Time To Say Goodbye

Latest Episodes:

The kids (and parents) aren’t all right, with Bryce Covert Mar 29, 2023

Show notes

Hello from Jay’s flooded basement! (Apologies for our less-than-ideal audio.)

This week, our guest is Bryce Covert, a writer who covers the culture and work of child care (and its increasingly dire state) in the U.S. Bryce tells Jay and Tammy [14:50] what she’s been hearing from providers as pandemic-stimulus funding dwindles; [27:55] why care workers haven’t been able to win better pay, even in a strong labor market; and [52:25] how private-sector incentives might help—but don’t go nearly far enough. (A lot of our references are to hetero nuclear families, but the pain is universal!)

In this episode, we ask:

Why do Jay and Bryce have to apply to 94 summer camps to make sure their kids aren’t marooned?

What would an ideal child care system look like? At what age would public care and schooling begin?

What can we learn from previous U.S. policy and experiments elsewhere?

Why does an adequate child care system feel politically impossible?

For more, see Bryce’s writing…

In The Nation:

The Childcare Crisis Is Getting Worse

Child Care Providers Are Organizing, Demanding More, and Winning

In Early Learning Nation: "I Can't Compete": Child Care Providers are Losing Staff to McDonald's and Target

In Lux: Child Care: The Radical is Popular

Also read:

* James Butler on the social care crisis in the U.K.

* Dana Goldstein on child care and private equity

* The ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ Effect (i.e. wealthy parents’ version of this crisis)

* More on the childcare provision in the CHIPS Act

Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. And email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Ten long years of socialist politicking, with Kshama Sawant Mar 22, 2023

Show notes

Hello from Tammy’s COVID bunker!

This week, after a short tribute to Montana’s “dean of journalism,” Chuck Johnson, R.I.P., Tammy speaks with Kshama Sawant, the three-term socialist Seattle City Councilmember who recently announced that she will not seek reelection after this year. Instead, she has launched Workers Strike Back, “an independent, rank-and-file campaign” to support organizing nationwide. We discuss [9:42] the Amazonification of Seattle, [31:05] a historic municipal bill banning caste discrimination, and [38:28] critiques of Sawant’s approach to politics and organizing. Plus: Tammy and Kshama debate union strategy.

In this episode, we ask:

Does socialism provide answers to today’s woes?

What did the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 reveal about identity politics?

How might the Dobbs ruling and other failures of Democratic leadership help us envision a new political party?

What does DSA get right and wrong?

For more, read:

* Tammy’s 2019 mini-profile of Kshama

* Kshama’s labor history fave: Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs

* A Kentucky worker on “How We’re Fighting for a Union at Amazon’s Biggest Air Hub”

* Kshama’s recent bill, making Seattle “the first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination"

And some extras from the TTSG team:

* Tammy and Mai recommend the French-German-Belgian film, “Return to Seoul,” currently playing in some U.S. theaters.

* Tammy semi-recommends the return of the LA-catering comedy “Party Down” (though the first two seasons remain vastly superior) and really recommends these sly, tingly novellas, translated from the Japanese, by Yoko Ogawa.

* A happy follow-up to the housing episode with Ritti Singh and Navneet Grewal, reported by TTSG guest Wilfred Chan: “‘It’s legal, there’s just no precedent’: the first US town to demand a rent decrease”

* More news in racial impostors, via Andy: “Raquel Evita Saraswati pretended to be a woman of color. Her deception traumatized the communities she claimed to help.”

* Some devastating TikToks by college applicants, courtesy of Jay

Thanks for listening! As always, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

The Asian Oscars, tradwives, and Korean feminists Mar 15, 2023

Show notes

Hello from Jay’s tradlife mancave!

It’s just us this week, dissecting all the ways our culture has gone too far. We begin with [0:20] a debrief of the most Asian (American?) Oscars ever. Then, updates [20:40] on feminism in South Korea and [40:38] the Stepford wives of TikTok.

