~ cueing up the show ~
~ pulling every episode ~
In Bed With The Right — Every episode — OmList
om
list
Swipe
Tournament
Lists
Friends
All
Movies
TV
Books
Games
Music
Podcasts
People
▾
Sign in
Every episode
In Bed With The Right
30 episodes
Episode 148 -- JD Vance's Communion with Jamelle Bouie
Ep 131 · Aug 11, 2026 · 49 min
Weird troll and sitting Vice President JD Vance's last memoir, 2016's Hillbilly Elegy, made him a household name and a darling with some surprising corners of American letters and politics. His new memoir-slash-retread, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith reheats the Elegy-pie to massively diminishing returns, and is likely to endear him to just about no one. In this episode, Moira and Adrian talk to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie about the book and the strange and deeply resistible…
Episode 147 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- Lesbian Nuns
Ep 130 · Aug 4, 2026 · 53 min
For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through hundreds of years of history in search of lesbian nuns -- and in search of the various meanings that were attached to the lesbian nun throughout the centuries in a patriarchal system. Walk-on cameos by the Derry Girls, nunsploitation films, Canadian immigration law and an angel named Splendatello! This is a preview for a Patreon episode! So it'll cut off at some point, and if you'd like to hear all of it, please go to https://www.patreon.com/InBedWith…
Episode 146 -- Gender and Road Trips with Sarah Marshall
Ep 129 · Jul 28, 2026 · 59 min
In America when the sun goes down and we sit in our apartments recording our podcast, watching the long, long skies over Oakland and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the East Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, we think of Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About, and we are seized with a desire to talk to her about being on the road. This is our episode about cars, about gender, and about one particular way in…
Episode 145 -- Third Anniversary Mailbag Spectacular
Ep 128 · Jul 21, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
To celebrate 3 years of podcasting together, we are going through some amazing questions our listeners posed! The results ran a little long, and so this is only the first part of the resulting mailbag episode (this one is main feed, the next one, in a few weeks, will be Patreon-only)! We decided to delve into more general questions first, so the topics under discussion include: Problematic faves, updates on Moira's squirrel, Adrian's adventures in art history exam taking, some thoughts about stu…
Episode 144 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- J.K. Rowling
Ep 127 · Jul 14, 2026 · 39 min
For the third installment of our TERF Island series, we use the case of JK Rowling herself to trace TERFism's "march through the institutions" in the UK and beyond. It's an episode about TERF self-staging as singular and "deeply personal" apostasy from "gender orthodoxy", which belies an increasingly sophisticated, well-connected and well-funded network pushing anti-trans talking points in public. This is a PREVIEW, if you'd like to hear the remainder of the episode (and the previous episodes in…
Episode 143 -- Joan Didion's California
Ep 126 · Jul 7, 2026 · 48 min
It's Hot California Summer over here on In Bed with the Right! For this first installment (of probably three), Moira and Adrian delve into the work of noted California-native and inveterate California-explainer Joan Didion, whose conservatism was a central part of our episode on San Francisco in the conservative imagination. The episode's focus is on Didion's 2003 book Where I Was From, a brilliant diagnosis of, and only intermittently self-aware display of, a particular California ideology. It'…
Episode 142 -- Nancy Mace
Ep 124 · Jun 30, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the troubled and troubling story of congresswoman Nancy Mace -- a moderate who first became MAGA, then a vicious transphobe, and then became a gendered apostate from that movement (while remaining hugely transphobic). Trigger warning: While we initially thought this would be an acerbic deep dive into an unusual MAGA politician, the portrait that emerged was instead pretty complicated, and Mace's story turned out to be incredibly dark.
Episode 140 -- Lena Dunham
Ep 122 · Jun 23, 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
For this episode, Adrian and Moira discuss the life, career and (many, many) opinions of Lena Dunham -- creator of Girls, writer of memoirs and the face that launched a million think-pieces back in the 2010s. They touch on the gendered attacks, questions of maturity and accomplishment, nepobabydom and the Apatow extended universe, as well as on the conspicuously different reception Dunham's new memoir has received when compared to her earlier work.
