One of my favorite parts of the Las Culturistas podcast is the one-minute rant at the end of the episodes.
Each person, the hosts and the guests, each get one minute to speak about a topic of their choosing and they have to start their rant with the phrase, “I don’t think so honey…” The topics they choose are always hilarious and indicative of whatever internet wormhole they have fallen down in the past week.
I volunteer with a group of 4th and 5th grade girls and we recently adapted this exercise. Each girl practiced their confidence and public speaking skills by giving a one-minute speech on a topic they were passionate about. The only rule was that they had to speak for the full minute, even if they just vamped or repeated themselves.
It was awesome. We heard rants about why dogs were better than cats, why hockey is the best sport, why the devil is bad, and more. It was so fun to hear how their brains worked!
I pretty often follow the one-minute rant format in this newsletter, but I thought this week I would make it a more formal rant about a topic I can’t stop thinking about – I don’t think so honey, the people who call into radio shows must be studied and stopped!
I do not listen to the radio often. Radio to me always feels synonymous with being in the car and since I don’t really drive, I don’t have the opportunity that often.
But every time I happen to catch the radio, I am absolutely fascinated by the psyche of people who call into radio stations.
Sometimes they are answering prompts or trying to win a contest, sometimes they are calling in out of the blue to compliment the station or ask the hosts to wish them luck at a new job, sometimes they are trying to catch a cheating partner with a fake roses scam, but ALWAYS someone is guaranteed to say something out of pocket and wild.
What makes people want to call in? Now that so many of them use voice disguisers, are most of these callers actually AI? Are the stories real or are most of them fake? Do people actually fall for the roses storyline since it has been on the air for decades? It has to be staged, right?
The last segment I caught was people calling in about the things that annoyed them the most about their partner. Some of them were so hurtful and specific and WHY WOULD YOU CALL TO TELL STRANGERS ABOUT THAT?!?!
I want to understand. I would read 10,000 words on prolific radio callers and what drives them. I want a series of articles on radio callers like they did after the 2016 election of people in rural diners who voted for Trump. OR I want someone from a radio station to confirm my tin foil hat theories about it being fake.
But for now I guess I will settle for ranting to anyone who will listen (or read it)!
This Week’s Recommendations
On My Shelf
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters - Torrey Peters is truly an all-time great author. Her writing always leaves me fully enthralled and turning the page even when I would have never imagined myself interested in the topics of her prose! This collection of three short stories and one novella is absolutely fascinating and covers all manner of weird topics – logging culture, post-apocalyptic estrogen black markets, Quaker boarding schools, and mask fetishes, and more. Like most collections, not all the stories resonate, but her writing makes the payoff in each worth it and you will absolutely finish it with new perspectives on the “invitation” of trans-ness.
A Proposal to Die For by Molly Harper - “A fast-paced, witty, and delightful new mystery about a marriage proposal planner whose biggest job yet is threatened by a dead body (or two).” This was so cute! Every character was so perfectly and fully described that I could get a clear visual and sense of them in the scenes. It even wrapped up without any loose ends – a huge feat – and managed to still find ways to give me the warm fuzzies even in a murder mystery story!
On My Screen
Not Just a Goof on Disney+ - A Goofy Movie is one of my all-time favorite animated films and I can’t believe it is its 30th anniversary! This documentary is such a good behind-the-scenes look and it was so fun to relive its magic with the people who made it! I was a puddle at the end!
A Nice Indian Boy - I laughed. I cried. Honestly the perfect movie to watch when you need something hopeful and joyous and centered on love. Also the cast (especially if you are a longtime Broadway Jonathan Groff fan like me!) is just sublime!
In My Ears
“Wealth Whispers and I’m Screaming” episode of the Las Culturistas podcast with Gabby Windey - If you need to laugh this week, this podcast is it! There are too many quotable Gabby moments to count and an epic rant about Disney villains. I’m so glad Gabby is getting her star turn post-Traitors!
In My Tabs
“As a congregational rabbi, I’ve been asked recurring questions over the last two Passovers. How can I celebrate this holiday while a genocide is being committed in my name? How can I observe a festival of Jewish liberation while a Jewish nation-state is acting as a pharaoh over an entire people? While I understand the anguish behind these questions, I believe the Passover ritual actually offers us an important opportunity: to squarely face the way the Exodus narrative is playing out in a very real way in our own day, to ask hard questions and avoid the simple, pat answers.”
On our recession of shared responsibility - “Public health isn’t the sum of individual choices. It’s our collective agreement to protect the most vulnerable among us: the elderly, the immunocompromised, the uninsured, the people who can’t isolate or work remotely. When we treat public health as a menu of optional precautions, we stop being a society and start being a collection of disconnected risk profiles. That may feel empowering in the moment. But when the next crisis hits, we’ll wish we hadn’t forgotten how to move as a unit.”
The Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write - “What it must have been like to try to explain all these things to children who simply had lucked out by being born when they were born. How I should have understood that I was hearing recent history; how I should have understood that a lifetime ago is not actually a very long period of time.”
“The question isn’t whether women should bake bread or stay home with their kids. The question is: Who gets to decide what a good life looks like, and who benefits when that vision is prescribed from above?”
More service journalism like this please! I am such a fan of Simplified planners and I LOVED how clearly this broke down what these tariffs mean for small businesses (and consumers!)
My favorite part of watching The White Lotus is dissecting every little piece of it with my friends and people on the internet. I have been SHOCKED this week at how differently people have been interpreting Laurie’s monologue in the final episode and how some are holding it up as beautiful friendship when to me it was heartbreaking and a message for how people lie to themselves because they don’t think they deserve more. This is the best thing I’ve read about it - Laurie Wasn’t Grateful. She Was Starving.
I’m so happy White Lotus has put more people on the Aimee Lou Wood train. She’s so talented and I hope we see so much more of her!
The Trump administration could allow Kilmar Abrego Garcia back into the U.S. and try to deport him through proper channels. So why won’t it even do that?
This is so fun! - He’s hiding cash all over the D.C. area — and leaving clues online
Real-life experts weigh in on the most important question of our time: Could an actual hotel franchise like the White Lotus possibly resuscitate its reputation after this many dead bodies?
Really appreciated this look at what role intimacy coordinators really play in a production. It’s much more nuanced than most of the descriptions I have read before!
I have to know: Did your girls start their rants with “I don’t think so, honey”? I love that idea!