The Daily Whatever

This morning on The Daily Whatever, Dana DuBois and I had a great conversation about her latest article, “I Had a Little ‘r’ Relationship”. It’s her fascinating take on a six-year relationship that met a lot of needs—but not all of them—and which never turned into a Relationship. Check out the article here:

Thank you Amit Sen , Beth Cruz , BiffBiff , BJ Roberts , Brandon Ellrich , Cat , Damon Kenner , Dana DuBois , Dr. Amber Hull , Jane B In NC🌼 , Füsun Aydın , John David 7, John Warrington , Joyce Reese , Karen Marie Shelton , Kimberly Finix , Kostadenos Priskos , Jo , Rich Kagan , The Mo...

Hello, Whatevers!

I did a reading from the latest chapter of my novel, and answered a few questions about what it’s like to write the future and then have it catch up with you! Read the full chapter here:

Thank you Alexandra Sarafidou , April Mensinger , R.V. Hughes , Brandon Ellrich , Brushy 🐺 📚 , Jeanne Elbe , Callie🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇲🇽 , Cat , C Wallis , Damon Kenner , BiffBiff , Dana DuBois , Jonathan Eddison , Dorothy Arney Yantis , Foye , Füsun Aydın , AlbertWilliams , Melissa Corrigan, she/her , Jon weston , Karen Marie Shelton , Kimmy Win , Jo , The Momster 🧷 , The One Minute Daily Boost , Lawrence Winnerman , Wendy Parker , Mel , MorganX ,

This weekend GenXy hit an exciting milestone—70 paid subscribers!!

To celebrate, as promised, Lawrence Winnerman and I have each taken the Ice Bucket Challenge and HOLY SHITBALLS, that was cold!

But also, it was pretty exhilarating.

As a special bonus, I wore the t-shirt from my “Hello, I Have Amazing Boobs” viral story, to commemorate what’s also turned out to be my first (and presumably) only wet t-shirt competition. So yeah, you’re welcome.

Mostly, we’re just so grateful to all of you. We’re only halfway through our Summer Pledge...

Y’all! We did it! GenXy officially hit 70 paid subscribers this weekend. Huge thanks to Alan and Susan, who were 69 and 70, respectively. And huge thanks to all of you for helping to get us to this point, and for tuning in to me completing the Ice Bucket Challenge!

I officially challenge my lovely partner in crime, Dana DuBois — your turn!

Thank you to Lahboss , Musings on Interesting Times , Nick Paro , Robin Wilding, The Bathrobe Guy 👘 and everyone else who tuned into my live video!

Join us tomorrow for The Daily Whatever! We’ve got a gre...

We had the best time today, celebrating the milestone of hitting 50 paid subscribers with a good, ol’-fashioned karaoke party for the ages. THANK YOU to everyone who helped get us to this milestone, and who helped us celebrate today!

We love this community, and we (tho’ highly biased) think that The Daily Whatever has the best Substack morning show community of anyone out there. Take that Coffee with the Contrarians!

* Dana karaoked the classic Baby Got Back in the voice of Richard Nixon!

* Lawrence sang Material Girl in the voice of Henry Kiss...

Every Friday, Lawrence Winnerman and I invite a very special guest to join us for Fucked-up Friday, a weekly competition for the most fucked-up news story of the week.

This week, the amazing (and very color-coordinated) K.R. Byers brought his A-game to the competition!

Here are the stories we each pitched:

* Dana DuBois: Substack Has it’s First Plagiarism Scandal. If Substack doesn’t have a clear, firm strategy on how to manage plagiarists, how can it thrive as a platform? Also, report and block Maalvika, the plagiarist in question.

* Lawr...

We’re in the throes of our genXy Summer Pledge Drive to reach 100 paid subscribers for GenXy by end of summer.

We committed to planning a special celebration at each 10-subscriber milestone—and today, we celebrated 60 paid subscribers by podcasting Live in our bathrobes. Lawrence got a bit spicy on-air with his, so be sure to watch for the leg and nip flashes throughout the episode.

