Steward and Evan return for Part Two of our discussion about The Bulwark, the Never Trump movement, and who controls the Democratic Party narrative. Enjoy! And go check out Steward and Evan’s substacks, and .

Certain Thoughts

Reality Checking the Bulwark – Episode 5

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk…

Listen now

2 months ago · 16 likes · 6 comments · Evan Stern and Steward Beckham

Certain Thoughts

Reality Checking the Bulwark – Episode 7

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk…

Listen now

a month ago · 16 likes · Evan Stern and Steward Beckham

Some Highlights From Our Conversation

Why Democrats shouldn’t choose political expediency over useful action.

Steward explains why conceding right-wing narratives and framing, especially regarding U.S. cities, is part of a broken Democratic Party playbook.

Evan discusses the now almost decade-long smear campaign against Rep. Ilhan Omar.

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I was fortunate enough to speak about this in depth with Steward and Evan. Watch and/or listen to Part One here, and come back next week for Part Two. Also, go check out Steward and Evan’s substacks, and .

Certain Thoughts

Hasan Piker & The Bulwark: Fissures in the Democratic Coalition

The Bulwark Publisher Sarah Longwell has somehow managed to make herself the main character of the story: she’s the villain…

Listen now

a month ago · 8 likes · Evan Stern and Steward Beckham

Certain Thoughts

Reality Checking the Bulwark – Episode 4

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk…

Listen now

2 months ago · 22 likes · 8 comments · Evan Stern and Steward Beckham

Some Highlights From Our Conversation

Evan warns about political “analysis” that simply launders bigotry.

Steward: The Bulwark has grown from just being a niche conservative publication where you have a bunch of conservative exiles, essentially debating over whether Trump is true conservatism, what they missed or what they couldn’t see when they were supporting conservative campaigns or reiterating conservative talking points on TV, which they still kind of do. And it has grown into one of the integral narrative forces within the larger Democratic Party machinery and the pro-democracy movement representing this kind of mythical middle voter or this reformed Republican or ex-Republican who wants to vote for Democrats but gets a little bit too scared by the Starbucks barista talking about trans rights and talking about Black Lives Matter.

Steward explains how Republicans co-opted patriotism and how this messaging continues to caricture liberals as inherently “anti-American.”

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Please check out Julie’s work over at Medium and follow her on Bluesky.

You can watch and listen here on Substack or over on YouTube, where I hope you’ll subscribe to my channel.

Some Highlights From Our Conversation

Julie explains how effective propaganda turns lies into a twisted form of “truth.”

Fox News isn’t just a shameless propaganda outlet. It openly controls the Republican Party.

Julie shares my position that Democrats shouldn’t go on Fox News, where they serve as controlled opposition. As detailed in the book The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country, Rupert Murdoch tasked Roger Ailes with creating Fox News for the sole purpose of making more people vote Republican, and no Democrat should delude themselves that they can “beat the house.”

Fox News already has a pervasive influence in society. We shouldn’t normalize it.

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She holds an MFA in non-fiction from Bennington College, with post-graduate work in medical narrative at Duke University. She holds workshops in Jungian theory at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago and hosts the podcast Jung in the World.

Some highlights from our conversation.

“How other people see us is how we see ourselves,” Patricia observes about our social media culture. “We have given the algorithm permission to define us.”

Our consciousness is for sale, and social media is the supply chain.

Patricia raises the idea that modern society is in the grips of what Freud termed a cultural “death drive.”

Will the Future Like You?: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention is available on March 5 wherever you purchase books.

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Both Democrats are sane and rational, so we should rally behind whoever wins. Unfortunately, the primary has become somewhat of a fractious slap fight. Some of Crockett’s supporters have outright accused Talarico of racism — and this isn’t limited to very online liberals but includes former Senate nominee Colin Allred. If Crockett wins, does she accept the endorsement of someone she not-so-subtly accused of racism? And if Talarico wins, does Crockett endorse someone she just reported to HR?

Texas was always a reach for Democrats, even in a terrible year for Republicans. However, the Democratic primary has also become a proxy fight for the direction the party takes in 2028: Will Democrats only nominate straight white male Christians — although there are a few of them in the United States — or will they only run base-driven campaigns without any appeals to the center? I wouldn’t necessarily blame them, considering Republicans attempted a coup when Joe Biden was elected. His platform was “unity” and “forgiveness,” and a MAGA mob stormed the Capitol. I think Democrats won’t forget that, and with Donald Trump starting illegal wars abroad and committing war crimes at home against Americans who dare live in states that voted against him, primary voters might side with the candidate who comes ready to fight, not reach across the aisle (where the vultures gather).

For now, though, let’s focus on this specific primary in Texas. Joining me for a deep dive is Midland County criminal defense attorney and political pundit Sara Spector.

Some highlights from our conversation

Why outreach is key for Democrats in Texas.

Talarico had some success with an unlikely audience in right-wing Midland.

