A Sense of Doubt blog post #3189 - You're Wrong About - Sarah Marshall Research
We had a great day on Thursday with Sarah Marshall at LCC. She's an amazing human: a great writer, great podcaster, great media critic, feminist, fan girl, all the things.
I gathered all kinds of things here as I researched.
https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_Wrong_About
https://www.patreon.com/yourewrongabout/posts
WITH TRANSCRIPTIONS
https://podcasteroid.medium.com/youre-wrong-about-podcast-review-1f40d7cab9b2
https://www.vulture.com/article/michael-hobbes-youre-wrong-about-podcast-interview.html
Fall 2023 Community Conversations: You're Wrong About: A Conversation with Sarah Marshall
Lower Columbia College - Community Conversations
https://yourewrongabout.com/2019/11/12/about-us/
Sarah
Sarah Marshall grew up in Portland and Honolulu and went to Portland State University, where she hung around long enough that they let her start teaching. Her writing on maligned women and alleged monsters has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, BuzzFeed, the Baffler and elsewhere. She lives across the street from a scrap metal yard in Philadelphia, and is researching a book on the Satanic panic.
Sarah wrote the preceding paragraph but this website is on Mike’s account so he’s including a bunch of great essays Sarah is too humble to brag about:
- The End of Evil (on Ted Bundy)
- Remote Control (the Tonya Harding essay that is how Mike and Sarah met)
- Living Things (on Jeffrey Dahmer)
- The Magic Kingdom: The dark side of the Disney dream
- The Afterlife of “Newsies”
- The Incredible True Story Of How “Titanic” Got Made
- How Anna Nicole Smith Became America’s Punchline
- Why America Will Never Stop Trying To Solve JonBenét Ramsey’s Murder
- The Afterlife of O.J. Simpson
- “Making a Murderer” and the New True Crime
- ‘Twin Peaks’ and the Origin of the Dead Woman TV Trope
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/youre-wrong-about-1216514/episodes
From: Sarah Marshall
Hosted by: Buzzsprout
https://podnews.net/article/iheartradio-podcast-awards-winners-2022
Amy Fisher, Lorena Bobbit, the McDonald's hot coffee case
https://time.com/6149560/youre-wrong-about-sarah-marshall-interview/
You're Wrong About Host Sarah Marshall Was Always Fascinated by History's Misunderstood Women. Now the Rest of Us Are Too
Sarah Marshall fell hard for Tonya Harding. “Why do you fall in love with the people you fall in love with?” Marshall asks. “If you research people for a living, you can ask the same question about why you dedicate months or years of your life to a particular human being and trying to understand them.” These days, Marshall is best known as the host of the popular podcast You’re Wrong About, in which she sets out to debunk misremembered history. But from 2010 to 2014, Marshall was obsessively reading the tabloid coverage of the disgraced figure skater who was accused of conspiring with her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly to attack Nancy Kerrigan, her rival in the 1994 Olympics. (Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the prosecution but denied being involved in the planning.)
In 2014, Marshall collected her thoughts in a 11,000-plus-word essay for The Believer, defending a woman who would become one of her future podcast subjects. She argued that the media vilified Harding for being poor in a sport made for the rich, being a victim of abuse who didn’t leave her abuser, and being athletic at a time when skating valued grace over power. Stories always seemed to slip in the fact that Harding had divorced and then reconciled with Gillooly. “Despite the restraining order and 911 calls she placed, and despite her claims that she feared for her life,” Marshall wrote, “few phrases … were quite so gleefully suggestive as white trash lifestyle, as live-in ex-husband.”
“We can debate the extent of the foreknowledge she had,” Marshall says now. “But I think, really, we were punishing her for the crime of being trashy.”
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Tonya Harding, left, performing in the fall Skate America figure skating competition held in 1991 at the Oakland-Alameda County Arena in Oakland, California. Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. Tonya: David Madison—Getty Images; Margot: Alamy |
This was before Margot Robbie starred in the sympathetic Harding biopic I, Tonya, and brought Harding as her date to the 2018 Golden Globes. While we’re inundated these days by documentaries, podcasts, and essays about women who made tabloid headlines in the ’90s and ’00s that add context to elucidate how we unfairly maligned them, Marshall was at the forefront of this trend before many people even recognized its value. “People had been talking about this for a long time, but maybe in quieter corners of the media,” says Carolyn Chernoff, a sociologist who studies gender in pop culture. “I do think that Sarah Marshall had this idea before other people really were talking about it in a mainstream way. We need to look at those stories to figure out what we’re doing wrong as a society, and do a little bit better.”