The idea was proposed by The Daily Whatever regular The Bathrobe Guy 👘, so naturally we had to invite him on the show to chat. We also asked Karen Marie Shelton...

You know how sometimes you meet your online heroes and they turn out to be total disappointments?

Today was the exact opposite.

Because today we welcomed one of my Substack heroes— Dr. Amber Hull—to The Daily Whatever. And she was even more incredible in real life!

While we originally invited her to the show to discuss her response to my sorta-viral story Middle-Aged Men Keep Ogling My 16-Year-Old, our conversation veered from expatriating to butt stuff to HRT to sex education to misandry to writing on the internet as a GenX woman, and...

Of the many joys I’ve found here on Substack (seriously, don’t laugh!) one of the most surprising to me is the elation I feel when reading excerpts of my novel out loud for the chat on our Lives.

I had no idea how rewarding that would feel, but here I am, awash in the post-orgasmic glow of yet another successful read, and ladies and germs, let me tell you, it rivals sex.

Today, I read from chapter 3 of Light Shines Through, my queer dystopian sci-fi novel that I’m serializing over on Lawrence Winner...

This morning on The Daily Whatever, Dana DuBois started by celebrating with the whole Chat: Lawrence, Dana, and Füsun Aydın got checkmarks, Nick Paro and The Bathrobe Guy 👘 placed on the charts, and more wins across our community.

We love to see it! A rising tide lifts all boats, we like to say. Congrats to everyone, and thanks for your support and reader/viewership. It means the world to us!

Dana wrote a powerful piece of memoir focusing on her family of origin programming around body and diet, and how taking a semaglutide GLP-1...

Short-n-sweet, baby! On The Daily Whatever today we celebrated (again) Dana DuBois birthday, and got a report from her about the festivities of the day! Also—Dana got her first checkmark, and we learned something about how Substack doles them out!

Dana had to leave to go to her daughter’s play, and the hilarious Brandon Ellrich was game enough to jump in for the remainder of the show. Thanks, Brandon!

Thank you Robin Wilding, The Bathrobe Guy 👘, Noble Blend, Yolanda D., tecolote42, and many others for tuning into my live video with Brandon Ellrich and Dan...

(Note: We’re in the middle of a fundraiser for our dear friend and talented author Füsun Aydın. Please subscribe and restack Füsun’s work, and if you are able, please contribute to her recovery fund.)

The great thing about this Substack adventure Dana DuBois and I have been on is the sheer volume of great people we’ve met. From the awesome Whatevers in our Chat, to the many guests we’ve had on the show, it feels like a smorgasbord of good, funny people. Even better when we get to meet them on Dana’s B...

I was delighted to welcome Walter Rhein and Nick Paro to The Daily Whatever this morning as the incomparable Dana DuBois continues her penguin-rescuing mission on the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP (What, you didn’t think it could mean two things?))

We kicked off the show with a show of love for our dear friend Füsun Aydın. Please, send her some love and show you care by signing up for her newsletter and, if you are able, by becoming a paid subscriber to her. Füsun, we love you! I hope you were able to see t...

Y’all! How lucky am I?! While Dana DuBois is away on another Top Secret mission hunting Nazis, I had the incredible, delightful Cat and Soso join me for today’s The Daily Whatever.

Cat and Soso host their own show, called Connections with Cat and Soso, and it’s a DELIGHT. Check it out:

Ostensibly, our topic was pets and support animals, and, indeed, for a good five minutes, we talked mostly about the Bengal cats that run the show for Soso and me, but we were quickly derailed by Epstein.

I mean—i...

What conversation about the way men treat women in our society wouldn’t be complete without a living example in real-time? Dana DuBois featured one of her most compelling—and popular—recent pieces about how grown men are treating her teenage daughter, only to have the Chat invaded by an asshole who has been stalking women in our community.

After re-blocking the schmuck, we had a chance to dive deep into Dana’s excellent story:

The Chat was full of observations, love, and support. We had some truth and hardship shared, and the community responded with lov...

