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Elaine has a big event she's going to attend, and decides to take a chance on a ritzy, high-priced hairdresser named Vincenzo Seneca (played by future Cheers star Ted Danson). But Elaine is unprepared for how avant-garde the resulting haircut looks. Will Elaine find the strength to stand up to Vincenzo? How does Louie figure into this situation? And just what does any of this have to do with Pac-Man? HP and Father Malone delve into the fun as they discuss season 4, episode 18, "The Unkindest Cut".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
The final instalment of the 2025 Cottage Mix Series! This is a very special one (and not just because it's the last mix before The Soul Shack turns 20!) - earlier in the year I was at my STK residency and thought it would be cool to use part of the night to make a short recording of all 80's retro remixes. I thought at best, I could maybe make an hour long mix before having to change it up out of 80's remixes...but that didn't happen. Instead, the people there that night were appreciating it, and coming up to me and asking for other 80's artists so I just kept going...and just like that, we got this timeless 3hr mix of remixed 80's classics! Hope you enjoy, and if you do, please share and repost for others to enjoy too!- Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dj_j_me- Bookings & Merch: jamiewichartz @ yahoo.ca- Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id306968245
“Kennedy and Trump are taking a wrecking ball to probably the most important thing we have done consistently better than the rest of the world over the last eighty years, and I don't get it.” — Barry Werth Last week on the show, the San Francisco based AI mogul and Eureka Machine author Richard Socher promised a scientific renaissance in which AI will cure everything. Socher's eureka moment, however, may have already occurred. Not with AI, but with big pharma. At least according to Barry Werth who has spent the last thirty-five years writing about American pharma. Indeed, his new book The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life, a twentieth century history of big pharma, completes a trilogy that began with The Billion-Dollar Molecule in 1994. When it comes to medical breakthroughs, Barry Werth isn't particularly optimistic on the AI front. It will add more data to preexisting mountains of data, he warns. And Werth reports that many leading scientific designers of drugs don't think it will change much. Given, however, the hundreds of billions of dollars now being poured into its ecosystem, what today's AI revolution does instead is remind you what a real scientific breakthrough costs, both politically and economically. Thus the significance of The Age of Cures, which The New York Times is already recommending. In his new history, Werth reminds us that ninety years ago there were almost no drugs for anything. Penicillin was discovered by accident in 1928, and by 1941 there was only enough of it to treat a single London policeman — who began to recover, then died when the supply ran out. Cutting edge technology plus state investment changed everything. The engineer and scientific mandarin Vannevar Bush (the guy who also first imagined the internet) persuaded FDR to fund science publicly without conscripting the scientists. And Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development, the same state institution that fathered the Manhattan Project, made penicillin for D-Day its number one priority. Bush then ensured the arrangement continued in peacetime, which it did, for eighty years. According to Werth, both big pharma's idealism and its now much derided financial ambition were real. George Merck's famous line about medicine being for people, not for profits, is true — as long as we remember that those profits will follow from life-saving drugs. What broke this virtuous cycle, Werth argues, was the Wall Street short-termism of the greed-is-good Eighties that focused only on quarterly profits. So today, the term Big Pharma is mostly used as an insult. Big Tech moguls like Richard Socher should thus read Barry Werth's The Age of Cures with particular care. Further Reading: • The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life by Barry Werth (Simon & Schuster, September 22, 2026), one of the New York Times' recommended books this week — the third book written, and the first chronologically, in a trilogy that began with The Billion-Dollar Molecule (1994) and continued with The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma (2014).• “The system that saved your life is being destroyed” — Werth's own excerpt from the book, in Fortune.• Science, the Endless Frontier — Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to President Truman, still cited today, and the founding document of American public-private science. Reissued by Princeton University Press with essays on what it got right and wrong.• Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, a recent guest on this show, on the Sacklers and OxyContin, and No More Tears on Johnson & Johnson — the case for the prosecution, raised in this conversation.• Earlier this week on Keen On: Richard Socher on why AI will unlock a new scientific renaissance — the argument this episode answers. Five Takeaways • Before the Cures. The premise is a fact most people have forgotten: as recently as eighty or ninety years ago there were almost no drugs for any disease. There were natural substances discovered over the eons, and no established method for finding new medicines. Paul Ehrlich postulated that chemicals could treat disease; it took another twenty years before the sulfa drugs suggested he might be right. The story Werth uses to make it concrete is penicillin. Discovered by accident in 1928 when mould spores drifted into Alexander Fleming's laboratory, it was still so scarce in 1941 — during the Blitz, before America entered the war — that the entire synthesized supply went to one very sick London policeman. He started to recover. They ran out. They harvested what they could from his urine and reinjected it. He died. The British scientists then came to the United States hat in hand, having found no American company willing to take it on.• Vannevar Bush's Machine. What turned that around is the book's central argument, and its hero is not a chemist. Vannevar Bush was an electrical engineer who had built one of the first room-sized analog computers. Surveying American science in 1940, he and a handful of other administrators found it disorganized and no match for the Germans, who had the best chemistry in the world. Bush went to Franklin Roosevelt alone with a proposal: fund it publicly, but don't draft the scientists into the military as in the First World War; let committees of leading scientists make the decisions, distribute the work widely, and make rivals cooperate. The result was the Office of Scientific Research and Development — better known for fathering the Manhattan Project — whose head of medical research, Alfred Newton Richards, made penicillin for D-Day the number one priority and delivered it. Afterwards Bush wrote Science, the Endless Frontier, the 1945 report arguing the partnership should continue in peacetime. It did. Sustained federal funding, transparency, cooperation between companies, universities and government: that, Werth says, is how America got great at science. AK's summary: cutting edge technology plus state investment changed everything.• Medicine Is for People. George Merck — whose family had been in the pharmaceutical business in Germany since the 1600s, and who was sent to Harvard to become a chemist before anti-German feeling in the First World War pushed him into the family firm — was on the cover of Time the week Werth was born in 1952, under the line that medicine is for the people. The usual ...
Send us Fan MailWelcome to a new segment on Loose Lips The Podcast featuring Ike Avelli, Chris Williams, and Adam Mattera, a Quarterly 1980s Album Retrospective Series focusing on 1980s Pop Divas.The series acts as a retrospective of the decade's ultimate icons, going year-by-year through the 80s starting with 1980.The hosts engage in discussions and share brilliant insider trivia and stories about legendary pop icons.Ike, Chris, and Adam each bring their personal, definitive "Diva Album of the Year" choices to the table, and you get to vote which Diva will go into the 'HALL OF FAME' for each yearhttps://strawpoll.com/eJnvVzYBanvListen to their Spotify Playlist of their favorite 1980 Diva Tracks!https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0U4UwI6iFhLojmeI9CIQ1H?si=3e9d0762912c4d9b&pt=4b78e8503d2d11cc78a5fdfd3973a3d3Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel @looselipsthepodcastFollow us on Facebook @looselipsthepodcastÜberlubeÜberlube is body-friendly—free of parabens, preservatives, and petrochemicals.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Where's Me Jumper , Fat Bear Week , Jack The Lad on News , The Eighties , Bats , The Circus , Sexy Male Voice , Christmas , Tipping and more ...