In this episode, we ask:

Are Asians now overrepresented in Hollywood?!

What happens when electoral politics revolves around gender relations? Why doesn’t anyone want to give birth in South Korea, despite myriad family supports?

How much of the “tradwife” lifestyle movement is about aesthetics, as opposed to a particular politics?

For more, see:

* Anna Louie Sussman’s article about the 4B movement in Korea

* An interview with Hawon Jung, author of Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide

* Zoe Hu on the tradlife movement and its “central hero,” the tradwife

And revisit these TTSG episodes:

* "Everything Everywhere All At Once" deep dive

* “Tár,” a film for the chattering class, with Vinson Cunningham

* On Korean feminism—

* Fantasies of progress on K-TV, with Jenny Wang Medina

* A feminist(?) K-drama about abortion

* Harper's, Boba Bros, Korean Feminism, and the NBA bubble

If you’re in NYC this Sunday, come to BAM for a screening of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” with Q&A by Tammy! Info and tix here: https://www.bam.org/film/2023/parasite

Thanks for listening. As always, you can subscribe on Patreon or Substack, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

‘100% authentic fake:’ Corky Lee’s Asian America, with Ken Chen Mar 08, 2023

Show notes

Hello from a D.C. hotel!

This week, our guest is Ken Chen, writer, professor, and former director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW). We discuss [6:45] Ken’s recent piece for n+1, about photojournalist and activist Corky Lee and the deep histories of class, race, and violence woven into his work, centered in Manhattan’s Chinatown. [1:03:20] We also chat about writing, publishing, and Asian American literature as a social-realist project.

In this episode, we ask:

When does a photo achieve representation?

What if we thought of Corky not as a photojournalist, but as a durational artist?

Can an identity be created through accumulation and aspiration, even through economic shifts?

Why are there so many books by Asian Americans coming out now, compared to a few decades ago?

For more, see:

* Ken on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

* Repeat guest Hua Hsu on Maxine Hong Kingston, author of the classic novel, The Woman Warrior

* Ryan Lee Wong on Corky Lee’s photos of protests against police brutality

And revisit these TTSG episodes:

* Our book club with Lisa Hsiao Chen, wherein we discuss the work of performance artist Tehching Hsieh

* Working-class unity, with organizer JoAnn Lum, the director of NMASS (the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops)

* "I want you to care when people are still alive," with Yves Tong Nguyen of Red Canary Song

Our first-ever TTSG Movie Club is happening THIS FRIDAY, March 10th, at 8pm ET / 5pm PST! We’ll be watching "Better Luck Tomorrow," and you can join our TTSG Discord to attend the viewing by subscribing on Patreon or Substack.

Thanks for listening! As always, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

When the right wing co-opts identity politics Mar 01, 2023

Show notes

Hello from our normal, boring lives!

Tammy returns from her reporting trip out West, and Jay is back at work after taking half his parental leave. It’s just us this week, talking through [3:20] the political disaster that has unfolded around the derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio. Plus, [28:25] a new Intercept interview with D.E.I. consultant Tema Okun, about her viral paper “White Supremacy Culture.”

In this episode, we ask:

Have we learned anything since the 2016 election about the risk of ignoring working-class communities?

How should the Democrats have responded to the derailment?

Why are people so obsessed with the term “white supremacy”? What anxieties does it mask?

Are diversity trainings really necessary?

For more, see:

* Our recent episode with train conductor Nick Wurst

* Field trips to East Palestine, Ohio, by Senator J.D. Vance and Trump

* Tema Okun’s interview with Ryan Grimm of The Intercept

* Okun’s original paper, plus the updated website

For our first-ever TTSG Movie Club, happening March 10th at 8pm ET / 5pm PST, we’ll be watching "Better Luck Tomorrow"! Join the TTSG Discord to attend the viewing. You can subscribe on Patreon or Substack.