Marshall’s essay went viral among the media set. It caught the attention of Michael Hobbes, who was working at a human rights organization but would soon join the Huffington Post as a reporter, and he wrote Marshall an anonymous fan letter. Years later, he wrote to her again, attaching his name this time, to ask if she wanted to collaborate on a podcast about misunderstood history.
You’re Wrong About debuted in May 2018 and exploded in the early months of the pandemic. Though podcast downloads briefly dipped overall during that time, interest in comedy and education podcasts remained relatively stable, likely because people either sought funny distractions or—at least initially—saw quarantine as a time to better themselves, whether that meant baking bread, watching newly free Shakespeare performances online, or delving into the archives of history podcasts. You’re Wrong About happens to be both educational and hilarious. Every episode, one of the hosts would play storyteller, the other vocal listener, gasping at revelations and offering up wry commentary. Occasionally guests with deep expertise on a topic would join them as well.
The podcast functions as a history lesson, a media critique, and a meditation on the ephemeral nature of truth. “I often try to reclaim a story that the tabloids have found lucrative because they present someone who the public can safely mock,” Marshall, 33, says during a Zoom call from her home-slash-podcasting studio in Portland, Ore. “Something powerful happens when I am able to look at someone’s life and the surprising things they did and say, ‘Oh yeah, I could see how I could do that.’”
You’re Wrong About, often the No. 1 history podcast in iTunes’ rankings, now garners 3.25 million to 4 million downloads a month, and tends to sit in the top 100 podcasts overall. The show relies on tried-and-true podcasting tropes: many of the episodes deal with true crime; the show capitalizes on our obsession with nostalgia; and the colloquial nature of the conversations makes it feel more like a debate at a bar than a history lecture. On Feb. 3, it won the iHeartMedia award for Podcast of the Year, beating out massive hits like The Daily, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and Crime Junkie.
Unlike most of the shows that surround it on the charts, You’re Wrong About is not produced by an established news outlet or major podcast network, even as companies like Spotify gobble up shows; according to Edison Research, it was one of only four independent podcasts in the top 50 in the third quarter of 2021. It has never even run an ad. The hosts have rejected all offers to be bought out. Instead, the show subsists on product sales, donations, and a subscription service for bonus episodes through Patreon. Among the merchandise is a sweatshirt printed with “It was capitalism all along.” Another lists several of the maligned women whom the show has asked listeners to reconsider: “Monica & Janet & Tonya & Anna Nicole.”
These days Marshall is hosting the show on her own. Despite their success, Hobbes left in October 2021, citing burnout, to concentrate on his other podcast, Maintenance Phase, on which he and a co-host debunk the junk science behind wellness fads. (Marshall also co-hosts the You Are Good podcast about movies.) At times the hosts were producing two episodes of You’re Wrong About per week, and last year, they both felt they were running out of insight.
Marshall considered departing too, but ultimately decided to stay. The pandemic had made her more cynical, she realized, and as she tries to find the voice of the show without Hobbes, she wants to get back in touch with the empathy that she has extended to everyone from Jessica Simpson to O.J. Simpson: “I need to start believing in people again.”
Like Harding, Marshall grew up in Oregon. She describes herself as a “lonely, indoor kid” who watched a lot of cable TV. Her media diet included shows like VH1’s I Love the ’90s, a series that revisited pop-culture phenomena with snark rather than rigor. The thesis, Marshall recalls, tended to boil down to “‘Look at this stupid bitch who wanted America’s media to abuse her,’ so we did.”
A voracious reader with a penchant for falling down research rabbit holes, Marshall also obsessed over everything creepy and crime-related, particularly scary stories that centered on women, from Rosemary’s Baby to true-crime TV shows. She still occasionally falls asleep to a TV narrator describing how the victim of the week was murdered, though she now has a complicated relationship with the often-exploitative genre.
