A 13-Year-Old, a Judge, and No Lawyer Plus an AI Torture Chamber & the Cornell 7: F@#ked Up Friday

This week’s Fucked Up Friday had a common thread, and Libbie Grant named it before the vote: “It’s all misogyny, man.” Dana brought the Cornell 7 case, now in Letitia James’s hands, and one line from Jane Doe that explains why survivors blame themselves first. Libbie, whose new novel The Ended World imagines an AI waking up, brought the developer who built an AI “torture chamber” on GitHub. I brought Angel, the thirteen-year-old who argued his own deportation case alone.

In the room, it gets raw fast. Dana takes apart the right’s favorite talking point—why did she act friendly afterward?—with the answer every woman already knows: we’re trained to blame ourselves. The room goes incandescent over Angel’s judge, and the chat starts crying. Then Libbie, a self-described stoner optimist, makes the case that we are going to come out the other side of this.

• [27:41] Dana reads the line from the New York Times that shows the moment Jane Doe first understood what had been done to her, a week after the party, in an anonymous Greek-life forum.

• [30:27] Lawrence on Julie Roginsky’s Lift Our Voices and its AI tool built to read your NDA and find the ways out, plus the New York push that could carry an NDA ban nationwide.

• [36:42] Libbie on the developer who built an AI “torture chamber,” and the question nobody wants to answer: why someone’s first move with a thing that might suffer is to hurt it.

• [40:46] Lawrence’s story: a thirteen-year-old named Angel, a Texas immigration judge, and a choice no child should ever be handed.

• [50:33] The vote. The chat picks the most fucked up story of the week, and everybody loses.

Thanks for listening!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!