We’re blaming Rent: The Musical for mispronouncing Maya Angelou’s last name all these years because we can. And because it’s just another reason to hate Rent. We’re also reading her poetry. That too. Join us and discover Angelou’s cable-car aspirations,
Tag: White People At It Again
85: Clear Eyes, One Nut, Can’t Lose
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL??? By which we mean a book about football. Specifically, Friday Night Lights, journalist H.G. Bissinger’s journey to Odessa, Texas, a town so obsessed with its high school football team it was willing to sacrifice …
82: Frederick Douglass Could Beat Up Alexander Hamilton
Sure, he was born about 14 years after Hamilton died but our point still stands. This episode marks an ON!LC first as we cover a memoir: The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Highlights include: Frederick Douglass Is …
81: Soothing Whale Sounds With RJ
In this episode, we cover author Witi Ihimaera and his culturally influential novel, Whale Rider, and learn the dangers of not properly appreciating your great-grandchildren, the (continuing) fine art of mascot-naming, the inherent awesomeness of old ladies, and the objective …
76: The House on Mascot Street
What do Iowa tourism slogans, college mascots, Mel Gibson movie corrections, Miami Dolphins draft options, and institutionalized racism all have in common? Probably more than you think but mainly they’re all things we end up somehow talking about in the …
March Mini-Madness 1: Book-Shaming with Kate from Ignorance Was Bliss
Our first entry into Miniaturized Madness in March is with Webby-nominated(!) Kate Wallinga, host of Ignorance Was Bliss and co-host of LifeWorld. Megan and Kate ostensibly discuss the pointless pedantry of book-shaming someone for not having read something but quickly …
71: The Way The World Ends (Not With a Bang But a Meow)
Megan and RJ are prancing and dancing their way into 2020 like a regular pair of Jellicle cats as they take on TS Eliot and his wildly disparate body of work, including poems of fragmented existential Modernist despair and also …
61: This Teen Angst Is Vintage
Another special request episode takes back down that old YA road to Paul Zindel’s novel, Pardon Me, You’re Stepping On My Eyeball. Soak in that good good 1970s teenage disillusionment while RJ forgets who wrote Catcher in the Rye, gives …
56: The Lion, The Bris, and The Wardrobe
We step through CS Lewis’s titular wardrobe into Narnia with Matt Johnston aka The Narcissist Cookbook to take a story of magical lands and good vs evil that’s been dear to him since childhood and just ruin it. Just really …
53: Huckleberry Finn and the Magic Power of Chest Hair
We’re talking Mark Twain and super excited to be rolling down the Mississippi River with literary rhyme-master and self-professed Huck Finn fanboy MC Lars! Lars does his best to teach Megan and RJ a thing as we discuss the validity …