The end of 2025 is here, whether we like it or not. Nancy and Sarah celebrate with a year-end episode that includes a pop quiz, their favorite culture recommendations, and even a few resolutions. Have and attend more parties! Don’t pay attention to nonsense! It’s an annual look-back with cameo appearances by Paul Thomas Anderson, Sean Combs, Sydney Sweeney, Charlie Kirk, Billy Joel, Chappell Roan, old classic books, and the AI future that awaits us.

Also discussed:

* FaceTime doesn’t work in Australia?

* Hard times for America’s bourbon industry

* Nancy doesn’t flunk the pop quiz!

* Sarah favorite 2025 pop song is actually from …

* Nancy explains VistaVision; gets it wrong

* Sarah’s love-hate thing with Yorgos Lanthimos

* Olivia Colman gives an all-time performance

* The time-weathered face of Ethan Hawke

* American Studies is a bangin’ major

* A John Travolta gifting story

* Whoodoggie, did things get hot on the set of Cleopatra

Plus, Sarah invents Drinking School, Nancy accidentally chugs weed lemonade, we all have Moby Dicks to climb, and much more!

The great Kat Rosenfield, Free Press columnist and novelist, joins Nancy and Sarah for a very special Christmas-themed conversation that includes: a new holiday short story by Kat, the whole man-keeping/emotional labor debate, the role dirty socks can play in the unraveling of a marriage, and what it means to “get what you deserve.”

Plus, each of the ladies builds her Mount Rushmore of Hotness, but only ONE MAN makes the cut on every woman’s list. Who will it be??

Also discussed:

* Will people ever stop freaking out about Bari Weiss?

* “I don’t want a birthday party!”

* Sarah would like to man-keep, thanks

* Kat and Nancy have thoughts on pie crust

* Epstein: Is the media trying to make “fetch” happen?

* Nobody likes the word “deserve.”

* Crying in trees, sleeping in trees …

* A totally unironic Leo DiCaprio calendar

Plus, sorrow over Ben Sasse’s announcement that he has terminal cancer, animatronic milk in Connecticut, what Kat texted her husband after watching that scorching “Wuthering Heights” trailer, and much more!

It’s Christmas and Kat has a special gift for you, if you’ll just step right into this post office, so cozy, so inviting, what could go wrong?

All we want for Christmas …

Andy Mills, audio storyteller extraordinaire, joins Nancy and Sarah to talk about the “AI hinge moment” we’re living in, the subject of his new podcast “The Last Invention.” How scared should we be? Let’s discuss. They talk creative process, journalism’s inflection point and what was lost and gained in “the war of public shaming.” Plus: Books books books!

Also discussed:

* Gotta love a rotund tree

* “The thing about when you’re making your sauna …”

* The country mouse/city mouse ideal

* Are we really living in “unprecedented times”?

* The secrets of how Andy builds a podcast

* The trend to exaggerate victim status is REALLY UNHEALTHY

* Bringing down a deer with a bow-and-arrow is harder than you think

* When pain comes your way, don’t add regret to it

* The Wall Street Journal is crushing it

* Make centricism sexy again!

* One was joyous, one was meh: Apple vs. Free Press holiday parties

* Andy explains frog embryology to Nancy

* Andy and Sarah are Magnolia stans

* Alexander Hamilton got what he deserved

* Demon Copperhead: Even funnier than Moby Dick!

* “There’s so much comfort in history.”

* WANTED: Presidential biography recommendations

Plus, three cheers for Bari Weiss and building new media, everyone loves Anna Karenina, “to be alive is to be heartbroken,” and much more!

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This is a hot one! Pamela Paul — longtime editor of the New York Times Book Review, author of nine books, current writer-at-large for the Wall Street Journal — tells Nancy and Sarah about her unceremonious exit from the New York Times, where she had been an Opinion columnist. What happened? Well, it’s a long and juicy story, one that includes a J.K. Rowling column, a “lot of dishonesty and fear,” and an email dispatched in the middle of the night, a story that caused Nancy’s and Sarah’s jaws to literally drop. (It’s on video!) Paul joined the Opinion section in 2022 to “create space for liberal opinions that had been snuffed out,” the thorny topics most journalists in 2020 were afraid to write about — and might still be. “It’s really unsettling when an Opinion section is afraid of opinions,” says Paul. “You cannot pretend culture out of existence.”

Also discussed:

* How were things inside the New York Times in 2020? “Really awful.”

* George Will, 2014: “Victimhood [as] a coveted status that confers privileges.” NYT 2020: “Hold my beer.”

* “You’ve lost the room…”

* We are not finished talking about the defenestrations of Times’ James Bennett, Bari Weiss, Donald McNeil Jr….

* New York Times readers are smarter than we give them credit for.

* Props for Jesse Singal, Michael Powell, whoever Pamela’s editor was at Opinion, whose stand-up-ness makes Nancy tear up

* “The truth is a motherfucker.”

