Victoria: Both of us have found one podcast that rises above the others over the last year: You're Wrong About. For each episode, hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall pick a past media phenomenon to revisit, explaining how the popular narratives about the event got the substance of what actually happened wrong.
I started to listen to YWA before the pandemic, but it's one of like three podcasts I can stomach lately (and one of those is my sleep podcast, so it barely counts). I've been listening to newer episodes, but I've also gone back to the very first one and have been working my way from there. I pull up a game on phone and pop in my headphones and let them carry me away.
I imagine this is, a little, how people who love true crime podcasts feel: It's not escapist content, because a lot of it is very terrible and sad, but it somehow lets me not focus on like....the most pressing terrible things about this moment?? But YWA is also the opposite of true crime. It is a debunking of the very world that lets true crime and true crime podcasts exist (though it covers lot of other things). Like, you can't listen to the episodes about Sex Offenders or Murder without questioning our societal obsession with serial killers and dead white women! This podcast has completely changed the way I watch Law & Order (I make a lot of pointed comments that my mom ignores).
Hayley, you suggested this topic. Why do you love YWA right now?
Hayley: I had never listened to YWA before the pandemic, but it's safe to say that I have fallen completely in love with it and it has been my constant companion throughout the pandemic. In fact, I am slightly worried that now I will forever associate the two in my mind, because there was a stretch of time this past fall where I was listening to multiple episodes a day. There are parts of my neighborhood where I will walk my dog and think "This is where I heard about Kitty Genovese" and "This is where I learned what Marcia Clark thought of Kato Kaelin." I am honestly surprised that I have gotten this invested in a podcast, because I have always described myself as "not a podcast person." But now I think that I am a podcast person, I just needed to find my podcasts. And be isolated from all of my friends and unemployed and facing a dearth of new media to consume, etc etc etc.
I had seen people — you included! — tweeting about YWA for a while, but never felt compelled to check it out. It was partly due to my extreme podcast pickiness, sure, but I think that for a while I didn't actually want to know what I was wrong about. I think I expected it to be more about why my so-called "faves" were "problematic", but to quote Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. What eventually got me hooked was their miniseries on Princess Diana. I can't resist royal content in any form, and I have found it extremely difficult to parse through all of the media about Diana and find out what actually happened and what was lore, or myth, or straight-up factual inaccuracy. After the Diana series, I scrolled all the way to the bottom and started downloading any episodes that were interesting to me. I went for the Tonya Harding episodes next, and then the deep dive on Jessica Simpson's memoir, Open Book, which I read last spring.
What stands out to me is how smart, critical, conscientious, nuanced, compassionate, and funny Michael and Sarah are as journalists and as hosts. I started listening to YWA because of the handful of topics that I was already interested in. But hearing how well they researched and untangled all of these highly famous stories and misconceptions made me realize how much I wanted to listen to what they had to say on every topic. Did I ever imagine being interested enough in the Enron scandal to listen to two people talk about it for an hour and eighteen minutes? Of course not! Now I want Michael and Sarah to help me understand everything that I only had a passing knowledge of as a tween.
How did you come to YWA? What have been some of your favorite, or most thought-provoking episodes?
Victoria: I had heard about the show on Twitter a lot — I remember when they first released merch with the "maligned women" graphic — but I didn't start listening in earnest until winter 2020. For some reason one of the first episodes I listened to was about Terri Schiavo, and I have no clue why, since that's not someone whose name I would have recognized? Maybe someone tweeted about it?? Also I was aware of Michael Hobbes before the podcast because of this huge article he wrote for The Huffington Post in 2018 "Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong." Eternally recommend that article.
The Anna Nicole Smith episode is a classic. I mean, the whole experience of listening to YWA is being like, "Wow I can't believe I never knew that!!!" but the Anna Nicole episode is really like that. I would consider both episodes of Sex Trafficking really essential, especially after the human trafficking moral panic of the summer (If you start listening to You're Wrong About, you will start calling things a "moral panic" all the time). The episode about Sex Offenders was extremely enlightening. Losing Relatives to Fox News has also changed the way I think about a lot of our current problems as a country. I also appreciate that sometimes Sarah and Michael are like, "Actually someone else could explain this better than us," and the Electoral College, Anti-Vaccine Movement, and Matthew Shepard episodes are great because they passed the mic.