I’m not pleased with the mudslinging in this race. It doesn’t help anyone.

If you’re a Texas Democrat, please vote tomorrow and remember to come back in November, regardless of the outcome. Oh, and I should clarify that if no one clears 50 percent in the Democratic or Republican primaries, the “party” continues until the May 26 runoff.

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John Davidson, the Scottish Tourette’s syndrome activist and the inspiration for the film I Swear, shouted the “n-word” — the full Tarantino — at presenters Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo. That was unsettling but even worse was the BAFTA response.

The usual suspects also emerged to argue that Jordan and Lindo having the “n-word” shouted at them is no big deal because they appeared in Sinners, where the word is used. It’s as if people who support Donald Trump don’t understand how consent works.

Someone on Threads even posted in my feed that white people learned the n-word from “our” music. It’s a pathetic argument. Besides, if we’re talking about “my” music, I don’t think the “n-word” comes up much in Candide or Jesus Christ Superstar.

Some highlights from our conversation

The BAFTA aftermath has shown that too many people don’t seem to grasp how apologies work. You apologize when you cause someone harm, regardless of your intent. Your intent determines whether someone is inclined to accept your apology and forgive you. I don’t demand that Davidson atone for his outburst, as it was it wasn’t intentional, just acknowledge the painful impact without making it about himself.

Too many people also struggle to empathize with Black pain and the legacy of racism.

Apologizing when you cause harm — even if unintentional — is not about accepting undue blame but expressing empathy.

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This is actually good news, if you’re up for Democrats winning elections. I know many liberals insist that Trump won because he’s a racist, sexist bigoted fool rather than in spite of those obvious character flaws. However, if all 2024 Trump voters wanted him to Make American Antebellum Again, he’d enjoy much higher approval. I don’t need to like former Trump voters to accept them in a winning coalition. It’s like Buffy teaming up with Spike in that epic Season 2 finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spike’s motivations were self-centered and hardly noble, but ultimately, he still helped her save the world. (Watch below.)

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Friend of the podcast Cliston Brown joins me to discuss the Wall Street Journal’s findings and more in a lively chat that’s well worth your time. Here endeth the lesson.

Some highlights from our conversation

We discuss whether online shaming might feel good but isn’t the most effective persuasion tactic.

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Why Democrats too often fall victim to “silver bullet” thinking.

Why John Fetterman’s curious Senate career likely ends after one term.

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Combining comedy and confrontation, Teal shares her experiences as a wheelchair user in a world where strangers at Whole Foods either don’t notice you exist or ask oddly intimate questions about your sex life.

Teal has performed multiple roles on stage and screen. One of her first major roles was in 2004’s Warm Springs with Kenneth Branagh and Cynthia Nixon. She played Venom in the web series The Guild and herself in her own hilarious series My Gimpy Life. (Watch one of my favorite segments below.)

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Oh, and I love this one featuring Felicia Day. It’s a great series is what I’m saying. Check it out.

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The following isn’t homework, though there might be a quiz later.

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Lee hosts the podcast Disrupter Politics, which you should check out.

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Edited excerpts from our discussion:

ERICA: I was challenging Congresswoman Doris Matsui. The reason most people don’t know who she is, even though she represents the capital of the fourth largest economy in the world, is because she doesn’t stick her neck out for anything. She’s deeply entrenched. Everything is prepared. The joke is that she still acts like the spouse of a member of Congress.

The history here is she’s not from Sacramento. That’s fine. People move around. But her husband, Bob Matsui, was on the Sacramento City Council in the ‘70s. He was elected into Congress in his 30s in 1979. I was two years old and he was elected into Congress for Sacramento proper. He was in Congress for 26 years and he died. And then just days after the memorial — I believe that he was lying in wake under the rotunda — I’m pretty sure Doris Matsui announced that she was going to run. And with Nancy Pelosi’s help, she cleared the field.

So there were people who had been in line to run, who were going to run, who had actually been doing the work in the community who were going to run. But the field was cleared for Doris Matsui to become the next member of Congress, despite not having any experience that any normal objective person would look at and think, “Oh, she’s a great candidate for Congress.”

It was just her name. Even people who like her will say she was only elected because of her last name.

SER: But [Rep. Matsui] is 81 years old, will be 82 [and she’s running for another term].

ERICA: Right.

SER: Which is insane.

ERICA: Not reading the room.

SER: I’ve written a piece about this a while back about why Democrats can’t resist dying in office.

ERICA: She’s never really lived in Sacramento. When her husband won back in 1979, they bought a home in Maryland. She basically lived there. They used her father-in-law’s address at a home in Sacramento. I believe they raised their son there. So all of her experience is like local to D.C.

She was appointed to the transition committee for Bill Clinton … I think she was a corporate lobbyist, too, right before she was appointed into this role basically, or won the special election. But you don’t find that anywhere in her history because I think they know it’s toxic.

