Season 5, Episode 3: This is Fake News

July 18, 2025

Daniel is joined by his colleague and fellow librarian Jenny Durham to interview author and public historian Christine Wenc about her new book Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

This transcript was generated using Adobe Premiere Pro and was reviewed for accuracy by a member of the Library's Digital Services team before publishing. If you find a transcription error, please contact us with any corrections and we will make those corrections as quickly as possible.

[MUSIC]

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Hello, everybody. This is episode three, season five of Read Return Repeat. I'm your host, inspiration librarian Daniel Pewewardy. I'm really excited for this next episode that we're doing today because it's about The Onion, which for those that don't know, The Onion was a satirical newspaper that was started in 1988 that then, as times changed, became a pretty popular website, YouTube channel. There's even a couple shows. High school and college Daniel loved The Onion. I got a lot of laughs out of it. We're talking about The Onion because we're interviewing the author of Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, Christine Wenc.

Christine Wenc is originally from Spring Green, Wisconsin, and she was a member of The Onion's original staff. The Onion was started at UW-Madison in 1988, and she worked on it for the first two years.

Also for this episode, we'll be joined by Jenny Durham, enrichment librarian at the Wichita Public Library. She's going to be talking in the second half of the interview with Christine about media literacy and satire's role, or news satire's role in media literacy, because as a lot of you know, The Onion, which kind of created this genre of news satire that then a bunch of other people copied and then used for different purposes to kind of help influence elections, plays a big role in media literacy now, or being able to acknowledge satire.

So it was really cool to talk with Christine about that. And overall, it's a really cool interview. Christine is a public historian also, and she's worked on public history projects at Harvard, as well as the Brigham Women's Hospital and the National Library of Medicine. She also restores prairie ecosystems in her free time. It was a really awesome chance to talk with her.

She lives in Wisconsin. So let's go ahead and just jump into this conversation, and we'll join Christine and Jenny and talk about the book Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

Daniel Pewewardy: Christine, thank you for joining us on the podcast. And we're, it's awesome to have you on the podcast. I love the book. I did the, I read the audio version of it and did you record that?

Christine Wenc: I did, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: Cool. That's awesome. Yeah, I really, being a huge fan of the, like being a Midwest kid and like, you know, graduating high school in 2004, like a millennial, like The Onion was a big part of, like, high school and college. So before we jump into the book, I figured we'll just like... so this is kind of a two part episode. Act 1, we'll talk about you and the book and then act 2, we're going to talk about media literacy and like how the information age has changed and things. And that's what Jenny is here with us for as our... enrichment librarian?

Jenny Durham: Enrichment librarian. But I teach a lot of media literacy classes, and I've done a quite a few speeches on it.

Christine Wenc: Oh, wow. So you probably know more about this than I do.

Jenny Durham: Maybe. I mean, yeah, I also am, like, in that -- I'm technically Gen X, but barely. I'm like a one month away from being a millennial.

Christine Wenc: Oh, right. I will allow you, that's okay.

Jenny Durham: Yeah, I'm like one month, just really tail end of 1980. So yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. And I was really excited. I also listened to the book on audio because I'm a big audiobook fan.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah.

Christine Wenc: Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm always in favor of being on Midwestern.

Daniel Pewewardy: Thank you. Yeah. On the very cusp of it, we are, like, technically like --

Christine Wenc: Oh, you're Great Plains, maybe.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah. We have the Midlander voice is what we've been...

Jenny Durham: Except for me. I actually grew up in Michigan.

Christine Wenc: Oh, okay, so you definitely -- yeah, I'm always like, is it just the Great Lakes states, is it the other... like we don't really know.

Jenny Durham: I have an upper Midwestern accent that hasn't gone away even though I've been here a decade.

Daniel Pewewardy: And I think the library is, our region is considered southern mountain. It's a weird region. I've never seen, I've only seen on random statistics. Southern mountain plains or something.

Christine Wenc: Other.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah. So, Christine, before... so you wrote this book and I... so you did, you've done, you were a writer on The Onion, and can you just, like, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do and, like, how this came to be?

Christine Wenc: Yeah. So I was on the original staff of The Onion as a UW-Madison undergraduate back in 1988. And my roommate, one of my old roommates, Tim Keck, is the person who started The Onion. So I was literally there from day one, and I only -- I was a copy editor. Everybody kind of did everything. It was like a startup. Tim Keck comes from an actually a kind of a midwestern newspaper family, which I talk about in the book. So he sort of grew up in a newspaper environment and, you know, sort of knew how to do it, you know, just from being there, even though we were all between the ages of 18 and 20, you know, when it started. And I was only there for a couple of years in the beginning.

But then I did know a few people that were there involved later, the people who got went on to make it really famous. I always sort of paid attention to The Onion. But when I moved back to Madison -- I'd been on the East Coast for about 25 years and moved back in 2017, and when I moved back to Madison, and, you know, you naturally think about, you know, what you're doing when you're in college.

It was also during the first Trump administration when people were first talking about fake news and being really horrified about it. And so I thought, gosh, I wonder what The Onion people think of this. And then I also found some inaccurate information about, you know, The Onion's origins and stuff online. I was like, maybe I'll, I'll write a book about this.

And so the pandemic actually, because I was a freelancer -- I also, I work on public history projects. I've done projects for like the National Park Service and National Library of Medicine, stuff like that. So I had my own business during the pandemic. I was able to get pandemic emergency funding. And so I used that funding to write my book proposal. So that's kind of how the book came to be. I had an idea, and I also had the actual, like, sort of material, you know, possibility of working on it and that and there you have it.

Daniel Pewewardy: I, doing research, I, for this interview, I was kind of shocked given like how long The Onion has been around and like, its impact on America, like, or the world in general. There hasn't been a lot of, like, oral histories or anything like you see with like, The Simpsons has like, so many books. And did you find...

So, I guess my question is like, what, why do you think that is? Like, what do you what, what do you... yeah, I guess that's my question.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there were other people have tried to do things and they never, you know, didn't quite make it for one way or another. The Onion's also... it's, it's kind of... it's like The Onion is big, but it's not like super... you know, it's not like super famous. The Simpsons are probably way more famous than The Onion. There is actually an old Onion editor who still writes for The Simpsons, even now. And but I don't know. I don't know why it never it never happened.

