Podcast appearances and mentions of sam thielman

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Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, has spent decades in hiding as radical Muslims have hunted and killed many others involved with the controversial novel. Recently, he reemerged in New York, only to be stabbed near-fatally as he took the stage. But are others wrong to draw parallels between the rhetoric used by his attackers and the rhetoric we see increasingly in the West?Plus, Substack writer Sam Thielman had his contract unfairly terminated, but Jesse uncovers events in his past that suggest he may not be quite as fair to others. Then, enjoy the chaos as internet insanity bleeds over into the opera scene once again, this time with an abolitionist twist.Salman RushdieThe attack on Rushdiehttps://www.cnn.com/2022/08/15/us/salman-rushdie-attack-monday/index.htmlBari Weiss’s history of the fatwa against himJesse’s review of Helen Joyce’s bookhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/books/review/trans-helen-joyce.htmlThe MacLachlan assaulthttps://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2017/09/trans-rights-terfs-and-a-bruised-60-year-old-what-happened-at-speakers-cornerThe outcome of the casehttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5613057/Model-punched-feminist-smashed-120-camera-violent-brawl-walks-free-court.htmlThe Julie Bindel casehttps://www.scotsman.com/news/scottish-news/feminist-speaker-julie-bindel-attacked-transgender-person-edinburgh-university-after-talk-545841Sam ThielmanAckerman’s post mildly criticizing Substack (note Thielman credit)https://foreverwars.ghost.io/forever-wars-off-substack-on-ghost/Thielman details how Substack punished him for editing the posthttps://foreverwars.ghost.io/substack-retaliates-against-forever-wars-editor/Substack backpedalsOur episode on the Gist controversyPesca’s suspensionhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/business/media/slate-mike-pesca-suspended.htmlThielman isn’t happy how things turned outJesse’s responseThielman digs himself deeper re: Donald MacNeil Jr.Sam’s devastating response, a masterpiece of polemics thoroughly discrediting Jesse and dishonoring his descendants for centuries to comeTheater BlowupPlaywrights Ensemble resigns collectivelyhttps://medium.com/@ofvictorygardensplaywrights/letter-from-the-playwrights-of-victory-gardens-theater-fcbd3e1d1840A list of demands for white american theater, invoking, of all things, the 13th Amendmenthttps://www.weseeyouwat.com/The results of the protest outside the theaterhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/theater/ken-matt-martin-victory-gardens.htmlThe internal conflict at Victory Gardenshttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/theater/victory-gardens-theater-chicago.html?smtyp=curKen-Matt’s statementhttp://www.kenmatt.com/blog/2022/7/18/for-those-doing-the-workImage: People listen as writers gather to read selected works of British author Salman Rushdie, one week after he was stabbed while on stage, during a rally to show solidarity for free expression outside the New York Public Library in New York City on August 19, 2022. - Hadi Matar has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges after being accused of stabbing British author Salman Rushdie multiple times on stage during a literary event at the Chautauqua Institution. The severely injured author is recovering well according to family and friends, after the assault left him with multiple stab wounds on August 12, 2022. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.blockedandreported.org/subscribe

Hello! Long time no post! Alissa is writing her book and Sam is working on [REDACTED] and we have let this fall by the wayside a little bit in the interest of drawing out the length between episodes, since we have precious little time to record these days. But we really ought to announce that sort of thing in the future, and for this we apologize. We have a very fun episode for you today, a little out of date but none the worse for wear, with the great Mason Mennenga, on James Wan’s faith-based film The Conjuring. We hope you enjoy it.The image on the website is plate 43 from Francisco Goya’s series of 80 aquatint etchings, ‘Los Caprichos.’ The inscription on the stone table where the sleeping figure is resting their head reads translates to “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” Via The Met.This episode of Young Adult Movie Ministry is produced by John Kemp. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Conjuring is copyright 2013 Warner Bros. All other material is copyright 2022 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

We welcome our first guest! Journalist and fellow right-wing watcher Sam Thielman joins us to discuss the anti-lgbt laws that are inundating states and school districts across the nation, and the links between these efforts and the 2017 Nashville Statement, its authors and signatories, and the dark money groups turning Christian far right dreams into nightmarish legislative reality. Follow Sam Thielman on twitter at https://twitter.com/samthielman, find his podcast at Young Adult Movie Ministry, and see his substack at foreverwars.substack.com. The article we discuss in this episode is At War With the Pedophile Knowers. As always, our intro/outro music is The Dweller on the Threshold by Nihilore. Links: Exposing ALEC: How Conservative-Backed State Laws Are All Connected - The Atlantic Report: John MacArthur's Church Defended and Supported a Convicted Child Abuser and Pedophile - RELEVANT Southern Baptist Convention report on sex abuse shines a light on evangelical culture EXCLUSIVE: John MacArthur Covered Up Pastor's Sexual Abuse, Witnesses Say HSLDA Defends Special Needs Cages Family, Redux | Libby Anne Abuse case against Pressler may proceed, Texas Supreme Court rules – Baptist News Global Nashville Statement - CBMW

Program for 05/06/22 Jim Wood: Interview with Dr. Sam Thielman, Mental Health - Praying the Psalms

Hello! We are back with friend of the pod Jamelle Bouie to talk about the new Batman flick, which is good. We hope you enjoy it! Soon Alissa’s book will be out and we will announce the winner of our subscriber contest!This episode of Young Adult Movie Ministry is produced by John Kemp. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Batman is copyright 2022 Warner Bros. All other material is copyright 2022 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! We have acquired a wonderful producer, John Kemp, an old friend of Sam’s who offered to help a bit ago and whom Sam in his generalized lack of organization finally followed up with much more recently. John’s great, as you can hear, and we’re thrilled to have him aboard. This may also mean a more regular pod sked for a bit, and as such, we offer yet again a plea to subscribers: Please become one! This month (April, not March, as Sam says on the pod), if you subscribe, we will enter you in a drawing to receive an autographed copy of Alissa’s book! We’ll draw the names out of a hat on a future ep.This week we talked about Drive My Car, a gorgeous film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi about cars and love and fatherhood and Uncle Vanya. Sam talks a little about having been a stage actor briefly; Alissa read the original short stories and has wise thoughts.This episode of Young Adult Movie Ministry is produced by John Kemp. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Don’t Look Up is copyright 2021 Netflix; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. Trust us, that’s all we had to do with it. All other material is copyright 2022 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! Today we watched the critically acclaimed and Best Picture-nominated 138-minute $75 million Netflix dramedy Don’t Look Up so you don’t have to! We hated this. We hated it so much we didn’t have the heart to make a guest watch it. Sam is kind of ranty on this one. If you like hearing him angry, please subscribe. If you can’t do that (we understand!) please leave us a good review on your podcatcher of choice (but especially Apple Podcasts) so that more people can hear us. It’s the environmentally friendly thing to do.Our image on the site is a screengrab via the Frinkiac from the “Treehouse of Horror VI” short “Attack of the 50ft Eyesores” in Season 7 of The Simpsons. It is a much better use of your time.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Don’t Look Up is copyright 2021 Netflix; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. Trust us, that’s all we had to do with it. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

This episode we have the marvelous Helen Shaw, New York magazine’s theatre critic, to talk about Joel Coen’s new film of Macbeth, which we all enjoyed immensely. The movie can be streamed on Apple TV and might still be in theaters; it’s good. Watch it.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Secret of Kells is copyright 2009 Cartoon Saloon; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer prize-winning Maus was recently banned from a Tennessee county's classrooms. The McMinn County School Board's decision to remove Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust from its curriculum has caused a national outcry, but this is by no means the first time that comic books have been accused of being dangerous for young people. In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta is joined by Sam Thielman—a journalist and an expert on the comics industry—to talk about comics as a medium, the anti-comics hysteria of the 1950s, the subversive world of alternative comics, and why we ended up with so many superheroes.Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in New York. He is the editor of Forever Wars and co-creator of Young Adult Movie Ministry, a podcast about Christianity and movies, and his writing has been featured in The Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, Talking Points Memo, NBC News, and Variety. In 2017 he was a political consultant for Comedy Central's The President Show.Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Dwayne GladdenRead the transcript of this podcast: Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

