy’s Zoom lecture!
This week: the class politics of the Netflix K-drama “Itaewon Class” (이태원 클라쓰), success and failure in leftist utopias, and “slouchy Asian” fashion.
0:00 – Happy Birthday, Mama Kang! Plus: Tammy introduces Andy and Jay to Eileen Fisher.
6:10 – Jay binge-watches (the notably progressive!) “Itaewon Class,” which Tammy inhaled long ago; Andy makes plans to catch up, and offers his commentary anyway. Why do so many K-/Asian dramas reflect the same theme of capitalist overcoming? Is chaebol / keiretsu resentment baked into all contemporary cultural production (and mass protest)? Why are the protagonists so often middle-class instead of working-class? Other shows mentioned: “Terrace House,” “My Mister” (나의 아저씨), “Dear My Friends” (디어 마이 프렌즈).
32:35 – We discuss Wes Enzinna’s recent piece in Harper’s, “The Sanctuary,” about a group of abolitionists who transform a Minneapolis hotel into a mutual-aid encampment after George Floyd’s murder:
In the end, the fight fizzled out, but I wondered what Steve or anyone else would have done if the violence had escalated even further, as it was clear the volunteers didn’t have the ability or willpower to intervene….
So, no, it wasn’t that the fight showed that we needed the police, or that the abolitionists were naïve idealists—they didn’t want a thousand Sheratons, they wanted a world in which no Sheratons were necessary—but it did show that the abolitionists weren’t yet sure what to do when the actions of some threatened the well-being of others.
What do recent attempts at utopia reveal about young people’s attachment to, or abandonment of, the welfare state and organized politics/Politics? Also: Jay’s time at Standing Rock and his Avakian-loving friend at Revolution Books, Andy’s critique of critiques of corruption, Tammy’s dream of an unemployed people’s union, and a collective boost for a candidate for Oakland City Council: Carroll Fife, of Moms 4 Housing.
Big thanks for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com), and please stay in touch via Twitter (@ttsgpod) and email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)! Get all your comrades to subscribe, too.
Finally, don’t miss Andy’s webinar, tomorrow night (September 30, 7-830P EDT), with the Critical China Scholars group: “China’s Rural Capitalism: Land, Labor, and Environment.”
Sign up here for the link and details!
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Hello from the TTSG drop-out commune!
This week, a longer-than-we-intended show about the TikTok saga, Chinese/US hegemony, and nationalist traps. We also respond to a few of your brilliant emails and DMs.
0:00 – Jay explains his obsession with the history of Jonestown, and we toss around a few theories of left (and right) millenarianisms.
5:30 – After all Trump’s blather about security, TikTok, USA looks to be headed toward Oracle and Wal-Mart, with no promises of Internet liberty. Plus: will $5 billion from the deal somehow fund “The 1776 Project” aka Patriot Education aka Uncritical Race Theory?
14:10 – Enter the American splinternet? Or is that what we’ve been surfing all along? We ask why the past couple generations of US leftists seem so local in their thinking. Is a new kind of internationalist organizing possible?
34:20 – Our humble (and not-so-humble) takes on listener comments and questions:
1) How to support Chinese international students in this xenophobic age? And what to make of parents on conservative WeChat? Bonus: the surprising demographics of GOP Asian America. (Thanks, Elaine!)
2) What to make of the cops’ courting of Asian American communities? (Terima kasi, Megan!)
3) What does it mean to “organize,” and do upper-class people have any right to get involved in labor struggles? (감사합니다, Ollie!)
4) Is ethnic studies a force for good in politics, or does it just produce diversity aesthetics? (Salamat, Jael!)
ありがとう for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com), and do reach out any time via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)! Get all your friends to subscribe, too.
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Whither memory: Guantanamo W. Bush paints over his legacy.
Hello from the future!
Inspired (triggered?) by last week’s commemorations of 9/11, we get a bit contemplative. How will future generations remember (or suppress) the events of the Trump era, especially the mass death of Covid-19? We discuss state-sanctioned memory in the US and China, how Trump has effectively rehabilitated George W. Bush, and Paul Krugman’s tweet threads (1, 2) about 9/11 and Islamophobia. We conclude with a listener question about how a “corporate Asian” should be.
0:00 – Yet another 9/11 anniversary provokes an imagined retrospective of the Trump era. How will we remember, or try to forget, these years under 45? Andy compares Chinese and US history and how state-sanctioned political narratives have domesticated personal memory and trauma. Tammy and Jay disagree over how we remember the 1960s, and we wonder how the explosive protest movements of 2020 will go down in history: will they be reduced to aesthetic commodity? Bonus: plugs for W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers.
47:38 – Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman got in trouble for Twitterasing/ retconning the Bush administration’s Islamophobic policies and wars in the Middle East as genteel by comparison to Trump. Do his arguments have any merit? Plus, Jay previews his libretto for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s forthcoming coronavirus musical (coming to Broadway in 2026), and we examine the absurd unreliability of hate crimes statistics (tsk tsk, Krugman) in the context of anti-Asian violence.
1:19:05 – TTSG listener Gestational Yuppie asks how Asian Americans should deal with their guilt for outwardly working corporate jobs while inwardly harboring leftist politics, leading all three hosts to do some soul-searching.
Thank you for supporting TTSG (https://goodbye.substack.com)! Please reach out via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and tell all your friends to subscribe.
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Greetings from Jay’s 95-degree basement!
This week, we start, inevitably, with our takes on Jessica Krug, the historian caught assuming a series of brown and Black identities. We then respond to a provocation by Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels: that talk of racial disparities distracts from the universal thievery of neoliberal capitalism. Finally, we dig into the live-action remake of Mulan—or, um, since we haven’t seen it yet, a human-rights controversy over its partnership with the Chinese government.
3:20 – Did Jessica Krug respond to market incentives for minstrelsy? Do white people feel the need to justify their interest in non-white/Eurocentric fields? Should Andy start using his Chinese name to gain more cred in the academy? Bonus: Jay and Tammy place bets on the number of “academic Dolezals.”
23:30 – In a recent paper, Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels explain the “trouble with disparity.” What does a focus on racial disproportionality—in regards to state violence or poor health outcomes or poverty (see Andy’s interview with Merlin Chowkwanyun)—really get us? What, or whom, do we risk losing along the way?
49:40 – First, the cast of Mulan was doing takedowns of the Hong Kong democracy movement. Now, journalist Isaac Stone Fish reports that the production did business in Xinjiang, the site of Chinese internment camps and widespread abuse of Uyghur minority groups (see Andy and Tammy’s interview with Darren Byler). How do we feel about the human-rights strategy of “naming and shaming”? Is the American critique too selective? Frightening reveal: Andy 同志 goes tankie/CCP plant.
Thanks for listening!
ICYMI, check out Tammy’s newsletter Q&A on San Quentin State Prison’s COVID-19 disaster, with Kony Kim of the Bay Area Freedom Collective.