Happy Monday!

Today Lawrence Winnerman shared the latest chapters from his novel, The Shattered World Series.

Or more accurately: we explored Chapter 2: Jake. And Lawrence read it aloud, and we all reverted to small children, utterly rapt by storytelling because his voice is so meliflous and the story is so compelling.

Here’s the chapter. But definitely listen to the podcast because it’s soooo gorgeous when Lawrence reads his own work.

We decided we needed the full show to discuss Jake, and that we’ll talk about Chapter 3 - Jackie on Sat...

It’s not easy to arrive anywhere in formalwear by 9am.

But let this be known about Lawrence Winnerman and me: We don’t shy away from hard things. Including ties and sequin on a Saturday morning.

A couple weeks back, we ask the “Whatevers”—our amazing Live audience members—what we should do to celebrate reaching milestones in our Summer Pledge Drive. The first suggestion was that we should show up for The Daily Whatever in cocktail attire.

This week, we hit our first fundraising goal: 40 paid subscribers.

So today, we brought i...

Join us at noon ET/9am PT for a very formal The Daily Whatever, where Lawrence Winnerman and I will celebrate 40 paid subscribers to GenXy!

We’ll be joined by my bestie Sunny Hong, who was number 40.

There may be champagne.

There will most def be sequin,

Hope to see you there!

TGIF! The great thing about Fridays is that here at The Daily Whatever, we use it as a time to process how unbelievably shitty our descent into authoritarianism has become. It’s a celebration of the worst of the worst news.

Welcome to Fucked-Up Friday!

Dana DuBois and I were thrilled to welcome Nick Paro to the show, and get to know him as a community member (and a poet!) Nick shared his Kum ‘n’ Go tribute poem with us, and it was a great way to kick off our time with him.

The Fu...

The Opinionated Ogre stopped by The Daily Whatever this morning to chat with us about antisemitism, and y’all! It was a convo for the ages. Shockingly, Ogre has opinions about this topic, and we got an earful—in a good way!

(Note: we started the hour with an update on our Summer Pledge Drive*, wherein we cheered that we hit 40 paid subscribers! Thank you! Come join us on Saturday, when we’ll broadcast in formalwear to honor our commitment, and keep it going to 50 when we’ll do a live karaoke show!)

Our conversation was wide...

One of the things I have always loved about Dana DuBois, my friend, Anam Cara, and co-founder of GenXy is her love for music — her deep and abiding passion for it —and her ability to use music to build community.

This passion for music is innate for Dana, something she remembers from her earliest years. In the early 2000s, Dana co-founded Three Imaginary Girls, a Seattle indie-pop review site that got to the core of the local music scene with its upbeat and fan-fueled documentation of a resurgence of Seattle-centric music.

From there, stepping into musi...

Greetings, Whatevers—and a happy Twat-tastic Tuesday* to all who celebrate!

Today we welcomed author Diane Geurts to The Daily Whatever, to talk about her newly published novel, Still the Millers.

We chatted about all the things: self- versus trad-publishing, inspiration and muses, horses and meth labs, and most of all, Diane’s sage advice for all of us multi-hyphenate busy writer Join utypes: write one sentence per day.

Be sure to follow Diane on Substack and Medium!

Huge thanks to Patrick Mill, Beth Cruz, BiffBiff, BJ Roberts, Brandon Ellrich, Mariellen, Cat...

Frederic Poag is one of the best humans we’ve had the pleasure to meet on Substack.

And for good reason. Frederic has wise words about this political moment in time. He’s also a staunch feminist and ally, using his substantial online blast radius to champion for women and marginalized groups.

Simply stated: Frederic is awesome.

So when we saw him getting grief for a Note he posted about asking a woman out in a cafe, we knew we had to bring him onto The Daily Whatever to talk about it.

Wh...

On Saturday’s show, we spoke about writing, worldbuilding, vexillology and focused on the latest chapter from my serialized novel, Light Shines Through. I read from the chapter, and was truly flattered by the great feedback.

