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: 

* Alex’s post-election editorial for In These Times

* 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. 

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 immigration-family-detention.html">a potential reinstatement of family detention 

* Hannah Dreier’s NYT report about migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html">migrant child labor in the U.S.

* fire-ciudad-juarez.html">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. 

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: 

* 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. 

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: magazine.com/article/universal-child-care-portland/">Child Care: The Radical is Popular

Also read:

* James Butler on the social care crisis in the U.K. 

* Dana Goldstein on care-centers-private-equity.html">child care and private equity 

* fleishman-is-in-trouble-effect.html">The ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ Effect (i.e. wealthy parents’ version of this crisis) 

* More on care-chip-makers-biden.html">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. 

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   

* A Kentucky worker on “How We’re Fighting for a Union at Amazon’s Biggest Air Hub”

* 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, to-seoul-davy-chou-laure-badufle.html">“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: evita-saraswati-ethnicity-lgbtq-racial-identity-philadelphia-community-harm-20230320.html">“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. 

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: 

* movement-feminism-south-korea.html">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. 

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: 

* 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. 

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: 

* Our recent episode with train conductor Nick Wurst

* Field trips to East Palestine, Ohio, by Senator J.D. Vance and Trump

* Tema Okun’s interview with Ryan Grimm of The Intercept

* 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. 

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: 

* Ted Chiang on super intelligence and capitalism 

* 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. 

* A compelling history of A.I. by Stephanie Dick 

* 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. 

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. 

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-trade-mavericks.html">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 tr-is-not-an-art-monster.html">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.

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: 

* 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

* Accusations of racism in the prosecution of NYPD officer Peter Liang

* More people killed by police in 2022 than in any other year in the past decade, according to Mapping Police Violence

* Oakland’s Anti Police-Terror Project

* Cultures of violence in police departments and special units: 

* Rise Of The Warrior Cop by Radley Balko

* The Riders Come Out at Night by Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham

* We Own This City by Justin Fenton

* The killing of Amadou Diallo, which led to the disbanding of NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit

* The L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy-Gang Crisis

* Similar dynamics within the military (correction: from NYT, not ProPublica): seal-training-death.html">Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs 

* The Oakland Police Department’s extended recruitment video

* A worker shortage across government: It’s Not Just a Police Problem, Americans Are Opting Out of Government Jobs

* 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: 

* Racial dynamics in recent mass shootings: Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay, and who owns a tragedy

* 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”

* Abolition as practice: 

* How not to think like a cop, with Naomi Murakawa

* "I want you to care when people are still alive," with Yves Tong Nguyen of Red Canary Song

* "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. 

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. Jay expanded on these ideas in this essay for TTSG.) 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 magazine.com/article/disability-books/">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. 

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 cold-hard-lessons-of-mobile-home-u.html">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 cause-eviction-passing.html">robust tenant protections to social housing, coops, community land trusts, and eviction-port-morris-bronx.html">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 homeless-mental-health-plan.html">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 magazine.com/article/mike-davis/">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.

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 university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html">Hamline University adjunct’s firing.) We also touch on [21:32] the floor-confrontation-gaetz-rogers.html">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 everything-guide-to-george-santoss-lies.html">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.

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! 

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 podcasts-2022-chat-comedy-history-politics.html">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.

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! 

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 union-strike.html">Starbucks, school-parsons-strike-walkout.html">The New School, and strike.html">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-crowd-crush.html">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 lynd-dead.html">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!

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. 

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! 

Hello from Jay’s trick-or-treating route! 

This week, Jay affirmativeaction-supreme-court.html">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 action-asian-american-bias.html">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. 

If you missed our early episode with Mike, you can listen here or read the transcript.

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. 

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:  

* The political dimensions of K-12 school lotteries

* A post-affirmative action world

* Midterm election hotspots (plus: the effects of labor power and anti-Asian sentiment) 

* 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 segregation-pollution.html">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. 

+ RSVPs open this afternoon for 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!

+ 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. 

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 korea-us-nuclear.html">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. 

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. 

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. 

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 magazine.com/article/raven-leilani-needs-to-know-how-her-characters-pay-rent/">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!

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 university-us-news-ranking.html">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!

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 korea-autism-extraordinary-attorney-woo.html">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!

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 debt-economy.html">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!

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. 

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. 

Hello from Mai's high-speed European train! 

This week, Tammy and Jay watch “film.com/">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). 

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. 

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 zeya-thaw-dead.html">Phyo Zeya Thaw and now.org/en/news/myanmar-junta-executes-four-political-prisoners">Ko Jimmy. These judicial is-the-country-of-great-deaths.html">executions, the first since the 1980s, shocked even those inside Myanmar, where extrajudicial murders and widespread arrests have been 05172022210115.html">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. 

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 s-Coffee-takes-the-cultural-appropriation-17293192.php">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 magazine.com/article/our-animals-ourselves/">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. 

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 manchin-didnt-kill-biden-democrats-agenda-alone.html">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 analysis-2022-midterms.html">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. 

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 social-housing-can-save-California-from-a-17271843.php">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!