And support us by subscribing and evangelizing to your friends! You can reach us any time via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com).
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Greetings from our virtual union hall!
This week, we talk protest and death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, and consider what to make of the longstanding, but local, street confrontations between the far right and “Antifa.” We then turn to the recent NBA players’ boycott(?) / strike(?) / demonstration(?): What does it mean, in labor terms? Why do we get so excited about bajillionaire athletes’ activism? (Check out what Jay wrote in NYRB and Andy, in n+1.)
0:37 – Inspired by the Milwaukee Bucks’ one-day work stoppage, professors plan a #ScholarStrike and labor unions… sign a petition. Which side are we on?
9:27 – Following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a white supremacist killed BLM protesters in Wisconsin, and a white supremacist was killed in Oregon. Is there any reason to fear a Trumpian militia war? What does the filmic replay of Patriot Prayer vs. Antifa do to our collective perception?
25:36 – The NBA, MLB, MLS, Naomi Osaka… a labor uprising or just scattered disaffection? We lit-crit our way through what’s been called a wildcat strike, making stops for the “NBA state media,” LeBron’s Obama-style-school-reform diplomacy, praise of teachers’ unions and old-school boycotts, unpaid college athletes, and the question of whether sports can carry progressive “revolution.”
Comments, questions, criticisms always welcome! Reach out via @TTSGpod or timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. And get your friends to subscribe to our Substack!
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Hi everyone:
Today we’re presenting a conversation between myself (Andy) and my college friend Merlin Chowkwanyun, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
For years I’ve peppered Merlin with questions about how to understand the never-ending debate over “race versus class” in the US -- for instance, this New York Times piece from two weeks ago -- a subject that he’s studied for years.
We focus on a critique of “racial disparity” discourse that he has written about several times, co-authored with the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. (University of Pennsylvania). Across discussions of public health, economics, and policing (for instance, their NEJM paper on Covid-19 disparities this spring), they argue that we too often view “race” as a natural and absolute trait, and “racism” as a question of primordial individual prejudice. Racial thinking, they argue, is in fact inseparable from an analysis of the dynamics of economics and class. “Race” as ideology is certainly real, but we should not mistake it as natural.
2:34 -- How did Merlin, a Thai-Chinese-American from the Asian SoCal suburbs find himself studying a primarily “black-white” story of race and racism in US history? Why not Asian American studies? How do his students make sense of the “black-white binary”?
Mentioned: the work of Claire Kim, “Are Asians the New Blacks?: Affirmative Action, Anti-Blackness, and the ‘Sociometry’ of Race”
18:20 -- We’ve all memorized the mantra “race is a social construct,” but Merlin argues that many old-fashioned nineteenth-century beliefs in the biological reality of race remain in circulation today, even among good liberals (think about the craze for 23andMe).
22:15 -- We touch on a recent New York Times article on the “race versus class” debate within the US left. Merlin has collaborated with Adolph Reed Jr. on several articles, but rather than take sides, we discuss their basic criticism of mainstream social science and its simplistic presentation of “racial disparities,” which often wind up stuck in individualized, psychologized notions of prejudice divorced from broader dynamics. Nate Silver-style quantitative regression analysis has helped reify “race” and “class” as static and natural variables of human existence.
30:40 -- Merlin and Reed’s co-authored articles on racial disparity reporting, both for Covid-19 and more generally. How did they come together to co-author these articles? Why is it dangerous to harp on “racial disparity” in a vacuum?
48:20 -- Missing from most discussions of “racial disparity” are the specific political-economic dynamics of capitalism. Specifically, modern “race” ideology originated in efforts to legitimize, justify, and naturalize slavery and Jim Crow in US history.
(In short: it’s not that white planters, because they were motivated by the racist ideas in their heads, therefore set up the slavery system; rather, because they profited off slavery and sought to defend it, planters then naturalized “race” as a scientific ideology.)
At stake today is this: a primordial account of racism (viz., “everyone’s just born a little racist”) is one that does not challenge the inequities of capitalism and is thus easily embraced by ultra-rich institutions and corporations.
Mentioned:
The classic historical account from Barbara Fields
Also Reed’s own interpretation of this history and its implications (how many pop culture podcasts are giving you a discussion of commodity fetishism?)
57:20 -- Merlin warns (Andy) against going too far with “the Marxism” and reducing everything to capitalism. But also a warning against “white fragility”-style characterizations of 400 years of continuous white supremacy.
1:01:20 -- Is this historical and economic account of “racism” useful for comparative thinking, both with and beyond the black-white binary? For instance, understanding ethnic and racialized hatred between Dominicans and Haitians, or, further away, can “racial capitalism” be applied to understand China today? Asian American history? What about anti-Semitism?
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Hello from behind the Great Firewall!
As summer winds down and election season begins to heat up, we reflect on the political prospects of Asian America and the mess that is the Democratic Party. We discuss AOC’s speech at the DNC last week as evidence that the party has lost the thread. We then examine Trump’s WeChat ban and the many uses of this Chinese super app. This leads to a concluding conversation about whether first- and second- (and third-...) generation Asian Americans could trend rightward as part of a racial realignment in both parties.
0:00 – An update on the start of school, the wildfires in northern California, and failed Covid policies.
10:40 – Who said it best? We debate the messaging of the Democrats during last week’s convention and whether the speech by the party’s rising star (and TTSG favorite), AOC, captured the urgency of the moment. Are accusations of elitism fair? Or just bad faith? Also, debater Jay makes his return and recites his own version of a convention speech in an effort to get AOC’s attention.
26:05 – Why WeChat? The Trump administration’s ban on TikTok may claim, as a collateral casualty, the messaging-payment-social-media super app WeChat. The administration doesn’t seem to understand what the app is used for, but it’s clear that a WeChat ban would hurt hundreds of millions of Chinese in China and abroad—and tank iPhone sales in China.
While free-speech concerns are well founded, we consider how WeChat and other Asian apps have been used to organize right-wing diasporic activism, including anti-affirmative-action drives. We revisit Jay’s interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen about first-generation immigrant conservatism—and “Four Prisons,” an essay by Glenn Omatsu, on the rightward turn of earlier Asian activists. (Thanks to listener Naomi Hirahara.)
Edit: see also this 2018 article from Alia Wong on WeChat and anti-affirmative action politics: “The App at the Heart of the Movement to End Affirmative Action.”
43:20 – Are we gonna go neocon? Jay worries that, on account of the weird politics around standardized testing and affirmative action, Asian Americans will become more conservative and eventually vote Republican. Is the conservative critique of the Democrats correct: that identity politics have superseded a universal economic focus? Have both parties engaged in a Black/white culture war that leaves many Asians and Latinos bereft? (Caveat: not the Bernie-crats!) Tammy argues that the debate over immigration policy will give the Democrats an edge in the foreseeable future.
Feel free to contact us with comments and questions at @TTSGPod or timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com, and please share and subscribe!
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Hello!
We’re very excited to have Pulitzer Prize winner and Macarthur Genius Grant recipient Viet Thanh Nguyen on the show. There was a lot to discuss and a lengthy conversation that I (Jay) found absolutely fascinating about the role of academia, especially during a time of national protests. A lot of history in this one as well — if you didn’t know about AAPA and Third World Liberation Front, there’s a short primer at the beginning of the episode.
1:05 - A conversation about the promise of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a student movement that started at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley in the late sixties and promised an inclusive, solidarity-based activism rooted in anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. The TWLF fight resulted ethnic studies programs across California and Viet talks about being an ethnic studies student at Cal in the early 90s and gives an assessment of what has happened over the past forty or so years since the establishment of the TWLF and the AAPA (Asian American Political Alliance).
8:00 - Discussion about Viet’s conversation with Pankaj Mishra, which we highly recommend you read.
19:00 - Have Ethnic Studies programs been effective in producing radical thinkers and progressive students? We talk about the early demands of the TWLF, which included a separate school within a school with its own faculty search committee and admissions office.
50:00 - a lengthy discussion about where the focal point of the Asian American identity should lie. Should we talk about immigration and the immigrant experience as much as we do? Or should we think more about where we came from and the effects of American imperialism across Asia? Can Filipinos, Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and others find common fighting ground in a renewal of “third world” logic? Or are those efforts nullified by the presence of an upwardly mobile, assimilation-driven class of Asian-Americans?
Thanks for listening!
Jay, Tammy, and Andy
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In a late-Sunday-night mega-recording session, we discuss the big news of the past week: Kamala Harris, the first major vice presidential candidate who’s Black, Asian American, and a woman. Commentators have tried to pick apart her identity from countless angles: Is she Black enough? Indian enough? Caribbean enough? An Asian-immigrant icon? In other words, the kind of juicy s**t you KNOW your podcast hosts are ALL ABOUT.
0:44 – Our promise to improve TTSG’s audio quality is followed by a recording glitch
1:20 – Updates on Tammy’s temporary life in Montana, Andy’s teaching by Zoom, and Jay’s love of nonstop road trips
9:40 – Who is Kamala Harris?
17:28 – Identity, Act 1: Kamala the politician: Is she a cop? Is she malleable, or does she have a motivating ideology? Also: Jay and Andy award her 30 speaker points for last year’s debates.
26:42 – Identity, Act 2: Is she a second-generation immigrant? Will her familial ties to Jamaica and India (and, briefly, Zambia) matter to West Indian and Asian voters? What can we glean from her strategic and rhetorical uses of immigrantness?
35:30 – “Two or more races”: Why are we so bad at talking about mixed-race identity? Do hapas have privilege because they’re hot?
42:05 – Identity, Act 3: Is she Black? Jamelle Bouie wrote last week that, “because of heritage, upbringing and the realities of American racism, Harris calls herself Black and is also understood as Black by people within and outside the Black community.” ADOS adherents disagree. Is Blackness a matter of choice? Is Blackness international or American?
51:45 – Choice and reparative policies
The Kamala announcement was followed by the DOJ’s accusation that Yale discriminates against white and Asian applicants. Is anti-Asian discrimination like anti-Black discrimination, or is any similarity negated by the apparent fact that Asians “chose” to come to the US? We dissect this concept of choice, which leads us to a theory of Asian identity that’s less about what we have in common than why we’re here in the first place.
1:26:10 – Save the mail!!
A look at the US Postal Service, which has one of the largest, most racially diverse, unionized workforces in the country. It is also a paragon of the types of universal, social-welfare services we should defend vigorously. We unpack the November election theories and distinguish them from troubling long-term trends toward privatization, racist dog whistles, and exploitation by Amazon. Bonus: Tammy achieves her dream of discussing Bureau of Labor Statistics data and the USPS in one segment.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
In this episode, Tammy gabs with her old friend Radhika Natarajan, a professor of history at Reed College and low-key brilliant TV critic.
Radhika talks about her childhood in Ohio, her parents’ emigration from Tamil Nadu (relevant spoiler: an arranged Brahmin marriage), and her scholarly work on post-colonial migration, citizenship, and multiculturalism in Britain. (Bonus: BAME = POC/BIPOC?) She schools Tammy on Portland’s Black and immigrant communities (the city isn’t all white, Radhika softly yells) and describes the local vibe during 74+ days of Black Lives Matter protests.
Then, the discussion (takedown? disquisition?) many TTSG listeners have been waiting for: about the Netflix show “Indian Matchmaking”! Tammy and Radhika talk caste, religion, class, and colorism in the series, media representations of South Asians, and Modi’s bloody transnationalism. Radhika invokes the cultural critic Stuart Hall to question the desire for “cheering fictions” over messy depictions of identity, and looks forward to learning more about Dalit–Black American connections in Isabel Wilkerson’s new book on caste.
For more, Radhika recommends:
Stephen Frears’s 1985 film, “My Beautiful Laundrette” (per Hall)
Nicholas B. Dirks’s 2001 history, Castes of Mind
Annihilation of Caste, the 1936 book by Dalit revolutionary B.R. Ambedkar (arguing that inter-caste marriages could never solve the problem of caste; take that, Auntie Sima!)
And here’s what the TTSG team has been perusing:
Come on, Karen—Indian Food, really?
The political economy of the TikTok and WeChat war
Media savagery at Sports Illustrated
Pankaj Mishra and Adam Shatz talk Anglo-American failure and free speech
P.S. – We recorded this episode before the Kamala announcement, but now that she’s every liberal’s favorite Indian…
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Hello from the ledge of cancellation!
We have some heady stuff for you this week—on school segregation, the perennial struggle between historians and journalists, and religiosity in Asian America.
0:40 – After a quick update on Tammy’s new life of canoeing in Missoula, Jay describes his roundtrip between Berkeley and Whidbey Island, when he listened to the newest, most Upper West Side podcast ever: “Nice White Parents,” by Chana Joffe-Walt.
We discuss the first three episodes of that series—tldr: the road to hell is paved with good intentions—and the broader contours of education, race, and class in the US. Are Asian students missing from the show’s presentation? Can we distinguish “good integration” from “bad integration”? Do individual choices make a difference, or are government policies all that matter? WTF, Rob?
Other shows we mention:
The “School Colors” documentary podcast.
An earlier (2015), touchstone series of This American Life, featuring Joffe-Walt and Nikole Hannah-Jones, on school integration in Hartford, Connecticut and Normandy, Missouri.
37:04 – Andy shares a NY Mag interview with public intellectual Adam Tooze, which includes hot takes on the role of history vs. journalism. Is the archive-digger the natural enemy of the reporter? In this hellishly unprecedented(?!) moment, are some disciplines especially relevant? What about the political economy of journalism and academia? Included: the 1619 Project, fascism, and ye olde breakfast foods.