This Monday's (8/17) Deep Focus is on pocket trumpeter and global troubadour Don Cherry, a dear, deeply missed friend of WKCR. Back in the Eighties, Don was a frequent guest on Mitch Goldman's show. Don would guest DJ, talk to the audience, bring guests... It was an ongoing Eighties NYC Don Cherry party. And if there was a blank cassette handy, Mitch would make a recording. The tapes got tossed in a box and ended up deep in storage. In January of 2024 and again in February of 2025, Mitch and his guest, the bandleader, trumpeter, cultural historian, and raconteur Steven Bernstein, blew the dust off a few of the tapes and took their audience on a time-travel journey beyond the imagination of PKD or William Gibson. Cherry as a radio host was knowing, passionate, deeply curious, and remarkably generous. He was generous to his guests with his attention and generous to his audience (which is to say, us) by considering them to be part of the conversation. It's very much the way he played music. This Monday (8/17) from 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org, Mitch and Steven pull out a few more of these never-before-listened-to magnetic treasures just for you. Or join us when it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/. Subscribe right now to get notifications when new episodes are posted. It's ad-free, all free, totally non-commercial. We won't even ask for your contact info. Find out more about Deep Focus at https://mitchgoldman.com/about-deep-focus/ or join us on Instagram @deep_focus_podcast. Photo credit: by Mitch Goldman 2026. All rights reserved. #WKCR #DeepFocus #StevenBernstein #DonCherry #JazzRadio #JazzPodcast #JazzInterview #MitchGoldman
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Dave's time in Europe to get away from being drafted to fight in Vietnam. By that time, with a couple years at City College taking photo classes under his belt, Dave had built a portfolio. He took all his gear with him because he didn't know whether he was ever coming back. His French cousin had a friend whose mom worked at the US Embassy in Paris. Dave got about a dozen photos into a group show at the American Culture Center there, his first public showing. Through another connection, he was able to print photos for the show at the Sorbonne. The National Library of Paris ended up acquiring all of Dave's photos from that show, and they're still there today. Lodgings with his French family were barely adequate, and definitely crowded. He had a friend, also a draft dodger, living in Scotland. And so Dave decided to move to the UK. He and his cousin had bought a car together, and he ended up taking that car to Leeds in northern England. Locals there took Dave in, and so he stayed there, rather than Scotland, for another half-year. We go on a sidebar thanks to my out-of-left-field question about Dave smoking cigarettes when he lived in Europe. We also talk about partying as a young person over there. At the end of 1971, Dave returned to The Bay. It was safe by then, he says, because there were so many other draft dodgers. He shares a tidbit about how, before he left, if you had gone to the intersection of 19th Avenue and Lincoln, you would see at least half a dozen young men holding hitchhiking signs that said, "Canada." A few years down the road after Dave's return, Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to all the draft dodgers. At our live event, he next showed a photo from Mission and 18th Street that shows, among other things, Lakeside Liquors, Dave's family's business back then. His dad and a partner owned and ran the place, and Dave worked there. His dad also owned a laundromat on the block. His dad claimed that his was the first full-service, coin-op laundromat in The City. It was 1957, and we'll just go ahead and take his dad's word for it. As a young man, Dave learned to fix those washing machines and dryers, which he says "were always breaking down." And that's how he got his first taste of appliance repair, a career he spent 25 years in. When his dad retired in the Eighties, Dave opened his own joint—Little Hollywood Launderette on Market near Laguna. But by the time he opened Little Hollywood, unattended laundromats were fading in popularity, for various reasons. So Dave included attendants and wash-and-fold service at his place, as well as a dry cleaner next door. He ran Little Hollywood from 1989 until 2007. Dave shares the story of a music video that was shot mostly inside Little Hollywood. A then somewhat up-and-coming artist called Del the Funky Homosapien shot the video for his song "Made in America," directed by Michael Lucero, in a funky laundry spot on Market. Read all about that in this story from Hieroglyphics. Dave's behind-the-scenes story of that video shoot is fun. Back in his repairman days, Dave would travel from the Mission to the Western Addition regularly, as well as trips out to the Sunset and Richmond districts. He got to know his city even better. He knew all the laundromats, including the spot that would eventually be his own. In 2007, Dave decided to retire. That gave him more time with his cameras. Three years later, his parents really started aging and needed more and more care. To help out, Dave took over running his dad's businesses when he was no longer able to. He did continue taking photos during this time, though. In fact, he'd been taking photos since his return from Europe back in the early Seventies. Photographers from Dave's era didn't commonly show their work. They had boxes full of negatives instead. Eventually, though, someone turned Dave on to a photo-sharing site, and he acquired a scanner and went to work. He enjoyed it, and leveled up on the scanner. He set out to scan all of his negatives. He spent the next roughly 10 years scanning (in fact, he adds, he's still scanning to this day). Through those early photo-sharing websites, Dave started to make connections in the SF photo community. Eventually, Troy Holden reached out and asked Dave to be in a photo show at Cha Cha Cha, back when the Mission Street location was still open. A year later, he met Adrian Martinez at Michael Jang's open studio in the Richmond District. Adrian, Troy, and Dave formed the San Francisco Photography Club. He figured he could serve as a mentor to the many younger members of the group. But it turned out the other way around. Dave points to the young photographers in the club that came from punk rock and skateboarding backgrounds (communities that are near and dear to my heart, as I spent countless years of my childhood and early adulthood in both). Dave considered their art to be edgy and good. It reminded him of work by Ken Hayman, who in the Eighties published Hip Shot. Those young photographers' style wore off on Dave, and point-and-shoot street photography is what he mostly does today. At this point in the conversation, Dave points to the inspiration of Hamburger Eyes, a photo magazine founded by Ray Potes in San Francisco in 2001. There's an exhibit up at the SF Public Library's Main Branch through Sept. 24 celebrating a quarter-century of this amazing publication's work. Dave has one photo in that exhibition. Dave talks about another of the photos he shared that evening, which is also available in the gallery on this page. It's a photo he took of the moving of a Victorian house out of the Western Addition during the so-called redevelopment (read: gentrification) of that neighborhood. The next photo he showed was from Candlestick Park in 1989. Next is an example of Dave's street photography—a photo from a Nineties Pride Parade, taken near City Hall. I ask Dave whether he ever shoots color photos, because everything of his I see is black-and-white. He says that in the early days of digital cameras, he shot some color. He ended up shooting about 10 years of digital color, and he liked it. But the lure of film and black and white was too strong. Dave sold all his digital cameras. He says that, nowadays, smartphones do just as well as or better than cameras did back then. Today, he uses vintage cameras, vintages lenses, and black-and-white film, a combination that gives you a look and feel that you just cannot recreate with a digital camera. The last photo Dave shared that night at Warfield Commons is the most recent one. It's of folks and their cars at Ocean Beach, near to where Dave lives today. He says that his love of cars and car culture dates back to the Sixties. Back then, there were no stoplights on the Great Highway. It was like a drag strip (something you'll also hear about in our bonus episode on SF lowrider culture tomorrow). He shares fun stories of taking his mom's car, picking up friends, and joining the racers out near the ocean. They'd stay until cops chased them away, at which point they would head to Daly City and go to Pip's, a drive-in that existed back in the day. Please follow Dave on Instagram @daveglass_foto. Special thanks to Mel Baker and the team at SF Public Press for hosting and producing the live event where we recorded this episode. Look for Dave's exhibit at the San Francisco Historical Society next summer. It should stay up through the rest of 2027. Photography by Nate Oliveira/Shoot First SF
Alex's ex-wife Phyllis is back, nursing the wounds of another failed marriage. Phyllis is looking to shake up her life, and somehow Louie has entered the picture. Will Alex intercede with Phyllis and Louie's planned rendezvous? Do Alex and Phyllis still have feelings for each other? And what was up with the 80's obsession with beautiful twins? HP and Father Malone dive into these questions as they discuss season 4, episode 17, "Take My Ex-Wife, Please".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
This Monday's (8/17) Deep Focus is on pocket trumpeter and global troubadour Don Cherry, a dear, deeply missed friend of WKCR. Back in the Eighties, Don was a frequent guest on Mitch Goldman's show. Don would guest DJ, talk to the audience, bring guests... It was an ongoing Eighties NYC Don Cherry party. And if there was a blank cassette handy, Mitch would make a recording. The tapes got tossed in a box and ended up deep in storage. In January of 2024 and again in February of 2025, Mitch and his guest, the bandleader, trumpeter, cultural historian, and raconteur Steven Bernstein, blew the dust off a few of the tapes and took their audience on a time-travel journey beyond the imagination of PKD or William Gibson. Cherry as a radio host was knowing, passionate, deeply curious, and remarkably generous. He was generous to his guests with his attention and generous to his audience (which is to say, us) by considering them to be part of the conversation. It's very much the way he played music. This Monday (8/17) from 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org, Mitch and Steven pull out a few more of these never-before-listened-to magnetic treasures just for you. Or join us when it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/. Subscribe right now to get notifications when new episodes are posted. It's ad-free, all free, totally non-commercial. We won't even ask for your contact info. Find out more about Deep Focus at https://mitchgoldman.com/about-deep-focus/ or join us on Instagram @deep_focus_podcast. Photo credit: by Mitch Goldman 2026. All rights reserved. #WKCR #DeepFocus #StevenBernstein #DonCherry #JazzRadio #JazzPodcast #JazzInterview #MitchGoldman
the DJ one3 show - iHeart 80s House Party (Session 1) -UPDATED SOUND- * iHeart 80s Song Choice = H*** NO! * Flashback 2 the 80s w/DJ one3 * Twilight 22 * Arabian Prince * NWA * Igor * Model 500 * Mc's of Rap * N2Deep * 3rd Bass * Sleeze Boyz * Herbie Hancock * Lil Suzy * Kid Panic * Neneh Cherry * Jonzun Crew * Nice "N" Wild * Eazy E * Beastie Boys * JJ Fad * 2 Live Crew * DJ Jazzy Jeff * Arnold Schwarzenegger * Bill Murray * Michael J. Fox * Madonna * Eddie Murphy * Will Smith & more DJone3.com & iHeart.com
A cursed VHS traps viewers in a slasher nightmare, vampires rent movies after dark, and a horror host draws a young fan into his show. Rituals, Reels & Rentals gathers seven scary Halloween stories into nearly five hours of Weekly Spooky fiction. Hear PHANTASMAGORIA, Special Halloween Hours, The Strickfield Slasher, and ERASURE, alongside graveyard rituals and a deadly rental. Dan Wilder, Keith Tomlin, Morgan Moore, Rob Fields, and Charles Campbell turn 1980s horror nostalgia into cursed-media nightmares. One tape can erase people from existence. How safe are you on the other side of the screen?Bonus episodes & support: https://weeklyspooky.com/joinMore scary stories: https://weeklyspooky.com/Story submissions: WeeklySpooky@gmail.com
This Monday's (8/17) Deep Focus is on pocket trumpeter and global troubadour Don Cherry, a dear, deeply missed friend of WKCR. Back in the Eighties, Don was a frequent guest on Mitch Goldman's show. Don would guest DJ, talk to the audience, bring guests... It was an ongoing Eighties NYC Don Cherry party. And if there was a blank cassette handy, Mitch would make a recording. The tapes got tossed in a box and ended up deep in storage. In January of 2024 and again in February of 2025, Mitch and his guest, the bandleader, trumpeter, cultural historian, and raconteur Steven Bernstein, blew the dust off a few of the tapes and took their audience on a time-travel journey beyond the imagination of PKD or William Gibson. Cherry as a radio host was knowing, passionate, deeply curious, and remarkably generous. He was generous to his guests with his attention and generous to his audience (which is to say, us) by considering them to be part of the conversation. It's very much the way he played music. This Monday (8/17) from 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org, Mitch and Steven pull out a few more of these never-before-listened-to magnetic treasures just for you. Or join us when it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/. Subscribe right now to get notifications when new episodes are posted. It's ad-free, all free, totally non-commercial. We won't even ask for your contact info. Find out more about Deep Focus at https://mitchgoldman.com/about-deep-focus/ or join us on Instagram @deep_focus_podcast. Photo credit: by Mitch Goldman 2026. All rights reserved. #WKCR #DeepFocus #StevenBernstein #DonCherry #JazzRadio #JazzPodcast #JazzInterview #MitchGoldman
Tony picks up a runaway kid in his cab, and Jim decides to try his hand at becoming a father. But Jim's idealized notion of fatherhood can only take him so far. Will Jim realize the folly of harboring a runaway? Can the cabbies convince him to do the right thing? And what does any of this have to do with the Bad News Bears? HP and Father Malone break it all down as they discuss season 4, episode 16, "Jim And The Kid".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
“No sheep is safe tonight.”On this episode we take a look at THE JEWEL OF THE NILE (1985) to see if how the sequel to the Eighties box office smash Romancing The Stone measured up. We're joined by Jairo from the True Bromance podcast to discuss whether Kathleen Turner's dancing, extensive scenes of fire-breathing and juggling, and a [possibly] pharmaceutically enhanced Danny De Vito, can make up for a spectacularly lacklustre script. And of course we examine an exploding helicopter that's the equivalent of cinematic pizza. Episode 175.Show notesFollow Exploding HelicopterBluesky: @chopperfireball.bsky.socialWebsite: explodinghelicopter.comInstagram: explodinghelicopterFollow True Bromance Twitter: @TruBromanceCast
The early eighties is for many, their favorite era in horror. It was a transition time where filmmakers felt they could still push the boundaries of censorship, but a backlash was coming. This is the golden age of slashers and werewolf films. And most importantly, R-rated movies were arriving at home. That didn't just scare audiences, it scared the morality police. The Scariest Things digs deep in this episode to mine for hidden horror gems in Episode 215.