I think the show particularly appeals to millennials like us because so much of the stuff they cover are things that I heard vaguely covered on the Today show while getting ready for school as a kid. That's basically everything I knew about Elian Gonzalez, for example, until I listened to the episode. For a very long time, everything I knew about Monica Lewinsky I learned from old episodes of SNL. A lot of these people became punchlines and memes without most of us even remotely understanding what actually happened. It is depressing! But the best episodes help frame my thoughts moving forward, so I can see through other media circuses to try to uncover the truth.
Which episodes do you recommend?
Hayley: I agree that the Anna Nicole Smith episode is a string of constantly being surprised and then mad that you didn't know what was really happening with her. I also enjoy the Courtney Love episode a lot, because they make an important distinction that not every maligned woman is someone who has secretly been a saint. There is value in learning the truth, or closer to the truth, about fundamentally problematic people as well.
I had never been interested in the O.J. Simpson trial in any form before YWA. I consumed all of those episodes within a few weeks, and now I am anxiously awaiting more. What really struck me about their O.J. Simpson series is how intensely detailed each episode is, and how they start their deep dive with Nicole Brown Simpson's story. Placing her, and not him, at the center of that story is what kept me interested. If anyone else is also true crime-adverse like I am, this is a really thorough way to look at the media and criminal justice phenomenon that continues to have an impact on these areas of our lives.
Now that I've gone through so much of their existing catalogue, the episodes that are the most interesting to me are the topics I knew nothing about, or the ones that unpack why our existing criminal justice system is such a fucking scam. The Exxon Valdez oil spill episode is a great example of this. The way they explain white collar crime in the Why Didn't Anyone Go To Prison For The Financial Scandal? episode was also thoroughly enlightening. The Shannon Faulkner episode about sex discrimination at the Citadel was also one that I thoroughly enjoyed and had no prior knowledge of anything they talked about in that episode; same with the DC Snipers series. I think that inevitably, if you scroll through their episodes you will find a good mix of things that you are familiar with and things that you have never heard about before, and they are all worth a listen.
Victoria: YWA works because it’s not just a history podcast and it’s not just a media criticism podcast — it mixes both, adding in a whole lot of empathy. Sarah and Michael are critical, but they understand why some people made the choices they did, even if the end result was bad. That’s especially true of people like Shannon Faulkner, who were just living their normal life and didn’t know that they were about to be part of a media circus. (Also, I definitely agree about the OJ series — even though I watched all of OJ Made In America, this was the first time I really had any grasp on Nicole’s life and what her life with OJ was really like.)
“We have to learn from history” is a cliche but, we DO have to learn from history! Not to make this about covid, but something I find genuinely upsetting and unsettling right now is how focused people are on like three months from now. People want to move on from the pandemic. They want it to be August 2021 and they’re on a beach and they’re never thinking about the word “pandemic” again. And I get it!! I am exhausted. But if we don’t actually make any effort to reflect on what we’ve all gone through, to remember and memorialize the lives lost, to learn from some of the fucking mistakes, we are so deeply screwed for the future.
Things Victoria Recommends:
Ann Patchett wrote this beautiful essay about friendship and the pandemic and stories that I really recommend. Just a warning, there is a lot of discussion of pancreatic cancer in it.
I made this pasta last night and it was delicious! I think I doubled the amount of tomatoes, which worked.
The Cut put together a good list of action items after this week’s shooting of Asian women in Atlanta.
I found this Spotify playlist called “Jane Austen Country Walks” which combines some Jane Austen movie soundtracks with some other movie scores and is very pleasant.
Stuff Hayley Likes:
This delicious Jessica in the Kitchen BBQ Cauliflower recipe.
This incredible Glow Recipe Toner.
This wonderful Eater article: The Responsibility of Saving Restaurants Should Never Have Been Ours.
This poignant Vice article: One Year Without Sex, Love or Dating.