As a graduate student in creative writing at Portland State University, Marshall began to study women’s captivity narratives in colonial America. She theorized that myths of young girls being possessed by demons were a manifestation of early panic about the increasing independence of women. She began to realize how the cultural and political forces of any era help shape these narratives in newspapers and novels. After graduation, she spent years pitching essays like the one about Harding, but with limited success. One on Anna Nicole Smith earned some attention, but she had trouble convincing editors that these stories needed to be told. “I’d be like, ‘Let’s revisit Amy Fisher,’ and an editor would be like, ‘Why?’”
Hobbes’ podcast conceit offered an outlet for those stories. The two would comb through publicly available documents like court records, biographies, and contemporaneous news coverage for the facts. And nothing pleased Marshall more than ordering pulpy true-crime books from eBay for episodes on the Satanic Panic or Nancy Grace. The co-hosts called into question the familiar stories of Kitty Genovese, a woman who was supposedly stabbed while 37 impassive New Yorkers looked on. (In fact, bystanders did call the police, and one risked her own life to rush to Genovese and cradle her head in her lap as she died.) And Jessica Hahn, who supposedly brought down an evangelist empire when she had an “affair” with Jim Bakker. (Hahn has said for years that Bakker and one of his colleagues raped her; they said the encounter was consensual.) And Marie Antoinette, who supposedly said of starving peasants, “Let them eat cake.” (Nope.)
Marshall and Hobbes’ goal was not to unearth some hidden fact but to refocus the narrative on a particular person or issue. The multipart series on the 2002 D.C. snipers, for instance, made the case that while reporters at the time framed the story around terrorism, it was actually a tale of domestic abuse. The older of the two shooters, John Allen Muhammad, had emotionally manipulated, starved, and threatened his ex-wife Mildred Muhammad. He even kidnapped their children. Hobbes and Marshall argue on that evidence that John Allen’s real objective was to harm his ex-wife and her friends; he only orchestrated the murder of strangers to obscure his intention to target people he knew. The podcast spent an entire episode on Mildred’s journey to become an advocate for battered women.
But You’re Wrong About doesn’t just shine a light on victims and their untold stories. Marshall has also spent hours examining history’s villains with empathy so radical that a listener might wonder whether a subject is worthy of her understanding. She has recorded more episodes on the O.J. Simpson trial than on any other subject, and you can hear her exploring whether her seemingly limitless empathy does indeed have a limit: Is Simpson—who was acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman but later wrote a book disturbingly titled If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer—telling some delusional version of his truth? Or is he a monster who defies comprehension? “I probably err a little bit too far on the side of being credulous and wanting to believe that people are at least trying to tell the truth—or their truth,” she says.
Marshall may have been ahead of the curve with her Harding essay, but by the time You’re Wrong About debuted, the country was in the midst of a major reckoning with sexism. In early 2017, after Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, 4.6 million protesters across the U.S. turned out for the Women’s March. #MeToo would go viral later that year. From 2016 to 2018, an HBO film on Anita Hill titled Confirmation, a Slate podcast called Slow Burn on Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and a Ryan Murphy series on the O.J. Simpson trial that focused heavily on the media’s criticism of prosecutor Marcia Clark flooded the airwaves.
Throughout the ’90s, the media pummeled women for the crime of being famous. We focused on their clothes, their hair, or the details of their sex lives, rather than the pain they endured, the power the men in their lives abused, or the work they were trying to do. While not every episode of You’re Wrong About deals with sexism, it’s a pervasive theme. “When we started the show,” Marshall says, “I was really eager to share this observation I had that the American media blame women for whatever happens near them.”
The churn of reclaimed women’s narratives has only intensified in the last year. Beanie Feldstein played Lewinsky in another Ryan Murphy show Impeachment, co-produced by Lewinsky herself. Both Emma Corrin and Kristen Stewart ventured inside the psyche of Princess Diana in The Crown and Spencer, respectively, each earning an Emmy or Oscar nod; Elizabeth Debicki will do the same later this year in another season of The Crown. Three high-profile Britney Spears documentaries shed light on the pop star’s infamous “breakdown” and tacitly advocated for Spears to be released from her conservatorship. This year we’ve already gotten commiserative retellings of Pamela Anderson’s sex-tape scandal in Pam & Tommy, Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance in the documentary Janet Jackson, and the jailing of scammer Anna “Delvey” Sorokin in Shonda Rhimes’ Inventing Anna.