1:08:34 – Listener Jonathan Tang asks why so many East Asians, especially from the upper middle class, seem to be churched. We apply all kinds of anecdata in the search for truth. (Correction: Tammy references Christian missionaries’ visiting Korea by the early 19th century; she meant the late 19th century.)
P.S. – Tammy’s new nightly hike (suckers):
Please support us by subscribing and telling friends and family! Also ask a question to timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com or @TTSGPod!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from three time zones!
This week, we mull the Covid-era classroom (fears of contagion and falling behind), the meaning of Trump’s attack on TikTok, Nike-brand kneeling (and not kneeling) in the NBA bubble, and universalism and particularism in the Black Lives Matter uprising.
1:40 – Will Tammy find an Oriental market in Missoula? How does Andy plan to teach through his screen? What will be the impact of these lost semesters on poor and working-class students? Also, should we blame diversity administrators for the collapsing academy?
17:07 – Why is Trump raging against TikTok? Is it because of Sarah Cooper’s impersonations, the Tulsa BTS Army, or his larger vendetta against China? Are we being tricked into siding with a mega-corporation or military state? Further reading: on US fears of the app, Western and Eastern Internets, Microsoft and tech nationalism against China, and whether TikTok is basically just as bad as Facebook. Bonus: Jay reveals his strategy for making Twitter “unusable” through his war with music writers.
35:45 – We discuss Tammy’s recent article probing the tensions within the “POC” label. Are Asians excluded from new euphemisms for ethnic minorities (“Black and brown,” “BIPOC”)? Can we include non-Black perspectives without going “all lives matter”? Could a new political bloc emerge amongst immigrants, especially Latinx and Asian Americans (see recent exchange between Pankaj Mishra and Viet Thanh Nguyen)? Does foundation funding keep domestic and global politics separate? Are we helping the right wing capture the immigrant vote? Bonus: an update on the Portland Wall of Moms.
1:01:10 – Jay advances a Manufacturing Consent thesis: the media’s coverage of BLM has kept public discussion within the boundaries of safe and acceptable topics. This leads to a bro-out over the NBA’s cringey coverage, in which the richest companies in the world have turned “social justice” into a profitable brand. (Also, Jay and Andy are hypocritically watching lots of games.) More generally, should we be optimistic or skeptical about the evolution of progressive politics this summer?
1:17:50 – Our listener question of the week! We’ve heard from some of you that our podcast is one of your first experiences with politically-oriented Asian Americans, in part because you were too busy studying orgo in college (like this comrade). Is there a split between “STEM Asian Americans” and “humanities Asian Americans”?
We can always be reached via @ttsgpod or timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. Tell your friends and family to subscribe!
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你好 from cyberspace!
This week, Jay scuba dived the depths of Asian American TikTok to engage Andy and Tammy in a critique of gendered home-cooking videos. How far have we really come? We then get a bit more serious, with a discussion of the continuing Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Portland and lessons in coalition-building from the 1970s Combahee River Collective.
4:10 – TikTok Cooking
Jay plays several TikTok videos of young Asian Americans cooking their favorite dishes. The men seem to adopt a “Black” style of talking, while the women take on a more childlike “kawaii かわいい” tone. What does this say about the personae available to Asian Americans? Is there such a thing as “pan-Asian”—or even Korean, etc.—English? Also, a “Waysian” TikTok blows Andy’s mind.
TikTok Highlights:
Kimchi Fried Rice
Instapot Pho
Popeyes Chicken
Miyeok Guk 미역국 (K seaweed soup)
Filipino with a Texan accent
Waysian
34:50 – Portland Protests
The feds are still rioting in Portland, Oregon, spurring thousands of locals to fill the streets. The novelist Mitchell S. Jackson, a native of the city, recently described his skepticism about white anarchists in these protests. Contrast this with the big-tent perspective of Kent Ford, founder of Portland’s Black Panthers chapter. What makes a protester, or a protest, really about Black Lives Matter?
47:40 – Good Identity Politics
We’re all big fans of How We Get Freeand other writing by and about the Combahee River Collective. How does this model of Black, queer, socialist feminism apply to our present movement moment? Can we forego an “oppression olympics” for more productive solidarity? Can “identity politics” be redeemed? Also, Tammy’s landline rings.
Please send us comments, questions, corrections!
@ttsgpod + timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com
And subscribe!
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Hello from 1997!
This week, we start by crate-digging our souls, with a discussion of Lilith Fair-era feminist (and feminine?) music. We then ponder the ongoing Black Lives Matter rebellion in Portland, an op-ed on “white fragility” and its race-baiting subconscious by the country’s most lucid Catholic conservative, and what it means to be (or cosplay being) “transnationally Asian.”
2:22 – Jay reveals why he’s been tweeting so much about his 1990s playlist. What was Lilith Fair, and is its feely, anti-corporate model of women’s artmaking still relevant? Plus: Nas and Liz Phair and straw(wo)man Beyoncé.
11:27 – Unidentified federal cops have been brutalizing protesters in Portland, Oregon. In response, a cadre of “Momtifa” Karens has joined with antifa gutter punks on the streets. Why do certain kinds of protesters get a bad rap? What allyships are needed to keep up the BLM momentum? Bonus: Andy posits a theory of Pacific Northwest anarchism.
43:08 – New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently speculated that, because the old system of so-called meritocracy is collapsing, its guardians are jumping ship and embracing the critique of white privilege. Among his examples are the threat of high SAT scores posed by Asian students(!).
Is Douthat right? And are the conditions ripe for a major revolution today?
59:33 – Hot off the press! Tammy’s feature on transnational Asian media, featuring New Naratif (Singapore/Southeast Asia), fellow substackers Chinese Storytellers, and, as featured on TTSG, Lausan (Hong Kong) and New Bloom (Taiwan).
The three of us have a group therapy session discussing the differences between our parents’ generation, our own, and these new kids’. Were we raised to think “only losers go back to Asia”? If we tried to return to Asia, would we just be cosplaying? Bonus: Tammy recounts her meeting with Jay’s parents.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Credit: Carolyn Drake
Hello from the greater Sea-Tac area!
Andy and Tammy here with a bonus episode, interviewing Darren Byler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado and an expert on the Uyghur people, a Muslim community in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China.
Darren’s years of anthropological research in Xinjiang will be published in a forthcoming book titled Terror Capitalism. Until then, you can find his work at SupChina, Made in China journal, and his own site, “art of life in Chinese Central Asia.” He has also written specially about surveillance technologies in Xinjiang.
5:30 - Is it true that right-wing voices dominate the international conversation about the Uyghurs of Xinjiang? Why isn’t the international left more vocal?
9:50 – What is Xinjiang? Who are the Uyghurs? And how has the relationship between Uyghurs and Han (ethnic Chinese) people changed from the 1950s to the present? In recent decades, Xinjiang has become a source for energy resources, the cotton in our clothing, and the tomatoes in our food.