But I was, you know, there was an opportunity there, and I actually ended up getting The Onion's old agent, the one who was the agent for all their books, through a strange, serendipitous connection with the university. And so he understood, you know, The Onion's history and impact. So he was able to, like, pitch the book in a way. But, yeah, it started out as an oral history. But at the time, you know, he was getting responses from publishers that were like, eh, you know, how about an oral history of Friends, you know? And I was just like, like, ugh, you know, because I was trying to put it in this deeper context of the history of media, you know, because when I realized when I was working on it that the history of The Onion is also a history of the media since the '80s as The Onion has been satirizing the media since then. And so I really had to learn about that as well.

And I didn't want it to be, you know, just this internal history. I wanted to place it in a larger context. So anyway, it changed from an oral history into regular prose history. And, you know, it's been actually, it's been doing pretty well. So I've been pretty happy with it, with the response.

Daniel Pewewardy: I think I expected it to be more of like a poppy, like oral history book. And then I was like, oh, this is what we're doing. This is kind of academic, all right, all right. And it's like, I think because it's The Onion, like, I typically would not read like, hardcore history book like that. And I was like...

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: But yeah, I was because I knew like because I remember, like watching Mr. Show and seeing like you would always like hit these like things like, oh, I remember that. I was like, I experienced that as a living, like living through this. So that was kind of like a really cool way. And it got me really engaged. I like really enjoyed that format for the book.

Christine Wenc: Oh good. Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, like, I'm trying to not make an academic import. You know, like I, I got this, I have a strange background of after The Onion, I became the editor of Seattle's alt weekly. And I also worked at Wisconsin Public Radio newsroom for a while, so I'm sort of... and then I did go to graduate school in history. So I'm trying to like, kind of mush all these things together and make something that, you know, as like real history. But also it was hopefully, you know, not a not a slog to read. So that's -- I put a lot of, there's a lot of Onion front pages in there for, you know, to either introduce like jokes throughout the whole book.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah, during the audiobook, I also had a physical copy and kind of like thumbed through.

Christine Wenc: Oh good. Okay. Yeah. Originally there was going to be and I was like, oh you got to have the, you know, the cover's in there for the audiobook that at least people could look at. But I'm glad you had the book.

Daniel Pewewardy: I know some audiobook server, like some audiobook websites are starting to add like supplemental PDFs you access and stuff. I wasn't sure.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jenny Durham: I was going to say, because a lot of them will mention -- I listen to a lot of audiobooks where they'll like mention, see supplemental PDF, blah, blah.

Christine Wenc: Oh yeah.

Jenny Durham: But I, I kind of had the same reaction to the book when I was listening to it, especially when you get to the, like, post-9/11 where I'm like, oh my gosh, yes, I remember that. Like I remember before it came out and thinking to myself, how are they going to handle this? Like, because I knew there was an issue coming out and I was like, oh my gosh, like, I... this could be really bad.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, definitely.

Jenny Durham: And so yeah, like I think from like the post-2000, I was like remembering a lot of that stuff that I engaged with a lot because I was in college the first time when I went during those years. And so, yeah, a lot of that brought back a lot... there was some nostalgia there.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, that, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: So you kind of mentioned like some of the information that was about The Onion was kind of like wrong. And I was just going to ask about like what was like some of that, if you want to talk about it or just I guess my question is like, what... do you think that came from, like, do you think that came from like, bad reporting or do you think that was more like, do you think there's some mythologizing going on with The Onion? Because I do feel like growing up, I would hear about The Onion, like as a teenager and then like you, there's like a whole like in college parties, there's more of like an oral history of The Onion going on. So like our oral --

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: So I didn't know if you felt like there was a little bit of mythologizing happening when you were doing your research.

Christine Wenc: I mean there, there... I mean, it there was basically nobody from The Onion has ever, except for one former editor has ever, like, stepped up and sort of taken credit, you know, and, everyone's been very, you know, Midwestern and modest or, you know, couldn't get their act together enough to do it or something, you know, I don't know. And, you know, and in sort of that void, you know, stuff just kind of appears like, like there's this thing going around that, like, oh, the name of The Onion comes from this old journalistic term for like, a juicy news story with many layers. And I'm just like, what? Like that's not, there's nothing to do with that.

Daniel Pewewardy: I think I saw that on Wikipedia.

Christine Wenc: It just got made up and is, like, floating around out there somewhere. I'm like, I don't know, it's weird. It was interesting working on the book, you know, because it's called Funny Because It's True. And I was thinking a lot about, like, you know, how do you decide something is true and like, what evidence do you use? And you know, if you're just going by what people say, you know, that you have, you know, sometimes you can't like fact check what just some guy said. You know, it's hard to do that sometimes.

And it was interesting how over the course of researching the book, I -- a number of times, and it took me about five, six years to finish this -- there were a number of times where, you know, my head would spend a little bit with the all that sort of extra information and try to figure out like what to include and what not to include and, you know, that kind of thing. So it gets... stuff kind of, I don't know, in the online environment, like information just sort of kind of escapes and like runs off on its own, you know, and like picks up all of this stuff along the way. And it can be very strange to try to figure out, like, you know, how to sort of present something or frame something. So, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah. I was just curious about that because, yeah. Just like how, like when you... because it's like ephemeral, kind of, like the stories are. Like, it's either like if you're reading the physical paper, then it's like if you're reading like, the website and like, it's sometimes I'll think of a story, like, I'll think of an Onion story and I'm like trying to remember it and I'll go Google it and search for it. It takes me forever or something... And then, so like, I have, like a background, like in comedy, in memes and stuff and so like I thought that was an interesting aspect of like before they got online, like there's a meme-ification of Onion stories where radio people were just stealing them and stuff.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah. And, like I being from the Midwest, I, you like, didn't know this. I just like, assume that everything that I like comedically is like from, like from, like, Second City or like Harvard, like, that's like the disillusion about being a comedian from the Midwest is like, oh, I can't go to SNL because my parents weren't rich enough or whatever, like, and I know there's exceptions, but like, but like listening to this was so like awesome because like, oh, these were just like Midwestern folks. They weren't like, yeah, Ivy leaguers. And you talk about that. I was like, maybe that's why, like, I didn't know how.

And I guess my question about that is like, can you just... I was just wondering if you can kind of speak about the Midwest identity and how it helped shape The Onion's voice.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, every, you know, The Onion, I mean, there was some experimenting with bylines early on, a lot of fake names, but when they kind of redesigned themselves at around 1995 and it became like, really just like total, straight up straight newspaper parody, you know? I mean, it's all anonymous. Everything's written, you know -- there aren't any names attached with those stories or the columns. And who writes Jim Anchower? Nobody knows. You know who writes Jean Teasdale, you know. And that felt really Midwestern to me, you know? I, you know, I would say that after having lived on the East Coast for a long time after growing up in the Midwest, you know, on the East Coast, it's just expected that you're going to be, you know, cutthroat and, you know, ambitious and, like, shove your way to the top and all that kind of stuff.

