• Sid Rosenberg is looking…well toasted? Let’s just say, when you make Trump’s skin look normal, then you might have a problem. Everyone, please wear sunscreen (EVERY DAY).

• Bari cleans house at 60 Minutes and installs a new crony, Nick Bilton, one of media’s least essential voices, as the new executive producer

• Scott Pelley? He’s not happy about this news, babe, and ripped Bilton a new one in his first staff meeting. (Note: This episode was recorded before Pelley was fired from CBS News)

• Trump’s failed “Freedom 250” concert series, which apparently involves Vanilla Ice, Martina McBride, half of Milli Vanilli (???), and Flo Rida

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, Jack gives us a helpful rundown of the California gubernatorial primary, starring Xavier Bacerra, Tom Steyer, and Steve Hilton

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends the Amazon Prime series, Kevin

• Sam recommends Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear and the Summer House reunion on Bravo

• Aleks recommends the new season of The Four Seasons on Netflix and Daniel Roher’s Tuner, now in theaters

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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• Jack doing a tight 10 on the Strait of Hormuz

• Boots Riley’s latest film, I Love Boosters (we’re not fans)

• Trump’s very convincing excuse for missing Don Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson

• Trump describing his son as “a person who I’ve known for a long time”

• The DNC 2024 election autopsy is finally here (sort of) and everyone is mad at DNC Chair Ken Martin

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we chat about the recent reporting alleging that Bari Weiss’ reign over CBS News might be curtailed after the merger between Warner Bros.-Discovery and Paramount

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends the DEBUT LP from Discourse Blog’s own Paul Blest and his band Long Relief, Win Some, Lose Some

• Aleks recommends Charli XCX’s new songs, “Rock Music” and “SS26”

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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• New York State is eying banning potassium bromate, AKA the chemical that makes bagels taste so damn good

• Speaking of chemicals worth dying for, you can pry Katherine’s vape from her cold, dead hands

• Remembering Some Blogs (or the time Katherine tweeted about her “personal 9/11” and it caused a lot of drama at work)

• Protests outside the New York Times building demanding the paper retract Nicholas Kristof’s piece, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians”

• Benjamin Netanyahu? Mad

• The Free Press? Mad

• The overuse and misuse of “blood libel”

• CBS Evening News anchor Tony Du-poop-il didn’t plan for his reporting trip to China very well

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, Sam unpacks the BIG DRAMA involving Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, Barack Obama, and breakfast tacos

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Katherine recommends Ben Lerner’s new book, Transcription

• Sam recommends Curry Barker’s new movie, Obsession

• Jack recommends prescription sunglasses

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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• How having a W2 job can make you a little bit (or a lot of bit) libertarian

• Trump saying he doesn’t care at all about the impact of the Iran war on Americans’ finances

• A quick aside about The Devil Wears Prada 2 (listen/watch our subscribers-only ep!)

• A chat about how Spencer Pratt opened his run for mayor of Los Angeles with an incredible AI slop video depicting himself as Batman that Republicans are absolutely eating up, munch munch crunch crunch

• Cros’ theory on why MAGA loves these hyper-stylized fake videos and images so damn much

• A detour into how badly the Bush family is aging

• How evil is like IBS

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we talk FBI Director Kash Patel going ballistic in a Senate hearing about his alleged drinking on the job

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This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends Cats: The Jellicle Ball, now on Broadway

• Cros recommends the second seasons of Running Point and Beef, both on Netflix

• Aleks recommends Veronica Mars, newly on Netflix

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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MAJOR SPOILER ALERT! We get into all the major plot points of the film, so if that’s something you care about, you’ve been warned!

We get into:

• What the hell this movie is trying to say about The State of Media

• The ouroboros of legacy sequels

• Whether Andy Sachs is supposed to be a good journalist

• If this movie hates women

• The specter of Anna Wintour haunting this movie

• The uncanny valley of Justin Theroux’s prosthetics

• Who the Real Villain of the original Devil Wears Prada was

This is a Subscriber-Only Special Edition. Join us at discourseblog.com.

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The Week’s Rafi Schwartz returns to the third chair to discuss:

• What foods are better soggy

• Kelsey Grammer’s 2021 collaboration with Gristedes??