Episode 139 -- Mifepristone
Ep 120 · Jun 16, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the history of Mifepristone. Developed in France in the 1980s, this medication (which, together with Misoprostol, is used to end pregnancies) has been a flashpoint in Europe and the United States pretty much since it was first created. Today, it is the only way for millions of Americans living in states where abortion is illegal or impossible to get to safely terminate their pregnancies safely. This episode dives into the attack on Mifepristone, the hi…
Episode 138 -- The Politics of Plagiarism-Hunting
Ep 118 · Jun 5, 2026 · 1 hr 12 min
In this episode, Adrian walks Moira through the strange politics of plagiarism hunting -- an (initially non-partisan) German preoccupation that became another line of attack in the right wing assault on higher education in the United States. The episode details how legitimate concerns about academic fraud were fused with a broader populist critique of "university corruption", which effortlessly fused with anti-woke and anti-"DEI" critiques of the university. NOTE: As he feared, Adrian was indeed…
Episode 137 -- Catching Up with the Cinema of Cancellation
Ep 116 · May 26, 2026 · 54 min
For a while now (though mostly on Patreon), Moira and Adrian have examined a strange canon of films and texts about. powerful people being taken down by forces of social justice. Many of these take place on college campuses or near them (Oleanna, Deconstructing Harry,The Human Stain, After the Hunt); others center figures of the art world (Tàr). There have been a few new entries in this genre, and they tell us a lot about where our culture and are politics are with regards to consequences, impun…
Episode 136 -- Marilyn Monroe
Ep 114 · May 20, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
For this episode, Moira guides Adrian through the life, career and legacy of Marilyn Monroe, and the role gender played in all three. Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926 -- so her centennial is coming up in a few weeks. We touch on Monroe's suffering, her canny manipulation of her own image, and the political dimension of her public persona. Here are some of the books and articles we refer to in the episode: Joyce Carol Oates, "Blonde" Norman Mailer, "Marilyn, A…
Episode 134: Natural Law
Ep 112 · May 5, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
In this episode Moira and Adrian discuss the natural law tradition -- its origins, its long varied history, the many uses to which it has been put, and the way conservatives are trying to revive it in our own day.
Episode 132 -- "Repeal the 19th"
Ep 110 · Apr 28, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min
In recent months, the call to repeal the 19th amendment and rescind American women's right to vote, has proliferated as a hashtag, meme and a shibboleth in certain far-right spaces. But how serious are those championing the cause? In this episode, Moira explains to Adrian that while we needn't worry that the 1920 amendment is going anywhere soon, this demand is about jockeying within the masculinist coalition that brought Donald Trump to power. While the supposed "arguments" for a repeal don't r…
Episode 131 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- Dining, Flavortowns and Gender
Ep 109 · Apr 21, 2026 · 24 min
For this episode, Adrian and Moira talk about gender and food -- specifically about the figure of the chef, visible and invisible labor and masculinity. Their main exemplar is Guy Fieri, the self-declared Mayor of Flavortown, but they also discuss 2022's The Menu, Anthony Bourdain, #MeToo in the restaurant world, and the baffling appeal of Gordon Ramsay. Please note: this is a preview for a Patreon-episode, to hear the whole thing, please go to our Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/InBedWi…
Episode 130 -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Ep 108 · Apr 14, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
For this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902). Famous as a pioneering feminist intellectual and crusader for women's suffrage, Stanton is today also remembered for the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that dominated the second half of her incredibly long career. We explore how these two go together, and what Stanton's life tells us about the effects of political disappointment. Find Ellen Carol Dubois's new Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionar…
Episode 129 -- Looksmaxxing
Ep 107 · Apr 7, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
In this episode, Moira walks Adrian through the strange, disturbing world of looksmaxxing. We try to spend less time asking where this phenomenon comes from, less time gawking at the weird terminology and rituals of this subculture (though we do spend some time, we're only human!)--but our main question is what a phenomenon like looksmaxxing says about masculinity, right-wing gender politics, and heterosexuality.