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Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky in Impeachment: American Crime Story. Tina Thorpe—FX |
When Jessica Chastain was preparing to produce and star in last year’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, she sent around the You’re Wrong About episode on evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker (now Tammy Faye Messner) to everyone working on that film. Marshall recently rereleased that episode with a new intro featuring an interview with Chastain, who has since earned an Oscar nomination for the role. The actor praised the work Marshall did to rehab Messner’s image.
“We’re in the middle of this societal reckoning with history … especially around issues of gender and race and sexuality,” Hobbes told Marshall on his last episode. “And I think your work has been a really big part of sparking that. When you wrote that Tonya Harding piece, when you wrote your Anna Nicole piece, the kinds of things that you were doing, at the time, nobody was doing them.”
Today, Marshall admits that recording episodes without a partner can be daunting. “I feel like there are ways I could go that I haven’t even thought of yet,” she says. She wants the show to remain a conversation in which one person explains to another something they have researched or are passionate about. But she and Hobbes spent years getting into a rhythm with each other before the show hit it big, and now she has to find that energy with new people each week—though she hopes some guests will become regulars.
Marshall also struggles to reconcile the excitement she feels about the show’s rapid growth during the pandemic with the exhaustion of living and working through it. “It’s a stressful time, and it stresses me out to consistently have to have something meaningful to say to so many listeners,” she says. Instead she’s trying to focus on the joyful aspects of the show. “I prefer to think of myself as an entertainer. I do think I can be funny on a routine basis.”
Fortunately for Marshall, her jokes tend to telegraph profound lessons—and reminders to persevere. To quote one particularly apt T-shirt sold on the You’re Wrong About site: “If Marcia Clark could get through 1995, then I can get through this day.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/how-we-lie-to-ourselves-about-history
How We Lie to Ourselves About History
I first started listening to the podcast “You’re Wrong About,” a cultural-history show hosted by the journalists Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, because of a T-shirt. Late last year, while lazily strolling along the social-media promenade, I came across a woman wearing a boxy T with a cheeky, provocative illustration on the front. The design, which was drawn by the artist Aude White, featured an X-Y axis, along with the faces of eight notable women who had made headlines over the last six decades. The caption read “The Maligned Women of ‘You’re Wrong About,’ ” and it sorted the women into four categories: Mistreated by Politics (Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky), Mistreated by Media (Kitty Genovese, Anna Nicole Smith), Mistreated by Capitalism (Tonya Harding, Janet Jackson), and Mistreated by Religion (Tammy Faye Bakker, Terri Schiavo). At first, the shirt seemed like yet another piece of Girlboss merchandise, an attempt at hagiography that flattened women into symbols. But the categories intrigued me; I knew very well how Lewinsky had been mistreated, from her own public reclamation of her story through articles and activism. But I was less familiar with the story of, say, Kitty Genovese—I had only a hazy fable in my head, of a woman who was murdered in New York City while dozens of apathetic strangers watched.
As it turns out, I was wrong. Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old whom Marshall introduces as “a real-life woman who became a metaphor,” was fatally stabbed, by Winston Moseley, in Kew Gardens, Queens, in 1964—but the narrative, pushed by a hyperbolic New York Times headline, about how thirty-seven people witnessed the attack and did nothing, was patently false. In fact, only a few neighbors were able to see the crime, and none saw it from beginning to end. Other neighbors called the police after hearing screams, and one witness, a valiant, petite woman named Sophia Farrar, immediately dashed downstairs to help, knowing full well that she might be rushing into a dangerous situation. Farrar cradled Genovese’s body until aid arrived, an act that directly contradicts the fearmongering media angle that the victim was left to die alone. For Marshall, the frenzy around Genovese’s death became a tool used to scare women about the dangers of moving through the city independently, and to scare the broader public about the terrors that new freedoms, forged by the civil-rights movement, might unleash upon an urban populace. “We used a story about what was wrong with a society we already had to make us feel afraid of that society changing,” she says in the podcast. “Once again, society figured out that it was sick, and decided that the antidote was more poison.”
