Welcome to Reading the Comments 👀, a feminist podcast that digs into the comments sections of buzzy articles, essays, and social posts to figure out what the hell is going on— so you don’t have to.

Who are we? 👀

Unlike most comments sections, we are not anonymous.

Amanda lives in California, where she grew up. She has written several essays for big media outlets that had *ahem* robust comments sections and, as a general rule, does not read the comments on her own work. But she’s fascinated by how we do (or do not) discourse on the internet today and by what comments sections can tell us about where we are as a culture and the stories we can’t seem to shake, especially those about gender and feminism.

Angela Veronica Wong is a writer, artist, and educator living in New York City. Named a Poets & Writers Debut Poet for her first book, she is the author of two books of poems, most recently ELSA: AN UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY, and several poetry chapbooks, including the Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship winner Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter. Her writing has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and she has been a finalist for several book prizes. More recent writing includes essays on female mentorship and on Mariah Carey. She was a Hemispheric Institute EMERGENYC fellow, and her performance work has been featured in independent galleries in Buffalo, Toronto, and New York City. She has also been awarded a Fulbright fellowship, a Humanities New York Public Humanities fellowship, and a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows fellowship.

Veronica can't. stop. reading. the. comments. Help.

But… why on earth would you want to read the comments? Isn’t that where conversation goes to die? 👀

You might think posting in the comments of major media publications or viral social posts is a weird hobby, but we have observed that the conversations people have in these virtual forums can be very telling when it comes to social and political attitudes. Sometimes people even have great discussions or add really important points to the thing on which they are commenting!

Comments sections can be full of personal diatribes, shouts into the void, and personal opinions disguised as social critique. But we think that even these tendencies say A LOT about our cultural moment. And we’re looking forward to unpacking all of it with you.

To be clear: Reading the Comments is not just a podcast that pokes fun at the characters who tend to run wild in these forums, from Boomer moms to mansplainers. We take the work of wading through the comments seriously (while raging and eye-rolling a bit along the way) in an effort to explore what people are saying about issues like parenting, women’s rights, male loneliness, desire, even the holidays— and to consider how we might talk about these and other topics in new ways.

Count me in, now what? 👀

For this 12-week limited-run podcast, paid subscribers will get six podcast episodes, published biweekly. In each episode, we’ll look at the comments section of one article, essay, or social post, covering topics such as women’s “choices”, whether pickleball could be the cure for male alienation and wives holding their husbands’ social calendars, and the Surgeon General’s latest warning for stressed out parents. On the show, we’ll look closely at what commenters had to say about these subjects, and what they may have missed.

We also have some fun bonus episodes in the works— and we’ll be asking for paid subscribers’ topic suggestions for these. Paid subscribers will be invited to submit their favorite comments sections via a subscribers-only Google Form to be considered for a bonus episode of the show or for discussion right here on the show page.

We’re doing all of this because we’re invested in exploring better ways to have conversations online, so every other week, we’ll also invite paid listeners to participate in a discussion thread about the articles, essays, and posts we discuss on the show. In these no-judgement, RTC-community-only threads, we’ll debrief on the latest episode’s themes, try our hand at more productive and thoughtful discussions, and dig into anything we may have missed or overlooked in the latest episode. And we’ll be there, in the threads, with you.

We hope that listeners come away with a little more clarity on how folks are talking about key feminist issues— and with a better sense of where they land in the timely and urgent conversations we explore.

Strap in! We’re reading the comments.

By subscribing for free here, you’ll get weekly updates and episode previews. To have full access to the podcast and RTC community, participate in biweekly threads, and get a link to the subscribers-only recommendations form, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber. It’s just $5 per month, or $15 for the full season, including all bonus episodes.