Man, what hyper-fixations will we get into next? Gardening? Video game accessories? Coming up with new gameshow ideas for the podcast? AITA?
Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. discusses the early days of the Sunset Strip (and how he was there the night Van Halen signed their record deal), the censorship movement of the Eighties, and teaming up with another legend in K.K. Downing of Judas Priest. [...]
Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. discusses the early days of the Sunset Strip (and how he was there the night Van Halen signed their record deal), the censorship movement of the Eighties, and teaming up with another legend in K.K. Downing of Judas Priest. [...]
With this episode BJ revisits soundtracks, this time focusing on great songs that were buried on random movie soundtracks in the glorious decade of the eighties, when new wave and AOR met, got married and had babies. KILLING JOKE - EIGHTIES WEIRD SCIENCE PHOEBE CATES - HOW DO I LET YOU KNOW PRIVATE SCHOOL PAUL ENGEMAN - SCARFACE (TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT) SCARFACE THE ALARM - WHAT KIND OF HELL BACHELOR PARTY BONE SYMPHONY - ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER REVENGE OF THE NERDS COMMUTER - YOUNG HEARTS THE KARATE KID REAL LIFE - FACE TO FACE ONCE BITTEN HUBERT KAH - THE PICTURE ONCE BITTEN HUBERT KAH - ANGEL 07 GOTCHA! DWIGHT TWILLEY - KEEP ON WORKING HEAVENLY BODIES ANDI SEX GANG - THE QUICK AND THE DEAD PHENOMENA CHARLENE - FIRE THE LAST DRAGON KARLA DEVITO - WE ARE NOT ALONE THE BREAKFAST CLUB JUDE COLE - BACK TO SCHOOL BACK TO SCHOOL CHERRY BOMB - HUNGRY CITY HOWARD THE DUCK PETE SHELLEY - DO ANYTHING SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL THE MARCH VIOLETS - TURN TO THE SKY SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL E.G. DAILY - MIND OVER MATTER SUMMER SCHOOL SOUTHERN PACIFIC - SHOOT FOR THE TOP POLICE ACADEMY 4: CITIZENS ON PATROL PAT BENATAR - SOMETIMES THE GOOD GUYS FINISH FIRST THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS ALICE COOPER - I GOT A LINE ON YOU IRON EAGLE II SHARK ISLAND - FATHER TIME BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE CHEAP TRICK - YOU WANT IT SAY ANYTHING... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If you have ADHD, the back to school season hits from every direction at once. The end of summer. The end of freedom, staying up late, seeing your people. Then the start of everything: school, homework, earlier mornings, packed schedules. David calls it two oceans slamming together. If you're a parent watching your kid melt down over grab-your-backpack-let's-go, you're losing bandwidth just as fast as they are. Probably blaming yourself for it too. And no kids? This season still finds you. Your routines scramble right along with everyone else's, whatever's going around the schools lands in your workplace within weeks, and even just seeing the school supplies out in stores can stir up feelings you thought you left behind years ago.The refusing, the stalling, the "I don't wanna," yours or your kid's, is very often something else entirely. David and Isabelle get into why every demand costs more this season. Why even a pleasant thing can feel like one ask too many. Then the reframe that changed how Isabelle parents, sees clients, and talks to herself. When her clients hear it, the first thing they say is some version of: oh my gosh, I'm not lazy or stubborn. She demonstrates it with nothing but her ten fingers, and it comes with real relief you can use this week: what to lower, what to stop expecting of yourself during the transition, and how to respond to the meltdown, yours or theirs, with help instead of blame.Also in here: Isabelle shares something personal she's just starting to explore about her own brain. Plus the greatest allergy medication story ever recorded on this podcast, in which Isabelle, fully awake in her own apartment, watches a hallucinated Tim Curry wander into her kitchen looking for a snack.This is also the last episode of our Summer Replay series. If you're listening in real time, brand-new episodes return Wednesday, September 9!In this episode:Why back to school is the most complicated transition of the year, even years past your last classroomThe ten-fingers demonstration that shows where your bandwidth actually goes every morningThe "I don't wanna" that isn't defiance, what it actually is, and what changes when you can tell the differenceWhat Isabelle is exploring about her own brain, and why doing this for a living didn't make it obviousIsabelle's fully-awake hallucination of Tim Curry asking for a snack, courtesy of a common allergy medThe childhood song David got tormented with, and the recording that might have accidentally healed it-------Wait, What's That? Here are some of the terms and people mentioned in this episode explained:The Histamine Thing Isabelle promises the science on this one, so here it is. Histamine isn't just the allergy chemical, it's a brain neurotransmitter that keeps you awake and alert, and allergy meds that cross into the brain mess with exactly that system. She was not talking pseudoscience. Read the research here. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19843401/)Legend The 1985 fantasy movie starring Tom Cruise covered in glitter, with Tim Curry as a giant horned demon. Eighties scary was a different animal. This one stayed with Isabelle from childhood, which matters once a common allergy medicine meets her subconscious.Boy by Roald Dahl The autobiography of the author behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG. Read it once, then you understand why his books are full of kids surviving a scary, unfair world run by cruel adults, and why the sensitive, kind kid is always the hero. Find it here. (https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Tales-Childhood-Roald-Dahl/dp/014241381X)Tim Curry's Davy Crockett A real track from Disney's Music From The Park, a real 1996 album of popular artists covering the classic catalog. The Barenaked Ladies doing Grim Grinning Ghosts is on there too. Tim Curry does Davy Crockett as spoken jazz, fully Tim Curry, at one point just asking "David Crockett?" like he's questioning the man himself. You cannot make this up. It plays a surprising role in this episode. Hear it here. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_TvXa3TtPI)Persistent Drive to Autonomy (PDA) A term rooted in the autism community, originally called pathological demand avoidance. David and Isabelle both have complicated feelings about the label. Isabelle prefers pervasive demand avoidance, or persistent drive to autonomy. What it describes is the heart of this episode, and it applies across the whole neurospicy spectrum.AuDHD Having both autism and ADHD. Isabelle shares that she's genuinely curious where she lands. Doing this work professionally hasn't made the answer obvious. Recognizing yourself in the people you love and just get? That's its own kind of data.Spoons Shorthand from spoon theory. You start the day with a limited number, everything costs at least one, and when they're gone, they're gone. Isabelle's clients reach for this language the moment they finally stop calling themselves lazy.-------
Latka's lost love Simka has come back into his life, and he's determined not to make the same mistakes again. However, Vic Ferrari's ill-timed return threatens to drive a permanent wedge between Latka and Simka. Will Latka find the courage to tell Simka how he really feels? Can Simka resist Vic's oily charms? And what exactly is a styptic pencil anyway? Things get a little rowdy as HP and Father Malone discuss season 4, episode 15, "Simka Returns".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
In today's episode, a conversation with Simon Reynolds, acclaimed music writer and journalist, and author of a new book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994. Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the mid-Eighties into the early Nineties. Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise. A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything. Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781399618373/still-in-a-dream--simon-reynolds--2026--9781399618373
Nananananananana… Batman! The Scandalous Sex Suite is an epic journey that Prince took, at least in part, with Kim Basinger. And we loved the connection in the lyrics between Scandalous and it's super fun b-side, Sex. Visit us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TMATSPodcast/Twitter… X… Twix: @TMATSPodcastEmail: TMATSPodcast@gmail.com
WARNING! WARNING! DOUG WALKER ALERT WARNING! WARNING! Jon, Lauren, Spanky, and TJ talk about the fun time they had at the Midwest Gaming Classic 2026. Yes, we saw the Doug Walker body pillow, no, we did not talk to him so you don't have to.