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!

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!

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 economy-recession.html">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!

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 professor-jed-rubenfeld-suspended-for-sexual-harassment.html">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.

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!

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 guns-senate-republicans.html">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!

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 taiwan-china.html">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!

Hello from Prague!

Tammy tells us about her travels through Czech Republic, and Jay describes his favorite of-the-country-cioppino-fish-stew-from-the-pacific.html?sec=travel&pagewanted=print">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, philippine-election.html">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!

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: bans-restrictons-roe-v-wade.html">the state of abortion rights today, judicial activism, magazine.com/article/editors-note-3/">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!

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!

Hello from a reunited podsquad, each back in their natural habitat!

This week, taking off from an essay by scare-culture-wars.html">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!

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, union-labor.html">traditional/large versus small/independent unions, and the democrats-really-want-amazons-workers-to-win.html">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.

And subscribe via Substack or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod.

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 reed-controversy.html">charge against him of “class reductionism” (NYTreed-controversy.html">), 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 (2.pdf">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

You can subscribe via substack or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

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!

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 rogan-covid.html">few recent disinformation-education.html">pieces on disinformation and livestream-videos.html">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

You can subscribe via substack or https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

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

https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

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 xi-jinping-russia-china.html">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

https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

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

https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

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. board-recall.html">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? francisco-school-board-recall-asian-americans.html">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

https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

https://www.patreon.com/ttsgpod

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.

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!

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!

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 food-prices-inflation.html">this New York Timesfood-prices-inflation.html"> 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!

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.” wax-penn-law-racism-asian-immigration-20220114.html">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 greene-twitter.html">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!

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 school-closures.html">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.

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 didion-influence-writers.html">Joan Didion, bell hooks, and historian spence-dead.html">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!

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

Thanks for listening and spreading the word. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!

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 Virginia-Post-Election-Research.pdf">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 Timeselection-polls.html"> 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, closed-fridays-remote-learning.html">school closures, the economy and Covid stimulus plans, and supply chains.

17:40 – The prospect of Asian and Latino voters going Republican (see vote-election-politics.html">Jay’s pieces on democrat-asian-voter.html">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.

Thanks for your support! Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!

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 crypto-art.html">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!

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.

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 Timeschain-trucks-south-carolina-ports.html">, 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.

Thanks for your support. Please subscribe and stay in touch via Patreon and Substack, email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com) and Twitter!

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!

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!

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 Memoir by Jenny Heijun Wills

On November 16, Also-Known-As will host an event with immigration-korea.html">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!

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!

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 “american-workers-battle-for-power-amid-labor-crunch-202634154.html">Striketober.” From John Deere to Hollywood to healthcare, we are seeing record quitting-august.html">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 climate-biden.html">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!

Hello from a spicy group chat!

This week, we begin by celebrating the release of Jay’s book, The Loneliest Americans, which was just american-identity.html">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) v-larson.html">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

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!

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 americans.html">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 Ono-AsAm-St-after-Critical-Mass.pdf#page=137">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”

* economic-impact.html">Myths about immigration

* Why “Abolish ICE” isn’t nearly enough

* Recommended reads by Harsha Walia and bridges-not-walls.html%20">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!

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 recall-orange-county.html">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!

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 vaccines.html">new vaccine mandate and the current discourse around “the unvaccinated.” Are we too un/sympathetic to the material constraints of delta-vaccines-unvaccinated.html">poor and working-class people who haven’t been vaccinated? Is vaccine skepticism a reflection of the US’s science-trust-us.html">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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* Substack: 

(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.

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 majority-white-media.html">media misfires of 1968.

* Who is teen TikToker Charli D’Amelio, and why does her whole family dixie-damelio-hulu-show.html">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.

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 22-california-ruling.html">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 civilian-casualties-iraq-airstrikes.html">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.

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:

the-left-can-save-globalization-now.html">“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!

Please share, contact us, and subscribe!

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* Twitter + DM: https://twitter.com/ttsgpod

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* Substack: 

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!

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 san-hair.html">for… having short hair. Why are so many young men emoji-feminism-misogyny.html">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.

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 peck-young-karl-marx-film-director-i-am-not-your-negro-communist-manifesto-a8330811.html">make this movie? france.net/fffh/the-buzz/raoul-pecks-the-young-karl-marx/">(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 marx-a-life-by-rachel-holmes.html">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!

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, joseph-haiti-stepping-down.html">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., is-the-Covid-19-surge-impacting-in-San-16321854.php">especially in Black and Latino communities. How do these numbers square with covid-19-vaccine.html">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-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html">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 rachel-nichols-maria-taylor.html">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.

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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

housing-california.html">How Berkeley Beat Back NIMBYs in NYTimes Opinion

Who are the PHIMBYs? in LA Mag

An interview with Ananya Roy

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.

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, us.org/pdfs/cadreschool/fields.pdf">"Slavery, Race and Ideology in the USA"

Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag

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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 covid-wuhan-lab-leak.html">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.

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?

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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.

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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!

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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.)

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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.

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!

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??

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