The Sauce with Maya Gurantz and Rebecca Cohen Maya Gurantz & Rebecca Cohen

Dune is Rebecca’s favorite novel, but Maya is a pure 100% Dune virgin. We watched Denis Villeneuve’s massively popular adaptation of this legendary, and legendarily unfilmable, sci fi epic to see if we see any of the same things. Does it work as a movie series? As an adaptation? As a meditation on the white savior narrative?

There is too damn much to talk about so we try to talk about it ALL! In this episode, Beyonce Goes Country, Tradwifes Go Viral, OJ Simpson Goes Dead, and Rebecca and Maya just try to keep up. We break down Cowboy Carter, the weird fantasy of white housewife cosplay, and the legacy of a famous wife-killer.

After taking a much-needed break from TFG, Maya and Rebecca catch up on Trump’s troubles: legal, financial, political, and psychophysical. How f****d is he? How worried should we be? What’s the most productive way to direct our anxiety between now and November?

Depending on whom you ask, Academy award winner Poor Things is either a feminist masterpiece about an empowered woman, or a male fantasy about a baby-minded fuck toy. Maya and Rebecca attempt to bridge the gap, asking the really important questions: Why is Yorgos Lanthimos so obsessed with old-timey whorehouses? Is this quirky visual style more or less irritating when Wes Anderson does it? And is a critique of men the same thing as a feminist movie?

College presidents forced to resign. Faculties gutted. Anti-DEI legislations cropping up nationwide. There’s no doubt about it–Right Wing activists are attacking Higher Ed, trying to “capture, restructure, and reform” centers of learning. Georgetown political scientist and Women’s Studies professor Nadia E. Brown joins us to help us understand this moment, what makes it different than usual institutional racism and sexism, and how to fight it.

Intellectual expansion! Youthful passion! Exploited innocence! Genius writer, musician, and professional flame-throwing shit-starter Meredith Yayanos, comes on to talk about their problematic fave: Liberal Arts Education. What does college MEAN in the social imaginary? What did it mean to us? Cronyism, elitism, pranks, nubility, narcissistic faculty, racism, classism, date rape, Jeffrey Epstein, the hangover of 60s counterculture, DEI, panicked articles in The NY Times about what the kids are doing, Real Genius, Rules of Attraction, Good Will Hunting Animal House, A Different World, Revenge of the Nerds, and Genny Cream Ale.