Tony takes a side gig as a chauffeur for a beautiful uptown woman named Christina, and faster than you can say "aspirational", Tony starts falling for her. But Tony knows that, just like his boxing career, he's a longshot at best. Can Tony win her heart? Will the rest of the cabbies steer him to success? And how does 'Broktoon' figure into all of this? HP and Father Malone get into the nitty gritty as they discuss season 4, episode 14, "Tony's Lady".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
80s vibes nostalgia - with a little bit of disco - on the rooftop on a Friday morning into afternoon. Hopeful Romantic? https://qooldjmarv.bandcamp.com/track/hopeful-romantic —— https://sohohouseny.com/ ——Artwork by Kadir Nelson: https://store.kadirnelson.com/ --- https://www.youtube.com/@qooldjmarv https://music.apple.com/us/artist/qool-dj-marv/1558418894 https://www.instagram.com/qooldjmarv/ https://qooldjmarv.bandcamp.com/album/sound-paths-v-1 https://tidal.com/browse/artist/23883666 https://www.mixcloud.com/qooldjmarv/ https://open.spotify.com/artist/48vhJ2d1hVaFHf6gqXeTm0?si=fWO0N456QeWRMWLUtqe4Yg https://soundcloud.com/qooldjmarv https://www.twitch.tv/qooldjmarv
There's a band in San Francisco comprising musicians from The City and whom I discovered on social media playing shows on a stoop here in SF. I can't quite be sure when I discovered them, or whether it was me or my wife, but either way, right from the start, we knew we'd stumbled upon something special. Something truly unique. Something joyful, beautiful, free … something for the people. People could gather around with neighbors, some they know, some they might be meeting for the first time. Community is something of a buzz word lately, especially in light of things like gentrification, neo-tech fascism, and just plain ol' fascism. But for good reason—it's one of the most powerful tools we have not only to resist all the nonsense being forced on us, but also to overcome that crap and move on toward creating a world of inclusion, equity, diversity … and good tunes. The band's name is Top Chefs. This last episode of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco is, not by accident, all about them and the magic they create. We start things off with TJ Milan, lead arranger for Top Chefs and co-editor of what they call "Stoop Sessions." TJ was born and raised in San Francisco. His dad came out here from Connecticut, and his mom is from The Philippines. His parents lived in South of Market, and TJ lives in that neighborhood today. TJ's mom came to The City with her parents when she was young. She later joined the Army, serving with a support group for the Green Berets. His dad had moved to New York first for work. Then he got offered a job in San Francisco in the late Eighties and took it. In the mid-Nineties, the two met at a law firm where they both worked. In 2002, they had TJ, the youngest of their three kids—he has an older sister and an older brother. His dad is an amateur saxophone player. More on that in a bit. The family lore goes that his sax stylings played a part in his parents' union, because duh. I give TJ the opportunity to rattle off his SF schools, something he's proud to do—Clarendon Elementary, Hoover Middle School, and School of the Arts (SOTA). He describes his time at SOTA as "very chaotic." There was beef between the SOTA kids and the Academy kids in his days. Academy is sort of a school-within-a-school for SOTA, a majority/minority arrangement. Despite that situation, though, TJ met the person who's still his significant other to this day. The only time TJ left San Francisco for any significant time was to go to college at The New School in New York City, where he studied jazz. But he credits most of his education with Community Music Center in The Mission. The entire time TJ spent in NYC, he felt in his heart that he would return to his hometown. He played out a lot while he lived in New York, but the market for saxophonists was saturated. He came back to SF around September 2024. It started off rough, as he puts it. He started busking to make ends meet. Then we turn to Liam Berry, aka Loveberry, the head of audio production and guitar player in Top Chefs and co-editor of Stoop Sessions. His mom came here from San Diego. Her mom came to the US from Ecuador, where she was raised. His mom's dad is from Illinois. Loveberry's grandfather was on a work trip in South America when he met his grandmother. That couple went to Philadelphia before landing in San Diego. Their daughter, Loveberry's mom, moved to The Bay to go to UC Berkeley to study biology. I take us on a sidebar about how San Diego can be cool to visit for like two days, max. But there's only so much that good Mexican food and nice weather can do for me before I need to get back home. His dad is from Cupertino. His dad's dad is from Philadelphia and his dad's mom is from Houston. They met when his grandfather worked for NASA and was stationed at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. His grandfather was transferred to the Ames facility on the Peninsula and brought his wife with him. Loveberry's dad wanted to get out of the area where he grew up, but he didn't want to go too far. So he got into SF State for meteorology. He ended up working in the data science field after discovering that meteorologists don''t make great money. His parents met at a party through mutual Cupertino friends who'd moved up to Berkeley and Oakland. They were still together until a couple years ago, when Loveberry's dad passed away. He was almost raised in Oakland. His dad worked a low-paying job at a tech company and his mom, back then at least, worked different admin jobs (today, she's a librarian). They'd lived in the Inner Sunset and put bids in on a couple houses in Oakland, where they could afford to buy in the late Nineties/early 2000s. They also bid on one house here in The City, in The Castro. And that's the one they got. That's the house Loveberry grew up in, and when his parents first bought it, the house needed a lot of work. There are family stories about moving in and a mysterious tub of some sort of toxic goo. Schools he went to and music intertwine for Loveberry. He started at Rooftop K–8, where kids worked on a different art project every year. When he was in second grade there, Loveberry started to gravitate toward guitar and started taking lessons. He went to high school at Gateway, which didn't have a music program at the time. So he and some friends started the school's music club. In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Loveberry smoked pot for the first time. He also did an internship at NASA over that same summer. Going back and forth between those two wildly different worlds, he preferred the community that came with smoking pot with friends. Music became more and more a thing, but so did partying. Shit got out of control. He got out of high school to get himself into rehab. After rehab, he wanted to go to music school in Los Angeles, but his parents nixed that idea. Instead, he stayed in The City and worked at a few different local eateries. So he never left. A guy he met playing open mics in SF offered Loveberry $1,000 a month to open a recording studio and music business. It didn't work out, but it showed him that he could persue music and art as a lifestyle. He worked at some nonprofits and did visual art as well as music. He met Afterthough (Aft) in 2021. Top Chefs formed soon after that. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the final podcast of Season 8. We recorded this podcast on Scott Street near Alamo Square in June 2026. Photography by Marcella Sanchez
***This is 2025, you can check out the 2026 Cottage Mix Series over on Mixcloud***Another summer long weekend, another edition of The Cottage Mix Series! Moving along the flow of a cottage weekend, we're going from the Saturday Afternoon Edition last month to the Saturday Night Edition this month! This was recorded at a yacht club season opening party, so it's probably the most mainstream / mobile dj mix you're gonna hear from me here on the Soul Shack page, very similar to what you'd hear if I was djing a wedding (which I have 5 this upcoming month!).Hope you had a great summer and hope you enjoy the continuation of the Cottage Mix series (and if you do, please share and repost for others to enjoy too!)- Bookings: jamiewichartz @ yahoo.ca- Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dj_j_me- Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id306968245
This week, on "Naked Lunch," we explore the Soul in the Machine as we bring together two distinguished musical greats who each in their own way made David love The Eighties a lot more -- and who are both out there still turning on synthesizers and audiences here in 2027. They discuss Howard curating his current "Things Can Only Get Better Tour" featuring Wang Chung, English Beat and Modern English, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis' acclaimed "Nothing But Hits" Las Vegas residency at Volaire inside the Venetian. Join us for great stories about Stevie Wonder, George Michael, Ringo Starr and more and some deep musical conversation. For more on Howard's tour and upcoming 2027 album, "Global Citizen," go to http://www.howardjones.com. To get tickets to see Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis' Vegas residency, click here. To learn more about building community through food and "Somebody Feed the People," visit the Philanthropy page at philrosenthalworld.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“It's like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.” — Ricardo Semler on why bosses won't let their workers vote on them Ricardo Semler might be the most anti-boss boss in the history of corporate bosses. Thrown into his Austrian immigrant father's São Paulo manufacturing firm at seventeen, the young Brazilian ripped up the rulebook — no dress codes, no time clocks, a ten-page cartoon manual instead of HR — and grew the company from 110 employees to more than 5,000. In the mid-Eighties he was already inventing hybrid work, shipping Telex machines to his workers' homes. One of them even squeezed one of these 150-pound machines into his bathroom. Now, in his upcoming e-book The End of the Boss, the author of the iconoclastic autobiography Maverick argues that the corporate pyramid — an inheritance, he says, from West Point via the railroads — is as dead as a cuckoo bird (as the Swiss would say). Nothing good has been done with it since World War Two. Not in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, his native Brazil, and certainly not in corporate America where Elon Musk's current pay package equals the wages of all his employees for the next five years. Semler's alternative is disarmingly simple: groups of ten who validate their leader every six months. Fail the vote and you're not fired — you go back to being one of the nine. His Netherlands-based consultancy has brought versions of the idea to 208 companies, including the giant Dutch bank ABN AMRO, which agreed to do away with 399 branch managers. So why don't more bosses follow? Because, says Semler, asking executives to be elected from below is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. Even the self-styled “fearless” Elon Musk would be terrified to end up as the roasted centerpiece of the Xmas table. That same maverick idea (his first ex-wife joked he's only ever had one) runs through everything Semler has ever proposed — from the rotating district presidents of São Paulo, to the untethered MBA whose cohorts hire their own professors, to the schools that grade Call of Duty and map it to the curriculum. Switzerland, he points out, has been governed by seven rotating nobodies since the fourteenth century. No, The Third Man's Harry Lime was wrong. Rather than the cuckoo clock, it's this anti-boss invention which explains Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace. Five Takeaways • The Pyramid Came from West Point — and It's Dead. The corporate hierarchy, Semler argues, is a military inheritance that reached business from West Point via the railroads — and nothing good has been done with it since World War Two, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan. The numbers agree: the average company's lifespan on the stock market has collapsed from 61 years to 21, which makes the classical pyramid, not self-management, the biggest gamble of all. Jack Welch's GE is a shadow because he prepared it for nothing except Jack Welch. And when one Alexander Wang is valued like 20,000 engineers, or a CEO's package equals five years of everyone's wages, something structural is wrong.