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.
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?
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.
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?
Hello from a reunited podsquad, each back in their natural habitat!
This week, taking off from an essay by Jamelle Bouie, we discuss the right wing’s composite attack on queer educators and racial-justice curriculum as an attack on public goods. How should the Democrats—and the left—respond?
Plus: notes on and from the lockdown in Shanghai and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
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!
Today it’s just me, Andy, talking with guest Adolph Reed, Prof. Emeritus at University of Pennsylvania, about his new book The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives. Drawing from personal experience, he argues that racial segregation cannot be fully explained through abstract ideas about white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It was a coherent social order animated by ruling class power.
We talk about what he calls “neoliberal race politics,” the charge against him of “class reductionism” (NYT), and the broader usefulness of this analysis to contexts across the US and the world. Also, a bit of NBA banter.
0:00: The premise of the book and its reception (The New Yorker, Common Dreams, Harper’s podcast). Adolph periodizes Jim Crow from the 1890s-1960s, and he speaks about his formative years in Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Atlanta. He first drafted the book in the 2000s after realizing his would be the last generation with clear memories of the Jim Crow order. Jim Crow, he argues, has been conspicuously overlooked in contemporary discussions about race and slavery, which flatten history (“the bad old timey-times”).
20:20: An aside on Adolph’s polemic (2013) on Hollywood “race movies” such as Django Unchained and The Help.
28:30: Adolph describes the Jim Crow racial order as a practical and pragmatic strategy of class power over all workers, rather than an abstract hatred of one group. And why it is counterproductive to frame it as a binary story of all white versus all Black people.
It’s not like white people had a meeting around the campfire and said, “let’s go put some Jim Crow on some Black people”
36:30: Framing Jim Crow as unrelenting oppression in fact mirrors, ironically, the very vision laid out by segregationists themselves. This view, found today in liberal anti-racism discourses, attributes everything to an abstract “white supremacy” and “anti-Blackness.” Class is disavowed. The effect is to help sustain an elite stratum of racial spokespeople. But also, why does this race-first worldview have such broad appeal?
53:15: Adolph responds to charges that his argument is class reductionist. We reference an older exchange with the late political theorist Ellen Meiskins Wood (2002) to clarify the distinctions in Adolph’s arguments (see the original text here, esp. the “Rejoinder”). Race, he argues, is one of many ideologies to sustain accumulation and class power that rest on “ascriptive differences,” or, putative ideas about the natural differences between people: if not race, then sex, gender, religion, caste, tribe, mental and physical abilities, etc.
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.”
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?
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.)
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.
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.