So your primary residence is supposed to be in the state, just the state that you represent. And she got dinged in 2007 by the House Ethics Committee, because her taxes have been filed with Maryland as her primary residence. She’s still living in that home that her son now lives in, apparently.

When I was running against her, I heard from three separate people at three different events that I went to … they were a little tipsy, but they said, “Oh, you know, [her campaign manager Roger Salazar,] says he just tells Doris to stay in D.C. because people are going to vote for her anyway, because it’s such a blue district.”

It’s changed a little bit since redistricting after the passage of Prop 50, but she’s so entrenched. And she’s running for another term.

ERICA: When I realized that Doris Matsui was going to run again, I saw her new logo roll up on December 31st, 2024 on Facebook, Doris Matsui 2026. I said, you’re kidding me. So I immediately said, Who is challenging her? I’m a great campaign operative. I love to talk. Who’s challenging her? Nobody. Nobody’s challenging.

I was told the people on the bench are cowards or unhinged. That’s what I was told. So they said, you should run. I was like, I can’t run. I have anxiety. I have ADHD. I have OCD. I couldn’t do it. I don’t like pictures of myself even, you know, I can’t do it. But people kept talking to me and saying, “Look, you are kind of not like a nobody, but you are the person we need right now because you have a background that is unusual, right? Because you have lived experiences that we’re missing in Congress.

I finally filed in April. I still waited a month to actually drop a campaign ad. I was just making sure you know no one else is going to get in and then I did it and so that’s when I had that video I made and I went to the convention.

I would go to these meetings and I feel like I’d see epiphanies on faces. “Yeah, you’re right. You know, these Democrats, they’re a big part of why we lost again.”

So this was the time. Look at your primary challengers. Who was un-bought? There are a lot of people here who say “I like Doris but it’s time for her to go.” The reason why I suspended [my campaign] was because there was finally a more prominent progressive who decided to run. I know that she decided to run after I got in. Her name is Mai Vang. She is currently the lone progressive on the Sacramento City Council.

She was also on the school board. She was born and raised in south Sacramento She’s the oldest of 16 kids. She’s a daughter of Hmong refugees. She is someone people love and admire, and she’s been doing the work in the community.

It takes political courage to challenge Doris Matsui. [Vang’s] not waiting her turn. We have a bottleneck in Sacramento where there are all these people who want to run for Congress, but they’re just waiting for [Matsui] to retire. So they all endorse her. They say nice things about her, even though they know she doesn’t come back to the district or hold town halls. She’s never had to hold a debate in her life because she’s had the easiest ride in Congress ever.

So, Mai Vang announced that she was going to run and almost immediately I suspended and I talked to her and now I knock doors for her.

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The origins of the New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathon are in bit of a twilight zone of their own; no one knows which regional TV station syndicating Twilight Zone reruns started them – New York’s WPIX (Channel 11) or Los Angeles’ KTLA?—or whether they even began on that holiday at all. “The first one we did was on Thanksgiving in 1980,” said KTLA program director Mark Sonnenberg in a 1991 article in the LA Times. In a 1981 cover story, “The Great Twilight Zone Revival: Why Rod Serling’s TV Classic Lives On,” Alternative Media magazine noted that this first Thanksgiving marathon, only eight hours long, received a 16% share.

The Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) started airing “Twilight Zone” marathons over the Fourth of July holiday during the mid-1990s. (It still does sporadically.)

I prefer the New Year’s marathons because The Twilight Zone is the perfect accompaniment to long winter nights and inclement weather. Series creator Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day so the holiday timing is especially appropriate.

These days, I watch episodes from my own collection. My son might even join me this year. Before I go, I thought I’d share last year’s interview with Emmy-winning writer Joseph Dougherty (Thirtysomething, Pretty Little Liars) about his new book, Rod Serling at 100: One Writer's Acknowledgment, a wonderful tribute to Serling that examines his work and significant contributions to television.

Transcribed excerpts from our conversation:

SER: I’m a tremendous fan of Rod Serling in particular. He’s sort of a personal inspiration. Since I was a kid, I’ve read everything written about him and his work and [The Twilight Zone.] What I think I appreciate most about your book is that — you are obviously an acclaimed writer yourself — and I’ve always chafed at the idea that Twilight Zone is some sort of guilty pleasure or that Serling was a pulp writer.

I think he’s one of the greats, and you give him his flowers, to use that term, as someone in the field to look at his work as a writer and his impact on the work.

So, can you just tell us what inspired you to write about Serling?

JOE: Well, I’ll tell you right now, your reaction to the book is incredibly satisfying because it’s exactly what I wanted to do. I realized about a year ago that we were coming up on his centenary. And I thought if I was ever going to sit down and really talk about him and talk about what he’s meant to me and the kind of writer he is, this would be the moment to do it. And it’s kind of worked out rather well.