And in the Midwest, it's like, that's really frowned upon, actually, you know? Like you don't push yourself up to the front and you don't you aren't, like, visibly ambitious, you know, I mean, that's just not part of the vibe. So there was that aspect of it, the fact that, you know, The Onion is anonymous, kind of... I think it kind of helped people. It helped them stretch a little bit. You know, I think they probably took some chances that maybe they wouldn't have taken if they hadn't all been anonymous, you know? But that feels really Midwestern to me, you know, the very dryness of the humor.

And I think the, a lot of... so much of the '90s and 2000 Onion and especially the '90s, I think, was a lot of The Onion stories were about, you know, there were, it was parodying the kind of small town and sort of suburban local newspapers that we grew up with and kind of like everyday people, which weirdly, you know, don't necessarily tend to appear in sort of coastal media very much despite the fact that we're probably -- I don't know if, are there more of us than them? I don't know. But yeah, it's like weirdly, you know, I mentioned somewhere in the book that like, you know, sort of your average Midwesterner is not a person that really sees a lot of media coverage, right? But in a weird way, The Onion, you know, you know, gave that person like, a lot of coverage through a very, you know, like affectionate and sometimes, you know, very like cutting and hilarious way. But like, you know, area man, area woman. I mean, those are Midwesterners, you know? At least in my mind.

Daniel Pewewardy: I recently like found you can search your city on The Onion's website and you could find stories.

Christine Wenc: Oh, good idea. I hadn't thought about that.

Daniel Pewewardy: My favorite Wichita story as I'm turning 40 this year was, like... for Wichita, it was like "town's 40 under 40 are just people with regular careers."

Christine Wenc: I think I remember that one.

Daniel Pewewardy: I was like... I kind of was like, it'd be nice to be on that list. And then, like, I'm a mover and shaker. I saw it as like, all right, I'll be humble. I feel like humble now.

Christine Wenc: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's hilarious.

Daniel Pewewardy: I do want to take a second and just say that I really enjoyed the foreword where you talk about Keck's parents and, like, them being journalists and like, fighting for the workers in their town in Wisconsin. And I just thought that was like, a really cool way to start this story, especially as, like, what happened with corporate and media conglomerates kind of and their influence on The Onion. It added a lot of heart to the book.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that was important to me. I mean, yeah, they were in there in Hammond, Indiana. And yeah, it was... that just seemed, I don't know, that just seemed really important to me because then Tim's mom also was like the advisor. She was like the sort of only grownup who was advising the first year of The Onion, you know? So her DNA is in there a little bit.

Daniel Pewewardy: Oh, that's awesome, I didn't yeah, that's really cool.

Jenny Durham: I think the foreword also really centers the story of The Onion in Madison, because if I remember correctly, you know, there's a lot of just the environment of Madison and UW, I think.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jenny Durham: Yeah. And so I kind of like felt that, you know, and growing up from another Midwestern area and I did go to a little regional college too. So it's like the same thing. You get that sense of that identity from the beginning.

Daniel Pewewardy: I have to say, Gumby's Pizza is, apparently has like, are in every college town because we have them in like, KU's town.

Christine Wenc: Oh, really? That's so funny. But I was, I was, I had to, when I was working in the UW archives, I was finding I would find a lot of old issues of The Onion like on eBay and stuff and in people's garages in Madison. But at the university archives here in town -- I'm in Madison now -- they also had some old issues, and I was going through, I actually found an old Gumby's Pizza insert in one of the, you know, 1990s Onions. I had to take immediately take a picture of it and, like, sent it to Rob Siegel, who was editor at the time. And he thought that was, I think he got a kick out of that. But yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: So you wrote, you worked on this book -- we were able to find six years, is that how long you worked on it?

Christine Wenc: Something like that, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: And you interviewed a wide range of people from former staffers, readers, Weird Al Yankovic. From a reader's perspective, it seems like most people's association with The Onion was positive. More positive than negative. I know there is like not always the case, but I've really seen like, everyone had a soft spot in their heart for that, that worked on it, for The Onion. I guess my question is like, did you have fun writing this?

Christine Wenc: Oh yeah. It was really -- I mean, this was... I mean, I was working on this during the pandemic, right? And there were some other -- other difficult things happening in my personal life and stuff like that. So it was really great to, you know, watch, sit and watch The Onion News Network for an hour like it's part of like my work. You know, I mean, I laughed really, really hard. It was... so yeah, and it was, it was just really fun to talk to a lot of these people because I hadn't met, like, even the 1990s staff, like I had left Madison before The Onion really took off, you know? And so, like, I knew a lot of people's names and they had heard my name, but I hadn't actually met them, you know?

So now, you know, I'm actually friends with some of these people now and I, you know, I didn't really know them before. So they, you know, people who write for The Onion, they're all really smart, they're all really funny. They're really good talkers. They're all like, kind of weird and interesting and like, you know, it was just really fun to talk to all those people.

Daniel Pewewardy: That's really cool. It sounds like a lot of fun, working on it. We're going to go ahead and take a break. And when we'll be back, Jenny is going to ask you some questions. We're going to kind of dip into the ideas of media literacy. So thank you again, Christine. And we'll be right back.

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Daniel Pewewardy: And we're back with Christine Wenc, author of Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire. And I think -- Jenny is here and she's our enrichment librarian. And so, like... with The Onion and like, satire and like, media, like, what's going on? You talk a lot in the book about social media. So Jenny's got some questions about that. Jenny's done a lot of media literacy, like programs and outreach. So yeah, go ahead, Jenny.

Jenny Durham: Yeah. And I think right now is just really important to talk about it too.

Christine Wenc: Oh yeah.

Jenny Durham: Because of everything that's been going on. So in the book, you talk about the phenomenon of The Onion, like predicting the future. And I know we've heard that too, like from other comedy. The Simpsons is probably the most famous one I can think of. But in the book, you say it basically comes down to human predictability and kind of making an educated guess based on human patterns.

So were there any predictions you came across that shocked you with how close they came to reality? We're thinking for us, we -- when we came across some of the old footage of the Joad Cressbeckler from 2008 from the Onion News Network. Any listeners, if you haven't had a chance to YouTube that, I would suggest it. It's kind of, it's a little eerie. But were there any for you that were like interesting?