From behind the Paywall: Episode 105 -- Richard Wagner's Parsifal
Ep 106 · Mar 31, 2026 · 49 min
This week, Adrian and Moira are both traveling -- Adrian is finishing work on the newly titled Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now (available for preorder now). So, back by popular (?) demand (?), it's another Richard Wagner-focused episode of In Bed with the Right. Wagner's final opera, 1882's Parsifal, draws on the grail legends, various philosophers, Wagner's own aging process, and whatever the 19th century version of Buddhism for Dummies was. Come for the male suffering, stay for the syphilis…
Episode 128 -- Queer Women in Nazi Germany
Ep 105 · Mar 24, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Expanding on our Project 1933 series, for this episode we talked to historian Sam Huneke about the fate of queer women in Nazi Germany, 1933 and onward. This is a surprisingly contested history, because there was, for a long time, an assumption that women were not really persecuted for being queer in Nazi Germany. While the treatment of female homosexuality (and transgender people) in the Nazi state indeed diverged from that of gay men, this episode shows that this assumption has a lot to do wit…
Episode 127 -- Bari Weiss, Part 2
Ep 104 · Mar 17, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
In the second half of our two-part series on one of In Bed with the Right's bêtes noires, Adrian and Moira chart the resistible rise of Bari Weiss's from her time on the canceled-person circuit to the pinnacle of American news media. Topics covered: the rise of the Free Press and the decline of the free press; how a certain kind of Silicon Valley creep fell in love with what Bari was selling; how she rode the "vibe shift" among tech elites to maximum profit; and why the Trump-era may well prove…
Episode 126 -- Bari Weiss, Part 1
Ep 103 · Mar 10, 2026 · 1 hr 22 min
It's the first half of our (possibly? hopefully?) two-part series on In Bed with the Right final boss, Bari Weiss: reactionary centrist extraordinaire, #MeToo backlasher and the woman who parlayed a grifty "cancel culture" Substack into running pretty much 90% of the news you're still allowed to air on TV. This first episode deals with her origin story, up to her high-profile exit from the New York Times. CONTENT NOTE: Yes, we know we're mispronouncing her name. It's really hard to get out of th…
Episode 124 -- Wuthering Heights
Ep 102 · Mar 3, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
Last week, Adrian and Moira went to the movies and watched director Emerald Fennell's version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (trailer here). In this episode they explore the gender politics of the novel, of this adaptation and what it says about the fate of romance fiction in the 2020s. Here are some of the texts we refer to in the discussion or used in preparing for it: Elizabeth Hardwick, "Working Girls: The Brontës" Georges Bataille, "Literature and Evil" Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,…
Episode 123 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- The Botstein Files
Ep 101 · Feb 28, 2026 · 32 min
One of the men whose presence in the Epstein Files has been making a lot of news is Bard College's forever president Leon Botstein. While there is no suggestion that Botstein participated in any of Epstein's crimes, his relationship with Epstein was longstanding and close. Revelations about their interactions have brought to the forefront several symptomatic issues about how colleges handle sexual assault, campus anti-rape activists, and their young charges more generally. In this episode, Moira…
Episode 122 -- Tech's Vibe Shift and AI Discourse
Ep 100 · Feb 17, 2026 · 39 min
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…
Episode 121 -- Moira's in the Epstein Files
Ep 99 · Feb 10, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
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 (alle…
Episode 120 -- The Murder of Alex Pretti
Ep 98 · Feb 3, 2026 · 42 min
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…
Episode 118 -- The Romantasy Boom
Ep 97 · Jan 27, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min
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…
Episode 117 -- Birth Control Misinformation
Ep 96 · Jan 21, 2026 · 60 min
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…
Episode 116 -- A Murder in Minneapolis
Ep 95 · Jan 11, 2026 · 53 min
On January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a killing that was captured by multiple camera phones and witnessed by dozens. Since the killing, the Trump administration has used several gendered lines of attack to discredit Renee Nicole Good, to celebrate the killing and to make propagandistic hay of this murder. In this emergency episode (recorded 2 days after the killing), Moira and Adrian talk about the killing, about the question of…
Episode 115 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto with Michael Hobbes
Ep 94 · Jan 6, 2026 · 27 min
To start the year off right, Moira and Adrian were joined by Michael Hobbes to discuss Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto, the media hubbub about it, and what both artifacts say about our media environment, our elites, and about gender. Pieces we cite in the episode: Becca Rothfeld's review of the book in the Washington Post Alexandra Jacobs' review of the book in The New York Times
← Back to the show