I either had very neglectful or very indulgent parents, but I am of an age where I was able to be exposed to The Twilight Zone as a kid in its original broadcast. And when you’re a kid, you’re kind of a sponge for everything around you, but you’re pretty quick at determining what the good stuff is and what the bad stuff is. And Serling, his storytelling, his approach to storytelling, and his physical presence as a writer who had a job and his job was storytelling, standing there at the beginning of The Twilight Zone episodes after the first season — the first season he just narrated — standing there being a writer and saying, these are written stories, these are handcrafted objects, and we want you to pay attention.

And from that, pretty much from that moment on, even though I recognize it a little bit more in retrospect, like is usually the case, that’s how I started to become a writer. His influence never left me.

He was only 50 years old when he died in 1975. I think it was a tremendous loss to television and to education. He said himself that working in television was not for anyone under 40 years old. I fortunately have been able to disprove that slightly. But he was becoming an amazing teacher at Ithaca and at some other places where he visited.

I encountered him when I was in college and pretty much made an idiot of myself in the process. So maybe this book is an apology. I’m not so sure. I just wanted to put him in a kind of perspective for myself and also a perspective in a larger sense for television.

I’m not the first one to make this observation, but Rod Serling is arguably the first show runner. He is the first writer who took complete control of a television program. And even when he worked with other writers — he worked with the best: Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont and George Clayton Johnson and Earl Hamner — it was always in service of his vision and his vision supported their words. I don’t know if you get a Gene Roddenberry without Rod Serling or Jordan Peele.

One of the great experiences since the book has come out is having conversations with people like yourself and realizing that it’s a lasting legacy. It keeps going on. We’re talking about a man who wasn’t very certain of his own legacy in his final days. As a matter of fact, when it comes down to what he thought was important, his headstone does not identify him as a writer. His headstone identifies him as a World War II veteran. That was what was important to him. That’s what he felt he wanted to say about it.

He’s a damn good writer and a great storyteller.

SER: He made a lot of great choices [as a showrunner.] I’ve adapted a few things from other works, like books to the stage, but one thing that has inspired me is if you go and you look at certain changes that he made, [they’re small but significant.]

[SPOILER WARNING]

So in “The Invaders,” Richard Matheson’s script, a very famous episode, I think he changes the intro … the original script reveals that it’s not Earth. He removes that detail so that you identify with Agnes Moorhead’s character immediately because you just assume that she’s one of us, and “The Hitchhiker,” where he cast a woman as the lead, and that just changes the entire story and makes it more intense.

JOE: It does. It’s Inger Stevens, and you identify with her and her problems. The radio play, it was Orson Welles. You don’t really figure Orson Welles as a vulnerable character.

I think one of the most interesting changes he made is in a script he didn’t write, which is “A Game of Pool,” which was written by George Clayton Johnson. He changed the ending .. if I’m getting this right, George Clayton Johnson had the Jack Klugman character lose and die and be forgotten. Serling said, no, he should win and learn the cost of winning. That’s the way better ending.

SER: Ironically, because people think of him as this guy who did twists, and that’s what Twilight Zone is. There’s so much more than that. He did so much. The human stories [that said[ what you get is often what you shouldn’t have gotten.

JOE: The fact is we keep watching them even when we know where the twist is. Yeah, there are some things that you can see. He was not a fan of despots. He was very concerned about society and conformity.

One of the stock lines that I came up with, and it doesn’t bother me so much because it seems to be completely true, is that The Twilight Zone was a place where you may not get what you want, but you always get what you’ve been asking for. And you’ve been asking for it, buddy.

[ … ]

When I was in college, Serling came and talked to us. I was totally gobsmacked and I made a complete idiot of myself. I take great comfort in knowing I’m sure he didn’t remember it.

I remember talking to him briefly about Burgess Meredith breaking his glasses at the end of “Time Enough at Last.” And I said, “Why was it necessary for the glasses to break?” He said something to the effect of, “Nuclear war shouldn’t benefit anyone.”

And I realized, what would you have had if it was just a pullback to this lonely little man would read forever? We remember it because of the ending.

Check out Joseph Dougherty’s book, Rod Serling at 100: One Writer's Acknowledgment. It’s a great read about a visionary writer whose work remains timeless.

I’ll also have a special Serling-inspired piece on New Year’s Eve to kick off The Twilight Zone holiday for those who celebrate.

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Transcribed excerpts from our conversation:

SER: I’m delighted to have a fellow Southerner joining me — I’m from South Carolina. You’re from Georgia — to discuss our mutual affection for an almost 60-year-old British TV series, The Avengers. Can you tell me about your particular interests and what inspired you to write this book?

MICHAEL: I’ve been an Avengers fan ever since I was a teenager. I’ve always said that Doctor Who was my gateway into British cult television, my gateway drug. So in the 1980s, the PBS station in Georgia showed virtually everything British that was cult. You had Doctor Who. You had Monty Python. You had The Avengers. You had Blake’s 7. You had The Prisoner, all kinds of stuff.

