You're Wrong About

Megan Burbank’s gotta dance. The centuries-old dance style known as ballet has been stereotyped in our modern world with images of refined, wispy, frighteningly disciplined young women fighting viciously for roles in ethereal productions. For this episode, Adult Dance Correspondent Megan Burbank shares with Sarah the history and transformation of this misunderstood art from its early days as a fancy French aristocratic performance, to its post-French Revolution embrace by the working class, and finally into 20th century America when the expected body of the ballerina began to take shape. Megan also shares her own experience as a late-onset ballerina, dispelling myths about what ballet is, who can participate, and what we can learn about ourselves through its techniques. Together they discuss the line between art and sport, the aspects of horror found in many ballets, and whether it is too late for all of us to become the prima ballerina of our dreams. Digressions include: Final Destination acupuncture, the smell of the Scholastic book fair, and the questionable advertising employed by Tab soda. Send your submissions for our Halloween Listener Spectacular (scary stories or Halloween nostalgia) to [email protected] before August 31st! Referenced: Ballet Evolved How Political Anxiety Turned Me into a Late-Onset Ballerina eXit SPACE Dance Studio International Adult Ballet Festival TAB Soda Fever Dream More Megan Burbank: Burbank.industries Burbank Industries on Substack Produced + edited by ⁠⁠⁠Miranda Zickler⁠⁠⁠ More You're Wrong About: ⁠⁠⁠Bonus Episodes on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠Buy cute merch⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠YWA on Instagram⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send your submissions for our Halloween Listener Spectacular (scary stories or Halloween nostalgia) to [email protected] before August 31st! How many maligned women can you name in 30 seconds? For this episode, Sarah gives Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria a lightning round pop quiz on You’re Wrong About topics over the years with stakes so high that you’ll have to hear them to believe them. Digressions include an evil preteen softball team, the alternative pronunciation of pasta, horror movie publicity stunts, and at what point an infant becomes a baby. More Chelsey Weber-Smith: Listen to American Hysteria Follow American Hysteria on instagram Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler More You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merch YWA on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remember being a teen and coming up with “cool” ways of spelling common words? Well, just like the teenager it was, the United States in the 18th century was annoying their mom, England, with the hip words that were being edited and added to their lexicon. The antagonistic pair of nations on the brink of the Revolutionary War were always competing to prove their superiority and independence in small cultural battles, and words themselves were no different. Fellow word-nerd Gabe Henry, author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, joins Sarah as they chummily pun their way through the story of the 18th century Dictionary Wars, the story of the publishing battles fought between a handful of eccentric word-lovers in The US and England, all vying for the future supremacy of their own spellings. Digressions include crop circles from Unsolved Mysteries, dishonest detergent marketing, and old fashioned sock puppet accounts. More Gabe Henry: gabehenry.com Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler More You're Wrong About: linktr.ee/ywapod Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do you get when you combine a horror movie audience, a spiritualist séance, and a haunted house attraction? Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1960s, midnight ghost shows were ghoulishly chaotic, wonderfully campy 4D theater performances that accompanied the scary movies of the era, beloved by a mostly-teenage audience who often became a part of the show themselves. Schlocky showman Chelsey Weber-Smith tells Sarah about how magicians-turned-ghostmasters used paranormal parlor tricks, gory skits, and marketing gimmicks to create a new form of vaudevillian dark comedy. As horror obsessives, Sarah and Chelsey muse about what it would have been like to attend one of these late night wacky fright fests that paved the way for the happily trashy theater camaraderie of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Digressions include the resilience of the horseshoe crab, dollar store competition, and plot holes in the movie High Tension (2003). More Chelsey Weber-Smith: Listen to American Hysteria Original music in this episode is produced + performed by Magpie Cinema Club (except for Harry Belafonte's Zombie Jamboree which is, in fact, from 1962.) Listen to their cover of Season of the VVitch Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler More You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Sarah's other show, You Are Good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who really ended the Cold War, Ronald Reagan or a ten-year-old girl? Eighties correspondent Maris Kreizman joins us for a heartfelt conversation about America’s Youngest Ambassador, Samantha Smith, a child who wrote a letter to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov in hopes of cooling nuclear tensions. Then, Andropov wrote back. Maris and Sarah discuss the burden we place on the youth to “change the world” while simultaneously scolding them for their naivety. Digressions include the millennial urge to cut up plastic soda can rings, Christina Applegate’s SNL infomercial, and an important lesson from the Golden Girls. More Maris Kreizman: Buy the book, I Want to Burn This Place Down Subscribe to the newsletter, The Maris Review Maris on Bluesky More You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Sarah's other show, You Are Good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices