This Week In Despair With Peter-john Byrnes

Sometimes the peril of doing a topical show is that you end up processing tragedy in real-time. When my guest Joel Ingersoll agreed to do the show months in advance on a trip through Chicago, he had no idea that he'd be talking about the bombing at the Boston Marathon, which happened just days before we recorded. The result is a conversation that's sometimes sober, sometimes funny, but never dull. We spend a surprising amount of time talking about baseball. The recently-dead Margaret Thatcher is spoken ill of. The actress Jeri Ryan is praised for her political impact. I discover the existence of a Minnesota foodstuff with an ethnic slur in its name.