Author: Time To Say Goodbye

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. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from our normal, boring lives! 

Tammy returns from her reporting trip out West, and Jay is back at work after taking half his parental leave. It’s just us this week, talking through [3:20] the political disaster that has unfolded around the derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio. Plus, [28:25] a new Intercept interview with D.E.I. consultant Tema Okun, about her viral paper “White Supremacy Culture.”

In this episode, we ask: 

Have we learned anything since the 2016 election about the risk of ignoring working-class communities? 

How should the Democrats have responded to the derailment? 

Why are people so obsessed with the term “white supremacy”? What anxieties does it mask? 

Are diversity trainings really necessary? 

For more, see: 

* 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. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from a sci-fi future!

Tammy’s on a reporting trip this week, so it’s just Jay talking to our guest Ben Recht, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. We talk about the history of artificial intelligence, the new bots from Open AI (ChatGPT) and Microsoft (Bing A.I.), and share some of the reasons why they are both skeptical but also kinda impressed. 

In this episode, we ask:

Well, what really is A.I., and how does it differ from machine learning?

Is this Silicon Valley hype cycle any more believable than those we were sold on crypto, Web3, and the metaverse?

What is the actual technology behind ChatGPT? What’s so special about it?

Where do we get our doomsday fantasies from, and how worried should we really be?

Is the remedy for bad AI takes just better science fiction? 

How is A.I. Doomerism like Scientology? 

To read more, see: 

* 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. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from an ongoing ecological disaster! 

Our guest this week is Nick Wurst, a freight-rail conductor and a member of the SMART-TD union, who joined Tammy and Jay after an overnight shift. Nick is also a socialist and a member-organizer with Railroad Workers United, a cross-union solidarity organization. He was featured in Tammy’s recent New Yorker piece about the state of union power in the U.S. 

On Friday, February 3, a train carrying volatile chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing dangerous fumes and forcing the town to evacuate. State and federal authorities encouraged residents to return to their homes after a “successful” controlled release of the substances, but many are skeptical that the air is safe to breathe, given reports of animals dying en masse, highly acidic rain, and the post-industrial area’s baseline pollution levels. 

Nick explains how corporate avarice—encapsulated in the ideology of “precision scheduled railroading”—and government complicity led to this dangerous derailment. He tells Jay and Tammy how railroad companies successfully lobbied against common-sense safety regulations, and what feels different about this disaster, despite rising rates of train derailment. Nick connects the accident in Ohio to last year’s threatened rail strike, a fight which was widely mischaracterized and eventually squashed by Biden and a Democratic Congress. How drastically has precision scheduled railroading changed conditions on the railroads? What can be done to rein in this greedy industry and the existential dangers it poses to us all?  

Thanks for listening. Subscribe on Substack or Patreon to join our Discord and participate in an upcoming movie night with Jay, Tammy, and fellow listeners, and to vote on the movie pick! As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from Juilliard! 

This week, our friend Vinson Cunningham, award-winning critic at The New Yorker, joins Tammy and Jay to discuss 2022’s wokest(?) film, “Tár.” (Spoiler alert!) 

[1:00] Before we get into it, we address Kyrie Irving’s request for a trade from the Brooklyn Nets… and what makes him so annoying. (We recorded before Irving’s move to the Dallas Mavericks was announced.) Plus: What does his situation say about workers’ rights, in the context of highly-compensated NBA players? 

[12:50] In our main segment: “Tár,” the dark portrait of a high-powered orchestra conductor’s fall from grace, starring Cate Blanchett. How does the film see the dangers of artistic personas (with a #MeToo plotline reminiscent of James Levine’s abuses), “cancel culture” (per Richard Brody’s review), and labor relations? And how do the movie’s heavy-handed academic scenes compare to Vinson’s experience as a college teacher? 

[33:40] The film also critiques a specific type of (aging? resentful? arrogant?) second-wave feminist, as Zadie Smith argues in her illuminating piece in the New York Review of Books. We also discuss Becca Rothfeld’s analysis of “Tár” and the obsession with reputation management. Plus: the orientalist narrative of a Western (anti-)hero finding herself in the East. 

Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord and participate in an upcoming movie night with Jay, Tammy, and fellow listeners. 

As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from our culture of violence! 

This week, Tammy and Jay talk through some painful questions following the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers. 

For more on the cases and reports mentioned in this episode, see: 

* 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): 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. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from Tammy’s dark apartment! 

This week, Jay and Tammy are joined by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel, with Artie Vierkant, and co-author, also with Artie, of the new book Health Communism, a manifesto that reimagines our systems of care. 

[2:00] But first, we try to process the horrific mass shooting at a dance studio in Monterey Park, California, in which eleven people were killed on Lunar New Year. We discuss Asian America’s reactive hyperfocus on racial identification and hate-crime designations and ponder alternatives. (We recorded on Monday evening, just before news broke of yet another mass shooting—this time, in Half Moon Bay, killing seven people. 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 does not discuss COVID-19, Beatrice explains how our pandemic response has highlighted the left’s blind spots with respect to disability. She endorses a "margin to center" / “edge case” method, drawing on Black feminism, and a global approach to social determinants of health. Plus: how mainstream talk of Medicare for All falls short, a Supreme Court case about nursing homes, and the meaning of “extractive abandonment.”

