This week's show took us, and our guest Audie Cornish, to two very different but very interesting places: high above the streets of New York City and deep inside the recesses of Andy Samberg's brain.
First up, we chat about Spider-Man: Homecoming, the latest in a string of Spidey movies since 2002 and the marker of his full integration into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (You may remember we enjoyed him, and Tom Holland's first performance in the suit, in Captain America: Civil War.) We talk about the fighting and swinging, the dodging of the origin story, the presence of Tony Stark, and lots more.
In our second segment, we start with a talk about Tour de Pharmacy, the very silly HBO sports mockumentary made by many of the people who made the tennis spoof 7 Days In Hell — most famously Andy Samberg. But from there, we fan out to talk about when celebrities who do bad things can be forgiven and the crucial place of goofing in our consciousness.
As always, we close with what's making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about a new song from Rhye. Glen is happy about NPR's very own summer reader poll — this summer, about comics and graphic novels. Audie is happy about one piece about the nature of TV criticism and one about title sequences. And I am happy about an app following up on a site I really like.
I'm also happy to let you know that we're changing the format of the show a little — but not the amount of show. Rather than doing two topics and a What's Making Us Happy in one episode every Friday, we'll have one episode with one topic earlier in the week (we suspect often on Wednesday) and then on Friday, another topic and a What's Making Us Happy. You can still listen to both episodes on Friday if you like and get a very similar experience to the one you get now, but we'll be able to respond faster, schedule more easily, adjust on the fly and so forth.
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