* Tina, RIP. Bill Lee, RIP.

* Zone of Interest

* DeSantis announces

* Tim Scott announced too, btw

* An increasingly crowded and unimpressive field

* Our old pal Ethan Strauss joins

* Why does Joe keep saying that…thing about Iraq?

* “Trump is sharper than Biden”

* An interregnum on Ike Turner

* Ethan’s piece on Glen Kuiper

* The American employment gulag: exiled forever

* Paying indulgences

* Is it ok to boycott brands for not having the right politics? A debate

* Cruising, the gay Casablanca / Donnie Moore, baseball’s Ike Turner

* Bonus blathering about Basketball

* RIP Martin Amis (and Andy Rourke and Jeremy Clarke)

* “Pussies are bullshit”

* A reading list: Money. London Fields. Zone of Interest. (Note: these all appear to be sold out on Amazon)

* On Orwell and D.J. Taylor’s new biography

* The Citibike “Karen” and her “white tears”

* Online vigilantism

* Salman Rushdie’s return

* Why’s there no challenge to Biden from The Squad?

* The…

* “Zero-to-insane in the first three minutes”

* The terrible 2024 election

* The right’s bizarre infatuation with RFK Jr.

* The immigration crisis in NYC

* The cruelty isn’t always the point

* How the average American thinks about illegal immigration

* Eli Lake joins to wish us all a Happy Durham Week

* Takeaways from the Durham Report

* The “heroes of democracy” are, in fact, the villains of democracy

* David Frum’s Atlantic piece

* Eli on Robert Kennedy Sr., the cop

* Diane Feinstein, John Fetterman, Joe Biden

* That insane LA Times piece (that we will talk about more later)

* Charging the Islip Strangler

* Moynihan’s weird bias

* A bad WSJ podcast

* The Trump townhall

* Rating Kaitlan Collins

* Journalists who hate journalism

* The not Desantis response

* Tucker’s Twitter take

* Can he succeed?

* Killing [TK], A Series

* Sorry, but that guy you hate is actually really smart

* That amazing Firing Line destruction of Leander Perez

* Our grim election / memories of 1968

* Che jumps on the third rail

* Unaliving all the bad words

* Throat clearing Suedehead

* Let’s come to a conclusion before we know anything, ok?

* Another pretendian

* You guys are like Glenn Beck too, you know

* Nonsense talk about Western science from a nonsense person (and that insane Zoom intro mentioned by Moynihan)

* Michael Jackson’s doll isn’t ok

* A supermarket encou…

* A homicide at Broadway-Lafayette

* Crazy strangers on a train

* The dumb racialization of a tragic death

* The “delightful” and violent Michael Jackson impersonator

* Amazon’s Afrika Bambaataa impersonator goes to Cuba

* On Tucker’s identitarian texts

* Fox News’s leak war

* The Daily Show’s 81% rating collapse

* So many shitty late night talk shows

* You won’t notice the writer’s strike

* Hating the Correspondent’s Dinner is as boring as the Correspondent’s Dinner itself

* Gas stoves and Australian vapes

* Adderall nightmare updates

* Send pics

* Moynihan on Maher

* Los Angeles is a weird place

* Kmele in Chicago with Nirvana’s producer

* The mechanics of Hollywood that we don’t understand

* AA and Scientology

* A hockey disaster

* We need more “black” hockey players

* A listener on Father Coughlin and Ayn Rand

* RIP Wes’s mom

* First class talk

* A listener in defense of MMA

* Holy shit this Danny Aiello response video

* Holy …

He first came on to talk about a suicide in the porn industry. Then he came back to help us explore the origins of our roiling culture wars. And now Jon Ronson returns for his third one-on-one conversation with Michael Moynihan, this time to discuss The Debutante, his brilliant new podcast about high society neo-Nazis, bad swastika tattoos, Throbbing Gr…

We’re back with one long episode in two cracking segments. First up, Welch and Moynihan (Ed. note: Kmele is currently peering through a telescope on the South Side of Chicago or something) catch up on all the stupid news of the last week, including…

* The news of certain…errrr……media layoffs

* Defenestrations at Fox News and CNN

* The “they-ificaton” of Tucker Carlson

* The bizarro world of Robert F. Kennedy Jr

* Lil’ Bobby: Prosecute people I disagree with

And then it’s an hour with return guest Ben Smith (his third appearance, we think?), editor-in-chief of Semafor, former editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, and author of the new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. No explanation needed. It’s good. You’ll like it.

* Kmele MC’s the FIRE Gala

* Killer Mike blows the roof off the joint

* This is a hangover episode

* A celebration of FIRE, the great Harvey Silverglate, and various other heroes of free speech

* What cable news network has created this climate of hate….in Japan

* If only we could prevent shitty speech, we would be on a forward march to utopia. Right?

* The temptation, on both the right and left, to not “do the work”

* The EU will control ChatGPT and all will be great

* The forever instinct to “disappear” bad ideas

* That very expensive Fox-Dominion settlement

* The never-ending madness in Chicago

* Root causes: A Pantone chart and a CPA