We got to have Jeffrey Overstreet back! Hooray! Jeff is the author of the Auralia’s Colors fantasy novels and Through a Screen Darkly, as well as being writer-in-residence at Seattle Pacific University. We hope you enjoy this one. It’s free, but please subscribe if you haven’t!Jeff, Alissa, and Sam are talking about The Secret of Kells, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey’s 2009 animated fantasy feature about the preservation of the great illuminated book of the gospels.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Secret of Kells is copyright 2009 Cartoon Saloon; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Merry Christmas! This week’s episode is about The Muppet Christmas Carol, NOT A Muppet Christmas Carol, or Carol. Or Scrooge. Or Scrooged. There are lots of versions of the Charles Dickens novella, which you can see in its original manuscript form here. You can also visit it in person at the home, now museum, of real-life Scrooge JP Morgan! This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing!or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you!Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Muppet Christmas Carol is copyright 1992 Jim Henson Productions; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: It is a two-episode week! Sam has finally gotten around to editing our episode on Free Guy, a very good one, if we do say so ourselves. The movie is fun! It’s neither a stone classic nor something we feel the need to apologize for inflicting on you, but it is fairly new and we do have to spoil it for you a bit to talk about it, so check it out before listening to the pod if that kind of thing bothers you.This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing!or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you!Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Free Guy is copyright 2021 20th Century Studios; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week’s returning guest is the wonderful Tyler Huckabee, of Relevant magazine! He knows his Jack Kirby upside-down and backwards and he was definitely the guy to talk abou Eternals, Chloe Zhao’s new, much-discussed Marvel movie. It is… okay? There’s a lot of theology in it.This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing!or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you!Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Eternals is copyright 2021 Marvel Entertainment. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we watched Netflix’s incredible, terrifying show about [SPOILER] and Christian theology, Midnight Mass, which I don’t think I call Black Mass during the episode but if I do, please know that Alissa has already teased me about it and you will only be encouraging her if you do the same. Black Mass isn’t very good, whereas Midnight Mass is. Our guest us the delightful Andy Levy, costar of the only watchable show Fox News ever broadcast, Red Eye (long since canceled, obviously), now ascended to the highest planes of Twitter, where he is very funny This is one of our two spooooooooky episodes for Halloween (we’ll have another subscribers-only one up shortly) so if you are upset by scary stuff, we recommend AVOID AVOID AVOID on this one because it is especially frightening if you are a Christian! That is why your hosts enjoyed it and probably also why Andy didn’t think it was as scary as we did (though he did like it), but I can easily imagine finding it absolutely gut-wrenchingly disturbing in a bad way.Our image is Netflix’s incredibly vintage-y painting for the show, which I love. If you know who painted it, @ me on twitter.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Midnight Mass is copyright 2021 Netflix. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week Alissa and I watched Dogma, Kevin Smith’s goodhearted, filthy movie about theology and goofy stoners, a film that is very easy to watch but very hard to see! Alissa notes that there’s a YouTube upload and an Internet Archive version, neither of which seem terribly legit but since there’s no way to stream the movie or buy it from the distributor, we do not recommend watching a bootleg version but we also do not have an alternative.Sam mentioned Terry Schiavo, and Alissa mentioned the You’re Wrong About episode on her, which can be heard here.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Dogma is copyright 1999 Miramax. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Joe Mulhall is Head of Research at HOPE not hate and one of the UK's leading authorities on far-right extremism. He joins SH!TPOST for a chat about his latest book, “Drums in the Distance: Journeys in the Global Far Right.” In it, Joe provides an exhaustively researched accounting of far-right political movements around the world that he tastefully pairs with vivid recounting of his time spent infiltrating and exposing those movements.Follow Joe Mulhall on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeMulhall_Read the book: https://bookshop.org/books/drums-in-the-distance-journeys-into-the-global-far-right/9781785787515Joe’s favorite thing on the internet: TikTok train enthusiast Francis Bourgeois! https://www.tiktok.com/@francis.bourgeoisProgramming note: You may notice your host sounds slightly different! Thanks to listener support, SH!TPOST has upgraded our audio recording and processing equipment. We hope that as we learn the new hardware and software that the show’s audio quality will greatly improve.We also welcomed an editor to the SH!TPOST newsletter. Say hello to Sam Thielman when you get a chance! With Sam’s help, the supporters-only newsletter at shtpost.substack.com that goes out between episodes will be even better. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at shtpost.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great Vinson Cunningham, theater critic at The New Yorker, essayist, humorist, and all-around terrific writer whose work we heartily recommend to you. We watched P.T. Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, beloved of our hosts but new to Vinson. Vinson is really wonderful and open about his own experience of charismatic worship and we are very happy to have him on this one.Our photo on the site this week is of a Baptism near Mineola, Tx. in 1935, taken by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, the researcher who helped to popularize Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. Alissa recommends this SNL clip. Thank you for listening! Please consider supporting us with a subscription!Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. There Will Be Blood is copyright 2007 Paramount Vantage. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Our guest this week is Friend of the Pod Isaac Butler, journalist and cultural historian who has a new and very good book called The Method coming out in February; he would be grateful if you’re able to toss him a pre-order—he’s a terrific writer and you won’t regret it. He also hosts a podcast of his own, Working, at Slate. Check him out!The movie we’re talking about is David Lowery’s The Green Knight, starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, and Joel Edgerton. It’s still in theaters most places and rentable on Amazon Prime, among other services. We recommend the movie and we recommend against the novel coronavirus so we suggest you make an informed and responsible decision and beg you not to go to a movie theater if you haven’t had a vaccine. We love you and want you to live!The image on the site this week is the opening lines of the poem on which the movie is based, from the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, now at the British Library. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Green Knight is copyright 2021 A24. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d be delighted if you subscribed! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Our guest this week is the delightful Lyz Lenz, returning to watch another awkwardly erotic 1950’s Biblical epic with us. It’s a goofy one. Our film is The Prodigal, a notorious turkey that lost the studio a ton of money despite having the beautiful Lana Turner as a fertility priestess. It is, as you might imagine, “based on” the parable from the Gospels in only the loosest possible sense of that phrase. Please buy Lyz’s books! They’re good.Our image is a gorgeous Wally Wood illustration from his lengthy parody of this film, “The Prodigious,” from MAD Magazine #26, published 1955, with text by Harvey Kurtzman. There aren’t any print reproductions of the issue but DC Comics put out a big Complete MAD on CD that has nice hi-res images of the early issues of the magazine. I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it large enough here that the text can be read if you’d care to click on the image. It’s pretty funnyOur theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Prodigal is copyright 1955 MGM. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Welcome back! We took a break and now are thrilled to return to you with a new episode about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake, and guest Jeff VanderMeer, short-story writer and novelist whose masterly book Annihilation got made into a terrific movie by Alex Garland and whose books Hummingbird Salamander and A Peculiar Peril are both very well-reviewed (and good!) and available at Midtown Reader signed and inscribed, should you so choose, by the author himself. This movie has been made a few times! The original was made in 1956 by Don Siegel, two years after Jack Finney’s novel of the same name was published (our image on the website is a detail from the cover to the 1967 Dell edition). Finney revised the novel the year the Kaufman movie came out, and the story was officially adapted again in 1993, as Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, and in 2007 as The Invasion. It’s also the basis for a fun and trashy Robert Rodriguez 1990’s high school flick called The Faculty.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is copyright 1978 United Artists. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great comics writer Mark Russell on the pod to discuss another 1980’s classic action movie, Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi satire Robocop, much of which has come to pass in the years since its release. Mark calls it the best of the superhero movies; we are inclined to agree. It adapts and sends up all kinds of cool and weird comics without smoothing out any of their rough edges, and, of course, manages to be very much its own thing. Verhoeven is the creator of the controversial “Jesus Seminar,” a really unusual enterprise that is worth examining. Mark writes movingly about Christianity in a number of his terrific comics and has a new book coming up called Not All Robots with superstar artist Mike Deodato; we’re adding it to our pull list. His comics with artist Richard Pace about Jesus’s return to earth as a superhero sidekick, Second Coming, are wonderful; Vol. 1 is in print and Vol. 2 is currently being serialized and will be out in November. Mark is also writing one of Marvel’s terrific Life Story miniseries, this one for the Fantastic Four.Our image on the website this week is taken from the sales page for Knightscope, a technology company that sells mall cop robots like the 300-lb K5, pictured here, which recently ran over a toddler in a mall in California and tragically drowned in Washington, D.C. If you see one, kick it.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Robocop is copyright 1987 MGM. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Evangelical subculture has a habit of copying different art forms from the wider culture. In the era of superhero movies developed from long running Marvel and DC comic books, what were Christian comic books like? Cultural critic and co-host of the podcast Young Adult Movie Ministry, Sam Thielman joins the pod to discuss Christian comic books and committed Christian personalities who have worked in the comic industry. He also shares his story with Evangelical Christianity including his family's connection to Billy Graham and Franklin Graham. Connect with Sam Thielman: @samthielman on Twitter Subscribe to Young Adult Movie Ministry Podcast: https://yammpod.substack.com/ Mentioned on the Pod: -Sam writes on the Satanic Panic via a film review of "The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It": https://popula.com/2021/06/28/demons-panic-and-memory/ -Sam's obituary for Christian comic writer Jack Chick in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/25/jack-chick-christian-comic-cartoonist-death -Unpublished DC Comic where Swamp Thing meets Jesus Christ. Information on that issue here: https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Swamp_Thing_Vol_2_88_(Unpublished) -Check out Zach's music by going to: https://muzach.bandcamp.com -Read Dave's occasional blogging at: www.dangeroushope.wordpress.com. Twitter: @vcwpod Zach- @muzach Dave- @Davejlester Podcast music by Zach Malm Logo by Zach Malm

Journalist, Sam Theilman returns to Lush Left Media to talk RW fuckery & more!