Christine Wenc: I mean, Joad's got to be up there for me for sure. I mean, there's like little ones and big ones. I mean, I guess for me, it's almost like it seems strange that it is actually so easy to predict the future in a weird way, especially when you're -- I mean, in the book, I... in writing it, I thought a lot about how media sort of creates reality as much as it sort of, you know, it's supposed to be reporting on reality, but it actually really kind of shapes it and frames it and tells us, you know, the words to use to talk about it and the concepts and stuff like that.

And so I think it's more there's a weird blurring there, I guess that happens for me. People, you know, they sort of copy what they see on the media. And that's one of the reason, I think, for The Onion is so good at, you know, predicting the future is because it really understands the kind of the structure of the way media works and the kind of, you know, the way the writing process works. It's like almost mathematical, you know, it's almost like a formula -- not a formula, but it's like a formula in really like the mathematical sense, not the like sort of genre sense, you know? And, you know, anyone who understands media really, really well, like, won't be surprised when people, you know, start behaving in the ways that they've seen on the media, I guess, if that makes sense.

I kind of took that in a different direction.

Jenny Durham: Oh, no.

Christine Wenc: But I thought about that a lot.

Jenny Durham: Yeah, yeah, that makes a good point too. And I think with, people that do satire, you're, a lot of it is kind of just observing human behavior and kind of, you know, just pointing it out to people.

Christine Wenc: Absolutely.

Jenny Durham: Yeah.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, I mean, that's totally a genre of Onion story. It's just like describing reality very plainly. And you can do that, like in a really silly way. Like, I like the headlines that are like rubber band needed, you know, like stuff like that, but you put them in the headline and it becomes funny because you're doing this ordinary everyday thing and into a headline. But I do think there's something, they're sort of pointing out something interesting there. You know, the importance of something, it changes whether or not the media is reporting on it, even if it's not important, you know? So yeah, all these things kind of mixed together in my mind. I don't, life and media are really blurred together right now in ways that I'm not super thrilled with. But I think you can't really deny that.

Jenny Durham: Yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: I, I've made jokes that have come true. Like, I made a joke once that, like Total Recall, like the movie would be like, this thing that you would like in the... like, in real life, it would just be like in one of those middle of the aisle mall kiosks. And then like, I made that joke and then, like, all of a sudden, like all these VR like mall kiosks and everyone's like, sending to me, like, didn't you make this as a joke like five years ago?

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what, The Onion is almost like a genre of science fiction to the weird way. And like, if people have written, like their dissertations on how, like sort of what happens in real life, like even scientists, they get ideas from reading science fiction. So, you know, you know, I mean, you're like, like it's like there is a story, you know, people do stuff because they got the idea from somewhere, and sometimes they get it from someone who just made it up.

Jenny Durham: There was a whole documentary about that. I think it was called The Prophets of Science Fiction.

Christine Wenc: Oh, really? I don't know about that.

Jenny Durham: Yeah, it's about these famous science fiction authors, like starting with, like Mary Shelley and Jules Verne and stuff and how they actually influenced, like, physicists and stuff. Not just other authors, but like how they had real world impact. It was interesting.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What is it, like people talking about Parable of the Sower?

Jenny Durham: Yeah.

Christine Wenc: It's like oh, okay.

Jenny Durham: Oh, that's a little creepy.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah. You just have to be a good observer. You know, there's a lot more information out there, I think. Yeah.

Jenny Durham: In the early years of The Onion, you did mention in the book that people often thought because the stories were in print, they had to be true. And I think at the time, too, it was kind of presenting itself like a paper in form.

Christine Wenc: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Jenny Durham: Like so compared to today, though, how do you think that's changed in the intervening years, especially when now, some of our actual headlines from legit news sources are almost, if not more ridiculous than the stuff you see from news satire?

Christine Wenc: Yeah. Yeah, it's... yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, I thought a lot about, like, why, you know, what makes a real-life headline seem like an Onion headline, right? And, and I think it's because part of it is, is that so The Onion takes a very straight, you know, news format, AP style, and puts all this crazy stuff into it. But now in real life, people are doing crazy stuff. You know, public, you know, politicians and public figures are behaving in ways that, you know, would have gotten them thrown out even, you know, five, ten, 20 years ago, right? And but so but you take all these completely insane, ludicrous behavior and put it in that straight style, you know, you just present it, you know, in a straight way and it just becomes an Onion story, you know?

So yeah, I mean, we're in a weird, it's a weird time right now. I mean, there's, there's a, there's a lot of like blurring of, you know... I mean, it's, I don't know, the whole idea of truth has obviously become really blurry and like what you use as criteria for truth and, you know, and the, you know, this huge divide that we have and all that kind of stuff, I mean, it's a strange, it's a strange time.

Daniel Pewewardy: Especially with like A.I. and like if you like go to some of these like pictures that are obviously A.I. slop and you just see the comments. And like it's a bunch of people like commenting, oh, it's such a beautiful baby. And now it's like this weird thing where like all those comments are also possibly A.I.

Christine Wenc: You know, I was going to say, like at all the comments are fake too. So yeah, you know, I mean, I don't know, we're probably about two years away from the internet being totally unusable, you know?

Daniel Pewewardy: That's it. Yeah, I always go, come on, solar flare. Just get close enough to take out the satellites.

Jenny Durham: And then on top of that, you have because of that, bringing up the A.I., that's a really great point, is that you have people now questioning legit stuff.

Christine Wenc: Exactly.

Jenny Durham: And going, oh, well that's A.I., you know.

Christine Wenc: Right, exactly. That's like the next round of fake news because yeah, there's like fake news, you know, because it's not on the TV network you watch or fake news in the sense of like I don't agree with it. Fake news that is actually fake news. You know, it's like designed to sow chaos. You know, satire which is good fake news. But now you can, you know, you're just like, oh, well, it was just A.I. And it's weird because, like, I don't think any of us -- I mean, I think for really good reasons, it's just like, well, is that real? You know, like, how do you tell?