• Turkeys Voting for Christmas. Semler's system is cells of ten that choose or validate their leader by anonymous survey every six months. Fail the vote and you aren't fired — you return to being one of the nine. His consultancy has brought the idea to 208 companies, including ABN AMRO, which agreed to eliminate 399 branch managers. The reason it doesn't spread is not that it doesn't work; it's that nobody at the top wants it — turkeys don't vote for Christmas, and Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg would be terrified of their employees deciding whether they keep their jobs. His model is Switzerland: seven rotating councilors nobody can name, working out fine since the fourteenth century. The alternative ends, sooner or later, in Kim Jong Un.• Cycles, Not Failures. “Until death do us part,” Semler says, is about the silliest question anybody could ask. His own eighteen-year marriage with three children wasn't a failure — it was a cycle that ended, ten beautiful years out of eleven. Children born today will live to 100 or 110, with time for three full careers and still a retirement, so asking a seventeen-year-old what they want to be for the rest of their life is the wrong question. His daily metric is simpler: was today a valid day — like getting your parking ticket validated — or a dues day? When the dues days outnumber the valid ones week after week, the marriage or the job is already finished, whether you admit it or not.• The Untethered MBA. Semler taught MBAs at MIT and spent four years at Harvard Law School, so he knows exactly what he's calling outmoded, outdated, and obsolete. His replacement: cohorts of ten who work through a dashboard curriculum at their own pace, study the case of the day rather than decade-old case studies — is SpaceX worth a trillion dollars, or nothing? — and spend credits to summon former CFOs or Stanford professors on demand. The same logic runs his schools, which grade TikTok and Call of Duty and map them to the curriculum. The smartphone panic, he says, is mostly nostalgia: what the screens are ruining is your ability to memorize the periodic table.• AI Is Electricity — and He's Losing the Argument. AI, Semler says, is irrelevant the way electricity is irrelevant: a tide rising for every boat, pointless to oppose and impossible to live without. He runs everything through four LLMs — “there's nothing left of slop or hallucination at the end of that” — and confesses that when he tells his AI to push back, he now has trouble keeping up intellectually, which wasn't true a year ago. His hope is that we don't become “domesticated pets” over the next fifteen years. The deeper obstacle to everything, though, remains human: the cattle aspect of fear. There is no Trump and no Putin, he says — there is thirty percent of the population willing to support them, and one person who understands what populism can do. About the Guest Ricardo Semler is the chairman and majority owner of Semco Partners, the São Paulo company he took over from his father at 21 and transformed into the world's most famous experiment in industrial democracy. His book Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace (1993) was an international bestseller published in sixteen languages; The Seven-Day Weekend followed in 2003. He is the founder of the Lumiar schools and the Ralston Semler Foundation, has taught at MIT's Sloan School and Harvard Law School, and his TED talks have been viewed millions of times. His new e-book is The End of the Boss (endoftheboss.org, 2026). References: • The End of the Boss by Ricardo Semler (2026) — the e-book, and its “Round Pyramid” alternative: self-managing cells of ten with leaders validated from below.• Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler — the million-copy classic whose Brazilian predecessor, Turning the Tables, was rejec...
There's a new cabbie at the garage named Nina, and she's set her sights on a particularly grumpy Alex. But no matter how hard she tries, Alex refuses to go out on a date. Will Nina break the ice with Alex? Can Alex loosen up a bit? And what are the best and worst TV theme songs of all time? HP and Father Malone try to answer these questions as they discuss season 4, episode 13, "Nina Loves Alex".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
“Theory said, it doesn't matter what you've read. It's how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the FrenchmenWhen I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — which only made their ideas even more compelling. It was the seduction of the American mind, especially its elite campus version. Innocent times with forty years of hindsight.Emily Eakin caught this Eighties fever for French theory at Harvard. Now an editor at the New York Times Book Review, Eakin has written The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, which is both a confessional of her own seduction and a serious piece of intellectual history.A self-described farm girl from Indiana — albeit one whose Francophile parents once left her waiting at a Paris nursery school because a Lévi-Strauss lecture went overtime — she fell for theory as the intellectual equivalent of a little black dress. It looked expensive, even off the rack, she confesses. For a middle-class Midwesterner, it seemed like a passport to Left-Bank sophistication. All you needed was the jargon, the black clothes and, in Eakin's case, the opera gloves.But her Frenchmen, Eakin warns, turned out to be a slippery bunch. Lacan was so difficult that professors cancelled their own classes rather than teach him. Althusser murdered his wife. Foucault's histories were as much fiction as fact. Not even Derrida took Derrida seriously. These were the men undoing the “master narratives” while an enthralled generation of cross-legged young feminists in their little black dresses took notes.And yet Eakin's Frenchmen may have the last laugh. Their theory of language — an impersonal system requiring no human at its center — presciently describes today's AI revolution. Foucault predicted that “man” would be erased like a face drawn in sand on the beach. Forty years on, that tide may be engulfing us all.Five Takeaways• The Little Black Dress of the Mind. Eakin grew up in a family of Francophiles — one of her earliest memories is her mother arriving late to the Paris maternelle because Claude Lévi-Strauss's lecture had run over — and arrived at Harvard as a middle-class kid from a middling Midwestern high school, painfully aware of the gaps in her education. Theory offered the shortcut: it didn't matter what you'd read, only how you read. The cliché about the little black dress is that it looks expensive even bought on sale off the rack at Macy's, and theory, Eakin says, was its intellectual equivalent. It was also, frankly, sexy — young professors in jeans lecturing on the masturbation of the comma in Henry James, as Lorrie Moore's barely-parodic parody had it, and students dressed in black. Eakin went as far as the opera gloves.• System Replaces the Self. After the war, Sartre's existentialism made every accurate thought an authentic act of resistance — a heroic message for a France humiliated by four years of Nazi occupation. But the postwar world was not being changed by individual actors, and Lévi-Strauss dismissed the whole business in Tristes Tropiques as “shop girl metaphysics.” Around the time the Berlin Wall went up, Althusser routed Sartre at the École Normale, and a new philosophy took hold, obsessed with vast impersonal forces: not humans controlling events but a structure — with language at its center. The moment that fascinated Eakin is that sixties moment when system replaced the self.• Difficult by Design — and Easy to Distort. A colleague of Eakin's at the Times was once assigned Lacan's lecture on The Purloined Letter; a few minutes into class, the professor cancelled it, admitting he didn't understand the text he had assigned. That is the level of difficulty in question. Underedited and self-indulgent, Eakin the editor concedes — but each Frenchman left behind one bold idea worth the struggle, like Lacan's mirror stage, in which identity is formed outside ourselves in an act of misrecognition. The difficulty carried a price: it made the work easy to parody, and conservative pundits handed the public a distorted picture. The Frenchmen never said truth doesn't exist, Eakin insists. Their message was to beware political claims masquerading as eternal truths.• Slippery Politics, Awkward Pasts. Foucault, insecure about his thinning hair, shaved his head, ditched the suits, and by 1970 was in the streets with a megaphone defending prisoners, immigrants, and workers — and he was in San Francisco at the start of the AIDS catastrophe, which is reason to take his politics seriously. Derrida was temperamentally otherwise: nothing follows from deconstruction, as Stanley Fish put it, and the moment of silence his classmates held for Stalin at the École Normale was a bit much for him. The posthumous exposure of de Man's collaborationist journalism hastened theory's American demise. And there was the paradox Eakin only saw while writing the book: men undoing the master narratives, and a generation of feminists — herself included — enthralled to them. De Beauvoir was the indomitable exception, awarded second place in the agrégation by jurors who could barely decide between her and Sartre.• The Frenchmen's Revenge: AI. When the chatbots got good, American linguistics went into a tailspin: Chomsky's account of language as a uniquely human, embodied endowment cannot explain a machine producing sophisticated sentences. The structuralists' theory — language as an impersonal system in which meaning derives from how words differ from one another — describes generative AI rather well, and scholars such as NYU's Leif Weatherby are now calling for a structuralist revival to understand it. De Man called language a machine; Foucault wrote of the proliferation of authorless discourse; Eakin's recent New York Times essay argues Foucault foresaw everything from AI to the deep state. The Frenchmen, she thinks, would be fascinated rather than appalled — and would remind us to be just as wary of AI's language as of anyone else's.About the GuestEmily Eakin is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. She has worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, an ideas reporter for The New York Times, a fashion features writer at Vogue, and a deputy editor of Lingua Franca. Her features, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. A Harvard graduate with graduate degrees from Columbia and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, she lives in New York City. Her first book is The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory (Penguin Press, July 2026).References:• The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin (Penguin Press, July 2...
