In Bed With The Right

A few months ago, as part of the research for his forthcoming book What Tech Calls Governing, Adrian took a drive down Highway 101 from San Francisco to Palo Alto and back. This episode is about what the billboards along that stretch of highway tell us about Silicon Valley, about our tech elites, and about how technology is remaking society (it's not in the way you think).
If you'd like to buy Adrian's book, it's available for pre-order in the German edition only for now.
If you'd like to check out the work of Wendy Liu, whose column that Adrian and Moira refer to in the episode (and who did the drive with Adrian), you can find that here and here.

The Epstein files are many things: a study in elite impunity, a deep core sample of societal misogyny, a record of institutional failure. But they also give us a fascinating, if terrifying, alternate story of #MeToo and what came after. For this episode, Moira and Adrian take the recent drop of several million more pages of Epstein emails--and Moira's walk-on cameo in them--to think about networked antifeminism, #MeToo backlash, the traffic in women as social conduit, and the solidarity of (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly) predatory men.

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez in Minneapolis. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into questions of gender, solidarity, whiteness and the MAGA imagination as they pertain to the murder and the reaction across media and society.
Please note: We briefly mention the comparison sometimes made with the Nazi-era Gestapo. If this is a comparison that interests you, Moira and Adrian recorded an emergency episode on that group, its history, and the use of comparing it to ICE for our Patreon. You can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-119-149640913

For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Abby Kluchin from the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast to discuss a recent publishing phenomenon and its implications for gender politics: romantasy, a genre that's been emerging over the last 10 years with renewed force. Series like Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and the Empyrian-novels by Rebecca Yarros mix fantasy tropes with costume drama and pretty explicit sex scenes -- and they rely on a very particular kind of trauma heroine, and what seems to be a very particular understanding of gendered trauma.

For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the conservative attack on birth control, and in particular the influencer-led, MAHA-adjacent surge of misinformation about menstruation and birth control. At issue is ultimately a deeply reactionary, and deeply troubling picture of the gendered body and women's autonomy. Topics covered include: cycle synching, the politics of "naturalness" and the weaponization of legitimate grievances with the medical establishment for ideological purposes.
Here is the list of books/articles we refer to in this episode:
-- Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (1998)
-- Mikaeli Anne Carmichael, Rebecca Louise Thomson, Lisa Jane Moran, Thomas Philip Wycherley, "The Impact of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Athletes’ Performance: A Narrative Review"