“You’re Wrong About,” which began airing in May of 2018, has gradually climbed to the top of the history-podcast charts on iTunes, and now nets around 2.5 million downloads each month. The show works—and never feels preachy—because it follows a novel format. While many history podcasts feature one or two hosts reciting a litany of facts, like a staged reading of Wikipedia, Hobbes, thirty-eight, and Marshall, thirty-two, have taken a more exploratory approach. After they choose their subject—topics have included urban legends, infamous cultural figures, and tabloid fodder such as the Satanic Panic of the nineteen-eighties—one host usually does a mountain of research, and the other comes into the episode completely blind, with only their assumptions and memories to go on. The result is a sort of Schadenfreude theatre; you hear someone get absolutely schooled, in real time, as they make the journey from ignorance to insight. In a recent episode, for example, Marshall took on the task of explaining the story behind “The Stepford Wives,” the 1972 horror novel by Ira Levin about submissive housewives who may or may not be mechanical fembots. She begins by asking Hobbes what he knows about the book. He thinks that it was published sometime in the fifties, and that “all of the housewives are either robots or aliens, I can never remember.” Marshall simply laughs. “You’re Wrong About” thrives in these moments, when the hosts, after some acidic banter, begin evicting the untruths that have been occupying our brains.
And yet the show’s allure goes beyond mere fact-checking, which has become, by now, just another genre of entertainment. Fifteen years ago, in the first episode of “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness,” to distinguish those who “know with their heart” from “those who think with their head.” The deeper theme of “You’re Wrong About” is this divide—how we transcend it, or whether we are doomed, for eternity, to subordinate facts to the iron force of our instincts. Getting the Genovese story “right,” for example, is a more complex process than debunking it; it’s about wading through what felt right, at the time, and why. When the murder took place, the horrors of the Holocaust were gaining further exposure, and many families had left New York City for the suburbs; readers were primed to accept a tale, albeit one that was false, about insidious apathy to violence. When Marshall explains what we got “wrong” about the event, it is not an indictment of fake news. Instead, she is interrogating the “truthiness” that elevated one narrative in the past, and that allows us to seek out revisions of that narrative—her own take on the Genovese story, for example—in the present. The show is less about facts than it is a meta-narrative about how we absorb them. If, as Joan Didion once wrote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, then “You’re Wrong About” wants to know why we keep some stories going longer than others.To the extent that “You’re Wrong About” is a critique of the media, it’s also an inside job. The show began when Hobbes, a writer at HuffPost, sent an e-mail to Marshall in early 2018. He had read her searching essays, in publications such as The Believer and BuzzFeed, about subjects as wide-ranging as JonBenét Ramsey, the Titanic, and Elvis. Marshall’s writing is obsessive; she picks a popular story, pores over archival sources, and discovers what the public missed during the initial media blitz. Hobbes, who had used a similar method in his work, proposed re-creating their process in an auditory format. They recorded the show remotely for five months before meeting for the first time. The duo fund the podcast on their own, through both donations and merchandise sales; recent items include masks with slogans like “Aww, sweetie,” a catchphrase that Hobbes often deploys when the dramatic irony in an episode becomes too delicious. Because Marshall and Hobbes have never partnered with a major production company, and do all of the reporting themselves, the show has earned a kind of cult status among listeners. In September, it aired its hundredth episode, about the spectre of killer clowns.
What keeps the show fresh is its outlook. Marshall and Hobbes are endlessly curious about their own blind spots, which they hunt down like truffle pigs set loose in a damp forest. Each brings a unique view and tone to the show; Marshall is more world-weary and sardonic, with a gravelly voice that sounds not unlike the caustic cartoon character Daria Morgendorffer. Hobbes is excitable and buzzing, often so eager to rattle off information that he speaks in full paragraphs. Together, they make up a kind of millennial Statler and Waldorf, heckling the shoddy journalism of the past. But even their response to the media is one of amusement, or droll resignation—they stay far away from the outrage that has become the pattern of public life. (Indignation would imply certainty, and certainty would cut against the core of their project.) In one episode, the hosts discuss the Y2K-bug scare, in which people feared that the year 2000 would cause computer systems—and society at large—to crash. Hobbes tells Marshall that people often use the subject as a bludgeon. “When we’re talking about climate change, people will bring up, like, Oh, we were worried about Y2K, too, and that turned out to be a hoax,” he says. “And somebody else will respond to that by saying, No, Y2K is an example of us coming together and fixing a problem.” After he’s done, Marshall playfully clears her throat. Then she says, “And, since we have now had two years of doing this show, I am able to extrapolate that perhaps the answer is no one is right.”
It’s an apt mission statement for “You’re Wrong About,” which, despite the neatness of its name, is the one history podcast I’ve heard that assumes the audience is capable of complex thought. It doesn’t try to sift out nuance; it’s a podcast for adults, albeit those who have spent most of their lives telling themselves the wrong stories. As for the right story—who can say? You walk away from every episode of “You’re Wrong About” with questions, not answers. What else do we believe is true, just because it sounds correct? Can we ever see through the fog of media manipulation? And even if we push back on what we are told, dig for a deeper knowledge, will we find out, in twenty years, that the “real” story has changed yet again? It’s not that Marshall and Hobbes believe that nothing is true; they have faith in documents, reporting, quotations. But the very premise of their show, in which they apply old data to a new, unified theory, proves their broader point: that any story can be revisited, recast, and even remade. They know that there’s a seductive aura around the facts that feel true. And, if they can’t sell the feeling, they will, at the very least, try to sell you the T‑shirt. ♦
Comes After Revisionist
History
The host of the beloved and award-winning history podcast
has been welcoming more guests onto the show and turning her attention from the
maligned women of the past to criminal justice and the legal system.
Sarah Marshall still isn’t sure about the name of You’re Wrong About, the podcast she has hosted for the last four years. “I think it promises a more combative experience than it ultimately delivers,” the 34-year-old told Vanity Fair from a log cabin in Wisconsin earlier this year. “I feel like it would be interesting to go back in time, and do a timeline where it’s called Who Am I to Say? Then see how each title does, numbers-wise.”
Though the name is evocative for a show that reexamines the past, what has always made You’re Wrong About feel different from many thematic podcasts is exactly how intellectual and empathetic its approach to its subjects can be. And perhaps most importantly, Marshall said that she picks topics that her cohost or guest actually won’t know about before sitting down for the show, usually because they’re shrouded in misinformation.
“There are so many news stories that function as allegory, and they get stripped of certain details, and then you grow new details about them in your brain without really thinking about it, like moss,” she said. “I had listened to a lot of shows where someone pretends not to know something, but really they do know it, and I thought, we’re not doing that.”
Despite the success, Marshall has spent the last few months retooling the show’s focus and format. Last October, her original cohost, writer and online personality Michael Hobbes, stepped away to focus on his other podcast, Maintenance Phase, which uses a similar format as You’re Wrong About to discuss wellness culture and the faulty science that fuels our ideas about fatness. Now, Marshall does the show with a wide cast of guest hosts, including writers Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Helen Petersen, and even Jessica Chastain, who arrived for a conversation about The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
From the beginning, the show built up intellectual and moral architecture to help explain the phenomena they document, and early episodes focused on the Satanic Panic, the phrase “going postal,” and myths about the crack epidemic. Marshall said that they didn’t entirely plan to become so focused on the mechanics of culture-war controversy, but it just emerged over time. “The first year of doing the show was just this feeling of, Oh, God, what are we doing?” she said. “We started to talk a lot in episodes about, oh, here’s another moral panic. Here’s another. Blame the woman! We were really playing the hits of how moral panics work and starting to sketch out a taxonomy, like Darwin himself.”
The prehistory of You’re Wrong About begins with a 2014 essay that Marshall wrote about the figure skater Tonya Harding for The Believer, which led Hobbes to write her a brief email. For Marshall, getting interested in the story of Harding, and specifically the way the media portrayals of her seemed to paint her as a villain was the extension of work she had been doing in fiction as an MFA student at Portland State University. “I started thinking about her in 2010, and that was when I started grad school,” she said. “During that time I was writing a lot of MFA short stories about girls who were misunderstood because they put up a tough exterior, but inside they were very traumatized. So clearly that was a concept I was exploring in some way—therapeutically—for a while.”