Check it out here:

Thank you Beth Cruz, Brandon Ellrich, Callie🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇲🇽, Cheryl Chevalier, Dana DuBois, Debra Groves Harman, Diane Geurts, Daniel Paden, Elaine the Mean Old Feminist, JOHNSON CRIFACI, Karen Marie Shelton, Jo, Lahboss, The Momster, Linda Blatnik, The One Minute Daily Boost, Mason/she/her/💛🤍💜🖤, Mojmír VEDEJ, Musings on Interesting Times, Noble Blend, Robin Wilding, Nick Paro, Nick Paro, tecolote42, The Bathrobe Guy

Hello hello, Whatevers!

This week in news—like every single week living under this regime—has been fucked up. The deadly July 4th floods in Kerr County, Texas made this week particularly bleak. As of this writing, 129 have died, with 170 people still unaccounted for.

It’s extra fucked-up, as we know natural disasters like this are becoming more common due to climate change, and that we’re living in a country that will only hasten such events through inaction or wose.

It’s extra-extra fucked up, as these are deaths caused by Republicans, at both th...

Sometimes you don’t realize how a song from childhood resonates until someone points it out years later. Joe Guay joined Dana DuBois and me this morning on The Daily Whatever to talk about the burden of surnames, the rise of AI, and the power of “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie.

We recently published Joe’s story about his connection to the song:

As usual, the chat was off the hook, where we learned about things like customer loyalty cards for sex workers (and sluts: mine is a complimentary blueberry muffin (it’s not just f...

Thank you Robin Wilding, Polly Walker Blakemore, thepoetmiranda, Ashley Schmitt, John Pearce, and many others for tuning into my live video with Walter Rhein! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Whenever Frederic Poag invites you to join his Lives, you join his Lives!

This one was SUCH a blast. I don’t join till well into the episode, but I’m certain everything Frederic says it’s worth a listen. Enjoy!

Thank you Lisa, Nick P, Jeanne Elbe, Soso, John saxon, and many others for tuning into my live video with Frederic Poag! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Today I intended to dedicate the hour to talking GenX gay anthems with Brandon Ellrich.

Then last night, Untrickled by Michelle Teheux brought a story by MAGA incel Rohan Ghostwind to my attention. In it, he denigrates a cluster of women writers on Substack as “degenerates” and provides screenshot after screenshot to substantiate his claim that we made him say “what the fuck.”

I am featured as one of the degenerates.

Second in the list, no less.

And what was my offense, you may ask? Writing about my boobs and also my famil...

Poor Lawrence Winnerman! He made it home from Seattle safe and sound—but sadly, with a stomach flu*.

So today, I had to host it alone. But thankfully I had two amazing guests: first the incomparable Füsun Aydın shared how her brother’s wedding went, when she reunited with the family she hadn’t seen in 15 years, since she came out as trans. (Spoiler alert: it went really well, other than being mostly ignored by her mother, who clearly doesn’t understand what a gift to the world her daughter Fusun is).

Then the deligh...

Thank you Polly Walker Blakemore, The Bathrobe Guy 👘, Nick P, Steve Uppendahl, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video with Melissa Corrigan, she/her and Dana DuBois! Join me for my next live video in the app.

We had the best time chatting with our college roommate Lisa today! Thank you, Chat, for being amazing as always! We can’t wait to see you tomorrow!

Thank you Beth Cruz, BiffBiff, Bryan Hagerla, Brandon Ellrich, Carol Helbing, Cat, OldHenCharlie, Dana DuBois, Eileen Dougharty, Elaine the Mean Old Feminist, Füsun Aydın, Jeanne Elbe, JOHN ONEIL, John Pearce, Janet Scott, Karen Marie Shelton, KC, Kelly Mindiola, Lahboss, The Momster, Los Gatos Sin Madrid, Mason, She/her/enchanted beast, Rachel Hendricks, Musings on Interesting Times, Robin Wilding, Soso, The Bathrobe Guy 👘, Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈, Todd Goldin

Hello, Whatevers!

