Jennifer Romolini is one of my favorite thinkers about ambition, and workism, and the stories we tell ourselves about what we must endure in order to find a modicum of security and pride — and she also happens to be a true scholar of all things Ben Affleck. Months ago, I asked her to come on the podcast to talk about the intersection of Affleck and ambition, but we held the episode for a bit to give it some distance from the (also excellent!!) J.Lo episode. But we’d had it scheduled for today for several weeks — and I’m writing this intro just hours after the news broke that Lopez had filed for divorce.

The good news is that everything Jenn and I talk about re: Affleck’s star image, ambition, striving, his relationship to stardom just generally — all of that still holds true. Just ignore the part when I say that I don’t think they’re going to get divorced. And I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

• Follow Jenn on Instagram (lots of good Ben content!)

• Buy Ambition Monster! It’s so fucking good!

• Subscribe to Jenn’s great newsletter:

• My BuzzFeed piece The Unbearable Sadness of Ben Affleck

• Obsessed with this photo of Affleck and Paltrow from the Armageddon premiere

• Affleck being horrible in Chasing Amy

• THE BACK TATTOO

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

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