Matt talks about the time podcast celebrity Joe Rogan shamed him about his weight on air and Matt and Laura then discuss their frustration with what’s missing on both sides of the obesity debate.

Even 20 years later, the truth is underrated.

Silicon Valley Bank needed a bailout because it got the regulation it wanted.

Nikki Haley called wokeness “a virus worse than any pandemic.”

Matt’s vigilante crusade to tackle illegal plates in D.C. spurs blowback.

Backers of “Biden is too old” didn’t like him in the first place.

Or is fast fashion an outlier?

MrBeast is being called “demonic” for covering cataract surgery bills.

Pediatricians are embracing new tools to fight obesity early.

Kaling once said “The Office” wouldn’t get made today. Her new show muddies the waters.

A debate is raging over Louisa May Alcott’s gender identity.

What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank argues that conservatives are winning at dynamism, a take that Matt and Laura agree neglects major accomplishments by the left over the last 30 years and misdiagnoses the reason Democrats aren't winning more elections. Democrats' problem isn't being too boring, it's that they are too dynamic.

Matt and Laura bring bad takes from either end of the political spectrum this week. After Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced her decision to register as an independent, some liberals called her a white supremacist, while some moderate Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah cheered her as a moderate. Neither take makes much sense.

A Semafor climate journalist quits over a Chevron sponsorship, spurring a conversation about the ethics of accepting fossil fuel dollars. Matt and Laura say that undermines journalistic ethics and offers a very unrealistic vision of climate politics and the world economy.

Pollster Nate Silver says that reporting “both sides” of a story is better than the alternatives, to which Matt agrees but makes a narrow objection: That style of reporting crumbled in the last presidential election, not in the run-up to 2016. Laura looks at how events like the Iraq War and Bush v. Gore inspired a generation of journalists to push beyond the “both sides” dynamic. Both discuss how covid further broke the “both sides” standard, convincing journalists there was no “other side”...

This week, the call is coming from inside the house: Laura deems Matt’s old take defending Sam Bankman-Fried’s character the “bad take.” A debate ensues about whether the FTX founder’s good intentions matter. Matt argues the cryptocurrency billionaire is an “effective altruist” who was funding projects no one else wanted to, like pandemic preparedness. Meanwhile, Laura maintains SBF is a bad actor but doesn’t take away from the “effective altruism” movement at large.

Matt and Laura agree it’s a “bad take” to say Democrats are in a great position for 2024, not because it’s wrong but because it’s unknowable. But they still can’t resist disregarding their own advice. They discuss their most embarrassing presidential predictions of yore and, for some reason, go all in on who they think will win in 2024.

In the homestretch of the campaign, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida claimed he doesn’t know any Republicans who want to cut Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Matthew Yglesias and Laura McGann can name a few. In fact, as much as the election has been a debate about inflation, abortion and democracy, none of those issues will be at the top of either party’s agenda at the start of the next Congress. Instead, House Republicans are planning to force President Joe Biden to make cuts to Medicare,...

The morning after Paul Pelosi was attacked, the New York Times relegated the story to the bottom corner of its front page, framing the incident as a banal crime rather than attempted assassination of the speaker of the House within two weeks of the midterm elections. Matt and Laura call the decision to place the story so low and to frame it as they did a bad take. Holding it up as a proxy for media coverage, Matt and Laura agree that in ducking the straightforward political context, the...

After a stroke, Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania needs captions to hold a conversation. Matthew Yglesias sees this as a neutral statement of fact and sympathizes with lefty Twitter for lashing out at how NBC promoted a recent interview with the Senate hopeful. Laura McGann disagrees. She wants opinion writers, like Matt, to be better — to stop insulting voters who have legitimate questions, like how a stroke affects the brain. Where the two agree is on why unorthodox...

The right holds up Kanye West as a conservative folk hero, even calling his bid for social media platform Parler a “groundbreaking move into the free speech media space.” Hosts Matthew Yglesias and Laura McGann point out all the things conservatives are willing to overlook to have a Black celebrity on their side. Plus: Laura wonders if this should be a political story at all, raising larger questions of how the media covers mental health.