Daniel Pewewardy: I'm shocked that, like, you can't say... you can't even tell people to Google things anymore because like, Google's a profit-driven like... that people can... we were doing some research recently and like, we were researching things and I forgot what we were searching, but it was like Americans for Prosperity like... it was like history, looking up stuff about like events in history and like, I think one was like, Bill Clinton's Iran, Iran nuclear deal from the '90s. And I noticed it was like that and something else. But both of, like, when you search the thing that's, like, supposed to just have, like, you're looking for the Wikipedia article about it, right? But, like, yeah, some Americans for Prosperity article is like the top hit. You're like, oh, you can't even tell someone to Google something for like accurate information because of like this, like, you know, like if you have a point of view, an ideology you want to get across, you can just like dump money into your landing site and it's like... it's hard, it's becoming harder. And it's like, and that's the point where I'm like, I'm feeling like ChatGPT can also like be a better like resource than Google. And it's like, that's just where we're at. And then it's like awful.

Jenny Durham: Unfortunately now we have people being like, well, I use ChatGPT instead of Google and somebody was like saying that on the radio and I'm like, please, no, don't.

Christine Wenc: It's like something like 60, you know, like 40 to 70 percent of what you're going to get is inaccurate. I'm just reading, I read all these studies all the time. But it's, but this reflects on like sort of why I wrote the book in the first place, that there's sort of like a non-A.I. version of this. So like when I was googling like origins of The Onion, I was like, wait, this isn't right. Like, that's not -- that's, that person didn't do this. Like, this is not right at all.

But then I realized that that stuff was being repeated by like, the college journalists who were attending the talks and then later, you know, because journalists have to churn out all of this stuff, there, you know, you don't fact check. And why would you want to fact check something that seems so trivial, right? And so it was this weird snowball effect. And so even like the Wikipedia page for The Onion was just wrong. And I went in and tried to fix it and all my edits were rejected because it didn't match what was in the media, right? And so I'm just like, ahh!

So this strange, like, alternate history of The Onion sort of arose, you know, really because of the work of just like kind of just one person and a few people and the people who are reporting on it, not realizing that it wasn't accurate. It was like, very strange, but I was like, wow, it's actually become pretty darn easy to, like, sort of manufacture like an alternate history of whatever, you know, if you just spend enough time and, you know, realize how this stuff all kind of feeds on itself. Anyway, that, we're getting, I got a little sidetracked there. But it was just, but it's real interesting. I mean, you know, you're librarians, you're going, you guys are going to be the people that we really need to, you know, provide us with actual, you know, real information, you know, so your work is really important.

Jenny Durham: That actually makes me think of something that came out like about a month ago. The Chicago Tribune had a summer reading list that got published.

Christine Wenc: I saw that.

Jenny Durham: Yeah.

Christine Wenc: I saw that.

Jenny Durham: And about half f them were real. But then the other, they had like five books at the end that were not, they were like from legit authors, but they were books they actually hadn't written.

Christine Wenc: Yeah. They were books that didn't exist, right?

Jenny Durham: Yeah. And it was because the writer who's like, you know, kind of freelance writer that's selling their article to different papers had used A.I. for like the second half of it. Yeah.

Christine Wenc: And it's crazy because I'm just like, wait, why didn't the editor check that or what? But of course, you know, you're, you know, you're you got to fill so much space in a newspaper, it's like, oh, you know, do I really need to check to see that this book list of 20 books all actually exist? Well, now you kind of do.

Jenny Durham: They were trusting that columnist that was submitting it to them and yeah, just let it go. And it made news for a few days.

Christine Wenc: I remember that, I remember reading that.

Jenny Durham: That's a perfect example.

Daniel Pewewardy: Like yeah, I know A.I.'s going to recommend books to people like that don't exist means job security for us.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, exactly. If people remember like there are libraries, you know, they're free. Sometimes people don't know libraries are free.

Jenny Durham: Yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: It's weird. I'm seeing people like, there's this weird, every town now has, like, this weird like, question and answer where people will ask a question and not -- like, for anything, like a barbershop near me. And then people answer it because people don't have... they know how Facebook works, but they don't like their, you know, finding of these other outlets for access...

And it's like you could just call the library.

Christine Wenc: Right? They kind of forget.

Daniel Pewewardy: One of the like... I think I was kind of shocked to see how accurate in fact checking it was involved with The Onion. I think like the anecdote you gave about, what star was it?

Christine Wenc: Alpha Centauri versus what was... I can't remember the one that was the actual number of light years away. Barnard star or something, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: And so, like, they were arguing -- because Alpha Centauri is funnier.

Christine Wenc: Yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: But the whole joke was like, radio waves are finally reaching like --

Christine Wenc: It was the Cheers finale finally reaches Alpha Centauri because it's been four years. And so there's this huge fight about wait, wait, but Alpha Centauri is six light years away. So if it was only going four light years, it'd have to be Barnard Star. And so there was anybody who's going to get the joke is going to know that Alpha Centauri is the wrong distance. But that kind of stuff, like, I loved hearing stories like that because they just showed, you know, how seriously people took this stuff because they really did, you know? I mean, The Onion's writing process is extremely rigorous. You know, I mean, it's, I really gained so much respect for the editorial process by, by when I'm working on this book. But that, that story was also just funny.

Jenny Durham: I loved the fact that that was brought up in the book, though, about the fact that there were fact checkers at The Onion and people didn't think about, like, why would you have fact checkers? But honestly, to do good satire, I think it's, I think having, you know, your facts right so that you can intelligently, you know, make humor out of it.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like the fact checker for, like, The Daily Show is just legendary, you know? I mean, they did more fact checking on The Daily Show in the 2000s than probably like the real news did, right?

Jenny Durham: Yeah. That actually is a good segue into my next question. We talked a little bit about it briefly about news satire shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. You mentioned them being actually centers for media literacy. So I found that very interesting, though I completely agreed. I was like, you know, actually, yeah, that makes sense. So they're mostly intended to be entertainment. They're not supposed to be taken, as, you know, serious news sources.

But what does it say about our media landscape when, you know, satire news programs are actually the place you go to learn about how to objectively and critically evaluate your news?

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. It's like it, I mean, I think there was, there was a time... so there are all these scholars who work on news satire. And I talked to a bunch of them for the book. And, you know, if I had talked to them, you know, ten years ago, they would have had a lot to say about that. And, you know, news satire saving democracy and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But it's interesting because now, you know, they were like, wait, maybe news satire isn't saving democracy, you know? Like maybe what we thought was happening, maybe it wasn't happening, or maybe it was only happening for, you know, like, you know, people like us, you know, maybe a lot of people just thought it was funny.

And that is as far as it went. So, you know, I think that it probably, you know, I think those shows, I think they do serve as a form of teaching media literacy. But at the same time, you know, there's a lot of other... there's other, other forms of media that are that are, you know, it's like the bad fake news that is kind of actively involved in, you know, just kind of creating chaos and making people afraid.