We recount the path from “opening up the west” (1990s) to “the people’s war on terror” (2000-10s) to the most recent “reeducation camps.”
21:05 – Darren argues that the moralistic paradigm of “cultural difference” and “ethnic genocide” are inadequate. He explains why we need a broader analysis of the social forces producing violence, exploitation, and state repression. Hint: capitalism?
Also, how has China appropriated the US’s rhetoric of “war on terror” to racialize the Muslim Uyghurs? Aka “I learned it by watching you, Dad!”
Referenced: a new report on Uyghur labor in export-oriented factories in China (Australian Strategic Policy Institute)
56:50 – What’s a good leftist to do? Is it okay to back right-wingers who call China morally evil? What are potential avenues for international solidarity (what about the Uyghur diaspora? the Chinese diaspora?)?
Also, Darren cites recommended reading on the region and tells us what traps to avoid — and also defends journalists at The New York Times (the ones who wrote this) against Andy’s snobbish dismissal of reportage!
Outro: an excerpt from “Uchrashqanda,” by the Uyghur singer and dutar player Abdurehim Heyit, who was imprisoned by the Chinese authorities and has not been heard from since last year.
Links:
Camp Album project: a multimedia collection by Xinjiang diaspora
The Xinjiang Documentation Project at the University of British Columbia
From the same site, Chinese translations of English publications on Xinjiang
Historian David Brophy’s modern account of the region
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from our galaxy brain!
This week, we begin with a brief chat about (social) media “cancel culture,” based on an open letter recently published in Harper’s. We then discuss a workplace controversy at the Boba Guys chain; the suicide of the mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, and what his death means in the context of South Korean feminism, per Tammy’s reporting; and a telling exchange about the NBA’s rules of wokeness between Republican US Senator Josh Hawley and ESPN NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski.
As always, thank you for listening and subscribing. Please spread the word and send feedback via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)!
0:57 – What are the boundaries of “free speech” on the Internet and in the minds of media elites? Who has the power to cancel whom?
7:29 – Why did the owners of Boba Guys go all out on “Black Lives Matter” while mistreating Black and Latinx employees, and what does their conduct reveal about Asian-American food culture?
31:00 – Why have so many high-profile South Korean men escaped accountability for gender-based misconduct and violence? What are the contours of Korea’s #MeToo movement?
56:19 – Is it right for the NBA to host games in Orlando during the pandemic? Should we support “Free Woj” or does the other side have a point about league-sanctioned political slogans? Is it good when radical politics become safe enough to adopt by profit-driven corporations? (also Jay tries to remember what the CLS kritik said.)
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Greetings from our USB microphones!
In this episode, we discuss ICE’s recent rule prohibiting international students from staying in the U.S. if their colleges go fully online. We also dig into questions of cross-race solidarity in the Black Lives Matter movement, especially regarding Latinx/brown communities. Finally, we answer our first sampling of listener questions.
As always, thank you for listening and subscribing. Please spread the word and continue to send feedback via Twitter (@ttsgpod) or email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com)!
5:09 – How would the ICE crackdown on international students work? Who is the real target (psst China), and what are the broader economic implications for universities and college towns? (i.e., Whither Stonybrook, NY’s glorious Chinese food?)
28:22 – Jennifer Medina wrote a provocative story in the New York Times on Latinx participation in the BLM movement and questions of fit: “Latinos Back Black Lives Matter Protests. They Want Change for Themselves, Too.” Can a focused movement be inclusive? How do we stand up for one another? Do we need to complicate the Black-white paradigm of race in America?
53:39 – We attempt to answer very smart questions about our episode on tankie-ism and alternatives to American and Chinese imperialism, how we should actually address anti-black racism in the Asian diaspora (see our post from a few weeks ago), and what a rewriting of Asian-American history (from Chinese Exclusion to Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Vincent Chin) might entail. Thanks to listeners Carlo, Michelle, Chung-chieh, and Sam for their questions. And apols to everyone whose messages we didn’t get to tackle.
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Greetings from Berkeley, Philadelphia, and Tacoma!
This week, we chat about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s recent essay on Asian America, race, and class (Time); the abolition of whiteness advocated by Jay’s former mentor, Noel Ignatiev; and the dead-ends and possibilities of race talk in media.
- Remember to keep sending us feedback and questions via Twitter at @ttsgpod or via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. *
3:35 – Nguyen’s article on the “trap of the ‘model minority’ stereotype.” In what ways is the category “Asian American” limiting, and in what ways is it enabling—or something we might productively transcend?
30:43 – How to be an Asian American race traitor: we discuss the journal Race Traitor, about “treason to whiteness,” and consider analogies to the professional Asian class. What’s the difference between the radical historians of whiteness and White Fragility? Can we practice anti-racist politics without reifying racial categories?
49:48 – Are diversity gestures in the media world distraction from or emulation of real social change?
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Hi, all:
Just Andy this time, with a Thursday edition bonus episode, in which I talk with Brian Hioe of New Bloom, a bilingual online magazine with radical analysis of Taiwan and East Asia.
On Monday, New Bloom published an explainer essay on the very confusing phenomenon of “tankies,” aka people who argue that the true leftist position is to support the Chinese Communist Party as a check on US imperialism. Most famously, tankies denounce the Hong Kong protests as bourgeois and right-wing, as puppets of US empire.
Their statements are at once funny and depressing, amusing and exhausting. I think Brian and I agree, though, that they are worth taking seriously because they reflect a very real set of tensions in global politics—with few clear solutions.
Whom do we “side with” in an increasingly closed-off, nationalistic world? Must critics of US foreign policy — and the long history of Euro-American colonialism and imperialism — choose other states to support instead? For a Gen Z critical of free-market neoliberalism, what “actually existing” alternatives are there to global capitalism?
The New Bloom piece explores these questions by examining the mysterious Qiao Collective, whose members ostensibly belong to the left-nationalist Chinese diaspora. When it comes to the Asian diaspora (though not unique to it), there is the always fun, extra ingredient of confused identity and an unfulfilled sense of belonging, heightened by local xenophobic rhetoric.
Given these factors, Brian fears that tankie ideology may continue to spread.
Issues we touch on:
Are Hong Kong’s protests “right-wing” if their citizens espouse xenophobia?
Is the category “diaspora,” or huaqiao 華僑, good or bad?
The Orientalism and self-orientalizing of tankies
Tankies and US Republicans as bizarro mirror images of one another
Is there potential for common dialogue? With tankies or with the everyday people of China?
!!!
Links:
New Bloom: “The Qiao Collective and Left Diasporic Chinese Nationalism”
Today (June 25) marks the 70-year anniversary of the start of the Korean War. KAP SEOL reminds us, “The US Didn’t Bring Freedom to South Korea — Its People Did” (Jacobin).