Speaking of communism: On Tuesday, January 31, at 5pm EST, Tammy joins sci-fi novelist and activist China Miéville for a conversation about “contemporary capitalism’s rapidly multiplying crises and the Communist Manifesto’s enduring relevance,” in celebration of his new book, A Spectre, Haunting. Register here! 

Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. As always, feel free to email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from rental hell! 

This week, Tammy is joined by two friends of the pod who work in housing: Ritti Singh, a tenant organizer in Rochester for Housing Justice for All (and a TTSG Discord leader), and Navneet Grewal, a longtime attorney currently working for Disability Rights California. 

[5:30] Ritti breaks down the role of a housing organizer, particularly in a majority-tenant city, and Navneet explains her role as a lawyer supporting on-the-ground groups. We discuss the momentum against the commodification of shelter over the past decade, plus organizing successes at the state and local levels regarding rent stabilization, funding for affordable housing, and tenant protections. 

[34:02] Both guests emphasize the need to diversify the types of housing that exist outside of the private market. We also discuss the various strategies needed to to get out of this crisis—from robust tenant protections to social housing, coops, community land trusts, and tenant purchases of property. What are the connections between housing activism and the environmental justice movement? What if everyone who lives in a place, not just homeowners, could decide what happens to their homes?

[41:10] Ritti and Navneet also say what they make of NIMBY-vs.-YIMBY activist fights and the horrific policies being implemented against our homeless neighbors (CARE Court in California and Eric Adams’s increased use of forced institutionalization in NYC). How should we address this aspect of the housing crisis? (Hint: Definitely not like that!) 

Get involved in the fight in New York! 

If you want to hear more, we’ve previously talked housing with Darrell Owens, on the fight to end single-family zoning; Paul Williams, on social housing; and Jia Tolentino, on the nightmarish rental market in NYC. We also asked Mike Davis about housing back in 2020, inspired by input from Navneet (who wrote about Mike just before he died).

Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord and participate in our ongoing chats about housing, organizing, and more. As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from a Berkeley basement! 

This week, Jay takes a break from being his daughter’s personal helper to catch up with Tammy. 

[5:25] We start by discussing right-wing obsession with gender and sexuality. What do recent attacks on librarians tell us about older moral panics and Republican strategy? (Check out this Vice News video of a librarian in Michigan, a ProPublica piece from June about the targeting of an educator in Georgia, and a New York Times piece on a Hamline University adjunct’s firing.) We also touch on [21:32] the circus surrounding the votes for House speaker and [23:30] Jay’s short-lived boycott of Twitter following Elon Musk’s suspension of journalists.

[34:25] Next, we talk about Biden’s recent move to expand Title 42, the Trump-era policy that limits immigration under the guise of COVID prevention. Tammy relays what she’s heard from people in the immigrant-rights space, who have been continually disappointed by Biden’s policy choices, and speculates on the intractability of U.S. politics around immigration and labor. [43:25] Jay offers some free advice to the Dems about the mendacious Republican representative-elect George Santos. 

Thanks for listening! Please subscribe on Patreon or Substack, stay in touch via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello from what feels like the distant past! 

This week, erstwhile co-host Andy Liu joins Jay and Tammy to look back on 2022. (A note from Mai, our producer: Paid subscribers can get the full version of this ep, with some bonus banter about gambling, parental virtue signaling, etc.! Also, we recorded a week ago, so please forgive dated references to Morocco in the World Cup, Elon, and Jay’s not-yet-born second child.)

Twenty twenty-two was big for TTSG’s resident parents. Andy and his wife Reiko had their second kid in May, and Jay and his wife Casey just welcomed their second child this week! 

Speaking of kids, [14:10] Andy gets the podsquad to analyze Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1989 study of U.S. middle-class identity and the “professional managerial class.” We dissect Ehrenreich’s theories about educational capital, anxiety over class decline, and how this feeling of precarity animates many Americans’ concepts of the family. Plus: Malcolm Harris’s contribution to the discourse; and [31:30] Andy’s take on labor unrest in academia and a less exploitative vision for higher education.  

[41:10] Next, Tammy talks geopolitics and the bellicose, paranoid shift spurred by the war in Ukraine. Have we moved past the era of “stateless” threats (i.e., the War on Terror) and returned to a global order that pits the U.S. against China and Russia? What of the super-statist international cooperation we imagined in our youth, and what does the Ukraine war mean for small countries? We also talk about the ever-increasing (and rarely disputed) defense spending in the U.S. as well as Korea's rising profile as an arms dealer to the world. 

[52:50] Last, Jay observes that race and identity have recently come to feel less central to our national discourse. Why the lackluster defense of affirmative action? Why is there so little public anger over police killings? We try to unpack the many possible causes—anxiety about the midterms, inflation, media skew—and ask whether the shift is ultimately good or bad. 

Subscribe via Patreon or Substack for access to the full conversation and to join our Discord. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, or email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com. Thanks for a great year! 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe