This one got complicated fast. We were supposed to dive into J.D. Salinger this week, but we couldn't even get to the actual reading without talking about the man—specifically, the deeply unsettling pattern of him grooming teenage girls.

So we went there: can you separate the art from the artist? Should you? And here's the thing—we didn't have all the answers, but we wanted to actually talk it through with each other instead of just landing on some neat position. Truth is usually messy. We got into whether engaging with art is a moral choice, what we owe ourselves as readers, how to sit with discomfort without needing to resolve it—and honestly, it mattered to us what each other thought about all of it. This is the kind of conversation where you learn something new about your partner, where their reasoning reveals something you hadn't considered, and that's part of why we wanted to have it out loud. It's uncomfortable territory, but that's kind of the point.

Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link

Links from the Episode: CBS Sunday morning story: link

Photographers:

Carrie Mae Weems' Kitchen Table Series - link

Gordon Parks - link

Gregory Crewdson - link

Bill Cunningham - link

David LaChapelle - link

Additional Links: Joyce Maynard on her relationship with Salinger: link

We're back with Mary McCarthy—our second woman writer, and honestly, where has she been all our lives? "The Weeds" is hands down our favorite story so far, and we couldn't stop quoting it to each other. McCarthy has this incredible gift for turns of phrase that are both elegant and devastating, the kind of sentences you want to read out loud just to feel them in your mouth. We got a bit sidetracked gushing about her smoking on the Dick Cavett show (iconic), but mostly we talked about how deceptively dark this story gets beneath its polished surface.

The wit here is surgical—McCarthy slices into her characters with such precision that you're laughing even as you're watching something genuinely disturbing unfold. There's a bleakness lurking underneath all that brilliant style, and the story doesn't flinch from it. 

Our main takeaway? We need to read more Mary McCarthy, immediately. 

Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link

Links from the Episode: 

Mary McCarthy on the Dick Cavett show: link

Brené Brown on Empathy: link

We're back from the holidays with Dawn Powell—finally, our first woman writer in the book! And honestly, it's criminal how overlooked she's been. While F. Scott Fitzgerald was busy romanticizing Jazz Age dreamers, Powell was serving up razor-sharp satire about New York society, equal parts humor and barely concealed fury. We dive into some of her most caustic quotes and wrestle with the big question: why didn't her brilliant, acidic wit earn her a spot in the canon when lesser male writers got immortalized?

"Such a Pretty Day" peels back polite social surfaces to expose all the judgment and simmering frustration underneath. It's wickedly funny but also surprisingly tender, and brutally honest about human nature in a way that makes you squirm a little. We couldn't help but compare her approach to Fitzgerald's: where he gave us tragic glamour, she gave us people who saw through the performance and laughed bitterly at it. Is Powell's obscurity just bad luck, or does her anger make her harder to canonize than the melancholy men who came before her?

Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link

Links from the Episode: 

LA Review of Books Article - Minding Other People's Business: On Dawn Powell link

The Unmarked Graveyard podcast - Dawn Powell link

We finally broke free from short stories and dove into film, actually, two versions of the same film. The central question: how do you transform a 5-page story into a two-hour movie? We dug into what has to fundamentally change when you adapt a short story for screen, what a visual medium can do that prose simply can't, and whether these adaptations justified their existence beyond just "we liked the story." The film was beautiful—we said it repeatedly, because it actually was—and surprising in ways that took the story to another level entirely. We also spiraled into anxieties about AI and whether we're all just becoming Walter Mittys—fantasizing about doing things instead of actually getting out there and doing them.

Worth staying up after bedtime? Absolutely!

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We're officially in a rut—three middle-aged white men in a row, all deeply unsatisfied with their lives. James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939) gave us a protagonist who escapes into elaborate fantasies (complete with Sam's failed attempts at "pocketa pocketa pocketa" sound effects), but we couldn't help asking: why should we actually care about Walter Mitty? Here's a guy with every advantage and agency to actually do something with his life, but instead he just... daydreams about it. We wrestled with whether his fantasies are poignant or just kind of frustrating, debated the story's surprising staying power in pop culture, and somehow ended up talking about Star Trek—because of course we did. Thurber's prose is deceptively simple, but underneath it all, we're left wondering is this a story about the universal human need for escape, or a very specific kind of privilege?

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We doubled our runtime for this one, and honestly? Worth it. John O’Hara’s “Over the River and Through the Wood” (1934) immediately had us both leaning forward on the bed, which is saying something at 11 PM. We started by digging in to the actual Thanksgiving poem that clearly inspired O’Hara’s  story, then spiraled into everything from Jane Austen to *The History of Love* to—yes—Shiv and Tom Wambsgans. But here’s the thing: this 90-year-old story feels shockingly modern, with a surprisingly mature take on masculinity. Also, we talked about O’Hara’s epitaph, which may or may not count as gossip corner.

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We're kicking things off with E.B. White's 1926 "Life Cycle of a Literary Genius"—and honestly, we almost didn't make it past the title. After forgetting to read the introduction (parenting brain strikes again), stumbling into some juicy gossip about White's complicated relationship with his New Yorker editor, and one of us starting out pretty skeptical about the whole thing, something unexpected happened: we actually came around to it. By the end, we were already looking forward to the second story. 

Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link

Next episode: "Over the River and Through the Wood" by John O'Hara (1934)

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review—it really helps other exhausted parents find us!