This week we are privileged to have the great Gregory Thornbury, author of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music and some terrific essays as well, notably this one on QAnon, to talk with us about The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary about the late, supernaturally gifted, near-unknown singer-songwriter whose struggles with bipolar disorder kept him out of the public eye even as he amassed a following of similarly talented people. Also, demons.Demonology is something we talk about a little on the podcast when we watch The Exorcist or Hereditary; here we get a lot more intense about it, and Greg shares some of his own observations and experiences and I just want to say I’m really grateful to him for being so open and honest with us and with all of you. We hope you dig this one. Also if you’re just in it for good music, you’ve come to the right place, and you can listen to new, happy, funky, countrified stuff from Greg’s amazing daughter Kate Thornbury on Spotify, too. Greg was kind enough to supply the image for this week’s episode, drawn by Johnston himself for a showing of his art that Greg moderated, and is used with our thanks and permission.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is copyright 2005 Sony Pictures Classics. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

By epbechthold - de.wikipedia epbechthold, CC BY-SA 3.0.Details, credits, errata: This week’s guest is friend of the pod and all-around good guy Spencer Ackerman, who won the Pulitzer and the IRE Medal for his work on the Guardian’s Snowden coverage team and a National Magazine Award for his reporting on anti-Muslim training materials used to teach FBI recruits. His book Reign of Terror, which builds on that excellent reporting, is due out from Viking on August 10; you can pre-order it here. Sam has read it; it’s very good.Our film, I’m sorry to say, is Kathryn Bigelow’s despicable 2012 Oscar-bait torture apologia Zero Dark Thirty, one of the most morally repellent things I’ve had the misfortune to watch, down there with The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will. Spencer is great on it; we apologize for foisting it on him since he is also one of the great writers on the topic of torture, but his expertise on that subject is absolutely invaluable and so we hope you enjoy his perspective. Spencer has also consulted on better movies, notably Armando Iannucci’s UK-US politics farce In the Loop, and he has a lot to say about the difference between verisimilitude and veracity here. Spencer broke the news that the CIA tried to suppress the work of Dan Jones, a staffer for Dianne Feinstein, as he helped the Senate compile its torture report (you may remember this from the excellent movie The Report, which is about Jones’s disclosures). One other writer we want to shout out is Jason Leopold, who did the incredible reporting revealing the extent of the filmmakers’ cooperation with the CIA in the making of the movie.Our image for this week is from Wikimedia commons, used with our thanks to user EPBechthold; it is of a number of supposed torture devices including the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, a coffin with big spikes in it that the medievals supposedly closed on victims, which would indeed have been a horrible way to die if it was real, but it wasn’t. It was made up to demonstrate the barbarity of a different civilization, which certainly had its flaws and cruelties but wasn’t composed of bizarre, sadistic un-people. Some of the devices are real, and some aren’t. The tendency to invent atrocities to justify atrocities is worth bearing in mind if you watch this movie along with us.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Zero Dark Thirty is copyright 2012 Annapurna Pictures. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Photo by Nicolás Pérez, used with our thanks under CC BY-SA 4.0.Details, credits, errata: This week’s film is another A24 horror picture, Saint Maud, director Rose Glass’s first movie and a terrific flick Alissa has been trying to get Sam to watch for months. It has pretty much everything we like to talk about on this podcast, so it’s just the two of us this week, and we think you’ll dig the discussion.Our header image on the website this week is a picture of a polychrome wood carving of Mary Magdalene wearing a cilice or hair shirt undergarment, carved by 17th-century sculptor Pedro de Mena and currently residing at the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid. The image is made freely available through Wikimedia Commons and used with our thanks to the photographer, Nicolás Pérez.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Saint Maud is copyright 2020 A24. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Saddle up your horses, we’re back and want to thank you so much for your patience during our unannounced week off. We have some great episodes banked and here’s the first of them: friend of the pod Emily VanDerWerff returns with her friend Cassie LaBelle to talk about, appropriately, A Week Away, country music video director Roman White’s sophomore feature film, a Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) jukebox musical set at a church camp and distributed through Netflix.A Week Away is surprisingly palatable and clearly intended to be a trip down memory lane for people who grew up going to Christian music concerts; as such it’s a bit of a mixed bag for your stalwart hosts. It plays a lot with Amy Grant’s gay cred (she and Steven Curtis Chapman are both bit players here), which was a nice surprise, though I wish the filmmakers had been more pointed about that.Our header image is a picture of a campfire by Dirk Beyer, made available through Wikimedia Commons and used with our thanks.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. A Week Away is copyright 2021 Netflix. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed! Emily has a fiction podcast called Arden you can listen to here and Cassie’s blog is here! Check them out!confusingly, this term is often used to refer not to music that is currently contemporary, but instead to the Christian pop music of the 1990’s. Sorry. We’re a weird bunch. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week’s episode is about Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic film of faith, missionary life, and repressed desire, Black Narcissus, as chosen by our wonderful guest, Jessica Winter, an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the new novel The Fourth Child, which Alissa read, loved, and recommends to all of you.Our image is a still from the film; the hat, we are reasonably certain, is a mashed-up bycocket, though we welcome correction on this point since nobody was able to identify it with complete confidence and we have several degrees between us. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Black Narcissus is copyright 1947 The Archers and the still frame above, along with brief audio excerpts, are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

