Podcast Episodes

Big Beautiful Bunker Buster Bill

Season 9 Episode 76

It’s the Fourth of July and Congress just crammed through the Big Beautiful Bunker Buster Bill — 870 pages of fences and tax cuts, border walls and missile domes, detention dollars and pork for the s…

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

America’s Secret Socialism

Season 9 Episode 70

The Secret Safety Net We Pretend Doesn’t Exist

You can live your whole life in this country without ever seeing the crawlspace you’re standing on. America has always flirted with the idea of a safety …

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

Borrowed Time: USAID, Bono & The End of America’s Soft Empire

Season 9 Episode 65

Foreign aid is dead — long live foreign aid. On July 1st, 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development — USAID — shut its doors for good. An institution born under Kennedy to be America’s mora…

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

Theater Kids, Flitty Floofs, and the New Masculinity

Season 9 Episode 63

We always thought the real cultural coup would come from the ivory tower, the professors, the think tanks. Or maybe from the so-called “gay agenda” — whispered about by people who never once sat cros…

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

Manufactured Dissent

Season 9 Episode 55

How old ghosts, new lines, and our hungry machines keep us replaying the same pain

Some family stories hum so loudly through the floorboards you never need to tell them out loud. My pop-pop thought he…

Published on 5 months, 4 weeks ago

Poverty Fatigue: America's Moral Math and the Trump Vote

Season 9 Episode 53

America’s exhausted — and not just from inflation, rent, or the nine-to-five that turned into a nine-to-nine. There’s another kind of exhaustion we don’t name out loud: the fatigue of paying for peop…

Published on 5 months, 4 weeks ago

Be Careful What You Ask For

Season 9 Episode 50

Reference Source: NPR Code Switch: Dispatches from the living memory of trans people of color

Identity, Stealth, and Staying Submarine When the Wolves Come Out

I heard a line on Code Switch that stuck …

Published on 5 months, 4 weeks ago

The Buddha You Never Saw Is the One Who Saved You

Season 9 Episode 43

Enlightenment Isn’t Loud. It Mops Floors.

There’s a saying in Zen: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It sounds violent, but it isn’t. It’s a warning — against false idols, against ego, a…

Published on 6 months ago

What Kind of Commie Am I?

Season 9 Episode 42

I Am Whatever Kind of Commie Kurt Vonnegut Was

Am I a commie? Yes—but not the kind they warned you about. Not the doctrinaire type. Not the utopian. Not the bureaucrat. I don’t want to flatten everyon…

Published on 6 months ago

Who Paints the Target? Who Points the Spotlight?

Season 9 Episode 40

We act like the missiles decide their targets. As if the Hellfire drone strike has free will. But in modern warfare—and in modern narrative warfare—the target isn’t a target until someone paints it.

L…

Published on 6 months ago