But she balances it with her desire to treat the fallible humans she discusses with an abundance of empathy. “I think of it in terms of the way that I learned to think about other people. For me, it was probably a fairly utilitarian thing of knowing on some level that I needed to be able to trust that everyone out there was doing their best with what they had. Because that was the attitude I needed to have about myself,” she said. “You know, we don’t empathize because it’s good of us to do so. It’s not like flossing, where you get up and you think, I’m going to be a good person today, and do this good person thing. I think we do it because we desperately need to feel connected to other people and offer other people mercy.”
When the decision in the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial came down earlier this month, plenty of Twitter users seemed to point out that it was frustrating to see Heard be subjected to the same types of misogynistic treatment that would make her a great topic for an episode of You’re Wrong About in the future. From the beginning of the #MeToo moment to the feminist reassessment of ’90s tabloid favorites or seeing the 2000s through Britney Spears’s eyes, it all felt revolutionary. But addressing the wrongs of the past haven’t necessarily made the media less likely to perpetuate many of the same dynamics that made Harding a subject of national mockery.
So it’s telling that in embarking on new, broader missions with their platforms and research skills, both Marshall and Hobbes have moved away from a focus on relitigating the stories of history’s maligned women. (Though Hobbes has mounted a thorough debunking of Heard’s critics on his Twitter feed and in a Substack essay.) To hear Marshall talk about the podcast and its goals—in the same effortlessly funny deadpan she uses when she’s recording—it is rooted in catharsis, psychological understanding, and change more than sheer moral or political judgment.
“One of the themes of the show is that we think we’re these very logical creatures, but we’re really not,” she explained. “We have to accept that about ourselves, which is maybe both easier and harder now that we have so much very obvious evidence of that in current events every day.”
In our conversation, Marshall mentioned an observation that in the 1996 movie The First Wives Club, the characters mention the fact that “It’s the ’90s” multiple times throughout the film. “Someone tweeted about it,” she said. “People in the ’90s loved saying ‘It’s the ’90s,’ and yeah, they really did. We did, didn’t we?” It reflects something a little deeper about the time period that has provided her podcast with so much material. “There is this idea, that surely we have come to the highest level of cultural evolution possible!”
More than anything else, the show plumbs that emotion, sometimes by uncovering the smugness that overlaid coverage of controversies at the time, other times by telling an alternate narrative that makes the incomprehensible seem a little more explicable. Often, episodes point out that it isn’t always the facts that were wrong, but the interpretation of them was self-serving. It’s deeply personal too. In talking about her approach to telling these stories, Marshall described it as trying to “uninstall some of that software” that governs how we interpret them.
Over time, some of Marshall’s interests have started to push her in a different direction. Her fascination with serial killers in her younger years turned into a really persuasive critique first of the idea of the “psychopath” as a stereotypical criminal, then of prisons. She also widened her gaze to a broader set of issues that helped determine the punitive cultural tides in the 1980s and ’90s, from phenomenon like Court TV and Nancy Grace’s sensational coverage of murders like the Laci Peterson case. So now, she is a few episodes into a series on the show that are examining an “overarching narrative of the legal system and criminology as we know it,” as she put it.
“When you talk about the legal system being fucked, then people ask, well, what do you propose we do instead?” she said. “I have some ideas but ultimately I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I just know how to point at a burning barn and be like, that barn is on fire.”
In becoming the sole host of You’re Wrong About, Marshall has become increasingly attuned to what it is that listeners want from a podcast in the first place. “I have more responsibilities since I’m no longer a part of a duo that is steering together. But I have a wonderful producer, Carolyn Kendrick, and I’m not doing this alone,” she said. “But what I want to offer, if I have nothing else, the key thing is that you get to listen to two people having a conversation and enjoying each other.”
Her other aims are a bit more ambitious—a question she asks herself is, “What can I do to cover relevant American history that is undercovered in school?”—but her metrics for success are pretty modest.
“I just hope I can keep doing a good job in my wheelhouse,” she joked. “And not accidentally start a moral panic, because it seems like that happens!”
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2311.11 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3053 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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