We're talking all things Brat Pack and 1980s this week! Rob has curated some of his favorite conversations from the seven years of Literally! for this special episode focused on our favorite decade: the eighties! This episode features moments from interviews with Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Ralph Macchio, Molly Ringwald, Robert Downey Jr., Jon Cryer, and Kevin Bacon. Make sure to subscribe to the show on YouTube at YouTube.com/@LiterallyWithRobLowe! Got a question for Rob? Call our voicemail at 323-570-4551. Your question could get featured on the show! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Todd Kurnat is everywhere. In this episode, meet and get to know Todd. These days, he's also known as Ink Letterman for his art and DJ Circuit 73 for his musical stylings. We begin in Michigan. Both sets of Todd's grandparents grew up in Greenville, Michigan, about an hour outside Grand Rapids. His parents met in high school in that small town. They eventually moved to Grand Rapids, the big city in that part of the world. His dad worked at a transportation company and his mom was a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital. It was the early Seventies—around 1972 or so. Todd was born in 1973. His mom had done some college, and his dad had joined the US military to teach about weapons-grade rockets. He was never deployed to Vietnam. Todd says that engineering DNA in his dad runs through him, although Todd uses it for less destructive ends. Sometime after Todd came around, the family moved to Johnston Street, still in the inner-city part of Grand Rapids. The neighborhood had access to downtown. Todd spent a lot of time riding his BMX bike around the area with friends. Eventually, bikes gave way to skateboards, which he took all over his city. But we'll get to that. His earliest memories on Johnston Street involve playing in the front yard—baseball and football with kids from the hood. In the backyard, they had a basketball hoop. Eventually, Todd was joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother. He remembers spending a lot of time with his sisters before his brother was born when Todd was 13. Another of Todd 's earliest memories involve listening to music. His dad had an 8-track player that Todd used a lot. Those tapes made him so happy that he'd run around the house doing laps. The radio was also on a lot in Todd's house. Todd went to Catholic school until his early high school years. One day, his mom showed up at his private school, got him out, and said, "we're leaving." Both his parents worked to support themselves and their (at the time) three kids. But changes had to happen, and so they put their oldest kid in public high school. It proved to be a life-changing move for Todd. Right away, he made new friends, a few of which have proved to be life-long buddies. The common thread for them was music and movies. Bikes and skateboards, too. Speaking of bikes … Around age 12, Todd had a newspaper route. Because he already had a bike when the BMX craze really took off, around the mid-Eighties, he followed that. He and his friends eventually started riding their bikes on street ramps. They also built and rode on dirt tracks. BMX gave way to skateboarding when Todd was 13 or 14. For a minute, he did both, but then someone stole his bike. Like me, skate videos got him hooked—videos from Powell Peralta featuring pro skaters like San Francisco's own Tommy Guerrero. And it wasn't just the skating in the videos that impressed Todd—he also dug the music enough to record it from VHS to cassette tape. Toward the end of his high school days, Todd taught himself to play guitar. He bought a four-track Tascam recorder and started experimenting with it. He did stuff on his own, but also joined with some friends to form a band called Landis. They played for most of the rest of the Nineties. Relevant to who Todd would become years later, a lot of the existence of Landis involved him screwing around with different configurations and recording locations. Think: experimental, but not necessarily falling into the so-called experimental genre. After high school, Todd moved to Denver and kept playing music. He and two roommates called their Colorado group The Suspect. They played a couple shows. Todd and I go on a sidebar on playing live vs. recording vs. writing songs. Live was always my favorite, and Todd agrees. Moving to Denver was all about escaping Grand Rapids, seeing a little bit of the world, and going to art school. He studied illustration and graphic design. He'd been drawing and doodling about as far back as he could remember. In high school, at the public school his mom put him in, there was a counselor who had steered Todd in the direction of graphic design, and he's grateful for that. Turns out he has spent the better part of the last 30 years doing graphic design. We end Part 1 with Todd looking back on how much technology has advanced since he got started in the digital art world. Check back this Thursday to hear all about Todd's move to San Francisco and what he's been up to since he got here. It's a lot, and it'll all be in Part 2 of this episode. We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026. Photography by Dan Hernandez
After a short discussion of new fancy drinks, dirty or otherwise, Spanky and Jon discuss their dueling gardens, and Matt continues his playthrough of the entire* Resident Evil Series. Feel free to Read along with us, in the preview for Season 3 of Born in the Eighties, where we discuss the March and April 1996 issues of Nintendo Power!!!
Bobby's back! He's scored a part in a TV pilot, and must make his peace with leaving New York (and Sunshine Cab) for good. Will Bobby finally make it as an actor? How will Louie react to Bobby's apparent success? And why is Jeff Conaway's final Taxi appearance such a basic aspirational story? HP and Father Malone delve into these questions, and many more, as they discuss season 4, episode 12, "Bobby Doesn't Live Here Anymore".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
Welcome to Star Wars Reactions!Hosts Aaron Harris and David Modders are excited to bring back our Vintage Reactions series! In our last Vintage episode, they finished off season one of the 80's animated series Ewoks so this week they discuss their reactions to the first episode of Season 2! Listen in as they share their reactions to the marked a format change in the series from Season 1 like featuring two shorter stories per episode instead of one longer story. They also break down character design changes and differences in theme music before jumping into the stories of The Crystal Cloak and The Wish Plant! Of course, Aaron has to wrap things up with an Ewok themed Star Wars Dad Joke of the Week!Show Outline:Episode 251 IntroVintage Reactions IntroInitial ReactionsSeason 2 changesThe Crystal CloakThe Wish PlantFinal ReactionsClosingStar Wars Dad Joke of the WeekStar Wars Reactions: Elegant discussions for a more civilized age!Join the discussion! Click on any of the show links and send us your thoughts about this or any Star Wars topic!Visit our Reactions Outpost here!Click here to leave us a voicemail via SpeakPipe!Email us here!Follow us on X!Follow us on Facebook!Follow us on Instagram!Follow us on TikTok!Follow us on Threads!Follow us on Bluesky!Follow us on Pinterest!Subscribe on YouTube!Follow Aaron and David on X!Follow Aaron and David on Instagram!Check out Aaron's new podcast, Mic'd Up Bros!
Simon Reynolds in conversation with David Eastaugh https://store.whiterabbitbooks.co.uk/products/still-in-a-dream Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the mid-Eighties into the early Nineties. Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise. A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.