The Critical China Scholars group (new site) will hold the 2nd of two webinars next Thursday (July 2) on the topic of “Against Racism and Nationalism.” Register at eventbrite here.
A developing story worth monitoring is the border dispute between China and India, about one week old now. In India, there is now a call to boycott Chinese goods (most recently by hotels (SCMP), but analysts in India are skeptical if it’s even possible (The Quint). Worth paying attention to, if only because of the recent calls by other countries to decouple from China.
Under-the-radar news: the Trump administration this week exploited the coronavirus pandemic to extend a ban on multiple visas into the US, from “high-skilled” (H-1B) to seasonal labor (H-2B) and other categories. Early analysis here (Common Dreams).
Part of the hopeful wave of primary victories this week, Yuh-Line Niou successfully defended her seat against challenger Grace Lee in the Democratic primary for New York’s 65th Assembly District (including Wall Street and Chinatown). Beyond the superficial similarities of two Asian-American women running in the Democratic party, the two candidates represented different constituencies and political visions, a microcosm of the ongoing fight between liberals and progressives within the party (The Indypendent):
As always, feedback, questions, and comments are welcome.
On Twitter, @ttsgpod.
By email, timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.
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Hello from Oakland, Philadelphia, and New York!
It’s just the three of us this week, talking Koreaboos and soft power, protest goals, and, as promised, Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling book White Fragility.
But before we get into all that, a belated shout-out to our long-suffering audio editor (and master gardener) James Nicholson. And warm thanks to you, our dear listeners and subscribers. We hope to make this podcast and newsletter more interactive, so please be in touch with feedback and questions—which we may even answer on air! You can reach us via Twitter at @ttsgpod or via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. (We can keep you anonymous, if you’d like.)
2:57 – Can K-pop fans save us from Trump? Also: the contradictory racial politics of the BTS Army, hallyu (Korean wave) economics (hint: Jurassic Park), Jay on TikTok, and the vindicatory gift of the Koreaboo. This week’s segment on internalized racism: Tammy and Jay call out uncritical Korean nationalism.
37:27 – We check in on the protests in New York, the infamous South Philly videos, and Oakland. Jay provides a vicarious boost of internationalist energy from the longshoremen’s union and the great Angela Davis in Oakland. (Fact-check: the #1 busiest port in the US is not Oakland but LA–Long Beach).
54:13 – (White) people seem to love White Fragility. We discuss the incredible reach of its overly narrow remit (corporate diversity retreats) and wonder how to get America past “personal responsibility” race talk to an analysis aimed at social transformation. Does “white fragility” get in the way of structural change? And is Gen Z immune to an identity politics based on guilt and deference?
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Hello from the American rebellion!
A packed episode on the BLM protests from our vantage point as cynical Asians and former Seattle residents. (Yes, Mukilteo counts.) We discuss the evolving Capitol Hill Occupied Protest both at the top of the show and in the second half, when we interview special guest Dae Shik Kim, Jr., a Seattle-based journalist and activist.
We also get into the latest controversies on Asian American twitter, including a “chewy and bland” tweet about tofu and a handful of viral videos featuring racist Karens. On a more hopeful note, we talk about a writer we admire, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and her recent piece on the generational divide in black electoral politics.
1:06 – The ongoing occupation of Capitol Hill in Seattle and whether the city can successfully balance its focus on racism-specific issues with more general economic grievances (think “Tax Amazon”; her name is pronounced “Sha-ma”). Bonus: a bizarre Philly DSA statement.
15:02 – Bloomberg Asia’s bizarre tweet hating on tofu (screengrab because Bloomberg has since deleted it):
Also, why food seems so central to Asian American outrage, the timeless “cultural appropriation” debate, and how much we’d pay for an “authentic” Asian meal (not a lot!).
27:35 – This week, a couple videos of white women in California harassing Asian people went viral. Are these videos an appropriate way for Asians to link up with racial-justice struggles? Plus, a hobbyhorse of ours: Asians and the category “POC.”
39:56 – We unpack a recent piece by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor titled, “The End of Black Politics.” Tammy recently hosted a teach-in with Keeanga and Marc Lamont Hill.
47:25 – Seattle-based journalist and activist Dae Shik Kim, Jr. explains the ongoing Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. Why the name change from “autonomous zone”? What are the demands of the “decriminalize Seattle” group? Finally, how Dae Shik has processed this moment as a mixed-race (Korean and Black) person.
Also, a quick announcement: Andy will be participating in a webinar on Thursday (June 18, 7-830P US ET) hosted by a group of scholars of China who want to stake out a left politics against both US and Chinese nationalism. If you’re interested, please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/left-perspectives-on-the-world-and-china-part-one-tickets-109214433310
Below, a brief description and poster:
Viral Politics: Left Perspectives on the World and China, Part One
by Verso Books
The COVID-19 pandemic has become the latest locus of growing US-China tensions, opening crucial conversations for the international left related to the principles of anti-capitalism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism.
As critical scholars of China, we will take up these issues in a two-part webinar series.
We begin with the questions: How can we move from scapegoating China to developing an analysis of capitalism, authoritarianism and imperialism as global systems that produce crises and injustices? How can we address proliferating social inequalities, political oppression, and environmental degradation amid geopolitical tensions? How do we counter China-bashing abroad without sidelining the legitimate concerns of Chinese citizens and social movements in China? How do we address rising xenophobia, racism, and nationalism in pandemic times? And, what is the role of China scholars in producing critical knowledge and engaging with political questions?
Co-sponsored by:
Haymarket Books, n+1, Made in China Journal, The Nation, New Politics, The Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), Spectre Journal, and Justice is Global
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello! This is our freshest recording yet—part one made just hours ago.
In this episode, we talk about the latest hotspot in the Black Lives Matter uprising: Seattle, near where Andy and Tammy grew up and where Jay has family; and Jay and Andy review the new ESPN documentary on Bruce Lee. We then welcome our special guest (and Andy’s friend and fellow Philadelphian) Nikil Saval, the presumptive winner(!) of a seat in the Pennsylvania State Senate. (There is no Republican in the race.) Follow the results with us here.
3:24 - Jay packs his bags for the anarcho-socialist(?), abolitionist commune of Capitol Hill, Seattle. Why such radical resistance in Bezosland? Where does the uprising go from here?
(Andy’s audio fails for a bit at 13:15; keep listening!)
20:12 - Is Be Water, the Bruce Lee documentary, any good? Does it go beyond representational politics and potted history? Andy and Jay offer their thoughts. (Tammy hasn’t seen it but chimes in anyway.)
30:08 - We speak with Nikil Saval (taped Sunday, June 7, 2020) about his recent primary election for State Senate district 1 in Pennsylvania. Nikil gives an update on the votes and talks about balancing his two lives as writer and as labor organizer.
Also: Nikil explains how his South Asian background was brought into the campaign and how he had to parry his opponent’s nativist strategy. He discusses how Covid-19 and then the Floyd protests changed the tenor of the campaign.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
A special welcome to all new subscribers!
