Author: Maya Gurantz

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Is “everyone is 12” the unifying theory of our times? Through the power of dramatic reading and drawing upon their experience wrangling actual 12-year-olds, Maya and Rebecca explore whether we can survive the immaturity of those currently in power and holding guns. Drinking highly recommended.

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How did gay hockey player smut become the most galvanizing pop culture artifact of our fascist times? Very Special Guest Guy Branum joins us to figure out why HBO’s HEATED RIVALRY is making so many people freak out, and to talk cottaging, cock-sucking, house porn, and what happens when straight romance novel tropes meet the erotics of the closet.

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Huh, people are talking about Trump and dementia? Funny, WE TALKED ABOUT THIS A YEAR AGO! Rebecca and Maya revisit our episode where we investigate Trump’s lapses in memory, behavior and language and ask how well they match up with the medically defined symptoms of frontotemporal dementia.

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Who is Pete Hegseth, how in hell did he end up Secretary of Defense, why is he renaming it the Department of War, and what were he and Trump doing calling 600 top generals into a room for a Big Boy Pep Talk? Very Special Guest John Armenta–an army vet and communications professor who studies masculinity and patriotism in VetBro culture, explains it all to us.

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Why were flags at half mast for a grifting podcaster? In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Rebecca and Maya break down his life and the aftermath of his death–along the way noting flagrant political opportunism, right wing abuses of “free speech”, and key differences between various terminally online young male subcultures.

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Bob Dylan is many things. A basic bitch isn’t one of them. We welcome brilliant lifelong Dylan-ologists Elizabeth Nelson and Jeff Jackson to pull apart what Dylan means, why music biopics suck, and everything James Mangold missed in the most recent filmic attempt to contain Dylan’s legacy, the nostalgia-fest A Complete Unknown.

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Rebecca and Maya watched Fit For TV, the recent streaming Netflix docu-series on The Biggest Loser, and talk fat-shaming, abuse as motivation, fake therapeutic breakthroughs after which nothing changes, and why it takes a decade and a documentary for us to publicly acknowledge that the thing that seemed so fucked up back then was, indeed, fucked up.

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Will the Epstein Files put the final dagger into the rise of fascism? Rebecca and Maya are here to ruin any hopes you have. We’ve known for DECADES that Donald Trump was a creepy-buddy with mysterious financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Is this going to trigger a MAGA-Trump breakup? Might the administration be hoist on its own conspiracy theory petard? Or will this all turn out to be the Mueller Report Redux?

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Maya and Rebecca ride the down elevator into Apple TV’s hit Severance. Identity. Work-life balance. Bullshit jobs. Setting good boundaries. The toxic rot and unremitting evil at the very heart of Capitalism. Is this show hitting the BIG GESTALT BUTTON of THIS MOMENT?

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As Trump deploys National Guard and Marines to LA in the face of widespread civilian protests against ICE raids, we talk Martial Law and autocratic use of force (and drink!) with Dr. Carrie Lee, an expert in civil-military relations who concisely breaks down the specifics of what we should be looking for in this Administrations’s language and actions: why to worry, why to be hopeful, and what to do next.

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Let’s ruin the Great American Novel. Maya and Rebecca are joined by Artist (and longtime Sauce listener!) Marcus Kwame Anderson and writer David F. Walker to discuss their new book– Big Jim and the White Boy, an audacious (and inspired) retelling of Huck Finn. Listeners may remember Marcus and David from the last time we spoke about their Eisner Award-winning The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History. In this episode, we dig into the question of what gets revealed when difficult histories get told by different main characters.

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How are we going to survive the fascist takeover of our government? Through a delicate balance of activism and avoidance. Maya and Rebecca introduce a new ongoing feature, BREAD AND CIRCUSES with Cirque du Soleil’s insane Michael Jackson show, and unpack what it teaches us about how to make a spectacle out of a very bad man. Wait, I thought we were trying to do denial?

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After a nice long stretch of denial, Maya and Rebecca dip our toes back into political waters with Very Special Guests Guy Branum and Grace Freud, who bring queer and trans perspectives to the transphobic messaging the Trump campaign relied on so heavily this past election season. Why was it so effective? How did it connect to anti-immigration messaging? Is there any good way to respond to these right wing demonologies?

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As the DOJ indictments on Russian interference in right wing media and politics begin rolling out this week, Maya and Rebecca thought it would be a good time to share this episode about the changing roles Russia has played and continues to fill in the American cultural imagination.