And, you know, it's like the Fox News side of things. And which is, you know, weirdly, it's like another form of fake news. Just has a different -- I mean, their mission is to elect, you know, conservative politicians and keep them in power, right? And they've been extremely effective at that. So, so I don't know. I don't know how to, I don't know what the sort of, I don't know, best answer or right answer to that question really is any more. I think things, it's weird to be in a place where you sort of feel like you have to be skeptical of everything. That gets really tiring.

I think that's why I like to do like, nature stuff and my ecosystem restoration, because, you know, those plants aren't lying to me, you know? Like it's, it's that's up... I mean, I want to go out and do much more stuff with my hands. I want to go talk to people in real life. I want to look people in the eye, I want to get my hands in the dirt, you know, I want to move stuff with my body, you know, like, I don't want to spend all this time kind of neck up, you know, in the internet land. You know, I just feel like I just ugh, I'm just getting, like, a really yucky feeling like spending too much time there. So, I don't know, I would just tell people to just go spend more time in the real world. Just get off your freaking screen.

Daniel Pewewardy: Comedy wise, I do feel like in the last few years, like political satire just doesn't hit anymore.

Christine Wenc: Yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: I will clown on my like millennial friends for like still watching John Oliver and like, how do you do this? I, it's not funny. Like nothing's funnier than the actual headlines. So like we had astronauts --

Christine Wenc: I've become like a big Nathan Fielder fan.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah.

Christine Wenc: Because, like, it's like he's going somewhere really interesting with how media works and kind of what's left. I don't know, I'm really enjoying like the second season. I'm getting my mind blown kind of a lot watching right now. So it's just really interesting what he's doing. I don't know if I could even really quite describe it yet, but he's doing something that seems different.

Daniel Pewewardy: I, him and Craig Robinson, I don't know if you've seen, like, I Think You Should Leave. That's another like just like -- and he just came out with a movie with Paul Rudd called Friendship.

Christine Wenc: Okay, I'll check that out.

Daniel Pewewardy: It's about like, it's very like his whole humor is very like cringy and uncomfortable social awkwardness and like social situations, but to the point where... like, like I went to this movie, his movie recently and I like had to watch it through my shirt from cringing, you know? But like, as someone that, like, has a phobia of embarrassing situations, that was like very like... and so that's kind of like where... yeah, you kind of talk I think it was Hansen that talked in the book about like some of our best satirists were right like leading into like the Trump election, like, they were like firing on all barrels or shots, and like, it was just not. Nothing was like swaying people or anything. If there was this, if there's this idea that like, satire was like swing, which you kind of talk about in the book, having some kind of sway over like people's opinions on like leaders and it was like nothing was fazed and stuff. And then, yeah, I just think that it's the death of satire in the last few years is very interesting.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the other thing about like where The Onion is going now, like... like, I mean satire, I feel like the part of the function of satire is to it's like a morale boosting. You know, like does satire bring down the Berlin Wall? No. But does it tell you that you're not the only one who thinks what's going on is crazy? Like, yeah, that can be a good thing, and it can introduce kind of new ideas or new sort of, interpretation of stuff.

And you know with The Onion, you know, so The Onion has new owners now, and as of last year, like the new people, they have about a year and they sort of freed them from sort of like corporate, you know, awfulness, into the kind of like, you know, kind of do what they want again. And so one of the, one of the, one of the first interesting things they did was when that auction -- although now it's tied up in court -- to buy Infowars, right? And so that was super interesting to me because it's like The Onion sort of going out in the real world, you know, it was like The Onion, it's becoming The Onion sort of taking its sort of text-based performance art and kind of taking it out into like the actual world. You know, which is kind of what, like Nathan Fielder's --

Daniel Pewewardy: We're actually in the only --

Christine Wenc: There's something strange happening there. So, I mean, I don't know what The Onion is going to do next, but I feel like they want to try something different. I mean, I mean, they've brought back the print edition and it's been so long since print, like, meant anything like there's something like, weirdly avant garde about bringing back the print edition or something, even though it's also sort of like old-fashioned, like... I don't know, I mean, they want to try different things, and I really hope that they are like, brave enough or like, have the right kind of kind of creative leadership to, like, really do something that's maybe new, but I don't know what that would be.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah, I'm excited. I was actually gonna, like, check out some of the I was going to subscribe for the print edition. I'm curious about it.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, it's fun to get it -- I mean, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, I'm old school. I was at The Onion was best in print, you know, and there's stuff that really works. The Onion works well, with stuff that has a beginning, a middle and an end, you know, and it just isn't this endless, you know, sea of thumbnail videos or whatever. Like, it's like a thing, you know, it's like going out and having a nice meal, like you're not having it all day, you're just having the thing.

Daniel Pewewardy: I was subscribed to a magazine called Meme Insider for... that knowyourmeme.com put out because I was like, I just want to... Not that you should read anything in public, but I just want to read this about because it's the most absurd title ever. Like Meme Insider.

Christine Wenc: Is that for like PR people or are they just like read about memes in print?

Daniel Pewewardy: That's exactly what it was. They would like... it was a lot of like... so they would, just like short biography of me, It's like I got really involved in this, like, online meme community, like weird Facebook around 2016. And a lot of those people were like ended up being like guys from Harvard, that those are the only people that ended up being famous from it, like the like, The Know Your Meme game and then like, the Fyre Fest guys.

Christine Wenc: Oh, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: And then they got all in trouble because, the whole like, they started doing the, the branding thing you talk about The Onion was moving into. And then they all got like, they all... Bloomberg ran for president. And then a lot of those guys got in like, hot water for, like, making branded content to get people to vote for Bloomberg.

And it was like, so like, yeah, reading that The Onion went through that like towards like that... the whole social media era of The Onion was like stuff I felt personally as a comedian too, and it was really cool that I got to like because, like that community that I was involved with was like came out of like clickbait, like, Clickhole because on one side, people were disseminating information through these like BuzzFeed articles, but then they were also making, like Tweety Bird memes and like, putting like Minions and making like, oh, I can't wait for Friday. And so, like, that's what we were satirizing was like the lower end of that.

So like, this was a really cool experience. And even also interviewing you about this and talking about it, it's been really awesome. So I just want to say thanks and stuff.

Christine Wenc: Oh, sure.

Daniel Pewewardy: I totally derailed.

Jenny Durham: No, you're good.

