33 episodes
Bad Takes Grid
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- News
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4.3 • 289 Ratings
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Grid contributor Matthew Yglesias and his longtime editor, Laura McGann, Grid’s executive editor, discuss a take each week that’s gotten under their skin. They peel back the layers of the "bad take” to figure out what it tells us about American politics and policy.
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The lesson elites should have learned from Iraq
Even 20 years later, the truth is underrated.
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Stop blaming DEI for bank failures like SVB
Silicon Valley Bank needed a bailout because it got the regulation it wanted.
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Wokeness isn’t worse than covid
Nikki Haley called wokeness “a virus worse than any pandemic.”
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Traffic enforcement isn’t regressive
Matt’s vigilante crusade to tackle illegal plates in D.C. spurs blowback.
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The real reason liberal intellectuals don’t want Joe Biden to run again
Backers of “Biden is too old” didn’t like him in the first place.
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Is all of our stuff actually getting worse?
Or is fast fashion an outlier?
Customer Reviews
Great podcast
It is a good way to pushback on bad takes with a nuanced and care rather than the Jordan Peterson’s conspiratorial take on how woke marxists are taking over or whatever theory
Very fitting podcast title
If you want to listen to two journalists bash left wing activists and argue with straw men this is the pod for you. Lots of bad takes here, a good portion of them coming from the hosts.
They should “steelman” the bad takes they critique.
I enjoy the show, but McGann and Yglesias spend too little time on the substance of the “bad take” itself before proceeding to their critique.
I’d like the show to open with more context (especially in the case of tweets), and the strongest possible presentation of the bad take, even if it’s not necessarily the one offered by the “bad taker” who prompted the discussion.
Generally, I agree with the hosts, but I often feel that they’re playing on easy mode when they, say, dismiss a Jacobin argument that “elites have learned nothing” from America’s invasion of Iraq because the Jacobin argument that elites have learned nothing is based on the fact that elites have not yet embraced socialism.
Spending more time on the (superficially plausible and worthy of discussion) text and less time on the presumably ridiculous subtext would be more informative, and the contrast of a stronger “bad take” with their own “good take” would heighten the stakes of the debate and produce a more satisfying discussion.