A toy of Ripley 8 (Sigourney Weaver) from NECA’s Alien Resurrection toy line.Details, credits, errata: This week we had the wonderful Sarah Welch-Larson, Alien franchise scholar extraordinaire, on to discuss the least-loved and weirdest movie in the series, Alien Resurrection. It was great. You can read an excerpt from Sarah’s excellent book, Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, here at RogerEbert.com, you can follow her on Twitter here, and you can buy her book for yourself and then a duplicate in case you lend it out, plus copies for your loved ones, here.Our header image is a collage of promo photos of NECA’s Ripley 8 figure (Sam misidentified the manufacturer as McFarlane Toys, a different beloved toymaker that caters to adult nerds). These toys are a slightly later addition to the shelves; the original tie-in toys for the movie, believe it or not, were made by Kenner and distributed at Walmart and other big-box stores in the children’s section, despite the film not being anything even remotely like a children’s movie. Alien³ received this treatment as well, though those toys were legitimately pretty cool and came with little tie-in comics. Not that anyone’s keeping track.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Alien Resurrection is copyright 1997 Brandywine productions and brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we have the delightful Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor of American Theatre magazine and contributor to America, The New York Times, and many other discerning publications, and absolutely one of our favorite people. His terrific pitch was to watch Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent drama The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of many movies made from the story of Joan’s trial, largely because, as Rob observes, there’s lots of documentary material about the trial, notably the transcript, available in English here.There are lots of Joans of Arc; Sam did indeed go to see the Manhattan Theatre Club’s terrible production of the George Bernard Shaw play with Rob, though he got the lead, Condola Rashad, mixed up with the lead from another bad Shaw production on Broadway, Sally Hawkins in Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Roundabout. Poor Shaw. He’s a good playwright. Other notable Joans include The Messenger, starring Milla Jovovich and John Malkovich and directed by Luc Besson, his and Jovovich’s follow-up collaboration to their sci-fi flick The Fifth Element (The Messenger is not a success in any sense, but The Fifth Element slaps). Joan has been used by other playwrights, notably Bertolt Brecht, in Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which resets the story among unionizing Chicago meatpackers, and novelists including Terry Pratchett, whom you may remember from a few episodes ago, in his lovely Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment. Other filmed versions include George Méliès’ Jeanne D’Arc, which I’ll include below this paragraph on our website, and Das Mädschen Johanna, a Nazi version of the story. You can read Graham Greene’s review of it in The Spectator here.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Passion of Joan of Arc is in the public domain, and the image at the head of the page is from the film. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Influential dispensationalist pastor Clarence Larkin’s elaborate chart of the end times, made freely available through Wikimedia Commons.Details, credits, errata: This week we have the delightful Natasha Oladokun, the poet, journalist, and teacher; her most recent arcticle is here and two of her wondeful poems can be read here. Our film, as we have threatened for many months, is Left Behind: The Movie, directed by Vic Sarin and starring, though perhaps that word is misleading, Kirk Cameron, Brad Johnson, Gordon Currie, and Chelsea Noble, among other luminaries. It is… astounding. I believe this is the first time we’ve discussed a movie so bad the author of the book sued the filmmakers.The TikTok we refer to is preserved in a tweet here (the blowback from going viral was considerable and the author deleted the original); the song is by James (not Joseph, sic Sam) Arthur and is called, appropriately, Trainwreck. Sam did the math wrong: Brad Johnson is 13 years and change older than Janaya Stephens, who plays his daughter. This is a wide-ranging episode! We talk about Palestine, and the weird antisemitism of dispensationalist theology, queer issues in the church, and much more. We’re proud of it, it’s a good one, thanks in large part to our wonderful guest.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Left Behind: The Movie is copyright 2000 Cloud Ten Productions and Namesake Entertainment. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: For Holy Week, we have decided to be a bit daring and look at Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, the much-maligned work of two Christians, Scorsese and Paul Schrader, based on the work of a third, Nikos Kazantzakis, who published Last Temptation in 1955, two years before his death. With us is dear friend and author of The World Only Spins Forward and The Method, Isaac Butler. We re-recommend Alissa’s excellent interview with Schrader here, which we also mentioned during our episode about his film First Reformed. (Also check out episode 10, if you like, in which we discuss Scorsese’s Silence.)Our image for the week is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s oil-on-oil painting The Procession to Calvary, made freely available through Wikimedia Commons, which Sam thought was appropriate because it’s all about the circumstances around Jesus and the cross, just like this movie. Jesus is actually a little hard to clock in this painting despite being in its exact center. Bruegel died in 1569 just as the Dutch War of Independence — also known as the Eighty Years’ War — broke out after years of bloodshed and public executions of the kind Jesus would have seen and, eventually, been subject to. Massacres, executions, and biblical scenes feature prominently in his work; it’s profoundly appropriate for him to paint such a sweeping work about the most famous execution in the Western world.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Last Temptation of Christ is copyright 1988 Universal City Studios and Cineplex Odeon Films Canada. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week’s documentary double-feature is Cameraperson and Dick Johnson Is Dead, both directed by Kirsten Johnson, the former available through the Criterion Channel and the latter on Netflix, both eminently and easily watchable and well worth your time. Our wonderful guest this week is Eric Hynes, curator of film at Astoria’s incredible Museum of the Moving Image and a critic for Film Comment; please check out the Museum’s publication Reverse Shot, which is near and dear to Eric’s heart.The lead image on the website this week is symbolist painter Hugo Simberg’s 1906 work Black Death, made freely available with our thanks by the Finnish National Gallery through Wikimedia commons, and believed to be in the public domain.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Camerperson and Dick Johnson is Dead are copyright 2016 and 2020, respectively, Big Mouth Films. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: First, a quick explanation—last week Sam had some unexpected childcare stuff and had to bail out on an episode that he and Alissa still plan to do. This week we’ll have two for you: This one, and, to sweeten the deal for potential subscribers, an unlocked episode from our archives, going up on Friday. Thanks for your patience and apologies for the schedule interruption. This week we have a very fun treat for you in the form of award-winning documentarian Penny Lane, who joins us to discuss venerable cable TV trashfest The Real Housewives, which recently embarked on a new franchise in Salt Lake City. Penny is erudite and witty and we had a lot of fun with her; there’s a little more crosstalk than usual because of some mild internet lag but most of it was taken out in editing. If Sam seems interruptier than he normally does, that’s (hopefully) why. Sam said YPK when he meant YPG, the Kurdish militia group, in mentioning a good and very weird episode of controversial leftist podcast Chapo Trap House that might be a little hard to track down, so we’re linking it here.Our header image is entitled Tetra Pak® - Lady with shopping net and Tetra Classic® packages, 1960s and is made available via Wikimedia Commons by the Tetra Pak corporation under a CC-BY-SA license and used herein with our thanks. I don’t usually do this but our title is borrowed from Richard Hamilton’s witty 1956 collage, one of Sam’s favorite pieces of pop art, which can be viewed here.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is copyright 2020 NBCUniversal. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we watched the extremely lurid and silly 2007 Robert Zemeckis CGI movie Beowulf, easily the best of on-location shoots in the uncanny valley, starring Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Crispin Glover, and John Malkovich, and written by Neil Gaiman (Good Omens) and Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction). It’s both terrible and wonderful at the same time. Our guest is medievalist Ethan Campbell, which is a lot like having Noam Chomsky on your show to discuss the lyrics of Carly Rae Jepsen.Some recommended reading: Gaiman’s other two stabs at the Beowulf story, the poem Bay Wolf from his collection Smoke and Mirrors, and The Monarch of the Glen, which is in Fragile Things and features Shadow, the protagonist of American Gods. The translations of the poem we like are Seamus Heaney’s, from 1999, J.R.R. Tolkien’s, from 1926 (but first published in 2014—an excerpt is here), and a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that has nearly everyone over the moon and is winning plain old book awards on top of translation awards.Our lead image this week is a 3d rendering of a house and a lone tree in the sunset, provided through creative commons (CC-BY-SA) by digital artist Mayqel, created in Blender and used with our thanks. Sam really wanted to call this episode “Circolwyrde-Ġesċeōp Lícnes” but he couldn’t get the characters to input. Que sera, sera.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Beowulf is copyright 2007 ImageMovers. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week’s episode is about the ridiculous 2005 horror-noir Constantine, one of the early comic-book movies of the modern era and probably the best DC movie in… ever? Our guest is Vox’s terrific healthcare reporter Dylan Scott, a stand-up guy, an interesting Christian with an enormous brain, and a big fan of this flick, which we’re kicking ourselves for not thinking of doing before him (but we’re glad we didn’t, so we could have him talk about it). Dylan has a big piece on coronavirus responses coming soon at Vox, where he is Alissa’s colleague, so keep an eye out for that. Our lead image on the website this week is a painting of Hell from the early 16th century, often incorrectly attributed to Heironymous Bosch but probably the work of one of his followers, imaged by the Heritage Museum and used with our thanks via Wikimedia Commons. Alissa mentions Bosch a few times in this episode; he is a big influence on the production design of this movie.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Constantine is copyright 2005 Warner Bros. Pictures. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we watched Darren Aronofksy’s 2017 horror film mother!, the baby-eatingest Bible allegory in all the land. It was great? One error: Sam said Téa Leoni when he meant Marisa Tomei; he is forever making this mistake despite having met Marisa Tomei a few times and had pleasant conversations with her. He apologizes to Mss. Tomei and Leoni, who are, we want to emphasize, different people.We mention a few different articles for your reading delectation; here’s the oral history of Requiem for a Dream Sam mentions, and here’s Alissa’s great piece about mother! in Vox.Our header image is Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 1573 painting Primavera, of a woman who represents spring, made out of fruit, made publicly available though Wikipedia Commons. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Both it and the image of Primavera are used with our thanks. mother! is copyright 2017 Protozoa Pictures. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: We almost called this “Mel O’Drama” and were also considering “Claymore Minds” and “No Relation,” since our wonderful guest is Tyler Huckabee (no relation) and this film’s most famous line—“Every man dies, not every man really lives”—was written by the poet William Wallace, also no relation. This week’s film is the unbearable turkey Braveheart, a movie that won Best Picture, Best Director, and a ton of other awards it did not deserve. Fargo and Trainspotting, both terrific flicks, also came out this year. Heck, so did Mars Attacks. That should have won the Oscar.With last week’s episode, this marks our first explicit two-parter, on the subject of the relationship of fundamentalist Christianity to gender roles in the movies. You don’t have to listen to one to enjoy the other, but I personally consider the last episode a helpmeet to this one.Our image this week is of William Wallace telling the English to get lost from James E. Doyle’s 1864 history book A Chronicle of England, made freely available through Wikimedia commons. You can also read a scan of the full book on Google Books; Doyle both wrote the text and did the illustrations, which were engraved by Edmund Doyle—it’s pretty cool.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Braveheart is copyright 1996 Warner Bros. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. The lead image on this post is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and used with our thanks. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we subjected ourselves to Adam Shankman’s 2002 surprise hit romantic drama A Walk to Remember, an amazing time capsule of a movie about the importance of gender roles but not exactly about Christian complementarianism? It’s confusing. Don’t worry, we get into it. Our guest is Katelyn Beaty, founding editor of her.meneutics, former managing editor of Christianity Today, and author of A Woman’s Place. She was terrific and has many wise insights into what on earth is going on that this movie kindasorta refuses to acknowledge for the sake of mass-market appeal, and Alissa knows all and sees all about the development of the “inspirational” film industry in this movie’s wake. Sam is also on this episode.Our lead image is Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, an almost unbearably erotic roccoco masterpiece.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. A Walk to Remember is copyright 2002 Warner Bros. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. The lead image on this post is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and The Wallace Collection and used with our thanks. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week’s movie is Paul Schrader’s 2018 romcom First Reformed, a feel-good romp about a fish-out-of-water preacher (Ethan Hawke) in the New York exurbs who finds his faith tested by a beautiful widow (Amanda Seyfried), a conniving businessman (Michael Gaston) and a bumptious supervisor (Cedric the Entertainer). Just kidding, it’s devastating. But it’s very good. Here’s Alissa’s marvelous interview with Schrader, a masterly director and screenwriter with his own eccentric and thoughtful vision of both the world and our mutual faith. We love him. Paul: We love you.Our lead image is a promo card for The Velocipastor, a film Sam hopes one day to trick Alissa into watching.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. First Reformed is copyright 2018 A24. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied. The lead image on this post is courtesy of Amazon. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we have a crossover episode for Christmas, starring our friends at the Good Christian Fun podcast, Kevin T. Porter and Caroline Ely! Please listen to their pod, subscribe, buy their merch, and wish them a merry Christmas. Our film is the amazingly bad yuletide confection Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, starring Kirk Cameron as himself and director Darren Doane as Christian White, the white christian. It is a holiday miracle of bad editing, bad sound design, bad lighting, and inscrutable shot choices. Kevin describes it, incredibly, as “part Pureflix, part Koyaanisqatsi,” which Sam thinks may be the best single joke anyone has ever made on our podcast.A couple of things we mention on the pod that you might enjoy watching are Dinesh D’Souza’s fliptree video:And the dance scene from the film, which is the only watchable thing in the entire movie:Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas is copyright 2014 Provident Films. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review, and God knows no other copyright is intended or implied. The lead image on this post is courtesy of YouTube. All other material is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Hello! This week’s guest is the wonderful Emily VanDerWerff, critic at Vox alongside Alissa, the first TV editor of The AV Club, author with Friend of the Pod Zach Handlen of Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files, available at a number of fine booksellers, and host of her own mystery-comedy podcast, Arden. She is great!Our film for the week is the 1965 CBS holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas, an important film for a lot of Christians and a perfect evocation of a remarkable artist’s seminal and work—a difficult task indeed when you consider what an ingenious minimalist its author, Charles M. Schulz, was. Emily wrote beautifully about A Charlie Brown Christmas and Christianity here. Sam rarely links his own writing but this time he’s going to make an exception for his essay on Schulz and Peanuts from 2015, when the not-very-good Peanuts Movie came out. A Charlie Brown Christmas is available to watch on Apple TV; Emily wrote about the frustrating decision to wall off shows originally produced for the public here. PBS briefly made the show available; Sam recommends, no kidding, the blu-ray, which comes with all kinds of great bells and whistles.Also of note, as Emily mentions, is Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, available here and an excellent read, if not a comfortable one for Schulz’s admirers. He was a messed-up guy! As are many great artists. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. A Charlie Brown Christmas is copyright 1965 Peanuts Worldwide, as are all Peanuts comics. The two frames above are intended for purposes of review. It and brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review, and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week Sam and Alissa discuss Gabriel Axel’s beautiful 1987 comedy Babette’s Feast with the great Jeffrey Overstreet, professor at Seattle Pacific University, film critic at Christianity Today for many years, author of the Auralia Thread series of fantasy novels, and current contributor to the film journal Image. Jeffrey writes about art and faith at LookingCloser.org, and you can buy his books, including his highly regarded memoir, Through a Screen Darkly, here and here.Our episode art is a still from the movie, in which the timid townsfolk of the little Christian sect where our story takes place begin not just to eat but to enjoy the meal their servant Babette makes for them. We really dug this movie. Sam hadn’t seen it before and Alissa has seen it several times, and it is a perfect Turkey Coma Special for our little pod. It’s appropriate for all ages (although kids are going to think it’s boring until the food comes out) and constructed with total confidence. We call it a comedy above; some people call it a drama—if it is a drama, it’s a drama of caricatures, and a very funny one. And if it’s a comedy, it’s a comedy with very high stakes. It’s great.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Babette’s Feast is copyright 1987 Nordisk Film. The single frame above is intended for purposes of review, and Sam had actually rented the film a second time to cut audio clips to insert into the episode before he realized that this would not enhance anyone’s listening experiene since the entire film is in Danish. He’s very tired. No other copyright is intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.Please subscribe if you haven’t already! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week is a Sam and Alissa special, in which we discuss an obscure but hugely influential direct-to-VHS kids’ movie, Rick Garside’s 1985 Jumanjoid stop-motion extravaganza Hoomania, which is sort of the ur-Adventures in Odyssey and was billed as “A journey into Proverbs!” when it debuted in Christian bookstores across this great nation. (Hey kids! Proverbs!) It’s surprisingly pleasant and lacks the sadism of the eventual Focus on the Family offerings, and the production design is worth checking out. It can be bought or rented for a dollar from Christianbook.com, or watched on YouTube for free, though the audio on the latter only comes out of one speaker and c’mon, it’s a dollar. We’re talking about Hoomania, an International Christian Visual Media Crown Award winner for Best Children’s Film, here.Our episode art is a still from the movie, in which our hero, Kris, is sucked into the Hoomania game and given the ten-cent tour by several of the game pieces.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Hoomania is copyright 1985 Side by Side films. The single frame above and brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. No other copyright is intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.Please subscribe if you haven’t already! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week’s guest is the wonderful Alan Scherstuhl, whose incredible Studies in Crap column is one of the great works of 21st century journalism and can be read here. Alan suggested we watch Carl Reiner’s 1977 box office smash Oh, God!, starring John Denver as a schmoe and George Burns as God. It’s a really interesting artifact of the period if not a particularly good movie (Terri Garr, who is awesome in everything, is worth the price of admission), and it was hugely controversial largely because the title was a swear.1977 is a wild year in the movies—Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Eraserhead, The Hills Have Eyes, Annie Hall, Smokey and the Bandit and Network all came out that year. This, believe it or not, made more money than most of those! It can be watched on the streaming service of your choice for a fee—the Redbox link is here. This movie is based on Avery Corman’s 1971 novel of the same name, and can be bought here.Our episode art for this week is Michelangelo Buonarotti’s The Creation of Adam, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a portrayal the film’s God ranks below John Denver’s appearance on The Dinah Shore Show, for reasons known only to Him.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Oh, God! is copyright 1977 Warner Bros., and brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. No other copyright is intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.Please subscribe if you haven’t already! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Today, with our special guest Tara Isabella Burton, we finally ask the question: How did we get Trump? We watched the Liberty University-produced drama The Trump Prophecy to answer this question. It was… an experience.Tara is an all-around genius: read her great piece on this film here and buy all her books for yourself and then again as Christmas presents here.Our episode art for the week is twitterer recordsANDradio’s amazing photoshop of Donald Trump’s mouth onto his eyesockets. It is my favorite in the long history of images mocking the president, whom I loathe. Follow Danny on Twitter.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Trump Prophecy is copyright 2018 ReelWorksStudios no other copyright is intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.Please subscribe if you haven’t already! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Natalia, Neil, and Niki discuss British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s new Borat movie. Support Past Present on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pastpresentpodcast Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:  Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest sendup of American political culture. Niki and Neil commented on Sam Thielman’s NBC Think review, and Natalia cited this BBC piece from a Kazakh perspective. Niki also drew on Maureen Dowd’s interview with Baron Cohen.   In our regular closing feature, What’s Making History: Natalia discussed her recent essay for Marker, “How Long Can Gyms Survive?” Neil recommended Stephen Hudak’s Orlando Sentinel article, “Story of Ocoee Massacre Finally Being Told.” Niki shared her recent episode, “Election Night Sunday,” of This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast.