Thanks for listening! As always, follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and get in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

What can’t A.I. replace, with Ben Recht Feb 22, 2023

Show notes

Hello from a sci-fi future!

Tammy’s on a reporting trip this week, so it’s just Jay talking to our guest Ben Recht, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. We talk about the history of artificial intelligence, the new bots from Open AI (ChatGPT) and Microsoft (Bing A.I.), and share some of the reasons why they are both skeptical but also kinda impressed.

In this episode, we ask:

Well, what really is A.I., and how does it differ from machine learning?

Is this Silicon Valley hype cycle any more believable than those we were sold on crypto, Web3, and the metaverse?

What is the actual technology behind ChatGPT? What’s so special about it?

Where do we get our doomsday fantasies from, and how worried should we really be?

Is the remedy for bad AI takes just better science fiction?

How is A.I. Doomerism like Scientology?

To read more, see:

* Ted Chiang on super intelligence and capitalism

* Maciej Ceglowski with a funny and comprehensive breakdown of why people talk about A.I. in the way they do. As well as the case for better science fiction.

* A compelling history of A.I. by Stephanie Dick

* James Vincent on the idea of A.I. as a mirror

Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. As always, feel free to email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Another train derails, with freight conductor Nick Wurst Feb 15, 2023

Show notes

Hello from an ongoing ecological disaster!

Our guest this week is Nick Wurst, a freight-rail conductor and a member of the SMART-TD union, who joined Tammy and Jay after an overnight shift. Nick is also a socialist and a member-organizer with Railroad Workers United, a cross-union solidarity organization. He was featured in Tammy’s recent New Yorker piece about the state of union power in the U.S.

On Friday, February 3, a train carrying volatile chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing dangerous fumes and forcing the town to evacuate. State and federal authorities encouraged residents to return to their homes after a “successful” controlled release of the substances, but many are skeptical that the air is safe to breathe, given reports of animals dying en masse, highly acidic rain, and the post-industrial area’s baseline pollution levels.

Nick explains how corporate avarice—encapsulated in the ideology of “precision scheduled railroading”—and government complicity led to this dangerous derailment. He tells Jay and Tammy how railroad companies successfully lobbied against common-sense safety regulations, and what feels different about this disaster, despite rising rates of train derailment. Nick connects the accident in Ohio to last year’s threatened rail strike, a fight which was widely mischaracterized and eventually squashed by Biden and a Democratic Congress. How drastically has precision scheduled railroading changed conditions on the railroads? What can be done to rein in this greedy industry and the existential dangers it poses to us all?

Thanks for listening. Subscribe on Substack or Patreon to join our Discord and participate in an upcoming movie night with Jay, Tammy, and fellow listeners, and to vote on the movie pick! As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

“Tár,” a film for the chattering class, with Vinson Cunningham Feb 08, 2023

Show notes

Hello from Juilliard!

This week, our friend Vinson Cunningham, award-winning critic at The New Yorker, joins Tammy and Jay to discuss 2022’s wokest(?) film, “Tár.” (Spoiler alert!)

[1:00] Before we get into it, we address Kyrie Irving’s request for a trade from the Brooklyn Nets… and what makes him so annoying. (We recorded before Irving’s move to the Dallas Mavericks was announced.) Plus: What does his situation say about workers’ rights, in the context of highly-compensated NBA players?

[12:50] In our main segment: “Tár,” the dark portrait of a high-powered orchestra conductor’s fall from grace, starring Cate Blanchett. How does the film see the dangers of artistic personas (with a #MeToo plotline reminiscent of James Levine’s abuses), “cancel culture” (per Richard Brody’s review), and labor relations? And how do the movie’s heavy-handed academic scenes compare to Vinson’s experience as a college teacher?

[33:40] The film also critiques a specific type of (aging? resentful? arrogant?) second-wave feminist, as Zadie Smith argues in her illuminating piece in the New York Review of Books. We also discuss Becca Rothfeld’s analysis of “Tár” and the obsession with reputation management. Plus: the orientalist narrative of a Western (anti-)hero finding herself in the East.

Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack to join our Discord and participate in an upcoming movie night with Jay, Tammy, and fellow listeners.

As always, you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and stay in touch via email at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

How many cops is enough? Feb 01, 2023

Show notes

Hello from our culture of violence!

This week, Tammy and Jay talk through some painful questions following the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers.

For more on the cases and reports mentioned in this episode, see:

* San Francisco’s attempt to expand police surveillance: Breed and New DA Jenkins Pushing Hard to Expand Police Access to Private Security Cameras All Over Town

* Accusations of racism in the prosecution of NYPD officer Peter Liang

* More people killed by police in 2022 than in any other year in the past decade, according to Mapping Police Violence

* Oakland’s Anti Police-Terror Project

* Cultures of violence in police departments and special units:

* Rise Of The Warrior Cop by Radley Balko

* The Riders Come Out at Night by Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham

* We Own This City by Justin Fenton

* The killing of Amadou Diallo, which led to the disbanding of NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit

* The L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy-Gang Crisis

* Similar dynamics within the military (correction: from NYT, not ProPublica): Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs

* The Oakland Police Department’s extended recruitment video

* A worker shortage across government: It’s Not Just a Police Problem, Americans Are Opting Out of Government Jobs

* Jeet Heer’s take in The Nation: The Killing of Tyre Nichols Is an Indictment of the Entire Political System

And revisit these TTSG essays and episodes:

* Racial dynamics in recent mass shootings: Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay, and who owns a tragedy

* Police killings across race, a provocation by Barbara Fields and Adam Rothman in Dissent, and discussed in “SCOTUS trouble, working-class white people, and Taiwan's military”

* Abolition as practice:

* How not to think like a cop, with Naomi Murakawa

* "I want you to care when people are still alive," with Yves Tong Nguyen of Red Canary Song

* "A world where prisons serve no purpose," with Kony Kim of the Bay Area Freedom Collective

As always, please subscribe via Substack or Patreon to support the podcast and access our listener Discord. You can also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Health is not possible, with Beatrice Adler-Bolton Jan 25, 2023

Show notes

Hello from Tammy’s dark apartment!

This week, Jay and Tammy are joined by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel, with Artie Vierkant, and co-author, also with Artie, of the new book Health Communism, a manifesto that reimagines our systems of care.

[2:00] But first, we try to process the horrific mass shooting at a dance studio in Monterey Park, California, in which eleven people were killed on Lunar New Year. We discuss Asian America’s reactive hyperfocus on racial identification and hate-crime designations and ponder alternatives. (We recorded on Monday evening, just before news broke of yet another mass shooting—this time, in Half Moon Bay, killing seven people. Jay expanded on these ideas in this essay for TTSG.) How should the left respond to violence that doesn’t fit into a predetermined, racialized narrative?

[18:00] In our main segment, Beatrice takes us through the theory of Health Communism and its promise to save us from our financialized care nightmare. We discuss the transformation of “health” into an aesthetic commodity and the dogma of personal responsibility that keeps us from making population-level change. Though the book does not discuss COVID-19, Beatrice explains how our pandemic response has highlighted the left’s blind spots with respect to disability. She endorses a "margin to center" / “edge case” method, drawing on Black feminism, and a global approach to social determinants of health. Plus: how mainstream talk of Medicare for All falls short, a Supreme Court case about nursing homes, and the meaning of “extractive abandonment.”

Speaking of communism: On Tuesday, January 31, at 5pm EST, Tammy joins sci-fi novelist and activist China Miéville for a conversation about “contemporary capitalism’s rapidly multiplying crises and the Communist Manifesto’s enduring relevance,” in celebration of his new book, A Spectre, Haunting. Register here!

Thanks for listening! Subscribe on Patreon or Substack and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. As always, feel free to email us at timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

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