Today’s episode is an interview with Carrie Sun, whose memoir PRIVATE EQUITY came out yesterday. (Buy it here!) The book is a memoir about the time Carrie spent working as the right hand for one of the country’s most famous billionaire hedge fund managers. We talk about the allure of finance and Wall Street, Ishiguro and restraint in writing, the ways in which political awakenings can sometimes be quite mundane in their origins, and a lot more about this wonderful book. If you’re a fan of everything from Ishiguro to Michael Lewis, this book is worth checking out, especially if you want to see what its like to work in a place where there are daily exploitations, insane expectations, but also sometimes there’s a bag on your desk and there’s a $2000 pair of leggings inside.
Enjoy!
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Today, we talk about the Apple Vision Pro and its grim vision for how you should be spending your time. Also, we talk a lot about Jaron Lanier’s most recent essay about the Virtual Reality in the New Yorker, specifically the question he poses about how technology should fit into our lives and whether tech can just create things because they’re cool without affixing their products to some greater mission for humanity.
The Apple Vision Pro doesn’t come with any story about how its going to change everything or even a particularly great series of launch apps that feel revolutionary. It just kinda is a VR headset that asks you to wear it around all the time. Lanier’s essay, as we discuss, asks whether “all the time” technology actually makes sense.
ENJOY!
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This week we have on Musa Al-Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. We talk a lot about “kids these days” and the tendency for all sorts of reactionaries to blame them for everything that’s wrong with this country. Don’t like illiberal attitudes on campuses? Blame the kids. Do you think free expression is at risk? Blame the kids. Feel like democracy is on the brink of collapse? Blame the kids.
(As always, if you’re reading this and not subscribed to our substack or Patreon, please consider supporting the show at goodbye.substack.com. It’s just $5 a month and helps us keep it going.)
Musa’s work is a critical intervention into all this kid blaming and we talk about the actual problem: Adults these days. We also touch on teachers, peer review as gatekeeping, and much more!
Here’s some info on Musa’s upcoming book from Princeton University PRess, which I encourage everyone to pre-order.
A piece he wrote outlining the problem with people saying “the kids these days” are responsible for everything that’s wrong with the discourse.
This week, we talk about the big Polyamory article in New York Magazine and the proposition that breaking the bonds of monogamy might be a political statement, one that frees both sides from the constraints of marriage. Are we just reinventing ways to justify selfish behavior? And why does every personal decision in the lives of upper middle class, well-educated people need to turn into some movement that promises nothing?
We also continue our ongoing talk about visions of the climate future with a conversation about “Psalm for the Wild Built” by Becky Chambers, which, in turn, led to a longer conversation about surf movies and Tyler’s hobby of fishing at 3 AM in a wetsuit in the cold unruly waters of coastal Maine.
Enjoy!
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In today’s episode, we talk about Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower,” a science fiction novel from 1992 that unexpectedly found itself on the best seller’s list in 2020. The novel imagines a violent and grim future in which the world has warmed beyond safe inhabitation, the lucky get to live in walled off communities while the poor all kill one another in the streets. We talk about visions of climate apocalypse and how Butler, through no fault of her own, might have created a hegemonic vision of a warmed earth, one that has become almost cliche in the thirty years since Sower’s publication. Why don’t we have other, new visions for climate death? What would those even look like?
We also get a bit into a recent article in The Atlanticabout Butler and her use of “historofuturism” in her work.
And we talk a bit about the state of the Black quarterback and muse on why Lamar Jackson might get a more traditional, sports-talk-racist treatment than other Black quarterbacks in the league.
We will be continuing our look into extinction literature next week with a look at Becky Chambers’s “A Psalm for the Wild-Built.” If you’d like to read it before the show, please do so!
As always, if you’d like to upgrade your subscription and help support the show, we rely on your contributions to keep it going. Please click over and help us for $5 a month!
— TTSG
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I’m very excited to announce that Tyler Austin Harper will be our co-host for the next month or so.
Tyler was on the show last month and introduced himself then, but for those who missed it, he’s a writer at the Atlantic and a professor of literature in the environmental studies department at Bates College. He specializes in extinction literature and film.
For the next month or so, Tyler and I are going to talk to guests and to one another about a variety of topics, including literature and movies. In this episode, for example, you’ll find a “Book Corner” at the end where we talk about the rise of true crime podcasts and a recent op-ed in the Times.