Details, credits, errata: This week Sam and Alissa talk about God’s Not Dead, Harold Cronk’s 2014 Obama-era fever dream about liberal professors run amok on campus, a sort of Christian version of Crash or Magnolia where a bunch of tangentially related characters have mini-adventures throughout the Fox News Cinematic Universe. Americans can watch God’s Not Dead on Netflix, if they so choose.Our guest is the wonderfully funny comedian and writer Josh Gondelman, an absolute treasure of goodwill and good jokes, whose book Nice Try can and should be purchased here. He’s a writer and producer on Showtime’s terrific late-night talk show Desus & Mero and an all-around swell guy. He also watched this movie of his own free will long before he came on our podcast, so he is also a man of formidable patience and endurance.We talk about a lot of stuff on this episode; it’s a long one but there’s no fat on it largely because Josh is so funny. This is, he observes, an incredibly mean movie. I also get to the bottom of why I don’t care for Franklin Graham, Alissa reminds us that people are only mad at God in these movies because they have some trauma that it is the Christian characters’ job to expose, and Josh tells us about being a Jewish guy in a largely Christian community (and country) and is very generous about our incredibly weird culture.Our episode art on the website this week is a picture of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher and poet who caused all the trouble in the first place, made available through Wikimedia Commons and used with our gratitude.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. God’s Not Dead is copyright 2013 Pure Flix Entertainment, brief audio excerpts are used herein for review purposes and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re not a subscriber, subscribe now! We have a special Halloween episode next week and we don’t want you to miss it! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Episode 15: The Omega Effect is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. Our special guest is the wonderful Sarah Jones, politics writer for New York magazine and all-around solid citizen. Sarah wrote a fantastic piece for New York about Donald Trump’s tendency to bait evangelicals and that one time it seemed like he’d accidentally declared himself the Antichrist in the process. Here’s a profile of her in the New York Times.Sarah suggested we watch The Omega Code, a 1999 thriller directed, if that’s the word I want, by Rob Marcarelli, and produced, financed, and distributed (to a solid profit and an eventual sequel!) by the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which is the channel with the preaching and the lady with the pink hair that you get over the rabbit ears. (Sam said it was a cable channel; he was wrong.) It stars—again, just doesn’t feel like the word I’m reaching for—Casper Van Dien, Michael York, and Michael Ironside, and man. It is an experience. You can have this experience for yourself free on the TBN website, if you so choose.Our episode art on the website is Hieronymous Bosch’s John on Patmos (1490-95), as blessedly weird an image as any detail in the great Dutch master’s Garden of Earthly Delights, with an eagle in the bottom left, Mary and Jesus in the top left, and what appears to be a caricature of the artist as the Devil in the bottom right. That painting, oil on oak, resides at the Gemäldegalerie, Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (which is to say, the paintings gallery of the National Museum in Berlin).Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Omega Code is copyright 1999 TBN, whose website is arcane enough that I could not snag any audio excerpts, so all content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re a subscriber, thank you! Feel free to email us with your thoughts, requests, and criticism! If not, subscribe now! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s episode is Vera Farmiga’s 2011 debut feature Higher Ground, a beautiful comedy-drama new to Sam and Alissa, recommended by friend, colleague, and coreligionist Justin Chang, the film critic for the LA Times. Justin reviewed the movie for Variety when he and Sam worked there together; Sam, Alissa, and Justin all more or less lived in this movie as kids, which is surprising since Sam grew up in a white Presbyterian church in the South, Alissa grew up in a white non-denominational church in New York, and Justin grew up in a Chinese Baptist church in California.We talk about a lot of evangelical cultural stuff, but most of it ought to be legible to anybody who likes the movies; one name that may not be familiar to our non-religious listeners is Keith Green, a Christian singer-songwriter who died very young but wrote a huge number of songs that are sung in churches by people like us who grew up in churches like our parents.Our episode art on the website is a stained-glass window in All Saints’ Church of Tudley, a 12th-century Anglican church in the county of Kent, in England, whose windows are designed by Marc Chagall. The photograph is by Klaus D. Peter, who made it freely available on Wikimedia, and has our gratitude. Chagall was commissioned to design the windows on the church as a memorial to Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, who died at sea in 1963 when she was 21, by her parents Henry and Rosemary. When Chagall arrived for the dedication of the east window in 1967, he declared that he would do the rest of the windows in the church, as well. He did, and the last were installed in 1985 shortly before his death. They can be seen here.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Higher Ground is copyright 2011 Sony Pictures Classics, and brief audio excerpts are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re a subscriber, thank you! Feel free to email us with your thoughts, requests, and criticism! If not, subscribe now! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Episode 13: Swords AND Sandals? In This Economy? is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. Our special guest is Caitlin Mae Burke, supervising producer of Field of Vision’s IF/Then Shorts initiative; she is the first honest-to-goodness movie producer we’ve had on the show and she was fantastic.She forced us to watch The Ten Commandments (1956), Cecil B. DeMille’s nearly four-hour Biblical extravaganza starring Charlton Heston as Moses, Yul Brynner as Pharoah, Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, Anne Baxter, Yvonne DeCarlo, and the rest of the population of the planet as supernumerary slaves, Israelites, Egyptian soldiers, and so on. It won an Oscar for special effects and features some of the hammiest acting from Heston you’ve ever seen in your life but is otherwise not without its charms and Sam retains a soft spot for Vincent Price.Our episode art on the website is The Crossing of the Red Sea, a fresco of uncertain attribution, narrowed down to three 15th-century painters: Domenico Ghirlandaio, Biagio d'Antonio or Cosimo Rosselli. It resides at the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City and is in the public domain; the photo of the painting is generously made available through Wikimedia Commons. The Egyptian soldiers are in traditional Italian military gear, and you can see a hailstorm showing Egypt who’s boss in the upper right while Mt. Sinai looms on the upper left. The “pillar of cloud” described in the Bible—cloud by day, fire by night, which guided the Israelites through the desert for forty years, using a generous definition of the word “through,” is realized by the painter or painters as a literal pillar on the water, which, I have to say, would be pretty scary to see, so you can understand why the Egyptians seem worried beyond mere drowning.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Ten Commandments is copyright 1956 Warner Bros. and brief audio excerpts are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re a subscriber, thank you! Feel free to email us with your thoughts, requests, and criticism! If not, subscribe now! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week Sam and Alissa talk about The Maltese Falcon, one of Sam’s favorite films, with our terrific guest Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times. It’s a great flick we recommend highly do you—one of the all-time great movies ever made by any standard, and a great introduction to film noir. The movie is available to stream on HBO Max and also to rent or buy through various outlets but Sam hates the degraded quality you get with streaming and recommends the Warner Archive blu-ray that came out a couple of years ago, which has very nice blacks and no noticeable artifacts on the print.Jamelle, Sam and Alissa talk a bit about developing a Noir Syllabus; here’s everything the three of us mentioned, plus a couple of others added in to fill in some gaps by Sam after the fact:Laura (1944, Otto Preminger)Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)Murder, My Sweet (1944, Edward Dmytryk)The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)T-Men (1947, Anthony Mann)Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)The Lady From Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles)Blood on the Moon (1948, Robert Wise)Key Largo (1948, John Huston)Raw Deal (1948, Anthony Mann)Stray Dog (1949, Akira Kurosawa)DOA (1949, Rudolph Maté)The Asphalt Jungle (1950, John Huston)The Third Man (1950, Carol Reed)In a Lonely Place (1950, Nicholas Ray)The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang)Drive a Crooked Road (1954, Richard Quine)Killer’s Kiss (1955, Stanley Kubrick)Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich)Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander Mackendrick)Extra Credit: Raw Deal, Miami ViceSam said that The Killing is only about 65 minutes long; he was thinking of Killer’s Kiss, which is 67 minutes. The Killing isn’t a huge time commitment, either, at 85 minutes.Our episode art is Stanley Kubrick’s 1949 photo “Commuters in Train Station, Chicago,” a beautiful picture made freely available by the Library of Congress through Wikimedia.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Maltese Falcon is copyright 1941 Warner Bros. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re a subscriber, thank you! Feel free to email us with your thoughts, requests, and criticism! If not, subscribe now! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week Sam and Alissa talk about Donald W. Thompson’s kitsch classic/terrifying youth group mainstay A Thief in the Night, a trim 68-minute horror film about the Rapture, which, Sam was annoyed to learn after having rented it twice on Amazon, is available for free on Tubi, as is are its sequels.Our guest is the wonderful Elizabeth Spiers, who wrote an absolutely terrific piece about the downfall of Jerry Falwell, Jr. and the conservative heirarchy of sin for the New York Review of Books, which we discuss briefly and recommend to you highly.We also mention Corrie Ten Boom’s 1971 Christian Holocaust memoir The Hiding Place, which may be of interest to non-evangelical listeners and is avaialble from The Internet Archive here; and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s series of films, which are available through the BGEA’s deal with Amazon and are generally of higher quality than A Thief in the Night. At some point we’ll get around to the movie of The Hiding Place or maybe Joni. Sam offhandedly mentions the upsetting story of Fr. Andras Kun; he is remembered here, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s excellent website. We also talk about Larry Norman, the godfather of Christian rock, and Alissa recommends a well-regarded biography of Norman, Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? by Gregory Thornbury.Our episode art on the website this week is Empty Roads, a photo of Times Square in the twilight, made freely available by the photographer Julien Reidel through his Unsplash page, and used with our thanks.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. A Thief in the Night is copyright 1972 Mark IV Pictures and brief clips from the movie, and from the song I Wish We’d All Been Ready by Larry Norman, are used briefly for review purposes, with no other copyright intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re a subscriber and you haven’t yet, check out our special episode on Tenet! If not, subscribe now! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week Sam and Alissa talk about Silence, Martin Scorsese’s 2016 masterpiece of tested faith and cultural contrast. Sam had never seen it before and it instantly became one of his favorite movies so if you saw the trailer and were like “oh, the torture one,” please rest assured that that’s not what this is it all, in fact it’s unbelievably good. Out-of-this-world great. Our guest is the great film writer Bilge Ebiri, whose piece about Silence is one of the best pieces of writing and thinking about film we’ve had the pleasure to recommend to you on this podcast. Bilge is currently an editor at New York but has written just about everywhere.We talk about a lot of stuff on this podcast, most of it related to Scorsese. The three movies that get the most airtime besides our primary object of study are The Wolf of Wall Street, which can be rented from Redbox here, The Irishman, which is on Netflix, and The Last Temptation of Christ, also on Redbox.Our episode art on the website this week is a “Maria Kannon” sculpture, a porcelain statue from the Dehua county in the Chinese province of Fujian, opposite Taiwan. Chinese Dehua porcelain was traded to the Japanese until Sino-Japanese trade all but ceased in the mid-17th century, shortly after this film is set. Statues like this one, of the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kannon, was often venerated by Kakure Kirishitan (secret Christians) who were afraid to keep more literal images of the virgin Mary, and some statues, like this one, were made for that purpose.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Silence is copyright 2016 Paramount Pictures. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re a subscriber and you haven’t yet, check out our special episode on Tenet! If not, subscribe now! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week’s episode is a fun one: Sam and Alissa talk to renowned feminist public intellectual Jessica Valenti about a movie of her choosing: Brian Dannelly’s 2004 Christian high school satire, Saved! It’s a movie neither of your hosts had seen because frankly they were afraid of being retraumatized but it turned out to be really sweet and funny and we recommend it highly.Jessica is a remarkable writer and thinker and there’s a lot we mentioned here that I’ll try to run down: first, her 2009 book The Purity Myth, available here, and the other books and anthologies she’s contributed to, and her column at GEN. We also talk a little bit about The Vow, the new HBO documentary about weird misogynist cult NXIVM (which was covered well by the New York Times Magazine here), and Alissa briefly mentioned Bill Gothard, a Christian sex pest and founder of the Quiverfull movement. Sam mentioned a queasy incident at Christianity Today sister publication Leadership Journal, covered in depth here.Our episode art on the website is Orlando Ferguson’s 1893 Map of the Square and Stationary Earth. Saved! can be rented from iTunes here.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Saved! is copyright 2004 MGM Studios. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’re a subscriber, check back later today for our special episode on Tenet! If not, subscribe now! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Notes: Sam and Alissa both managed to get into socially distant critics’ screenings of Tenet, which they had long and passionate thoughts about, and they felt strongly that they should yak about them to each other and spare their spouses at least some of the agony of being married to people who can’t be stopped from talking about movies for hours on end.Nolan is a very interesting filmmaker; most of his movies are on Amazon Prime, a couple of them for free. Sam’s essay about whether or not to do to see Tenet is here; Alissa’s review of the film is here and her excellent piece on its use of the Sator Square is here. We recommend a pair of movies at the end of the piece; here’s Sam on I’m Thinking of Ending Things and here’s Alissa on Bill and Ted Face the Music.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Tenet is copyright 2020 Warner Bros. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.If you’d like to hear the full episode, sign up! It’s not expensive, it’s funny to hear two people who weren’t allowed to watch movies until they were in their thirties talk about pop culture, and it’s very rewarding for us, because we get some money out of it! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Episode 7, An Extra or a Principal, is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson, produced by Sam and distributed by Alissa, with our very special guest, A.O. Scott—Tony, to his friends. Tony is the co-chief film critic at the New York Times and does not have to be nearly as nice as he is. Please go read his wonderful book Better Living Through Criticism at once; you can buy it here. Our film for the week is the Coen Brothers’ 2016 Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar!, a favorite of, it turns out, everybody on the pod this week, so a certain amount of it is Sam quoting the lines and laughing at himself, but Tony and Alissa are good. Tony and his co-chief critic Manohla Dargis interviewed the Coens a couple of years before this film came out; we commend the interview to anybody who likes the Coens, which is basically anyone who likes movies.Our episode art for the week is a still from the very, very end of The Robe, the movie Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ is travestying. It’s directed by Henry Koster, incidentally, who also brought last week’s film, The Story of Ruth, into the world. Some significant figures in our discussion beyond the Coens: The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse figures prominently in the film; feel free to read about him here, at a website run by one of his grandkids. Edgar Mannix, the Josh Brolin character and the hero of the film, was a real guy: Here’s his obituary from the September 9 issue of Boxoffice Magazine. American Cinematography has a good feature on Busby Berkeley’s synchronized swimmers here, including a delightful video. The Channing Tatum character owes a lot to Gene Kelly, as does the musical number “No Dames!”, especially Anchors Aweigh. See for yourself below.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Hail, Caesar! is copyright 2016 Universal Studios. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Lyz Lenz, author and columnist at The Cedar Rapids Gazette, talks with Lee Pacchia about the severe thunderstorms that brought 120 mph winds through much of Iowa last week. The storms inflicted severe damage, leaving many homeless and in need of basic services. Lyz talks about the damage and some of the reasons why it took so long for local, state and federal government officials to even realize there was a problem in Cedar Rapids. Also, Sam Thielman, writer and host of the Young Adult Movie Ministry podcast talks with Lee about his recent article in CJR on QAnon and how the viral conspiracy movement resembles certain strains of American Christian Evangelists. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/niteswknds/support