I was not a big fan of American ‘80s television at the time. A lot of people see it as a classic era now but it wasn’t really my thing. I watched all these old British TV shows that were in syndication. So I became a fan of The Avengers.

It just seemed like there were several renaissances over the coming years. There was another one in 1990 when A&E showed all the Honor Blackman episodes for the first time.

So that was the second period of interest for me and then the third was when the big theatrical release came out in 1998 and then the DVDs started coming out from A&E. It was around that period in the late ‘90s I started writing a website that was intended to review all the episodes because we were watching a lot of them for the first time or the first time in a long time. The website was called Quite, Quite Fantastic Avengers Limited originally.

SER: I was a fan of the website.

MICHAEL: Oh, good. Some people still remember it. So that’s where it all started. Then for various reasons, it sort of got dropped before I managed to review all the episodes. I was looking for something that I wanted to collate into a book. Around 2018, I thought, “Well, I’ve got these all these old reviews. I can just easily put them together and do a little editing and it’ll make a book,” but I ended up basically redoing everything because opinions had changed, my writing was better, and I just felt like I could do a better job. So I ended up rewatching every episode and and re-reviewing everything, and that’s how the book came about.

SER: You talk about the book being for the modern viewer. [December] is the 60th anniversary of when Diana Rigg starting filming The Avengers. When you and I started watching the show, that was like a 16-year-old now watching old episodes of The X-Files. Yet, I don’t think it’s just my middle-aged nostalgia that makes me think the show still holds up quite well.

MICHAEL: It’s an unusual show in that it has survived the test of time much better than many shows from the 1960s. I think one of the reasons why is it just had a very high production standard for its day, even if you like put it up against the top notch, highly budgeted productions out of America at the time … This came from being like a videotaped show. This is this was a show that [in its first three seasons] had the same production values as William Hartnell-era Doctor Who.

Maybe they had a little more artistry from the beginning, but then it really comes out in the film era, and it starts to look very film noir. It looks like the films of the day, really, to me. I compare it to like a lot of the British cinema that was coming out at the time.

One of the reasons for this was because a lot of the directors that were working on the show that they were pulling in, they were pulling them in from the British film industry, which was in a kind of crisis and was kind of falling apart. It wasn’t being as successful as it had in the past. And so they had all these film directors that were essentially out of work. A way for them to get more work was to move into television. That was all [producer] Albert Fennell’s idea. He was the guy who had the film background amongst the two producers, and he was brining in a lot of talented film directors who boosted the image of the show tremendously.

SER: The book title, Quite Quite Fantastic!, comes from the final black-and-white episode, “Honey For The Prince,” which is another one that’s fun but also slightly campier. You see where it could potentially be a fifth season color episode as opposed to the early episodes [from the fourth season.]

MICHAEL: [“The Girl From Auntie”] is the transition point, in my opinion — the first one that feels like a fifth season episode.

SER: Absolutely. Obviously, there were high body counts as a spy show, as a drama, but where it wasn't necessarily a joke [like in “The Girl From Auntie”]. We see much more of that in the fifth season, the reaction to death was almost as everyone knows it’s a TV show, and we’re just having fun with this. They do sort of pull back from that later [in Rigg’s era]. They start doing much more serious stories, and “Murdersville” is one where the show presents the deaths as tragic. Mrs. Peel is genuinely hurt that her friend has died. It’s not campy or jokey like in “The Girl From Auntie,” which I absolutely adore because it’s hilarious.

MICHAEL: I love the witty banter [of The Avengers] probably most of all. I think that is a feature that goes all the way back to the beginning of the show. It’s just a matter of intensity or concentration of it. I think it reaches a peak in the fourth and fifth seasons, probably because the chemistry between Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee was so good.

Diana Rigg was so good at that witty banter and just delivering a line with with so much nuance to it. She could put a little bit of aristocracy into the most humorous line or she could put a little bit of humor into the most serious line. She was extremely good at the subtlety of her expressions, too.

SER: The issue of automation comes up a lot in the series. I wouldn’t say it’s dated [considering concerns about AI]. It’s in “The Cybernauts” and later “The House That Jack Built,” when the villain is someone who believes that machines are superior to people. He’d wanted to automate [Mrs. Peel’s company]. She’d fired him, and he now wants revenge. I was watching [“House That Jack Built”] recently during Jodie Whittaker's run on Doctor Who, and it’s interesting to see the ways how Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel was like the Doctor, especially in the modern era. She’s dashing but also brilliant and able to think through problems.

MICHAEL: It’s a tour de force for her. I mean, she’s got to do a lot in that episode and she’s got to do a lot with very little, because she hardly has any lines. It’s all about the frustration she displays on her face, whether she’s looking hopeful, whether she's looking fearful, whether she's uncertain or confident or whatever, and it all plays on her face. She only has this insane escaped convict to talk to, and then only briefly. So, it’s a lot of work for her, and I think she does a bang-up job. She had tremendous range as an actor.