As always, if you’re getting this email and want to support the show, please subscribe for $5 a month and you’ll receive access to our Discord server, where all these things are discussed at great length.
thank you!
Jay
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Today we have a great interview with Nithya Raman, the City Councilmember for Los Angeles’s District 4. We talk about housing, the despair around the homelessness problem in California’s biggest cities, and whether there might be a different future for the city’s political machine.
My interest in Councilmember Raman started back when I was writing the newsletter for the Times because there was an effort by some of the more powerful local politicians to redraw her district in ways that would both disenfranchise many of the people who had voted for her to be their representative but also seemed to reflect the unrelenting power of homeowners in Southern California.
You can read some of those pieces here, here, and here.
What became clear to me during the reporting of those pieces was that Mike Davis was right when he wrote “the most powerful ‘social movement’ in contemporary Southern California is that of affluent homeowners, organized by notional community designations or tract names, engaged in the defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity.”
The real battle in California, then, is between the self interests of homeowners to protect their value and the “character” of their neighborhoods and the best interests of everyone else. This is not a fight that follows basic partisan lines nor is it one that really has much coherence to it, but it’s the fight that every politician in California, especially in Los Angeles or here in the Bay Area, must navigate to get anything done.
Nithya and I talked about all that and the massive scandal in the Los Angeles City Council in 2022, where Latino members of the council and labor leaders were caught on tape making bigoted statements about pretty much every other group in the city. What those tapes revealed, at least to me, was how a type of identity politics actually functioned in the country’s second biggest city.
In our Discord server, which you can access by subscribing to the show for a measly $5 a month, a user asked me to not do shows about sports. I took this request seriously as I generally aim to please, but am sad to announce that after much deliberation, I do think it’s worth having a conversation about a very distinct phenomenon I’ve observed over the past few years.
As recently as 2020, it was difficult to have a conversation about sports without bringing in all that “politics.” LeBron was talking about Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. The NFL, still enmeshed in the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick, put together a variety of initiatives around ending racism or whatever. The NBA had its weird bubble spectacle with all its Nike approved slogans on every surface possible, including the player jerseys.
Today, almost all of that is gone. Sports coverage, for the most part, feels explicitly apolitical. Even the NBA’s big concession post the summer of 2020 — that they would not play any games on election days and use their arenas as polling sites — came and went this year without any real interruption to what had become a non-stop In Season Tournament hype cycle.
Are we in a period of overcorrection? To discuss this question, I brought on Bradford William Davis, an investigative sports journalist and a former sports columnist at the New York Daily News.
Today on the show, we have Tyler Austin Harper, a literary scholar and an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College. We talk about the history of extinction literature, the books that tech moguls read and the vision it inspires, the dangers of science fiction and all that’s happening in the Ivy Leagues right now.
0:00 - Jay talks about the new direction of the show, which for now will be a “degenerate Asian version of In Our Time.”
2:40-6:00 - Jay and Tyler talk about Maine and the L.L. Bean outlet.
7:00-34:00 - EXTINCTION LITERATURE TALK
34:00- end - How to think about what’s happening on campus, the need to address concerns about double standards in speech with seriousness and good faith, and a defense of DEI programs.
You should read Tyler’s work as well. Here are some links
Lastly, I wanted to put in a short message here about the future of the show. As noted, the show will still continue and while there’s no definitive plan yet on what the next months will look like, there will still be episodes and an ongoing assessment of what’s working and what’s not. Obviously, the show will not be the same without Tammy, but the community we built over the past three and a half years has always been extremely important to me and not something I take for granted. If you have any suggestions or complaints or whatever, please feel free to email me at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. I’m extremely grateful for all of your support over all these years and I want you to know that you also have a say in what comes next.
thanks
Jay
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe
For Tammy’s final ep as co-host, we answer questions from our beloved subscribers. Thank you for asking us to ponder:
* Vice, Jezebel, and the loss of irreverent digital media
* What makes podcasting so terrifying (and freeing)
* Biden vs. Trump in early polls + in Tammy’s reporting on young voters
* Our worst takes from 3.5 years of blabbering
* Whether TTSG was a guerilla marketing campaign for Jay’s book
To get Tammy’s infrequent writing updates (soon replacing her TinyLetter, R.I.P.), sign up here, and find links to her older work here. You can also keep in touch via email and follow her on Instagram for eventual zine-y things!
Mai can be reached via email, but apologizes in advance for her dismal reply rate.