Details, credits, errata: Episode 6, Sullied by Monotheism, is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson, produced by Sam and distributed by Alissa, with our very special guest, Lyz Lenz. Lyz is an Iowan affected by the derecho, a storm about the strength of a category 2 hurricane, and would be grateful if folks who have either time or money to give would check out a recent piece of hers at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, where she is a columnist, that itemizes ways to help people left homeless, hungry, and without water or power by the storm.And for folks who just like Lyz generally, check out her columns at the Gazette and her books God Land and Belabored, both of which are certain to be of interest to folks who like our podcast. Sam knows Lyz from CJR, where she regularly pantsed some of the worst people in media just by being ladylike at them. Her Alan Dershowitz and Tucker Carlson interviews are especially choice.Our film this week is Fox’s CinemaScope extravaganza The Story of Ruth, a film we found by Googling “sexiest biblical epic.” It lives up to the hype although not in the way you’d expect: This one is For the Ladies in a very real way, with a lot of guys in really short tunics battling it out for the affection of the most alluring Moabitess in the wheat field. Sam is basically the laugh track to this episode, because Alissa and Lyz have a lot to say about Biblical Womanhood.Episode art for Sullied by Monotheism is Rembrandt van Rijn’s Ruth (c. 1643); dude also did a Boaz, if you’re interested. The biblical book of Ruth was one of Rembrandt’s favorite stories and his wife was the model for her; he himself was the model for Boaz. He also did a lovely cartoons from the story itself that is worth looking at. We’ve included the fantastic “Legends of Ruth” title card mentioned on the pod at our website for those of you who want to click over and check it out.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Story of Ruth is copyright 1960 20th Century Fox. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Episode 5, He Died Doing What He Loved, is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson, produced by Sam, and distributed by Alissa. This episode is about William Friedkin’s masterpiece The Exorcist, one of the scariest movies Sam and Alissa have ever seen, and a favorite of our guest Jason Zinoman, who features it prominently in his excellent book Shock Value, which he researched by interviewing both Friedkin and William Peter Blatty, author of the book and the screenplay about their relationship—contentious—their movie—tremendous—and their faith. If you would like to buy all of Jason’s books, you may.Sam now knows that The Exorcist was neither written nor adapted during the papacy of John Paul II, but of Paul VI, two popes behind JP2. John Paul I, the pope in between, wasn’t the Bishop of Rome for even five weeks before he died, incidentally. Alissa made reference to The Case for Spoilers, her terrific piece at Vox; here it is.For folks reading this on their favorite podcatcher rather than Substack, the image on our website for this episode, courtesy of the Louvre Museum in Paris, is the 8th-century BCE statuette of the Mesopotamian demon-king Pazuzu, not named in the film but portrayed using a statuette that looks exactly like this one. He’s also in Jacques Tardi’s first Adele Blanc-Sec graphic novel, The Demon of the Eiffel Tower, which you should all read. Sam really liked the Blatty novel, which you can buy here. Sam is perpetually frustrated over the difficulty of linking to an independent movie store and would rather stay away from Amazon, so if any of our brilliant listeners can tell him the name of a movie store with a website containing a search bar into which you can type the word “Exorcist” and come up with William Friedkin’s 1973 film on blu-ray, he would be most grateful and will send it everyone’s business each week. This week he has to settle for eBay again, through which your hard-earned dollars at least go to normal people after eBay takes its cut.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Exorcist is copyright 1973 William Blatty and Warner Bros., despite Friedkin’s protestations, which resulted in some interesting court filings, or at least court filings interesting to people with the same brain sickness Sam has. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: Hi! This week we have an extra-long subscribers-only episode about McGee and Me, the Focus on the Family-produced VHS tape series sold through Christian bookstores to Christian schoolers (like Sam) and homeschoolers (like Alissa) as an antidote to secular sitcoms like Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and Full House, which neither of us were allowed to watch. It was a very unusual mix of high-budget sitcom content—at one point a couple of episodes were aired by ABC as trial balloons, but they didn’t break the ratings thresholds to get pickups—and absolutely brutal Calvinist condemnation. The Failure Bible, as referenced in the podcast, can be seen here. For anyone who would like to watch McGee and Me, the complete series is available at no cost here. For people who would like to spare themselves McGee and Me, please go watch The Simpsons. For people somewhere in the middle, we recommend James Covell’s album of his chameleonic pop songs written for the show; Who Do You Think You Are?, despite containing the lyric “you’re not as cool as you think you are!”, which, James, I know, is honestly kind of a bop.We know that not everybody can afford to subscribe so we’ve put up an extra-long sample of the episode. We hope you dig it. And if you can subscribe, please do!Sam said that Sylvester Stallone had won the Oscar for the Rocky screenplay; he now knows that Stallone was merely nominated for both the screenplay and his performance and did not win. (Both awards went to Network. Tough luck, Sly.) He also said that the BBC Narnia adaptations were available on Focus at Home; in fact only Focus’s own radio play adaptations of the books are available. Come on, Sam. Get it together. The radio adaptations aren’t bad, if Sam remembers correctly, but then, Sam thought he’d only seen a show or two of McGee and Me and then realized he’d seen them all and ended up having to apologize for all the swears on this episode.In the event that your podcast player of choice does not play the McGee and Me episode, we want you to know that it’s probably because you did something wrong.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The rights to McGee and Me are believed to belong to Focus on the Family, Tyndale House Publishers, and Biblica, which now owns New Living Translations, the company that product-placed its Bibles in every episode of this children’s sitcom. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.Our episode art is a picture of Sam’s son. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Details, credits, errata: This week we’re opening up our first subscribers-only episode as a treat for folks who’d like to see what they’ll get with a subscription. I think this is one of our better eps; we hope you dig it. -sbtHi! This week we have an extra-long subscribers-only episode about McGee and Me, the Focus on the Family-produced VHS tape series sold through Christian bookstores to Christian schoolers (like Sam) and homeschoolers (like Alissa) as an antidote to secular sitcoms like Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and Full House, which neither of us were allowed to watch. It was a very unusual mix of high-budget sitcom content—at one point a couple of episodes were aired by ABC as trial balloons, but they didn’t break the ratings thresholds to get pickups—and absolutely brutal Calvinist condemnation. The Failure Bible, as referenced in the podcast, can be seen here. For anyone who would like to watch McGee and Me, the complete series is available at no cost here. For people who would like to spare themselves McGee and Me, please go watch The Simpsons. For people somewhere in the middle, we recommend James Covell’s album of his chameleonic pop songs written for the show; Who Do You Think You Are?, despite containing the lyric “you’re not as cool as you think you are!”, which, James, I know, is honestly kind of a bop.We know that not everybody can afford to subscribe so we’ve put up an extra-long sample of the episode. We hope you dig it.Sam said that Sylvester Stallone had won the Oscar for the Rocky screenplay; he now knows that Stallone was merely nominated for both the screenplay and his performance and did not win. (Both awards went to Network. Tough luck, Sly.) He also said that the BBC Narnia adaptations were available on Focus at Home; in fact only Focus’s own radio play adaptations of the books are available. Come on, Sam. Get it together. The radio adaptations aren’t bad, if Sam remembers correctly, but then, Sam thought he’d only seen a show or two of McGee and Me and then realized he’d seen them all and ended up having to apologize for all the swears in this episode.In the event that your podcast player of choice does not play the McGee and Me episode, we want you to know that it’s probably because you did something wrong.Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The rights to McGee and Me are believed to belong to Focus on the Family, Tyndale House Publishers, and Biblica, which now owns New Living Translations, the company that product-placed its Bibles in every episode of this children’s sitcom. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.Our episode art is a picture of Sam’s son.Thank you so much for subscribing. We couldn’t do this without you. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), a fresco of Jesus at the church of Santuario de la Misericordia in Borja, Spain by Elías García Martínez c. 1930, altered in good-faith restoration by 81-year-old amateur painter Cecilia Giménez and dubbed by wags on the internet Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey), or less weightily, Potato Jesus. The restoration attempt breathed new life into the dwindling Spanish town, which saw its tourist trade boom and the resulting revenues benefit restaurants, the church itself, and a local care home for the elderly.Details, credits, errata: Episode 3, The Next Manger Over, is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson, produced by Sam, and distributed by Alissa. This episode is about Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a film made by the legendary British comedy troupe of the title, who personally threw Christians to the lions in ancient Rome and still persecute missionaries in China, all while laughing and screaming the Takbir.A video of John Cleese’s eulogy for Graham Chapman can be found here, as can the full text of the speech. The abridged version is embedded below. Sam made an error in his description of the speech: Chapman did not don a carrot outfit and scream. Rather, after accepting an invitation to speak at the Oxford Union, he arrived in a carrot outfit, took the stage, and refused to speak for twenty minutes. We regret the error. Here’s Cleese and Palin absolutely shellacking Malcolm Muggeridge and, I had forgotten, no less a personage than the Bishop of Southwark. There’s a lovely historical feature article and a gallery of still photos from the film at the Criterion Collection’s website. The movie is currently streaming on Netflix but if you’d prefer to buy a disc it’s readily available for cheap on eBay and elsewhere. The Pythons also cut a Life of Brian comedy album, which used to be a form distinct from stand-up specials, of sketches from the film, containing the James Bond-spoof theme song at its full 19-second run time, the big musical number, and a couple of gags too tasteless even for the Pythons to put into the movie itself. Netflix also has a six-part BBC doc about the troupe called Monty Python’s Almost the Truth. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Monty Python’s Life of Brian, both the film and the album, are copyright 1979 Python (Monty) Pictures Limited, something that has always amused me. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones’s frontispiece to 1894 fantasy novel The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris.Details, credits, errata: Episode 2, Nylons Suck, is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson, produced by Sam, and distributed by Alissa. This episode is about the most important text in a child’s life, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and its constituent books’ various adaptations, mostly Michael Apted’s 2010 film of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We also talk about the BBC’s 1990 unapologetically weird adaptation of The Silver Chair, which Alissa loves, and Neil Gaiman’s extremely disturbing short story about The Last Battle, called The Problem of Susan. There’s a nice graphic novel edition of The Problem of Susan that Sam likes here; the prose version is available in Gaiman’s short story collection Fragile Things. Sam and Alissa both like Philip Pullman’s Narnia-adjacent His Dark Materials fantasy cycle, too. Alissa grew up with the creepy Chris Van Allsburg covers for the Narnia Chronicles; Sam had the Pauline Baynes editions. Harper has reordered the books so that they go from the beginning of Narnia to the end of Narnia, but the correct and true reading order is:The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobePrince CaspianThe Voyage of the Dawn TreaderThe Silver ChairThe Horse and His BoyThe Magician’s NephewThe Last BattleSam and Alissa want to stress that no other reading order is acceptable. All links go to local bookstores where possible. The Silver Chair miniseries is not available to stream anywhere in the US, but the whole thing is on YouTube. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Our header image is the frontispiece to William Morris’s fantasy novel The Wood Beyond the World, an influence on C.S. Lewis, made freely available by the Alexander Turnbull Library through Wikimedia Commons. Fox’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, BBC’s The Silver Chair, and Sony Pictures’ Ghostbusters are all property of their respective rightsholders. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