Christine Wenc: I just want to say that like because what The Onion, part of the reason I wanted to put The Onion in the bigger context of other media is because, like news organizations were going through all the same things The Onion was going through, you know, like in what you're talking about. Anybody who was who was creating something for like the public to see your read or whatever, like, was struggling with like the same changes and like all the platforms coming in and hijacking everybody's clicks and like all that kind of stuff, like, you know, lots of different entities were going through the same thing. And so, you know, this, I don't know, it's just like my sort of sideways way of like telling a history of that, like through The Onion.

Daniel Pewewardy: And I think, yeah, this book is more about, does become more about media and it's how it's changed from print to cable, like because The Onion did start like, right, as like cable starts taking off.

Christine Wenc: Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: And the internet. So it's like the last 30 to 40 years of media is drastically different.

Christine Wenc: Yeah. And it's interesting that, you know, like I couldn't... I'm kind of amazed that The Onion like still exists. I mean, how is The Onion still here after almost 40 years? I mean, maybe it's some of the same people have been reading it this whole time, but like, that's a really long time for a comedy entity. I mean, I don't know how long Mad magazine lasted, you know? But I mean, it just to me, it's like there's something strange going on when this, like, really sharp, you know, sad satire and criticism of media is still popular after all this time. Like something that, I don't know, it's like a, it's a reason for hope, I guess. Like, I don't know.

Daniel Pewewardy: I forgot to mention it as of -- I know as of November of 2024, I haven't checked -- Wichita, Kansas's radio area is like one of the only places you can watch Infowars broadcasted on one of the antenna channels and like --

Christine Wenc: Really?

Jenny Durham: I didn't even know that.

Christine Wenc: You mean you don't even need cable, you can just watch it with your rabbit ears?

Daniel Pewewardy: You can watch it with your antenna. I try to watch, I don't know how close you have to be because when I was at my, like, my girlfriend, we were watching the election in November and she had like, PBS on I was like, hold on. And I would try to switch to Infowars because I was like, we're going to be fair and balanced. We're going to switch between all the networks. And it didn't come in that well. So I don't know. But it's still being broadcast. And so like, it's this kind of wild.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, I don't even know. I was gonna say, I don't even know if it's still being broadcast. I don't even know.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah, I think it... yeah, I think it is. I haven't seen it, but it's just this one because of some like connection the family of that owns the station has to Alex Jones. That's why it's still being broadcast. But anyway, I don't know why I wanted to mention that.

Christine Wenc: Got any more Onion questions?

Jenny Durham: Actually, since we kind of got a little bit into the change of the focus of media, it does make me think of another question I have, which is that you do mentioned in the book, like to stay afloat, how, you know, with the change from the focus of print to online, like short form video and stuff, and the focus on like monetization of content and branding and stuff, it kind of led to a little bit of a challenge for the writers to kind of maintain their integrity while they were also having to, you know, monetize like the sponsored content or whatnot.

Christine Wenc: Yeah.

Jenny Durham: Like, so when there's these ever shifting, you know, changes like how, like how does, you know, how does comedy continue to thrive in that kind of an environment when you know, you're doing it on behalf of you know, Coca-Cola or whatever?

Christine Wenc: Yeah. I mean, I mean, I don't know, I mean, if you're doing on behalf of Coca-Cola, I just don't see how it can ever be good, really. Like, I mean, it might be entertaining to some degree, but, like, I don't know, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm part of the, you know, generation that was opposed to selling out and, you know, and apparently now like, I guess that's not true.

Like, I don't know. But at the same time, you know, you gotta, you want to keep your publication afloat. So, I mean, I just read on The Onion's LinkedIn post -- and I was hoping it was a joke, I haven't confirmed it -- but they seemed like they might be starting up like their ad agency again. Which made a lot of money for The Onion. They made ads for other people, you know, they had Onion, you know, so I was like, oh, well, that's real. That's disappointing, I guess. But like, on the other hand, you need to make money. I don't know, like I don't know. But as far as I mean, I don't, I wouldn't know what to say about the comedy question.

You know, I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not a comedy fortune teller. I just think that you got to really, you know, I don't know, it's hard to... I would just encourage people to, like, not be afraid to try new stuff or something, you know, do something completely different, you know, rather than, you know, sort of focus grouping everything to death, like, do something new. You know, The Onion succeeded early on because nobody was doing anything like that, you know, and it was a bunch of kids who weren't, you know, there were no Hollywood agents, you know, watching them, there weren't even any parents watching, you know, there was just like people kind of just kind of going with what their, their gut instincts told them to do. And like, you know, you have a deadline at 3:00 in the morning, just going to make some stuff up. You know, and just, I don't know, like, just experiment and try a lot of different things. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't. It would be, it would be great.

I feel like the, the kind of -- maybe I'm wrong, but I just feel like because of the way social media works and everybody is just constantly like, you know, taking, you know, pictures and recordings of everything all the time, you know, it'd be nice if there was a space, I don't know where you could really just do your thing and experiment and develop it, you know, without feeling like, you know, you're going to be reported on and watched the whole time or something, you know? I don't know. I don't know what I would, but I mean, you know, keep being smart and witty and penetrating and, I don't know, do some weird, weird, interesting stuff.

Jenny Durham: I think that's the only way, really, if you're doing anything that's sponsored that I feel like hits authentically is some of these, like, YouTubers, I've seen some that they will sponsor with certain advertisers, but obviously the advertisers give them free rein --

Christine Wenc: Yeah.

Jenny Durham: -- to do the bit as part of their video and they're wacky and, and like cheesy. That's the only time where like, yeah, it doesn't bother me. Like, I know it's an ad and I know that they're paid.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But and maybe the fake part is pretending like the advertising is separate from what you're doing because it's not really. I mean, if the advertising is, you know, making it possible to do your thing, then should there, I don't know, like, it's... I don't know. I can't believe I just said that. Like, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is there.

I mean, part of it is it's just, you know, everyone's trapped in this stupid for-profit model and there's no arts funding in this country. And it's just there's just this, you know, brutal battle for, like, the five grants that do exist, you know, and it's just, it's a messed-up situation because when you feel like you have to, everything you do has to make a profit. And not just a little profit, like a decent profit, like it really limits what you can do when people just kind of end up doing the same thing over and over and over, you know, and with a different funding model, you would see a lot of it would be, would be very different. So I'm, I'm really bummed about the, the effort to, you know, destroy public what's left of public broadcasting, even though that's gotten really corporate too, you know?