Watch the full interview on YouTube below or download the podcast version above. Please like, share, and subscribe. You can order a copy of Quite Quite Fantastic! here.

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Lynne has 31 years experience in professional theater, and she’s spent most of her career serving young audiences. This includes performing at the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage and Adventure Theatre and teaching for such institutions as the Folger Shakespeare Library, Everyman Theatre, and Baltimore School for the Arts.

Lynne also co-hosts the podcast Fine Beats and Cheeses with her twin sister (and friend of this newsletter), Leslie Gray Streeter. Last year, Lynne and Liz invited me on to discuss all things Law & Order.

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Cassandra’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Brooklyn Rail, the Huffington Post, Public Books, The International Herald Tribune, and Art in America.

A Little Bit Bad is available for pre-order at your preferred bookseller.

(We discuss the 1994 indie film Go Fish, and Cassandra’s piece about watching the movie with her daughter is worth a read.)

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Edited excerpts from our discussion:

CASSANDRA: Yeah, I guess about a year before Roe v. Wade was overturned, I had this weird moment. I just a voice told me, you have to have a festival about abortion stories … So a friend lent me their gallery and we had a little art show and then we had a storytelling event in the park.

And then we also had some comedians and some music and various things throughout the weekend. Recently we just did another one which was not just abortion, it was bodily autonomy more generally where we were talking about how all these issues about the fight to be in control of one’s own body is an issue that we’re facing on a lot of different levels and we need to be united and fighting for [it as one issue].

One of the things that I really loved about the first festival was a lot of women came out who had to seek illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade. They were furious and upset because the festival, just by coincidence, ended up taking place a few days after the Dobbs decision was leaked, basically essentially saying that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned.

And these women [said] I’ve never told this story before. It’s very traumatic. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but I’m going to tell it now. Stories about having to get into … somebody’s car and go who knows where to have an abortion on a kitchen table. Stories about getting out of an abusive relationship, stories about being raped.

And my mother’s own story was something that I grew up with. So maybe this work came out of that. She had to help a friend get an abortion in 1960. They drove from Berkeley to Tijuana. Her friend was bleeding a lot on the way back. And my mom was really afraid that she was going to die. But the friend didn’t want to stop because she thought she would be arrested. [My mother] drove her through the night all the way back to Berkeley bleeding and then took her straight to the infirmary at school. And the doctor looked my mother in the eye and said, your friend is having a miscarriage. Isn’t that right?

They’re living people now who can testify what it looks like to live in a country where there’s no abortion access and what that can do to people’s human rights. And we should be listening to them.

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Joining me on the podcast for a special tribute to MST3K is Erik Barnes, a writer, comedian, and aspiring swashbuckler. Erik is currently a script writer for the comedy news video essay show Some More News, which you should check out on YouTube.

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The first Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode aired on November 24, 1988, which was Thanksgiving Day. It wasn’t intentional, but a holiday tradition began, especially once there were enough episodes to run as a marathon. It was perfect counter programming to sports and parades.

Here’s the late, always great Adam West hosting the 1994 Turkey Day, which I remember fondly. (Watch below.)

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YouTube labels the video as 1993 but that year, Comedy Central rejected the reasonable offer from MST3K’s Best Brains to provide bumper content and instead produced cheap-ass bumpers featuring MST3K fans, who probably didn’t know they were sloppy second scabs. That was the first Turkey Day I watched “live,” while home from college.

MST3K episodes are readily accessible on YouTube, so you can curate your own Turkey Day marathon or join the streaming version online. I recommend ending with Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, because Christmas time is officially here! See you in December (or Monday).

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The pandemic silenced Book-It for a while, just like many other theatre organizations, but Book-It is back in a new form that I was happy to discuss with Jane. You can watch or listen to the podcast interview here or at my YouTube channel. While you’re over there, please subscribe!

(Jane was also in the first episode of Twin Peaks, and she shares with me some advice she received from David Lynch.)

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Maya lives and works in New York City. She’s just finished a new book, The Language of Theft: How The Wealthy Fund Narratives That Rob America of Our Common Sense, in which she offers a blueprint of strategies Democrats can use to counter destructive, donor-funded right-wing narratives.

You can watch or just listen to our discussion here at the newsletter, but I’d also appreciate it if you hopped over to my YouTube Channel to leave a like and subscribe.

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Edited transcripts from our conversation:

MAYA: New York has a lot of representatives. I want to compare it to high school. There’s little cliques throughout New York City. And tere are a lot of them that are very excited about Zora Mamdani and backed him and were enthusiastic about him. And they are Democrats, right? There were some from, obviously, Democratic Socialists of America. But then there are some that are supportive of Israel who backed Mamdani, like Brad Lander, right?

So I don’t want people to think that it was this kind of myopic support for him in New York. It’s not. It was across the board.

Before I get to the negatives of who didn’t support him, I want to say why he won. I’ve seen a lot of people try to break all these things down. And to me, it’s not as complicated as people are making it sound.

