Ambitious Crossover Attempt

Jen and Noam discuss the comedians who attended the Riyadh Comedy Festival for the money that they didn’t need, what happened to the food on the Global Sumud Flotilla, the chances of Trump’s ambitious plan to end the war in Gaza gaining legs, the people who don’t seem to want to end the war in Gaza, and the increasingly awful deployments of ICE / National Guard in US cities.  We wrap up the episode with some recommendations. Noam’s favorite guilty pleasure, Love Is Blind, is starting its Denver season, and Jen recommends Perfect Blue for the 167th time in this podcast’s history. 

Noam and Jen discuss…well how everything sucks right now. From the shooting at a Dallas ICE facility, nihilism, how political affiliation doesn’t explain much anymore, online brainrot, Tylenol, and the Comey indictment, things aren’t looking so great.  But in an effort to cheer ourselves up, we talk about two things that don’t suck: the long-awaited Silksong drop and the manga / Netflix anime The Summer Hikaru Died. 

Jen and Noam manage to get past their (technical) issues and record an episode on the Jimmy Kimmel Saga now that it’s over (?), the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, and news of a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas that we don’t have any details on yet so it’s best to just wait for details instead of speculating. 

Noam and Jen finally return from their hiatus (it’s all Noam’s fault; he moved) just in time to discuss the murder of Charlie Kirk. While there is still a lot to unpack, we give our thoughts on the immediate aftermath of the shooting, focusing on the online reactions to the news. We spend some time discussing how internet culture is starting to seep into the real world and the consequences that have brought, from political violence to people who view internet famous people as characters in a show, to the inability to tell when someone is being serious.   

Jen and Noam discuss the ongoing situation in DC and the agents from…well we can’t tell which agency they’re from since they don’t have ID and their faces are completely covered. Of course, we can’t not talk about the infamous DC Subway attack and the staged re-arrest of sandwich thrower Sean Dunn.  From there, we move to GQ’s ill-advised profile of Hasan Piker and the quest to make him the left wing Joe Rogan. Unfortunately for Piker, this doesn’t go well.  We wrap up by talking a bit about the new horror movie Weapons (warning - there are spoilers!) and the tendency modern audiences have to read into a movie more than what is actually there. 

Noam and Jen return to discuss the back half of last week, which had more going on than most full weeks. We talk about the Gaza occupation that may or may not happen, the upcoming peace summit with Putin and Trump but not Zelensky, how Noam is not a Mossad agent sent to infiltrate American social media, and the ick of online sports betting. 

Jen and Noam record a late episode this week discussing the American Eagle nontroversy and the end of the culture war, Trump firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the job numbers, Jim Acosta's insane decision to interview a dead kid, and the ongoing situation in Gaza.

Noam and Jen did an extra long episode, because it was an extra long week. We start by discussing the tea on Tea, the vibe-coded app that was long on 2018 nostalgia but short on information security. Aside from the irony of repeating past mistakes, we discuss the shortfalls of relying on LLMs to do your heavy lifting for you, especially if you don’t have the knowledge needed to check the outcome. We move on to discussing the Macrons suing Candace Owens over the flagrantly insane (but also defamatory) things she has said about Brigitte. While the Macrons are completely within their rights to sue Owens and are justified in doing so, it also gives her more material for her content mill. So what to do? We also take a brief detour into the Mehdi Hasan vs MAGA trainwreck that demonstrated how siloing can rot your sense of reality.  Gaza is back in the news again, over an impending famine, and whose fault is it anyway? Also, the NYT published a piece citing one anonymous IDF source saying that they have no proof that Hamas has stolen humanitarian aid regularly, which is all some folks needed to blame Israel. Does it make sense? No, but when has that ever mattered.  The Trump-Epstein story keeps getting further off the rails, this week with the news that Bondi informed Trump he is mentioned in the DOJ’s investigation files. And maybe Ghislaine Maxwell is getting a deal to testify that Trump did nothing wrong? Or maybe Obama will be arrested?  Finally, we get to the movie part of the pod because we saw two movies this week, Eddington and Fantastic Four - First Steps. There is a lot to unpack with Eddington, but not as much with Fantastic Four.

Jen and Noam kick off this week with a tradlife PSA - don’t cheat on your spouse, and don’t have meaningless sex. Also, don’t let a handler ruin your big chance at connecting with Emma Stone. Next we explore the not-so-curious case of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert getting the axe (well, in 10 months from now) and how, despite this all being fairly SOP for a company getting ready for a merger, media folks want to make this about Trump.  And, of course, we can’t not talk about Trump’s big week in Epstein news, from his telling his base he doesn’t want their support if they refuse to believe the Epstein story is a hoax to the Wall Street Journal reporting on a letter that Trump signed (we are trying to not get sued here) for Epstein’s 50th birthday book. Haters say it’s fake, but we highly doubt that so what now? 

