Mandy Kaplan has been handed a Hugo-winning, Nebula-winning, Mormon-authored military sci-fi classic about a six-year-old being psychologically tortured into committing accidental alien genocide, and reader, she has THOUGHTS.
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What happens when you take a children’s party game, move it to a Scottish castle, and fill it with Real Housewives who don’t know the rules? Mandy and Entertainment Weekly editor-in-chief Patrick Gomez break down The Traitors Season 4 — the strategy, the chaos, the Michael Rapaport of it all, and why the most popular reality show on television absolutely should not work.
Tommy Metz III returns to nerdjucate Mandy on the comedy special that made him believe musical humor could actually work — Bo Burnham’s Make Happy — and together they dissect why a twenty-five-year-old in clown makeup delivering Pavlovian crowd-work traps and country music takedowns might be the most important comedian of his generation.
Mona Chatterjee returns for a Make Me A Nerd first: the show’s first-ever book-to-movie follow-up, tackling the 2012 film adaptation of The Hunger Games. Mandy and Mona debate what the movie nails, what it loses, and why a story called The Hunger Games somehow forgot to include the food.
Mandy and Mona dissect Suzanne Collins’ dystopian masterpiece The Hunger Games, exploring everything from Katniss’s questionable trust issues to the perfume potential of arena sweat. They tackle the big questions: Why don’t we get a peacekeepers’ reality show and how did a book about children murdering each other become required middle school reading?