Today’s episode is about the murder of George Floyd and the actions around the country.
A few days ago, Jay wrote in our newsletter about Tou Thao, the Hmong cop who participated in Floyd’s killing, and “the myths of Asian American solidarity.” Jay describes what motivated this post, and we discuss when Asian American self-reflection is useful versus narcissistic
Tammy and Jay describe the protests they attended in Brooklyn and Oakland, respectively, over the weekend (May 29 and 30). We also discuss the allegation—made by local, state, and national officials as well as liberal media—that the uprisings in Minneapolis and other cities have been the work of “outside agitators.” Finally, Andy asks whether having an international spotlight on these protests could serve progressive ends.
0:30- We discuss Jay’s essay, “Tou Thao and the Myths of Asian American Solidarity,” which preceded the first Minnesota protests.
5:45 - Street updates from Tammy (Brooklyn) and Jay (Oakland).
26:50- Tammy explains the theory and practice of mutual aid, and we unpack the unsubstantiated news of “outside agitators.” (Note that the Minneapolis government retracted this claim after an investigation into arrest records, but other parties have continued to run with it.)
59:20- Andy lays out a bizarre parallel: American conservatives support the Hong Kong protests but denounce Black Lives Matter; tankies believe the opposite. Could this moment present an opportunity for international solidarity? How might we use international criticism of the U.S. to support a left agenda?
ABOUT US
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
In this episode, we chat about relocating during the pandemic, reading (or, in Jay’s case, not reading) physical books, and the University of California system’s recent decision to suspend use of the SAT in admissions.
We then give a transnational welcome to Jenny Chan, professor of sociology and China studies at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and co-author of the forthcoming book, Dying for an iPhone. Jenny has devoted the last decade to researching labor conditions and activism in China, especially at Foxconn plants, where migrants and student “interns” build Apple gadgets for export. She speaks with us about the global struggle for workers’ rights and what Beijing’s recent crackdown on Hong Kong means for her community.
1:03 - Andy outs himself as someone who(se employer) hires people to pack his belongings.
5:45 - Is the UC’s rejection of the SAT “anti-Asian”? How do we change the zero-sum game of higher education and prevent Asian American students from getting red-pilled? For background, read Jay’s story on Asian Americans and affirmative action.
20:39 - Does the mainstream debate over affirmative action force progressive Asian Americans to act against their own self-interest? Bonus: a ZIP code thought experiment, and why freshman Bill Chang does not want to room with his best friend Bill Chang.
30:16 - Jenny explains how Hong Kongers are dealing with the coronavirus and reacting to a new national security law proposed by the central government in Beijing, bypassing Hong Kong. She is hopeful that Hong Kongers will continue to fight for their democratic values.
38:16 - Jenny discusses her work on labor issues in the region. In Hong Kong, democracy protests have spurred a historic rise of unionization; in China, labor activists have battled employers and the state, even in the face of repressive tactics. She tells us why people around the world should care about China’s working class.
51:06 - Is China the next logical site of a mass labor movement? With a workforce of nearly one billion people, it seems to offer the greatest potential. Elite Chinese university students have taken notice, too, and are organizing in solidarity with workers. Jenny discusses how their generation has been shaped by the negative consequences of globalization.
ABOUT US
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
We’re extremely excited about today’s episode, which includes a lengthy interview with Mike Davis, a friend of the international working class and the author of works such as Prisoners of the American Dream, City of Quartz, and Planet of Slums. We talk about “this moment,” and the need for dissent, street protest and the refusal of the false choice laid out in front of working people between risking their health and complete financial ruin. He also tells us about his rock collection.
Mike has been writing and giving a lot of interviews during the pandemic, as many have discovered his prophetic 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. And earlier this year, Mike and his friend, Jon Wiener, published Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a stunning history of social movements—led by black, Chicano, and Asian Angelenos—that reads like a playbook for organizing against our terrible present.
1:20 - Mike describes his holed-up multigenerational homelife in San Diego—with his wife, the curator and professor Alessandra Montezuma, twin high-schoolers, and Alessandra’s aunt. Also: why working-class leftists should protest the false choice of lockdown or death; and why Biden should be more like AOC. “We cannot yield the street,” Mike tells us.
18:08 - Central to the US Covid response has been the literal sacrifice of elders and disabled people in nursing homes. Mike tells us why this constitutes manslaughter, and predicts that Filipino/a health care workers may be among the top casualties of the pandemic. Plus: why food insecurity in Africa, South Asia, and South America should be everyone’s concern.
35:48 - “The Yellow Peril is back,” Mike says. He talks about Trump’s and Biden’s demonization of China, and their neglect of the risk of nuclear war. And he explains why “the world described in Karl Marx’s Capital is most true in China.”
55:00 - Mike is still in touch with white working-class pals from 1952 (some of them Trumpers). He describes multiculturalist thinking as “Janus-faced,” but praises young activists, including his twins, for their instinctively radical conceptions of race, class, and gender.
1:08:43 - Can housing organizing be as powerful a vehicle for working-class movements as labor organizing? Mike offers a historical perspective. And a Time to Say Goodbye exclusive: Mike’s extensive rock collection.
ABOUT US
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello from the US lockdown!
It’s just the three of us this episode, chatting about soggy bread and soggier humans—and all things China, America’s best frenemy and the official scapegoat of the 2020 election.
1:00 - What's the deal with focaccia? Tammy loves it, but Jay and Andy associate it with terrible sandwiches on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
3:17 - The Goopy cook and columnist Alison Roman got semi-canceled last week. We unwisely weigh in on this racialized controversy among wealthy celebrity foodies and lifestyle-brand influencers.
7:43 - In honor of Asian American Pacific Islander heritage month, we debate the utility of panels. Why so many? Are they capable of tackling broader structures and patterns, or do they necessarily champion capitalistic upward mobility? Also: the historian checklist of Yellow Peril, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin; the meaning and coherence of “AAPI”; and the often reactionary history of global pan-Asianism.
24:10 - Trump is predictably blaming China for Covid-19 and everything wrong with his administration, and the Republicans have circulated a template for anti-Beijing electioneering. What does this leaked GOP strategy brief (aka the O’Donnell Memo) say? And why have the Democrats, too, gone all in on China bashing? Hint: polling numbers. Also - What really happened in China at the start of the pandemic? Is “wet market” out and “bat laboratory” in? Bonus: how US nationalism produces Chinese patriotism and whether we’re headed for another Cold War.
ABOUT US
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Happy belated May 1st, international workers’ day!
This episode is about organizing and health care “heroes.”
We talk about cheering for essential workers, Whitmanesque yawps and coyote mewls, and the politics of “shelter in place.” Why are liberals so angry at people who need to get some air? And what’s behind right-wing protests at state capitals? We consider the underlying grievances and explore the possibility of class-based organizing.