• Was the shooting a FALSE FLAG OP to speed up the construction of the White House ballroom?????????

• Kash Patel reportedly being cucked mid-shooting :(

• Suspected WHCD shooter Cole Allen’s blog-worthy manifesto

• The Free Press’ Olivia Reingold going straight-to-cam

• The bleak conditions under which Trump assassination attempts keep happening

• A deep-dive on the mentalist Oz Pearlman, the entertainment at the WHCD

• This photo of Stephen Miller; this video of RFK Jr. and Cheryl Hines

• Our excitement for TMZ opening a DC bureau

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we get into the very funny Vanity Fair profile of CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil (or as we call him, Du-poop-ul)

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (and NOT!!! the Jonathan Demme remake)

• Rafi recommends Judd Apatow’s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling

• Aleks recommends AMC Lincoln Square in New York City

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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• Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigns; Tim Apple said, “Also, me”

• Checking in on Ellen DeGeneres (she’s back in America! sort of)

• Speaking of problematic lesbians, Rosie O’Donnell is MAD at disgraced former Congressman Eric Swalwell

• Also Producer Sam has been sitting on a Rosie O’Donnell impression???

• FBI Director Kash Patel is suing The Atlantic $250 million for alleging he is drunk on the job

• We remember who was on the various CSIs. Did you remember that Gary Sinise was the star of CSI: NY? (And randomly Sela Ward was on it????)

• The great reconsideration of Lena Dunham upon the release of her new memoir, Famesick

• Which reminded us of the uh, not so thinly veiled rumors of Jack Antonoff’s affair with a teenage Lorde

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, Jack finally saw Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama and we had to get into it!

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends Canada Dry seltzer

• Sam recommends the Blowback podcast

• Aleks recommends the fifth and final season of Hacks on HBO Max

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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Pop quiz, hotshot: Who has the best, most inspiring anti-war message in the United States today? Is a faith leader? A labor organizer? A rock star? No? What if I told you it was a high-profile, unapologetic bigot? Or the other one? Or the other other one, if you really want to collect the full regressive set?

Weird as it sounds, that’s the subtext of some of the messages we’ve been getting from the liberal side of the aisle these days. If you’ve spent more than a minute on social media this past week, odds are good that you have noticed an uptick in presumably liberal-leaning media figures online encouraging you to engage with a growing list of MAGA notables who can’t wait to tell you how offended they are by Trump’s war in Iran. Just for fun, try logging onto your social media platform of choice, search some iteration of “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Carlson,” and watch your browser sizzle up and crash. Be careful you don’t find yourself buried under an avalanche of “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” JPGs while you’re at it.

The “entire,” 43-minute-long anti-Iran War monologue of Carlson’s April 6th episode is “worth watching,” former Obama speechwriter-turned-podcaster Jon Favreau told his 1.3 million followers, sharing a more than two-hour-long episode of Carlson’s eponymous show.

Headquarters Newsroom, the liberal media outlet built from the ignominious remains of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, has been similarly enthusiastic whenever MAGA media oprichniks voice rare, and often conspicuously tempered dissatisfaction with the regime’s Iranian adventurism; “Candace Owens cites our post while shredding Donald Trump in new video,” bragged a recent Bluesky message, preceded by three other Owens-centric posts. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna went even further, crediting Owens, Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene—and nobody else—by name, along with other anonymous “progressive activists & anti-war conservative voices” he claimed pushed Trump back from an atomic Iranian brink. To date, his message has around 2.3 million views.

So what’s going on? Should we welcome these previously verboten figures into our lives now? Should we make a space for them in the anti-war vanguard?

The answer to those questions is no. Here’s why.

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• Sid Rosenberg’s beef with Mr. and Mrs. Met

• Eric Swalwell’s resignation from Congress

• Jack’s first bylines as an intern at The San Francisco Chronicle

• Those photos of Justin Trudeau and and Katy Perry at Coachella, which reminded us of that photo of Orlando Bloom and Selena Gomez

• Trump claiming he didn’t the AI slop he posted was of him depicted as Jesus

• Speaking of Jesus, Trump is now feuding with the Pope lol

• Doordash Grandma, welcome to the Resistance, with a side quest where we remember Ken Bone

• J.D. Vance’s 21-hour negotiations with Iran didn’t go well

• The double-blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and how Trump is leading the speedrun of American decline on a global stage

• Vance’s weird analogy about his wife skydiving

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we get into the alleged attack on Sam Altman’s house

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends Steven Sodebergh’s The Christophers

• Katherine recommends Jason Molina’s Songs: Ohia

• Aleks recommends Rooster, on HBO

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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• Whether werewolf astronauts would permanently be in wolf form due to their proximity to the moon

• Trump’s chaotic Easter Sunday post and his promise of war crimes (note: this episode was recorded before Trump threatened on Tuesday that a “whole civilization will die tonight”)

• Why Iran reminds Jack of how Trump handled COVID

• Pam Bondi was shitcanned as Attorney General—who’s next??

• This episode was recorded the same day Savannah Guthrie returned to the Today Show, which naturally led to a discussion about Jenna Bush Hager’s highly influential book club

• We took a quick scan of some current Kalshi bets

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we discuss the scandal involving Kristi Noem’s husband and correct the record on Timothée Chalamet’s Jewish identity

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends the pro-shot of Maria Friedman’s Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, on Netflix

• Rafi recommends Karthik Subbaraj’s Pizza Movie on Hulu

• Aleks recommends Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, now in theaters

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

Spotify: Tap the “Play” button and select “Link Account” to sync your Substack subscription and unlock it instantly.

Apple Podcasts & Others: Go to Settings in Substack > select Discourse Blog > scroll to the “private podcast feed” section > select “set up podcast” > then copy and paste the link it generates into your preferred app.

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• A very silly Politico magazine story about Rahm Emanuel that opens with an inane lede about how he eats a salad and how we’ll be slurping down countless stories like this in the lead-up to the 2028 Democratic primary

• We Remember Some Salads and each rank our top three office worker nutrient bowl chains (R.I.P. Hale and Hearty). What are yours????

• Also, remember when someone allegedly found a DEAD RAT in a Chopt salad???

• The Rahm story led us to this absolutely cursed YouGov ranking of Democrats’ “fame” and “popularity,” so of course we made Jack guess who was in the top five

• We also remember how Kelsey Grammer and Jennifer Aniston were great on 30 Rock

• There was also this goofy Axios story about how some (anonymous) Dems are wringing their hands about 2028 and whether they should nominate a straight, white, Christian man

• Did you know Grimes joined LinkedIn?

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we discuss Ryan Gosling’s career, the sad state of movie promotional tours, and the ways we make celebrities humiliate themselves to make us watch their little shows and movies. We also touch on The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Drama, and seeing movies in 4DX lol.

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends Jeopardy! (Ken Jennings ONLY!!!)

• Caitlin recommends Jury Duty: Company Retreat on Amazon Prime Video

• Aleks recommends Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary, in theaters now

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

Spotify: Tap the “Play” button and select “Link Account” to sync your Substack subscription and unlock it instantly.

Apple Podcasts & Others: Go to Settings in Substack > select Discourse Blog > scroll to the “private podcast feed” section > select “set up podcast” > then copy and paste the link it generates into your preferred app.

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• Trump saying the war is over, but not really, but maybe? The only thing we know for sure? We’re losing

• This Max Fisher video about what’s motivating the four main actors in the Iran War

• Gas prices soaring, seems fine, we definitely aren’t facing a supply shock we haven’t seen in decades, or maybe ever?

• As if going to the airport wasn’t already absolutely miserable, now we have to stand for hours in security lines while ICE agents run amok

• We started talking about James Talarico’s chances in Texas, but that led to us talking about magazine covers, what they’re even good for anymore (don’t even get us STARTED on the scam that is “digital covers”). This is also the moment Cros revealed he had never seen the “Planet Hillary” New York Times Magazine cover

• Coining our fandom/stan army name…if you don’t like it, then start commenting!!!

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we dive deep into the latest Chappell Roan drama involving soccer star Jorginho Frello, Jude Law’s daughter, and the mayor of Rio

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends the audiobook for Liza Minelli’s memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!

• Cros recommends Summer House on Bravo

• Aleks recommends the OTC medication GasX

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

Spotify: Tap the “Play” button and select “Link Account” to sync your Substack subscription and unlock it instantly.

Apple Podcasts & Others: Go to Settings in Substack > select Discourse Blog > scroll to the “private podcast feed” section > select “set up podcast” > then copy and paste the link it generates into your preferred app.

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This is a Subscriber-Only Special Edition. Join us at discourseblog.com.

Want to listen on your preferred podcast app? Follow these instructions:

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• A winding discussion about Train Dreams, Blue Moon, Felicity Jones Bad Actor Disease, and an important plug for our forthcoming annual Oscars Special Edition episode

• Producer Sam gives us the local perspective on the Texas Senate primaries

• She also reminds about that weird scandal involving James Talarico and Collin Allred

• The Free Press’ Olivia Reingold is at it again! This time she has a bombshell report on New York City First Lady Rama Duwaji’s Instagram likes

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we break open the biggest story of the year: Donna Kelce’s home renovation!

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This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends watching and/or listening to our annual Oscars Special Edition episode. Listen to last year’s here!

• Sam recommends Breaking Bad

• Aleks recommends The Sundays’ album Static & Silence

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your favorite podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

Spotify: Tap the “Play” button and select “Link Account” to sync your Substack subscription and unlock it instantly.

Apple Podcasts & Others: Go to Settings in Substack > select Discourse Blog > scroll to the “private podcast feed” section > select “set up podcast” > then copy and paste the link it generates into your preferred app.

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It’s never a good idea to expect Donald Trump to stick to one argument. The president is a congenital liar who loses a little more brain function with each passing day. Inventing new rationales for terrible decisions is kind of his whole thing.

But even by that degraded standard, Trump’s ever-shifting justifications for his war on Iran are breathtaking. Every few hours seems to bring a new explanation for why the United States and Israel decided that it was a good time to launch an illegal, unprovoked, open-ended assault on another country. The two countries struck because of some undefined imminent threat! No, wait, it’s because the nuclear program Trump definitely “obliterated” last year was perhaps un-obliterated and needed to be re-obliterated! Sorry, what he really meant was that the Iranians took Americans hostage… in 1979, and it’s time someone did something about it! Hmm, scratch that—it’s to do regime change! Actually, hold that thought…

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This nonsense makes Trump look like what he is: a reckless imperialist engaging in an already spiraling war of choice. It also helps create what he may feel is an encouraging level of confusion about what exactly he wants out of this catastrophe.

There’s just one problem: Other people are also talking about why we’re suddenly at war. And a lot of them are giving the same reason: because Israel wanted it. That has the potential to erode both the U.S.-Israeli relationship and Israel’s already shaky standing with the American people. For anyone who wants to see the U.S.-Israel alliance, with all of its inherent cruelty and oppression, consigned to the dustbin of history, this can only be a good thing.

Before we get to why that is, though, it’s important to understand how this story has unfolded over the past couple of days.

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• How this turned out to be even more terrible than we could have predicted

• Trump’s nonsensical pretext for why the U.S. joined Israel in their a…

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• Who we each think were the best and worst Faithfuls and Traitors

• Our Flops of the Season

• A debate about which of the “missions” was the stupidest

• An essential digression and dramatic reading of Colton Underwood’s “personal life” section in his Wikipedia entry

• Every moment where our souls left our bodies

• Our ideas for how they could change the game to be more consistent (or at least compelling!)

Enjoy!

Want to hear this special edition episode on your preferred podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

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On Saturday morning, the United States and Israel launched an illegal, unprovoked, unjustifiable attack on Iran—the kind of full-blown assault the world has been dreading for years. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but we should be clear about a few things that we already know for sure.

The first thing, obviously, is that this is a despicable decision by the U.S. and Israel. It is a flagrant act of imperialist aggression against a sovereign state, with no legal basis either domestically or internationally. You couldn’t find many clearer examples of a war crime if you tried. Already, civilians in Iran are being massacred; Israel got started right away by indulging in one of its favorite pastimes—murdering dozens of little children. Trump has barely tried to make a case for any of these crimes, with the exception of a gruesome and insulting video he posted in the middle of the night on Saturday in which he spewed random lies and called for regime change in Iran while wearing a ludicrous “USA” baseball cap.

This is evil stuff.

The second thing we know is that we have been lied to over and over again about this war. The U.S. and Iran have been engaged in negotiations all week about Iran’s nuclear weapons program—you know, the one that has never been proven to be anywhere near operative, and that Trump claimed to have obliterated less than a year ago. Less than 24 hours before the strikes, Vice President JD Vance was telling the Washington Post, “I think we all prefer the diplomatic option. But it really depends on what the Iranians do and what they say.” Now we learn, via Reuters, that all of that was a sham: “An Israeli defence official said the operation had been planned for months in coordination with Washington, and that the launch date was decided weeks ago.” That’s not surprising, but it’s still unconscionable.

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In the same Post interview, Vance said something he probably shouldn’t have.

“I do think we have to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. I also think that we have to avoid overlearning the lessons of the past. Just because one president screwed up a military conflict doesn’t mean we can never engage in military conflict again. We’ve got to be careful about it, but I think the president is being careful.”

That brings me to the third thing we know: Donald Trump is not being careful. He is being reckless and deranged, just like every warmongering U.S. president before him. And, despite Vance’s waving away the entire catastrophic history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as an irrelevance, we know that that history is actually a guide to what’s going to happen. We know what happens when U.S. presidents plunge us into open-ended, bloody conflict under false pretenses: tons of people die, and the consequences last for generations. We have had decades and decades of experience with these kinds of disasters. Does anyone really think that senile tyrant Donald Trump is the one to break that pattern? Of course not.

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Finally, one last thing we know as surely as we know anything: nobody wants this war—nobody apart from the bloodthirsty psychopaths who populate DC and Jerusalem, the weapons manufacturers, and the AI slimeballs looking to test their latest killing technology, that is. People know intrinsically that this is insanity. There is no mass constituency for this war of choice, no desire for the chaos, instability, and death that it will spawn.

We should be furious to live in a country that does this—to be at the mercy of a flailing empire that always chooses death and conquest over peace and justice. We should be furious at a political system that makes it so much easier to kill people than to help them. We should be furious at an establishment that lusts so ardently for war, and that has so much contempt for humanity. We should be furious at the untrammeled power of a global ruling class that causes so much suffering. And we should recommit to the most important task ahead: destroying as much of that power as we can.

Solidarity with the people of Iran. End this war now.

• How we’re all dealing with the Big Blizzard of 2026

• Katherine saw Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights. She’s not a fan!

• The DNC is refusing to release its 2024 election autopsy, probably in large part because of how much of Kamala Harris’ loss is attributable to the Biden Administration’s reprehensible response to the genocide in Gaza

• A helpful and definitely accurate pathologizing of FBI Kash Patel’s appearance in the locker of the U.S. men’s hockey team post-Canada victory

• A brief discussion on how our pending war with Iran would be the ultimate realization of America’s “foreign policy”

• And in our After Dark segment available only to subscribers, we touch on “longevity influencer” Peter Attia stepping down from his new gig as a contributor to Bari Weiss’ CBS News after his…interesting appearance in the Epstein Files

This week’s cultural recommendations:

• Jack recommends Alysa Liu’s gold-winning performance at the winter Olympics and the iconic interview between French clown Philippe Gaulier and Hilary and Chelsea Clinton

• Katherine recommends Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and David Cromer-directed, Tracy Letts-written play Bug, now on Broadway

• Aleks recommends Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette on FX and Hulu

Want to hear the full, extended episode on your preferred podcast app? First, subscribe to Discourse Blog here. Then, follow these instructions:

Spotify: Tap the “Play” button and select “Link Account” to sync your Substack subscription and unlock it instantly.

Apple Podcasts & Others: Go to Settings in Substack > select Discourse Blog > scroll to the “private podcast feed” section > select “set up podcast” > then copy and paste the link it generates into your preferred app.

And don’t forget to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel!

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