But anyway, I would, I would, I don't know, I would rethink the entire, you know, I don't know. If you could just give the top, you know, 10,000 creative people in the country, give them all like $50,000 and, you know, just a year to make something and you'd get a lot of amazing, amazing stuff.

Jenny Durham: Oh, yeah. They do that like in Scandinavian countries.

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you start looking at other countries just like, oh, wow. Like we're not even, it's like our train system compared to theirs.

Daniel Pewewardy: I feel like zines are on the rise because people are just like wanting -- I feel like because of, like the disappearance of a lot of different kind of media and like zines are like made with a Xerox and it's like...

Christine Wenc: Yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: And I like, really like Wichita has like six ongoing zines now. And it's like, I'm sure this is --

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah. I've thought about like, oh, I should have like a Substack or something. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not going to do that. I'm going to make like a photocopied thing that I'll mail to people. I'll just put the address on my Substack. I don't know, I really, I kind of want to do that actually.

Daniel Pewewardy: So what's, what do you, do you plan on writing more? Do you have another book coming out or anything?

Christine Wenc: Yeah. I've got other projects. I've another project has absolutely nothing to do with media or anything like it. Although it is about technology a little bit, it's -- I just got, I had a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, which was just terminated by DOGE for this. But it's a history of life support technology and how it changed American death. It's like a history of pulling the plug, basically. But it's about how a particular technological system came into the hospital, came into society in like, the 1950s and 1960s, and in just a couple of decades, it like totally changed, like how people die. And so now, I mean, I started, right, I became interested in this topic after experiencing this with two family members who came into the hospital for two totally different afflictions, and yet their death process via pulling the plug in the ICU was basically identical. And I was like, wait a minute, something strange is happening here. And so that's what this next project is about.

Daniel Pewewardy: That's, we've actually -- we might have you back because we've all, we've had -- who wrote the one we did the, the death industry book? I can't remember --

Jenny Durham: Oh, she was a British author, if I remember correctly.

Christine Wenc: Oh, yeah. I think, well, there's a, there was a British out there from like ten, 20 years ago who wrote a good death book. But there's a, but there's, you know, I know death is like sort of cool these days.

Jenny Durham: Yeah, she did one called All That Remains. I can't remember her name. But there was a -- yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: And the Big Read was Can We Talk about Something More Pleasant one year. So we've, that --

Christine Wenc: Oh yeah.

Jenny Durham: Roz Chast.

Christine Wenc: That's a great book, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: So it's actually something that we like to like, engage with to be like, it's like people like those kind of like books are people are interested. It's like something we like as a society don't want to confront. But having, that's really cool, that's, I like seeing when people explore that because I have a tough time with that. So it's like --

Christine Wenc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's weird, it's weird. But it's like at this point, you know, there was one study, this is like 1999, like one study in the New England Journal of Medicine was like something like 20 percent of Americans now die as a result of pulling the plug in the ICU, you know, and it's a modern death, it's a new death ritual. You know, it happens every day in hospitals. But people, you know, people like me don't know this at all until we go in there and experience it. But it's actually a completely ordinary, everyday thing that happens all the time. So. And I just thought that was, that was like, huh, that's interesting. And people have tried to change it. It's very hard to change that process. And you know, anyway.

Daniel Pewewardy: Have you read anything, you have any book recommendations for us?

Christine Wenc: Yeah. So I'm a very eclectic reader. I mean, like, I'm reading Moby-Dick for, like, the 30,000,000th time, on and off. There's a really interesting, fairly new book by a guy named Musa al-Gharbi called We Have Never Been Woke. It's about what he calls symbolic capitalism. It's published by Princeton University Press, I think. And it's not about wokeness, but it's about kind of how language and rhetoric is used in kind of professional culture in everyday life.

And a novel that I really enjoyed was called Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, she's the Japanese author who was, she was profiled in The New Yorker recently, and so I had to check her out because I love science fiction. And it's a very strange and weird and creepy book. And funny, about people in this science fiction world who don't want to have children anymore.

Daniel Pewewardy: Thank you for that, thank you for those recommendations.

Christine Wenc: Sure.

Jenny Durham: And we'll put them on the show notes.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah, we'll add those to the show notes. And thank you again for being on the podcast. It was really awesome interviewing you and talking about The Onion. And thanks again. And, did you have any last things you want to say?

Christine Wenc: No, I just want to say thank you, thank you for having me.

Jenny Durham: Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. And I really yeah, I really enjoyed our conversation, and I enjoyed the book, too.

Christine Wenc: Thanks.

Daniel Pewewardy: Thanks. Well, again, the book is called Funny Because It's True -- and I don't have my iPad.

Jenny Durham: Yeah, there's a big subtitle.

Daniel Pewewardy: There's a subtitle. And I was talking with Christine Wenc. Thank you again, Christine. Have a great day.

Jenny Durham: Yeah, bye.

Christine Wenc: Thanks. Thank you for having me. Bye.

VOICEOVER: Looking for an easy way to keep track of your ReadICT challenge progress? Check out the Beanstack app. With Beanstack, you can participate in library reading challenges, log reading activities, and even win prizes. You can access the app either through the Apple or Google Play stores or on a desktop computer by visiting wichitalibrary.beanstack.org. If you are participating in the ReadICT challenge, every month you log a book, you will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a cool book-themed prize. For more information on Beanstack, visit wichitalibrary.org/beanstack.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: That was a fun interview and it was really awesome to have Jenny join us in the second half of it. I'd like to give a shout out to Christine Wenc for joining us for that recording. This has been a production of Wichita Public Library. A big thanks and shoutout to our production crew and podcast team. And don't forget to log your books in the reading tracker app, Beanstack.

We're doing summer reading right now. And then we also will do ReadICT throughout the year. And it's a great way to like, you know, challenge yourself. I just completed the summer reading program. It's the first time I've ever done the adult summer reading program, and it was really easy to keep track of like everything I did. Like, I go to art museums a lot, which a lot of the like things I had to check off were art stuff. So that was really cool. And you can do all that, download, by downloading the Beanstack app.

You can follow this podcast on the Spotify app or stream episodes and whatever platform you listen to podcasts on. We're on YouTube, we're on Apple Podcasts. Wherever you check out podcasts, we're probably there. And if you like what you heard, make sure to subscribe to our show and also tell your friends. Post on socials, spread the love. And shoutout to all the people that listen to this podcast. I just want to say I appreciate each and every one of you and that we've had some changes this season, but we're still trying to put out a really good show and have really good interviews. And thanks for listening and I will see you guys on the next one. Have a great day.