A press handout photo from the 1976 film The Late, Great Planet EarthA podcast? A podcast!Welcome to Young Adult Movie Ministry, a podcast about Christian culture by Sam Thielman (The Guardian, The Columbia Journalism Review) and Alissa Wilkinson (Vox, Christianity Today). We plan on publishing one episode a week and we hope you enjoy it; if you already have a subscription to the Sidereal Daily Mentioner, that will roll over. Some of the furniture is going to change around here, too, but I’ll leave up my old essays with a note absolving Alissa of my opinions. If you’re a new subscriber, welcome! And if you’re merely curious and not yet a subscriber, please enjoy this episode on us, and consider buying a subscription, it’s cheap and we have lots of amazing stuff lined up for our first season.Details, credits, errata: Episode 1, You Should Write a Book About That, is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson and produced by Sam. The focus of the episode is Robert Amram’s… sure, we’ll call it a documentary adapted from Hal Lindsey’s monster bestseller The Late, Great Planet Earth, a sort of Chariots of the Gods for the wooden pew set. The movie stars Orson Welles and you can get a nice edition of it from Kino Lorber. It’s an important film! Sam knows he said “Neonomicon” when he meant “Necronomicon” and “Arthur Machen” when he meant “August Derleth.” Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The header image is a vintage press handout and is property of the original rightsholders. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at yammpod.substack.com/subscribe