Frightened by the current state of the world, Louie has decided to convert the garage tool room into a doomsday fallout shelter. He recruits several cabbies for his prep squad, and they're going to run a drill over the weekend to see how prepared they are. Will they make it through the entire weekend? Will Louie maintain control over his team? And just what is the worst fruit candy flavor? HP and Father Malone dig into these questions, and much more, as they discuss season 4, episode 11, "I Wanna Be Around".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.comemail: hpmusicplace@gmail.com
June 23rd, 2026 EP: 99 Unlocking Grimoire Magic with Dee Norman For centuries, grimoires have carried an intimidating reputation: ancient books filled with complicated rituals, strange symbols, talismans, spirits, and magical instructions that seem locked away from the average seeker. But what if those old texts were never meant to stay locked away? In this episode of ParaTruth: Reborn, Justin and Erik welcome Dee Norman, author of The Seeker's Guide to Grimoire Magic: Unlocking Secrets from Old Texts. Dee helps break down the mystery around grimoires and shows how modern practitioners can approach these texts with curiosity, humor, respect, and practical intention. If you've ever felt drawn to old magic but overwhelmed by where to begin, this conversation is your invitation to open the gates and start exploring. Guest Bio: Dee Norman is an author, artist, and witch who grew up in her family's Italian American magical tradition. She has been a student of cartomancy since the mid-Eighties and has been a professional card reader with an international clientele since 1995. Dee's latest book, The Seeker's Guide to Grimoire Magic: Unlocking Secrets from Old Texts, explores how to adapt and incorporate older magical techniques into modern spiritual practice. Throughout the past 20 years, she has been creating and presenting workshops on Tarot, Lenormand, and a variety of practical magical topics at festivals, metaphysical shops, and online. A lifelong student and teacher, her focus of study is on tarot, practical magic, and grimoires. United Public Radio & UFO Paranormal Radio www.uprntalkradio.com
Today, Theo Ellington is the secretary at the Ruth Williams Opera House. This born-and-raised San Franciscan is also running to be the next D10 supervisor. In Part 1 of this episode, meet Theo. His maternal grandfather, Clifton Weeks, came to SF because his sister, Marie Weeks (Theo's great-aunt), had come here. Clifton and his sister had grown up in rural Natchez, Mississippi, but they came out West during the Great Migration. Their first landing spot was The Fillmore. Clifton found work as a laborer, where he helped build roads and bridges. He also did a little work at the shipyard back when it was still in The City. He had three daughters and made enough money to be able to buy a house in Bayview. Theo grew up in that house with his aunts and cousins. Theo's dad, Grant Ellington, a veteran, came here from Cleveland as an adult. While Theo isn't 100 percent sure what the story is, his parents say that they met at a party … in the Eighties, no less. Grant was a big dude, 6'5", and he commanded a presence. Grant would come by the house, Theo says, and seemed overly concerned with whether his son had a girlfriend. Theo would get that question as young as 6. His dad passed away when Theo was in high school. Theo has two brothers—one older and one younger. He was the third-youngest among the 10 cousins living in his house at Third and Palou. They grew up pre-internet, and so, like a lot of us, went out and made up their own games. He and his cousins and their friends would stay out until the streetlights came on. Theo goes an aside about one of the games they invented—"baserunner." They rode bikes and skateboards, as well. He was born in 1988 and went to a lot of school all in The Bayview. Because he's born-and-raised, I ask Theo to rattle off the schools he attended: Charles Drew Elementary, afterschool at Leola Havard, and Gloria R. Davis Middle School, where he helped make a documentary on a grant from Salesforce about the 24-Divisadero called Bus 24 "The Diversity Bus." It's very much worth watching. That experience really helped to shape Theo's perspective. He started to see his neighborhood, The Bayview, in a different light. And he saw the rest of The City. It sparked a curiosity in him—why was his own hood living in such poverty while other parts of SF thrived? Theo was in the top of his class at Davis Middle School. He began high school at Sacred Heart, and suddenly found himself at the bottom of his class. Drawing from his experience making the Muni documentary, for his junior year, he transferred to School of the Arts (SOTA), where he could focus less on academics and more on filmmaking and documentaries. When he was a kid, Theo had done some acting with American Conservatory Theater (ACT) and WB TV, back when they had a studio in The Bayview. He spent two years in SoCal at Marymount College. One aspect he appreciated as a young freshman was the townhouse dorms, which felt less like typical college dorms and more like adult homes. The move served two goals—go to college, but also, pursue his dream of working in the film industry. While at Marymount, Theo worked at the local Boys and Girls Club, where he and others helped young boys who lacked role models. The experience allowed him to see how life in Southern California was different than life in his hometown. Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the conclusion of Theo Ellington's story. We recorded this podcast at the Bayview Opera House in Bayview in November 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Painter George, aka George Harry Crampton-Glassanos, is fine if you wanna call him just "George." In this episode, meet and get to know George. Both of his parents came to San Francisco early in their lives. His mom hails from the East Coast and her family were all working-class folks. His grandpa was a business agent for a machinist's union in Massachusetts. That grandfather shaped George's later involvement in organized labor. (Today, he's a member of the ILWU). George never knew this grandparent who had an outsize impression on him. He died shortly after George was born. But in Massachusetts, in addition to his union involvement, he owned a store that sold records on one half and hats on the other. His dad moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to attend school at the Art Institute (RIP). He got into that school and often slept overnight on a ledge on campus. Both of George's parents were punk rockers in SF in the late-Seventies. Amazing. His dad even lived with the guitarist from The Avengers (Penelope Houston's punk band). Though they would meet later, both spent time at the famed Mabuhay Gardens back in the day. George's dad was a painter as well, and that turned out to have a huge influence on George. His parents met when his mom got a job with his dad's construction working crew. This was around the mid-Eighties. George came along in 1989. After that, his parents had two more boys, making George the oldest of three. His earliest memories are from around the mid-Nineties in The Mission. George spent time when he was a kid running around The Mission and pre-gentrification Dogpatch with his dad. They lived on 18th between San Carlos and Lexington (or, zooming out a bit, between Mission and Valencia). That's two blocks from where I lived from 2003 to 2017, incidentally. But George's family got evicted from that apartment on 18th. The building sold and the new owners evicted tenants one by one, including families like George's. Both of his brothers were born in that apartment. His dad had made modifications there, handyman that he was. And George was old enough to remember all the awesome neighbors they had. I ask George about his favorite restaurants when he was a kid. "I fuckin' ate burritos every night of the week," he answers. He'd hit up nearby La Cumbre or El Buen Sabor around 300 times a year. Whiz Burger also figured big in George's childhood diet. There was a diner across 16th from The Roxie called Aunt Mary's (George shows me a coin purse from the place while we're recording) that he loved as well. Art was always encouraged at home. George's dad would bring home boxes of fax paper for him to draw on with ballpoint pens. He'd draw and draw and draw, often of things he saw. He remembers staring out the window of their place on 18th and watching cars go by, and he'd draw those. But it wasn't until high school at School of the Arts that George really started cranking it out. At SOTA, teachers encouraged George to draw whatever the hell he wanted to. He remembers drawing a skeleton pushing a paleta cart. When George tells me he attended SOTA 2004–2008, I mention that a number of past guests of this show went there around that time. "[The school] churned out a lot of us," he says. Joe Talbot, who co-wrote, produced, and directed The Last Black Man in San Francisco, went to SOTA in that era. George goes on a sidebar to share a story of getting caught smoking pot by a SOTA vice principal. I ask him to rattle off the SF schools he went to, and George obliges. Waldorf in The Mission for Kindergarten, then a Waldorf school in Pac Heights through eighth grade. They wanted him to attend their high school, but he chose SOTA instead. The Waldorf schools also encouraged art, which George appreciated. The social dynamics could be strange, though. You'd have kids like him who got into that school thanks to financial aid being classmates with kids who lived in mansions. After eighth grade, he needed a change. After he graduated from School of the Arts, George took some classes at City College. He'd been working summers painting houses for his dad, and eventually, college tailed off so he could work more. It also gave George more time for his artistic painting. This was about 20 years ago, and since then, he's been painting murals, hanging out with graffiti painters, doing work on Clarion Alley, and working with Precita Eyes to paint various houses and walls in The Mission. I ask whether George's art has evolved over the years. After thinking it over, he talks about the influence of cars and his mom and dad's comic book collections. He loved his mom's underground comics collections, and talks about going down to 23rd Street with them to Scott's Comics and Cards and SF Comic Book Co. next door. George points to artists like Spain Rodriguez, R. Crumb, and the Hernandez Brothers as having shaped his art from a young age. He'd go to Avalon on Mission for iron-on old English letters to have put on hats. The cholo influence of his neighborhood was seeping in, and George ran with it. The gumball machines on Mission with their foil stickers also played a part. He'd take those stickers home, many with images of cars on them, and draw from them. And of course the cars cruising Mission Street caught his artistic eye. George also touches on some of the violence he witnessed in The Mission in the Nineties, when he was a kid. George and his friends got around on skateboards, beater bikes, and Muni. He's quick to point out how, back in the day, you could take the 26-Valencia if you wanted to avoid potential trouble on the 14-Mission. I ask whether George got into any trouble himself. He says mostly harmless stuff like shoplifting. That was before his aforementioned time at School of the Arts. George has mixed feelings about the art scene, and I get it. He's had his art in shows, but prefers bookstores or community-oriented spaces vs. white-walled galleries. He doesn't feel like the audience that goes to those spaces is his. When he talks about painting at home after a long day at work, I ask George to talk about that work. He's currently part of a crew painting the new container cranes in the Port of Oakland. The ILWU is assembling the cranes and George and others use marine enamels to make the cranes look good. We end the podcast with how you can find George and his art. "You can find me on 24th Street," he says. No website. He's on Instagram at @paintergeorge415. We recorded this podcast at George's home in South San Francisco in April 2026. Photography by Nate Oliveira
Dale and Tim travel back to the 80's and remember what it was like. Take the trip with us and get ready to laugh.