Plus, tasty bits in the hotbox: a Disneyland for Netflix grown-ups, the 1000-page book about revenge and justice you should be reading, a new old-skool medical drama, and much more!

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we told you…

Going to Gacy: A Cross Country Journey to Shake the Devil’s Hand, tells the story of a drive I made cross-country with a pen pal of John Wayne Gacy’s, to visit the serial killer in prison in the weeks before his execution. I originally sold the piece -- my first feature -- to Details. I wrote a draft and faxed it to the editor - this was 1994 - who told…

Mary Katharine Ham is a journalist and political commentator who’s worked for both CNN and Fox. Her book End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun) came out in 2015 but basically predicts the next decade. A “natural contrarian,” Ham came to conservatism at a time when culture (and her Durham hometown) was dominated by liberals. It’s made her a rigorous and original thinker, clear-eyed and calm amid the political circus.

She talks with Nancy and Sarah about why Trump isn’t a conservative, how her faith helped her endure the death of her first husband, and how that experience shaped her perspective on Erika Kirk’s role since her husband Charlie’s assassination, when Ham found herself playing “widow defense.” We also talk the Trump-Mamdani summit, motherhood, and the utility of political commentary.

Also discussed:

* It’s good to have a weirdo in the room.

* Unintended lessons of a ‘90s public-school education

* MKH early inspiration: Rachel Campos-Duffy from The Real World

* “Politics is just not fun,” and yet…

* What is conservatism?

* What Obama and Trump have in common

* The Russiagate delusion

* Marjorie Taylor Greene folds

* The Tetris movie: Go, capitalism!

* “Charlie himself, as an example, was a bulwark against so many bad examples.”

* Admiration for George W’s post-presidential ride into the sunset

* The radical efficiency of freaking people out

* The hunger to find hypocrisy among people of faith

* A sunnier portrait of motherhood

* “God is good no matter what.”

* The necessary solace of Jeremiah 29:11

* Enthusiasm plus delusion is a very bad combination, and yes, we’re looking at you, Candace Owens

* Mary Katherine to Nancy: “Get lifting.”

* Sarah “resisted Apple TV for a heroic amount of time.”

Plus, Kelsea Ballerini wonders what she missed, the over-selling of freezing one’s eggs, Usha Vance gives good advice, and much more!

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Nancy and Sarah discuss political writer Olivia Nuzzi, who became the main character on Twitter this week when an excerpt from her new memoir, published in Vanity Fair, coincided with a bombshell story by ex-fiancee Ryan Lizza. The scandal included cameos by broadcaster Keith Olbermann, politician Mark Sanford, and Livvy, a pop-music persona Nuzzi created at 16.

Nuzzi is a talented journalist who’s appeared on this podcast. Last year, she lost her gig at New York magazine after news hit about an entanglement with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This sordid new chapter created a feeding frenzy among (many less talented) journalists, but Sarah and Nancy try to push past the schadenfreude to understand how we got here: the little girl drawn to the spotlight, fluent in the double-speak of politicians, and the ambitious young woman who lost both parents by 30.

Also discussed:

* That time Patty Hearst and the SLA hid out in Disneyland

* The magic of the open road

* “I like messy people.”

* A political profile vs. a celebrity profile

* Rule #1: Don’t sleep with your sources.

* Rule #2: Do not look through your significant other’s stuff

* The Keith Olbermann of it all

* Vanity Fair and glamour of the 90s

* Remember that time a governor from New Jersey was caught having sex with a dude, and it became a whole giant scandal? Yeah, us neither

* More Monmouth Musings could use a better name …

* Livvy, the “morally bankrupt” and “undeniably infectious” pop tartlet

* The dirty-girl era of Ke$ha and Lady Gaga

* The exhibitionism of the iPhone

* Sarah will lay her chips on Nuzzi’s future

Plus, Sarah can see alcoholism in people’s eyes, Nancy reconnects with a former flame, a nearly unbelievable story about a 38-year-old unopened letter from Ken Kesey and much more!

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Nancy and Sarah discuss a viral essay from British Vogue, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” The free-wheeling conversation touches on dating changes over the generations, the different ways women tell stories about their relationships online, and how women over the past half century have tried to balance independence and attachment.

Also discussed:

* First Kurt Rambis reference, for those who celebrate

* Sarah gets her colors done, has hair problems

* We need a producer!

* Our email, for the record: smokeempodcast@gmail.com

* Please, we beg you, no more videotaped marriage proposals

* On men traveling alone: “Who did that guy kill?”

* Influencer culture and the egg-freeze flex

* Was the world built for “men’s comfort”?

* Do men want to be protectors? Do women want them to be? A debate!

* Having a boyfriend is… Republican?

* Might we have a moratorium on quotes from content providers living in Dimes Square?

* “I just want a spinach salad…”

* The Hulu show that almost broke up your podcasters

Plus, a flashback to an early 20th century Edith Wharton banger, the glory that is Sebastian Junger, and much more!

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