Where we hoped to be opening season 3 from the Southern Foodways Alliance Spring Symposium with conversations with the best and brightest in Southern food, a global pandemic had other plans for us. With Catherine in quarantine, Jon heads out to make sense of the COVID-19 shutdown in Asheville and talks to Sam Thielman (Tow Center, the Guardian, NBC News) about how to source trustworthy information in days of panic and misinformation. Mountain Xpress' Virginia Daffron talks about the trials of local journalism in a particularly harrowing time.

Finding trustworthy news sources is already hard in the digital age, but throw a global pandemic into the mix and all hell breaks lose! Don't worry, Sam Thielman, Editor at the Tow Center and contributor to NBC News and the Guardian, is here to help us sort through the media circus to try to find trustworthy sources. Follow Sam on twitter @samthielman.

Our favorite thing is Gobbledyween, so to close out this year’s frightening festivities, Paul and Arlo are breaking from the norm to discuss Emil Ferris’ 2017 graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Joining them for this first Gobbledyween/Four-Color Flashback crossover is their The Deli Counter of Justice collaborator Eric Sipple. The gang marvels at Ferris’ stunning art (all done in ballpoint pen!), attempts to process the numerous threads in this first of two planned volumes (sexuality, duality, and reality, oh my!), draws unexpected parallels to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (a FCF entry just this past August!), and so much more (no parenthetical necessary!). We promise there are monsters.   Next: and I’m freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, free Gooooobbliiiiiiin’. THE BREAKDOWN Total Run Time: 01:42:55 00:00:44  - Intro 00:03:20  - My Favorite Thing is Monsters 01:36:51  - Outro / Next THE MUSIC “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, From Nowhere (1966) “Good Monsters” by Jars of Clay, Good Monsters (2006) THE LINKS “The Holocaust, Art, Chicago & Sickness: A 3,500-Word Interview with My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Mastermind Emil Ferris” by Hillary Brown, Paste “'My Favorite Thing Is Monsters' Is A Dazzling, Graphic Novel Tour-De-Force” by John Powers, NPR “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters - Review” by Andrea Crow, Lambda Literary “Emil Ferris: ‘I didn’t want to be a woman - being a monster was the best solution’” by Sam Thielman, The Guardian “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters - Review” by Paul Tumey, The Comics Journal “When Everyone’s a Monster, No One Is: The Ugly Everyday in My Favorite Thing is Monsters” by Em Nordling, Tor.com “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a brilliant, eye-opening graphic novel debut” by Oliver Sava, AV Club “The Bite That Changed My Life” by Elly Fishman, Chicagomag.com

Program for 08/23/19 Jim Wood: Interview with Dr. Sam Thielman

Returning to Lush Left Podcast with Mary Angela Perna, I sat down with the fantastic journalist, Sam Thielman (NBC News Think, Tow Center, Byines: The Guardian, Talking Points Memo, Variety and more) We discussed the Barr 4 page letter, Mueller Report, Russia, the left getting Russia wrong, the great Marcy Wheeler, the wonderful, Elizabeth Warren and more!

I had amazing conversation with journalist, Sam Thielman. Sam of The Tow Center for Digital Journalism, with bylines in The Guardian, Variety, The Daily Beast and Talking Points Memo. We discuss his breakthrough piece that was published in 2017, "Stringer Missiles: Ex-Biz Partner To Trump Has A Story to Tell" -- this incredible story is about Felix Sader. his background, shady business ties, Trump and so much more. A must listen!

Through her blood testing company Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes bilked investors like Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch out of hundreds of millions of dollars. That's cool. Less cool? Her blood testing technology never worked properly, and many, many patients who used it got bad results. Journalists Ismat Mangla and Sam Thielman join host Oriana Schwindt to discuss whether Holmes was delusional or a sociopath. For reading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901 https://www.vox.com/2018/9/6/17826924/goop-yoni-egg-gwyneth-paltrow-settlement Photo from Alden Chadwick (Flickr) via Creative Commons.

Welcome back, Finers! We've returned after a long, child-induced hiatus, just in time to fire up Season 2: Everything Is Still Fine, There's Nothing To Worry About, Really. On this episode, intrepid reporter Sam Thielman joins us for a retrospective on perhaps the dumbest year in American history; we discuss everything from Russian ad buys on Facebook to the Virginia governor's race, and make 100% ironclad predictions about how the following year is going to play out.

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.10: Fox Populi. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. In this week’s podcast, guest Sam Thielman helps us understand the business model that has sustained Fox News. We also talk about the ways in which state and local politicians have conspired with large corporations in places like Chattanooga, Tennessee to keep rural services like broadband expensive and only available through corporate oligopolies. Is fighting against monopoly power a way forward for the Left? As always, the show notes are available at http://www.thisisfine.net/2017/04/20/episode-1-10-fox-populi/.