I ran for office. It was a disaster. But what I learned from it was it’s difficult. It’s a very hard thing to do, to put yourself out there. If you watch [Mamdani’s] first video where he is thinking about running for mayor a year ago, he’s in the Bronx. No one wants to talk to him.

He’s just trying to kind of get a sense of why they voted for Trump. And what he saw that most of the people saw was that Trump was promising them, by the way, free shit.

You know how everyone’s like, “Mamdani is just promising all this free stuff.” Well, so was Trump, by the way. He was promising that he was going to lower inflation and that groceries are going to become cheap again and affordable again. And none of that has happened.

So Mamdani went out there into the communities and had conversations with people, long, hard conversations. And he was just kind of being himself. What he was saying was nothing that other Democrats in the past [hadn’t.] He wasn’t saying something new … He was talking about affordability. That has been a platform in the Democratic Party for a very long time. The difference is he really did distill and simplify the message.

That’s what’s tough for people like, I’ll say, Hillary Clinton and for Kamala Harris. Keep in mind, they are running at the federal level. It’s very different to run at the federal level than it is to run at this level, the local level.

I’m tired of this analysis of “Kamala didn’t do that and she didn’t do this.” Well, they’re also running at a different level. You’re having to go wider in your approach.

However, the way they were discussing policies was complicated when they were talking about the lift policy or talking about housing policy. Mamdani distilled it down to freeze the rent, which is, as New Yorkers, we know what that means. Free buses. We already know that 40% of New Yorkers don’t pay for the buses anyways. It’s tough here. We know that landlords keep pushing up our rent. So he was doing messaging that connected with locals who understood what that meant. And that’s why it landed.

One of the issues that’s the difference between Clinton and Kamala is that they were trying to make everyone happy. There’s that old adage, you try to make everyone happy, you make nobody happy. It was a little bit like that, where Mamdani [wasn’t/]

[The mayoral candidates] were all asked, “What’s your first trip going to be?”

All the Democratic candidates said, “We’re going to go to Israel.”

And Mamdani was one of the first candidates to ever say, “I live in New York. I’m a mayor for New York. I’m a mayor for everybody. My first trip will probably be going to Harlem to check on my constituency, going to Staten Island.”

Th at meant that he was staying centered in his own ethics, and I think that was refreshing for people to see.

SER: After Mamdani decisively won the primary, it shouldn’t been very easy for Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to just say, “We respect that the people have spoken,” but this didn’t happen. What are your thoughts on that?

MAYA: it shows a lack of spine, and you have to understand, Jeffries and Schumer are deeply entrenched in old school, New York politics. Part of that is their support and military support for Israel, and they felt trapped. They felt like, if I do this, I am going to have to explain it to my donors. To me, that’s spineless.

I think it’s pretty easy to say, so he is the Democratic nominee. He has invigorated a base in New York City. And therefore, I want to support who the voters support. Would have been very easy to do that.

Also, I will tell you this. A lot of representatives that I’ve spoken to in the past, they’ve talked about the pain in the ass it is to fundraise. If you have donors giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars and that’s a couple more phone calls you don’t have to make, this is one of the reasons why they’re just like, I don’t want to take a stance on this.

Jeffries and Schumer are underestimating how much the party is wanting to take a new direction across the board. Because when you look at who voted for Mamdani, it was Black voters. It was Jewish voters. It was across the board. People that would have ordinarily run to someone like Cuomo had no interest. So Jeffries and Schumer are underestimating how much people are wanting to embrace more progressive ideas and people are tired of this idea of incrementalism, especially when they see Republicans literally ignoring the law.

I will also say that for a lot of people watching children getting killed every day in Gaza, [they’re thinking,] I cannot understand what our continuous involvement is in this anymore. For some people, they’ve always felt like that, and then other people, what we call “normie Dems,” were also starting to say the same thing. I think that Mamdani was somebody that wasn’t tainted by any of that.

So now regarding “big tent politics,” Mamdani would not work this way in Virginia at the governor level, right? Now I’m saying that it couldn’t happen in a few years, but right now, Virginia has a different type of economy, My husband’s from Virginia. It’s very military outposts. There’s a different way of discussing things.

What people should understand when they’re talking about politics is that all politics is local. So, that’s why Mamdani works in New York City, because he embraced immigrants. He embraced the diversity of ethnic identity. This is a city that has about 900,000 Jewish people in it, about 880,000 Muslim people here, 50 percent of New York is Christian. We have a diverse background of all these different ethnicities and religions. And he embraced all of that. He leaned into that.

Whereas when Obama was president, he couldn’t lean into that. When people were accusing him of being from Africa, he tried to move away from any of these types of associations. And Mamdani was, like, I don’t have to run away from that because New York is built off of immigrant labor.

