Alyssa Milano: Sorry Not Sorry

In the second of our "Story Not Sorry" episodes, writer Kate Tell shares something so many of us dread and must still experience: the hole in our lives left by the death of a pet. With compassion and wit and blazing honesty, Kate touches our hearts. Kate Tell is a writer and poet based in Hoboken, New Jersey. She's currently working on a chapbook of poems centered on grief, as well as her first novel.

Friends, we took a little break, as you may have noticed. We used the downtime to put together something special: we asked writers to submit their very best writing on the theme "finding meaning in a time of strife." The submissions were overwhelming, and for the next twelve weeks or so, you'll get to hear some of the best of them. To introduce the series, Alyssa and Ben share one of Ben's own essays: "My Soul Doth Magnify The Lord." This essay won the Emerson College Graduate Writing Award in

Alyssa and Ben have some rare disagreements as we discuss Texas' redistricting nonsense and California Governor Gavin Newsom's response to it.

Recently, Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman warned that Trump's deportation policies could crush the economy, bringing more pain than his thoughtless tariffs. Last year, we spoke with Alice Driver, an investigative reporter whose book "Life and Death of the American Worker" chronicles the labor conditions and importance of those immigrants-and what could happen to our food system if they are no longer here doing this work.

It’s been a minute–Alyssa was away on vacation with her family and doing some cool political and creative work. But she didn’t miss anything, right? The world was calm and nothing ridiculous happened, right? Well, let’s find out as we spend this episode digging into the news of the summer and the general state of all of this.

Is Trump a fascist? Is MAGA a fascist movement? Give a listen to the first half of this two-parter and decide for yourself. In the 1990s, Umberto Eco published the essay "Ur-Fascism," which explored fourteen common points of fascist movements and governments. In this episode, we present the first seven of those characteristics and then present Trump's own words, along with excerpts from the 2024 Republican Platform and words of prominent Trump supporters and administration members.