Scot and Jeff discuss the second part of XTC's career (1984-2000) with Andrew Gretes. Introducing the Band: Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Andrew Gretes. Andrew is a fiction writer teaching creative rhetoric at Georgetown and George Washington University. You can find his work at andrewgretes.com. Andrew's Music Pick: XTC, Pt. 2 Awaken you dreamers! A month after we took you through the first part of XTC's career – an Argonaut-like journey across the world of postpunk and pop during the end of the Seventies and the start of the Eighties – we return to pick up the story where we left off in 1984: with a psychologically landlocked band (songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding as well as guitarist Dave Gregory), now forever off the road and consigned to a studio, forced to make the most of their remaining careers without fears of an audience to either drag them down or lift them up. And aside from the Beatles, it is little exaggeration to say that no studio-bound act ever made quite as much out of such a fate as XTC – though they didn't make much money, naturally. Instead they made great art, with a series of increasingly ambitious pop albums (including 1986's Skylarking, which you might even have heard of) that reflected the expanding musical palates and melodic ambitions of Partridge and Moulding. The first episode of this two-part series proudly featured some of the weirdest, most clashingly irregular sounds of the Seventies. This second features some of the most awe-striking beauty you've probably never heard. From their mainstream career (which rarely if ever sold) to their moonlight lark as the Dukes of Stratosphear (which sold gangbusters until people realized they were buying XTC music) Partridge, Moulding and Gregory never quit stuffing every single song they recorded with meaning and melody, and the results are an overwhelming trove of musical riches to discover – one you might only be vaguely aware even exists Political Beats has been building up to its XTC episodes ever since the day the podcast was founded. The second part of their story is every bit as impressive – and different – as the first. Settle in and listen to us sing a happy-sad ballad about the greatest band in popular music to never quite make it. Oh my, oh my, don't it make you wanna cry? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Taylor Dayne brings her good to our 250th episode. She's a Grammy-nominated, American Music Award-winning vocal powerhouse who has conquered the Top 20 on the Billboard Top 100 chart 17 times landing 7 times in the Top 10.Taylor's unbelievable career ascent has taken her from sold-out rock concerts to starring on Broadway in Aida to the semi-finals of the Masked Singer. In 2022, an unexpected diagnosis of colon cancer did little to slow her down and made her an advocate for promoting early detection and regular cancer screenings. We talk with Taylor about what drives her, how she chooses her songs (or if they choose her), and exactly what was that whole thing with Tig Notaro even about. This is a reunion of sorts as World Gone Good host, Steve, originally met Taylor at a mutual friend's last-minute cocktail hour in Santa Barbara. Funny how things work out, ain't it? Get ready to 'Tell It To My Heart' with the amazing Taylor Dayne here with us to celebrate episode #250! __________________ June 13 and July 12 - grab your seat to SLIDESHOW: IN COLOR! now playing in London. It's the live storytelling show the Los Angeles Times declares, "Downright magical, uncomfortable and shockingly honest!" and Theatreland Adventures London cheers, "FOUR STARS - This is unlike anything I've seen before, a warm, engaging, and memorable evening!" Tickets & Info: https://www.citizenticket.com/events/etcetera-theatre/slideshow-in-color/ Pre-Order CUPID'S CURSE - the fourth book in Steve's series THE DOG WALKING DETECTIVES MYSTERIES and catch up on the rest: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Steven+J+Silverman%22?Ntk=Publisher&Ns.
Ed. note: We recorded this episode outside on a windy day near The Bay. Apologies for the wind gusts you'll hear throughout. Jenny Chan found Storied: San Francisco thanks to Toshio from Sad Francisco. Jenny and I kick off her episode talking about Toshio, in fact. Jenny was born in Hong Kong. Growing up, her dad's mom babysat her a lot. Young Jenny really loved anime and would turn it on at grandma's house. When she did this, her Chinese grandmother would get upset, and Jenny didn't know why. She thought maybe her grandma was senile. Later in Jenny's life, when her grandmother passed away and she helped clean and organize her home in China, she discovered items her grandma kept that pointed to a life spent under Japanese occupation before and during World War II. We mentioned anime, but when Jenny was a kid, she just loved Japanese culture all around. She indulged in manga whenever she could save up enough money. As with the anime, her grandma didn't take kindly to these Japanese things in her home. When she was 10, Jenny's parents split up. She and her older brother then joined their mom and moved to the US. When Jenny remarks that she's not sure how her mom did it, we go on a sidebar. Jenny shares that her mom grew up during the time of the US war in Vietnam, so she's a survivor. I add that, simply, women are amazing. In US schools, Jenny learned about the Holocaust. She also learned about Pearl Harbor, but like most school-age kids in this country, it was in the context of what got the US into WWII. Japanese colonialism and dominance in east Asia never really came up. Her family came straight from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 2000. Members of her mom's family had already been here, dating back to the Seventies and Eighties. Jenny and her mom and brother lived in the Tenderloin when they arrived. She saw the dirty streets in that hood and wondered why they traded Hong Kong skyscraper living for this. Her mom told her that for many reasons, including not having to buy school uniforms, life in SF was more affordable. Jenny's run of schools in The City—Lafayette, Presidio, Washington High. I ask her if she experienced culture shock moving halfway around the world. She says yes and points to knowing only people from Hong Kong when she lived there. Here, she quickly learned that there are folks from all over China and differences abound. She says also that Chinese people she met in San Francisco or The Bay were stuck in whatever era they moved here during, and that was sometimes startling. We go on a sidebar here after Jenny asks me about my own move here from Texas in 2000. Jenny spent a lot of time in the school library, including during lunches. She dedicated herself to learning from an early age. She recognized the hardships her family was going through and saw education as a way to climb out of that. She used her 45-minute Muni commutes from the Tenderloin to school in the Richmond to read and do homework. Her mom worked in restaurants here in The City. Jenny would go with her mom to places like the bank to do the translation. Jenny was learning about life in the US in real time and for practical reasons. At my prompting, Jenny and I rap about all the awesome food in the Little Saigon area of the Tenderloin. I share the story of coming home from my trip to Vietnam and eating at Turtle Tower right away because I missed the food of that incredible country. Jenny lived in the Tenderloin through all her public school days in San Francisco. When her paternal grandmother passed away, she went back to China to clean out her home, as we've mentioned. And that's when Jenny and other members of her family started finding items—military yen, rice-rationing coupons—that pointed to life spent under occupation. Back home, Jenny had found a decent job after college, but was feeling stuck. The revelation of her grandmother's lived experience was a light bulb. It was around this time that Jenny realized a massive hole in her US education. Why didn't she learn about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, for example? Most of the emphasis was on the war in Europe, with Pearl Harbor and later the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the main subjects of the history of war in the Asian theater. In her own words, Jenny went "into a deep rabbit hole" to learn those untold stories. Her first stop was the library, where she discovered books like The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang and The Rising Sun by John Toland. The more she learned, the more she sought existing nonprofits she could join forces with to amplify the stories of the Japanese occupation of China. To her dismay, there weren't any. It was around 2012 or 2013, and Jenny figured that she already knew how to live without much income. And so, she decided to start her own company—a nonprofit dedicated to getting those stories out to the world. Pacific Atrocities Education was born. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Jenny Chan. We recorded this episode at Fort Mason in April 2026. Photography by Jeff Hunt
Historian Heather Ann Thompson's Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026) recounts the 1984 New York City subway shooting in which Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—and became both a fugitive and, later, a celebrated vigilante figure for many Americans frustrated by the social and economic tensions of the Reagan era. The book examines how media outlets like Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News fueled public fear and anger, transforming Goetz into a hero while casting his victims as villains. Using archival materials and legal records, Thompson revisits the shooting's lasting impact and argues that it marked a pivotal moment in modern American politics, media, and racial attitudes. Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
The hosts open the show discussing Jill's recent interview with the head of Infiniti USA regarding--among other things--the possible comeback of the humble sedan. This conversation dovetails nicely with Tom's news regarding the likely comeback of a Buick midsize sedan--and a possible Camaro, as well. Jill shared impressions of a would-be annual Land Rover event dubbed Defender Trophy Competition. The event would mirror the legendary Camel Trophy competitions of the Seventies and Eighties. Still in the first segment, Jill reviews the Range Rover SE premium large crossover. Listen in for her take on this off-road-ready luxury hauler. In the second segment, the hosts chat with Caterham's Simon Sproule about the carmaker's tiny sports cars. Listen in for details regarding the history of Caterham, as well as U.S. availability of these storied automobiles. In the last segment, Jill is subjected to Tom's "Which Sold Better?" quiz, including a special Talking Heads bonus question. After the quiz, Tom talks about Elon Musk, and how apparently distracted he is from from developing his core automotive products. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Grace Jones was one of the era-defining multihyphenates of the 1980s, an icon of the music, fashion, and movie worlds. From Jamaica to Studio 54, she broke down barriers and smashed glass ceilings at every turn – but she was also a magnet for true crime in the process. She was arrested numerous times. She was set up, the victim of a home invasion, and she wielded a loaded gun in order to get her way. At the height of her fame, she found herself fighting to defend her honor and her truth in the face of serious jail time. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to exclusive bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTER Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: Instagram YouTube X (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan Group TikTokSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.