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Edited excerpts from our conversation below:

LARAMIE: Well, you know, it’s funny because I was never really into the Brontes. I know that you and I are both Dark Shadows fans, and the last Dark Shadows storyline was a huge ripoff of Wuthering Heights, and that might have contributed to my not being super into it.

And then I saw a poster for the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier. It was this really cool, green, spooky-looking poster, and I was like, oh, I want to watch that. I started watching it, and I thought, “You know what? This could translate really well to Montana. This could translate really well to gay. There could be monsters.”

I made it bigger and gayer and set in Montana in the ‘50s. Oh, and I threw in some of hitchcock’s Vertigo too because why not?

SER: I love Vertigo. I love thrillers of that style. And in Wuthering Heights, there’s the idea of staying in a spooky house overnight and someone telling you a story. I just love that framing device. It’s inherently spooky to me.

I enjoy the tension in the thriller, the stuff that Hitchcock did. We don’t see a lot of that now, but it’s something that works so well in fiction. There’s actually legitimately horrific stuff in [Haunt Me, Then], because that’s your jam, but you’re sort of touching on all the genres, which is kind of cool.

LARAMIE: Well, my first book, I kind of coined the term Montana Gothic. Southern Gothic is a big thing right now. People love it. Gothic Gothic is still a big thing. I love the Gothic book, gloomy and the creepy.

I grew up in a farmhouse in eastern Montana, which is basically the house where this novel takes place. It was so spooky and so far from anything. We’re 20 miles from the nearest town. Our neighbors were miles away. We were off of a road, like a highway that was not paved, and then another road that was even less paved to get down to our house.

And as I was watching this version of Wuthering Heights, I thought, gosh, this reminds me so much of the house where I grew up in the winter of ‘95, ‘96, when it was routinely 50, 60 below zero. Even without wind chill that winter, I think it was that cold. Now I think about how it would feel to be that isolated. I live in a town. I live in a city.

I don’t think I could do that as an adult. I don’t know how we did it when I was a kid. And it just seemed to lend itself to this story in Wuthering Heights. It’s Heathcliff and Catherine and their terrible, tortured, tumultuous love.

But yeah, Wuthering Heights opens with the Lockwood staying the night. then here comes Catherine and she’s clawing at the window and that’s one of the scariest things I can think of. That’s what bothered me so much about Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was the vampires at the window when you’re in your bed and and you’re trying to sleep.

SER: The term “gothic” is thrown around a lot, gothic horror, gothic fiction... how would you define if you’re teaching it to your students or just lay people? What do you see as the pillars of gothic fiction?

LARAMIE: An obsession with the past, that’s really important the past needs to materialize in the present somehow or someone needs to be obsessed with the past. The traditional gothic has a house, preferably spooky preferably old, prreferably haunted or fake haunted.

There needs to be fear. There needs to be people having strong reactions to their surroundings, and of course, if it’s the ‘60s, if you’re looking at all those paperback gothics, there needs to be some young woman in a diaphanous gown holding a candle, running away from a house. There needs to be that element.

SER: A classic trope of gothic fiction is the house burning down. I feel like it happens in [V.C. Andrews’ Petals on the Wind], Rebecca …

LARAMIE: Yep. The Shining. It’s almost like the past is reaching out its bony, creepy fingers into the present. And the only way to stop it from doing that is to use the base element of fire to drive it back and to eradicate it as much as possible.

Even in The Haunting of Hill House, they don’t burn the house down. The house will stand forever, but they say it should be burned down in the ground, the ground sowed with salt.

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The bill declares that Charlie Kirk “engaged in respectful discourse,” “always sought to elevate truth,” “was a model for young Americans,” “worked tirelessly to promote unity,” and “was a defender of life and liberty.” Almost none of that is true, and Americans have lost their jobs when arguing otherwise — even if just sharing Kirk’s own words.

Republicans uniformly celebrating Kirk is alarming on its own, but predictable considering the party’s far-right shift over the past decade. What’s disturbing and unforgiving is that half of congressional Democrats voted in favor of the resolution. There is a difference between condemning political violence and celebrating someone who showed nothing but contempt for vulnerable groups Democrats claim to represent and defend. This resolution isn’t simply a show vote, either, but part of a propaganda push that will harm people, especially trans Americans who Republicans are scapegoating for Kirk’s murder.

The Congressional Black Caucus provided most of the no votes, and only two white Democrats voted against the resolution: Mike Quigley and Seth Moulton. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also voted “no,” of course, and delivered a moving speech explaining why. It’s amazing how easy these choices are when you just say the truth.

Jasmine Crockett also broke it down clearly for those who are at least willing to listen.

Hakeem Jeffries, who has yet to endorse Zohran Mamdani, apparently thinks it was more politically viable to honor Charlie Kirk. That is also why I don’t judge Sarah McBride, the only trans Congress member, for voting in line with leadership. She already has a target on her back.

My friend Claire Willett, an author and playwright, joined me to discuss this mess. We have a great conversation, though we would’ve much preferred to talk about theater, as originally planned.

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