Today Lawrence Winnerman and I dove into the news, and in typical fashion, our conversation wandered to more philosophical hot takes as we pondered the Overton Window and its steady slide into fascism.

But one news story in particular has stuck with me.

And that’s a story about British grime-punk band Bob Vylan.

At the Glastonbury Music Festival this weekend, the duo caused a stir by chanting “Death, Death to the IDF” during their set. Now they’ve been dropped from music festivals and their agent, lost their US Visas...

There are days that we speak eloquently about many things, and days like today where nothing seems to go quite right.

Thanks for putting up with the craziness today, friends! We appreciate you, and always look forward to having a conversation with you—even when everything seems to be going wrong.

Thank you Char Sundust, Peter William Murphy, Margaret Williams, MS, ACC, Cat, John Pearce, and many others for tuning into my live video with Brandon Ellrich, Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈, Füsun Aydın, and Lawrence Winnerman!

Join us for more The Daily Whatever every weekday at 7am PT / 10am ET...

It’s so good to be home!

I returned to Seattle late Saturday night, to the best treat ever—Lawrence is in Seattle! Yesterday we celebrated our reunion by purchasing a shit-ton of olives and devouring them Live, alongside a bottle of delicious pale French rose. The resulting “Olivepolooza” was an outrageously delicious good time. We can’t believe Ben Ulansey and Brandon Ellrich haven’t weighed in with a rebuttal.

But that’s not all Lawrence and I are up to…

We’re here IRL, scheming our schemes, hatching plans to grow genXy and The Dail...

We had the best time eating FIVE types of olives and drinking rosé, y’all! Take a gander as we ranked Collossal Greek olives, Turkish Grilled olives, Castelvetrano olives, Morroccan Dry Cured olives, and Pepper Stuffed Green olives.

Thank you tecolote42, Rachel Hendricks, The One Minute Daily Boost, Karen Marie Shelton, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

genXy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sorry for the short wrapup, but I’m not even sure I could capture the full range of our convo. Huge thanks and love to Walter Rhein and Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈 who were absolutely incredible on today’s show.

We’re back on Monday, June 30th! Dana DuBois will be home, and I’ll get my first taste of a 7am broadcast time. Yikes! Our theme will be Reunited, and it Feels So Good.

Thank you Polly Walker Blakemore, Karen Marie Shelton, Beth Cruz, Brianna, William Mieras, and many others for tuning into my live video with Walter Rhein and Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈...

Thank you Jason Dyer, Alexandra Porter, Anthony Burke, April K Wilson , Becky Martinek , Beth Cruz , Beth Plank , BiffBiff BJ Roberts , bluePNWcats , Brandon Ellrich , Mariellen , Carissa Rogers , Carol Duffy , Cat , CatherineC , Celice Carlough , OldHenCharlie , Cheryl , Christine Balint , Charles , Craig Nixon , Craig Pulliam , Dale Scaringi , Dana DuBois , dani clark , Dan Thornton , Dar Gfree , David Long , Deb17☘️☘️ , Deanna Surber ,

There are many things I’ve gotten wrong in my life, but friends ain’t one of them. I am lucky and blessed to have several women whom I have known for years that I consider to be best friends. Today I was lucky enough to be on a Substack Live with two of them!

Char Sundust joined me to cover for Dana DuBois, who, it turns out, completed her top secret mission early. Char and I started talking about our friendship and her work. Chat, I am here to tell you that she undersold the power of w...

Dana DuBois and I were absolutely delighted to have Sacha Cohen from A Good Vintage on the show today, it soon became clear that if we lived closer, we’d be hanging out with her over long, lazy apéro afternoons!

Sacha and her husband Jason are not expats—yet! They are taking slow and easy moves towards an expat life. The remarkably clever thing about this approach is that they get to live in various parts of France and experience the local culture along the way. Currently in Dijon, Sacha’s substack is awash in good bread a...