Noam and Jen tackle one of the more insane weeks in internet discourse. First, we have Grok going a little off the rails and becoming MechaHitler for 16 hours. Does its meltdown say more about AI, or the humans that it learns from?  Then we have the Man Who Never Dies, Jeffrey Epstein, who did not make any lists or files and did indeed kill himself. At least according to the DOJ and the FBI, members of which assured all of us for years that there was indeed a list, files, and that Epstein did not kill himself. We talk about how MAGA is right to be mad, how everyone involved deserves what is happening, and why anyone offered up a definitive answer in the first place.  Last, we discussed the very controversial movie Superman. Not controversial because it’s James Gunn’s first outing for DC (but that too) but because people on the internet cannot just let things be. 

Jen and Noam take a (slight) break from discussing politics to talk about internet drama. We go over the reveal that everyone’s favorite topic of discussion, Zohran Mamdani, identified as African on his application to Columbia, the Ethan Klein lawsuits and if they will set a precedent for what counts as fair use, Robert O’Neil’s grifter heel turn, the latest Pixar flop, and the value of just letting quirky characters be quirky without tying it to a trendy identity. 

Noam and Jen finally record this week’s episode! We talk about the big NYC Democratic primary upset of Andrew Cuomo by Zohran Mamdani, what is going on with the Iran-Israel conflict and Syria possibly joining the Abraham Accords chat, the Trump v. CASA that was not about birthright citizenship but nationwide injunctions, and the Fresh Prince of Ipswich deciding that being antisemetic is a easy way to fame. 

Jen and Noam discuss the war thing that happened last week, including (well, mostly) the US strike on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. Was it a good idea? What is the state of the Iranian nuclear program now? What happens next? Are we getting a ceasefire? Will Trump get his coveted Nobel Peace Prize? What really happened in the lead-up to the US strike? Is MAGA going to forgive and forget if this all turns out to be a success? 

Noam and Jen spend most of the episode discussing the current escalation of the Israel—Iran conflict and our various thoughts about it. Noam also teaches you how to make a nuclear bomb, kind of. Neither of us is sure where things will go from here, since so far, this attack and counterattack have not gone the way everyone expected.  We also discuss Trump’s comments on immigrants and the new directive not to perform workplace raids in specific well-connected industries. To finish it up, we discuss what we know about the assassination and attempted assassination of two Democratic members of the Minnesota state Congress. As of the time of the recording, the suspect was still at large, but was arrested Sunday night. 

Jen and Noam discuss…all of the things. We unpack the Trump - Musk breakup (for now), Terry Moran being suspended over a tweet that was correct but not nice, the Trump administration getting involved in places it shouldn’t, Alex Thompson outing a source for lying to him in the past, Karine Jean-Pierre’s new book (and political affiliation), and of course the LA riots and not believing everything you see on social media. 

Noam and Jen start out by discussing the Glenn Greenwald sex tape, because those are words that go together now. From there we move into discussing the Western media uncritically repeating a Hamas lie that Israel attacked Gazans who were in line for humanitarian aid, since the connective tissue between the stories is Israel being accused of things it did not do.  We take some time to nerd out over Ukraine’s surprise attack on Russian airfields using Trojan trucks full of cheap drones, and how the war is showing the next phase of warfare will not rely on money and brute force but tech and skill. To wrap up on a lighter note, we try to figure out what the hell the second season of The Last Of Us is leading to and the annoyance of creators retconning their original plot to make sure you get who the bad guy is. 

Jen and Noam discuss Biden’s big cancer announcement, the timing, the susness, how people can be very weird when it comes to cancer, and some of the revelations in the book Original Sin. We also talk about the tragic murder of two Israeli embassy employees outside of the Capital Jewish Museum and the difficulty of extending grace to those who never return the favor. Jen also gives her Grand Theory Of Engagement Slop and how it is driving political violence, and Noam gushes about The Rehearsal (again).

Noam and Jen discuss the mind numbing amount of stupid that took place last week, like people pretending to be very upset about James Comey’s dumb 86 47 post,  the umpteenth news cycle about Joe Biden’s mental state (not his cancer diagnosis thought, that was announced after the recording), and Sam Seder running into the brick wall that is Ezra Klein and the Abundance plan for making housing more affordable.  Not everything is stupid, though! We give our final thoughts on Andor and the portrayal of the Empire as a soul sucking bureaucratic grind that is both evil and banal. Also, the Israeli contestant in this year’s Eurovision contest, Nova attack survivor Yuval Raphael, came in second place overall and first in public voting. 

Jean and Noam discuss the audacity of Trump accepting a “gift” of a luxury jet from Qatar, how we still have no idea what is going on with the tariffs, the ongoing saga of the media vs John Fetterman, staking one’s reputation on defending someone you don’t personally know, the flare up in tensions between India and Pakistan, and whos ceasefire is it anyway. 

Noam and Jen discuss a politician with alleged mental impairments that would keep him from being able to do his job. No, not Trump, John Fetterman. Also, the tariffs are coming, but the first rule is you don’t talk about the tariffs. To wrap up the politics part of the pod, we spend some time talking about the Karmelo Anthony - Shiloh Hendrix dueling GiveSendGo campaigns and the new fad of taking absolute strangers and making them the avatar for you weird online wars.  And because we are cool kids we saw the movie all the cool kids are seeing, Sinners. We give our thoughts on the movie, why it’s not like anything else out there, horror being treated as a legitimate cinematic genre, and how there were indeed Chinese people in the Mississippi delta in the 1930s.