It’s a rainy New York Tuesday and I’m writing to you with a snack for your afternoon: a special transcript from our archive. Every once in a while, we receive requests from listeners to release our interviews in written form— a fantastic idea, but something we don’t have time to do for every episode. But now that we have this letter (newsletter? zine? I keep calling it the “digital publication arm” of Thresholds, which is true but sounds weird and corporate) as a container, we’re excited to begin releasing readable versions of our best-loved conversations.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Dir. Gil Kenan 115 min. There may be no better example of the ruinous influence of fan culture than the Ghostbusters franchise, which started 40 years ago as an amiable lark, then somehow shifted into the realm of Star Wars-level mythos the moment women wanted to get involved. The question of whether Ivan Reitman’s blockbuster comedy could even work as a sequel had already been answered with an emphatic “no” by 1989’s Ghostbusters II, which made a fortune on opening weekend before hemorrhaging viewers after people saw how terrible it was.

I posted a clip earlier of Tucker Carlson speaking in Utica, MI, but here is the full speech for anyone who is interested (if you do not wish to get these, please click the top right in your subscriber preferences). I ran the transcript through a transcription service I have and that is below. It’s a little choppy but you get the general idea. The best p… ncG1vNJzZmirkai1or%2FTqKWeZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe8Wuo6Vlo6Wypq%2FHZqafZaSqsKyx0WaamqqcqLyvecin

A few years ago, in one of my many failed attempts to develop a green thumb, I bought some Swiss chard seedlings at the nursery. As I was checking out, the cashier made a joke about Swiss chard being a scam — “they’re just beet greens without the beet!” he said. I laughed and nodded, and on the way home wondered if this was true. It is, and in fact, as I learned in a bit of Google research this week, in other parts of the world the beet relation is written into the vegetable’s name.

“No matter how sick I feel, I’m still afire with a need to do something for my living,” wrote Audre Lorde in her diaries about living with the cancer that would ultimately killer her, “A Burst of Light”. She frankly, intimately, describes the increasing care she requires from her lover, her children, her friends, and her frustration with her body’s refusal to let her be wholly independent, and let her complete her creative work.