Our guest, in the second half, is Tre Kwon, an ICU nurse in Manhattan, a shop steward for the New York State Nurses Association, a new mom, and an editor at Left Voice, an international socialist publication. Tre tells us why she gave up half her maternity leave to resume nursing and what she hopes the pandemic will produce in the way of social change.
1:11 - How do we maintain community in a world of social distancing? Tammy describes the nightly ritual of cheering (or playing Korean gongs) for health care workers in New York. Jay recounts his Oakland neighbors’ routine of howling and bongo drums.
5:53 - American cities are beginning to hire contact tracers to address Covid-19. Is something resembling the South Korean model possible in the US? Will Americans tolerate it, and can it work with the number of cases continuing to increase?
13:36 - Could contact tracing become a major jobs program? Mulling nationalization and its five government proponents.
21:57 - The debate over whether or not to reopen the economy is dominated by right-wing talking points versus liberal “Nimby” moralism. Why don’t leftists respond more forcefully to the economic disaster felt by the working class and the poor? Jay unleashes a bottled-up rant. Andy contextualizes the language of “freedom.”
37:58 - Tre describes the reality of corporate, for-profit medicine and explains why she and her colleagues could foresee the disaster of the pandemic. Also: why we can’t count on Democrats to save us.
47:06 - What good are small-scale protests and work stoppages? Tre digs into rage at work, the radicalizing nature of care labor, and why unions, despite their flaws, must be a central pillar of left politics.
ABOUT US
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
This episode is about the politics of the Asian diaspora.
We explain why we named our podcast Time to Say Goodbye and update one another on quarantine pickling (to Maangchi or not to Maangchi?). We then tackle the more serious topic of Asian American politics: How might we move beyond “seat at the table,” professional-class concerns and embrace an “internationalist” perspective that looks to Asia?
Andy tells us about his new book, published just last week, which leads to a brief discussion of scholarly trends and why Asian history—that of China and India, in this case—deserves to be studied not only through the lens of tradition and culture but also political economy.
In the second half, we speak with Wilfred Chan, a freelance reporter, contributing writer at The Nation, and activist based in New York. Oh, and Andy’s former student! Check out Wilfred’s writing on the 2019 Hong Kong protests and the Lausan 流傘 collective, New York City’s “essential” food couriers, and the WHO’s costly discrimination against Taiwan.
1:20 - We answer the burning question of why we’re called Time to Say Goodbye. (Spoiler: Jay loves old-people karaoke; Tammy felt outvoted; Andy just didn’t want to be fired.) Plus disquisitions on authentic YouTube cooking.
9:43 - The last thing the world needs is another podcast, so why us? We assess the state of Asian America and explain why we’re in favor of swerving left.
16:46 - Everyone nerds out in honor of Andy’s new book, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India. Also: the academy’s renewed interest in capitalism, the eighteenth-century French Physiocrats, Jay and Andy’s debate-team credentials and how Agamben (an Italian philosopher) got dunked on.
33:40 - Wilfred tells us about his journey from Seattle to New York to writing for CNN in Hong Kong, and how he got politicized.
53:00- We ask Wilfred about the “false choice” familiar to many within the Asian diaspora—between criticizing anti-Asian racism and blindly defending the governments and corporations in Asia (China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.).
ABOUT US
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to Time To Say Goodbye!
Today, we have a bonus episode for you about Korean coronavirus test-and-trace—with Max Kim, a journalist living in Seoul who recently wrote a lengthy article for the New Yorkeras well as an informative and timely piece a few months back for the MIT Technology Review.
We are still experimenting with the format of these emails, so today we thought we’d highlight some of the points we discussed with Max.
1:13 - How the Korean response to Covid-19 was a direct result of a failed response to the MERS epidemic in 2015.
10:39 - How the first days of Covid-19 felt and how quickly the Korean CDC sprung into action with a broad testing program.
16:01 - How Korea “rehearsed” for Covid-19 and how it got a little lucky.
20:40 - What are the actual strategies we can learn from Korea? And what are the particulars of the Korean test-and-trace program?
26:00 - Are there concerns about privacy in Korea? How are they processed?
34:30 - Could Korea have accomplished what it did without universal health care?
38:00 - The million-dollar question: Can we do test-and-trace in America?
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
EPISODE 2: African Guangzhou and Coronavoting in Korea
Hello!
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the upcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.
Today’s show is about markets and mandates.
The large African immigrant community in Guangzhou, in southern China, has faced persecution on Covid-19 grounds. We discuss this in the context of China-Africa relations and global racism. Soapboxing about: trade routes, multiculturalism, and ancient explanatory power.
We return, regrettably, to the topic of Asian American discrimination, America-first navel-gazing, and what it means to declare: “Chinatown is not in China.”
Then we welcome our first guest, Victoria Kim, Seoul correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Victoria tells us about last week’s midterm parliamentary elections in South Korea, the first national vote of the pandemic era. What can we learn from Korea’s election protocols? Why did voters turn out in such large numbers? How has Korea’s successful response to the virus affected its reputation abroad? And how might the ruling liberal Democrats parlay their landslide victory?
Show notes:
3:05 – Why are Chinese people lashing out against Guangzhou’s African immigrant community? What are the international implications and, without resorting to pop anthropology, can we draw parallels to the xenophobia in the U.S.? The latest, plus background here and here.
26:30 – Does a second-generation Chinese American doctor deserve to get “hate-crimed” less than a new immigrant laborer from Hong Kong? Discrimination takes from an Asian American éminence grise and a Joy Luck Club alumna.
40:01 – The brilliant Victoria Kim of the Los Angeles Times, on electoral politics and life in a functioning democracy. Sigh. Her coverage of record turnout, the woolly future of human contact, and all things South Korea.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
Hello!
Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.
A short introduction to your hosts:
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the upcoming book The Loneliest Americans.
E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.
Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.
Today’s show is about travel and opulence.
We trace the Pangolin market and its wealthy consumers. We then tell you about the city of Wuhan and how its place in the economy all but ensured a global spread of Covid-19. Included in the discussion: supply chains, business travel, car-parts manufacturing, and tourism.
We move on to masks and South Korea. Tammy tells us about her recent article in the New York Times, on the government’s efforts to prevent price-gouging and distribute masks through local pharmacies. We talk about why Westerners weren’t initially keen to adopt the mask, then rapidly changed their mind over the past few weeks, at least in the United States.
Last, we explore Andrew Yang’s infamous op-ed in the Washington Post—and the backlash.
Show notes:
2:41 – Korean quarantine for international travelers. A description of what it’s like here.
6:15 – How coronavirus spread, the politics of the “wet market,” and pangolins. Andy’s article about China and mundane forms of global transmission, plus a follow-up opinion piece here.
45:00 – Why did Americans resist wearing masks? Tammy’s article, with lessons from South Korea, and her interview with a lead Korean doctor here.
1:12 – Obligatory conversation about Andrew Yang’s op-ed.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe