I got the good NPR shirt, and the soup-sized mug, when I visited Linda to interview her at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Linda’s interview on The Hilarious World of Depression podcast

Television Without Pity, which became Previously.tv, which recently became PrimerTimer.com!

The Amazing Race was on the top of my mind when thinking about Television Without Pity

Again With This, a podcast hosted by Sarah D. Bunting and Tara Ariano, two of the founders of Television Without Pity, who do episode-by-episode recaps of Beverly Hills 90210

Stephen Thompson, one of Linda’s dear friends and co-workers, worked at The Onion before joining NPR

Linda’s writing was formerly hosted on the Monkey See blog at NPR, but that blog was sunsetted in favor of expanding the Pop Culture Happy Hour brand

Dancing with the Stars is now discussed on NPR, and that is largely due to Linda’s influence

All Songs Considered, the music-oriented NPR show and podcast that served as the inspiration for Pop Culture Happy Hour

Talk of the Nation, a live call-in show which had Linda on as a guest. She loved the spontaneity of participating in a live radio show

Linda had every intention of writing a book for National Novel Writing Month, alas her apartment flooded

Chuck Knoblauch throwing a baseball into the stands, hitting Keith Olbermann’s mother

If the yips interests you as much as it interests Linda, check out Field of Fear, a 30 for 30 mini-documentary

Before Sunrise is a movie that’s mostly talking, and is amazing, but Linda wanted Evvie Drake to have more action than that

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a TV show that brings Linda joy and is fun, but also is warm-spirited and compassionate

Audie Cornish gets a break from being a very serious NPR news reporter when she guests on Pop Culture Happy Hour

Linda uses Matt Damon growing potatoes in the film The Martian as a parable for the importance of art and culture in our lives

Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company reps Linda (hear Sarah Burnes’ episode of First Draft with Sarah Enni here)

Every listener should check out the first episode of First Draft with Sarah Enni with Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer, when we talked about her first novel, Layover

10 Things I Hate About You was shot at Stadium High School in Tacoma, Wash.

Shooting Trinkets on location in Portland, Ore. was a way to differentiate the show visually from glossier teen shows like Riverdale, and evoke classic teen shows like My So-Called Life

Awesomeness TV produced the show and helped shape the project into a TV show

Writer and artist Alex Israel was singing Amy and Emily’s praises to Kiwi for years before the three actually met

John McAlary, the casting director for Trinkets, said he saw 6,000 actors during the casting process for the show’s key roles

Seeing Trinkets star Brianna Hildebrand sing on her Instagram inspired Kiwi, Amy, and Emily to include singing as part of her character

Actor Katrina Cunningham, who plays Sabine in Trinkets, and is a performer as well and her music is featured in the show

Kiwi is currently writing “Party Girls” with long-time co-writer Karen McCullah

End of the Fucking World and Russian Doll are TV series that Kiwi thinks are ideal bingeable lengths for TV series

Learn more about The First Draft Listener Club

The New York Teen Author Carnival

When Jennifer visited Portobello Road in East London, she felt like she was stepping back into the London of Charles Dickens (author of Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities), artist William Hogarth, Jack the Ripper (learn more with The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Phillip Sugden), The Labour Movement, the London Dock Worker Strike

Simon Lipskar of Writer’s House was interested in Jennifer’s first crack at writing a novel, which was 1,100 words(!)

Sally Kim, VP and Editor in Chief at Putnam, was then at St. Martin’s, when she purchased Jennifer’s first book

Steven Malk at Writer’s House became Jennifer’s agent to sell A Northern Light and subsequent books

Jennifer’s mom bought her a copy of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, and that sparked the obsession that led to A Northern Light. (Non-fiction accounts of the murder of Grace Brown include Adirondack Tragedy: The Gillette Murder Case of 1906, written by Joseph W. Brownell and Patricia Enos; and Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited, by Craig Brandon.)

The murder case of Laci Peterson, documented in true crime novel A Deadly Game: The Untold Story of the Scott Peterson Investigation by Catherine Crier

Jennifer was stopped short by a New York Times article about the heart of Louis Charles, Dauphin of France, the imprisoned son of the king of France who was toppled by the French Revolution. The story was likely either “Genetics Offers Denouement To Mystery of Prince's Death,” by Suzanne Daley, or “MEANWHILE : Learning from a heart stilled by revolution,” by Catherine Field.

Jennifer was inspired by “Savage Beauty,” the Met’s retrospective of fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s work

Jennifer’s short story in Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All led her to explore the themes of beauty and how we reinforce those standards on young women in Stepsister

I blow up Maurene Goo’s spot (author of I Believe in a Thing Called Love, The Way You Make Me Feel, and her newest, Somewhere Only We Know) getting obsessed with the Supernatural TV show (listen to Maurene’s First Draft episodes here, here, and here)

I’m obsessed with The Dyatlov Pass Incident, which was covered in Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar

Abdi’s daughter has a PJ Harvey poster in her bedroom, which makes her the coolest seven-year-old on the block

Archie comics were what turned Abdi into a voracious reader

Andy Hardy, Christmas, and movies from the 30s and 40s were some of the Americana that made Abdi drawn to the U.S. culturally

Tahereh Mafi, author of the Shatter Me series, A Very Large Expanse of Sea, Furthermore, and Whichwood (listen to Tahereh’s episode of First Draft here)

Old TV shows like I Love Lucy were deliberately sexless

Judy Garland and Joan Crawford were two women who had public personas, but were hiding their interior lives. Abdi was drawn to that as a young, closeted gay man

The book How to Be Gay by David M. Halperin dives into how certain films and people become gay icons

Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele (33 ⅓) by Amy Gentry, a book that dives into the making of Tori Amos’s iconic album

One of Abdi’s first jobs was as an assistant in the company founded by director Alan J. Pakula, director of Sophie’s Choice and All the President’s Men, among other films

Abdi spent so much time reading scripts in his first jobs, he achieved Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of becoming an expert after spending 10,000 hours doing a thing (which Gladwell outlines in his book, Outliers)

Abdi is obsessed with Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, and feels that Maupin’s books have had the most influence over him as a writer

Reading James Baldwin makes Abdi “want to do something else,” because Baldwin is so intimidatingly good

Sarah suggests writing a couple pages of your finest Flannery O’Connor rip-off and see how it feels to mimic someone else’s voice

Tehrangeles is the word for the huge community of Iranians in Los Angeles

Alessandra Balzer was Abdi’s editor for The Authentics, and he knew he wanted to keep working with her

Abdi shares a quote from Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer and star John Cameron Mitchell about putting your obsessions into your work

The Act Up movement was pivotal to drawing attention to the AIDS crisis

Right from “Lucky Star,” Madonna’s first song and video, Abdi was obsessed with her

Two O.J. Simpson-focused films: O.J. Simpson: Made in America (documentary), and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story is a good example of Abdi’s dedication to revisiting history

Truth or Dare, the documentary about Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour

Some queer works that Madonna led Abdi to explore include the historic documentary Paris is Burning, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, known for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Talk to Her

Abdi is obsessed with RuPaul’s Drag Race

Mommy Dearest is one of the films that RuPaul supposedly gives contestants before they come on RuPaul’s Drag Race

Abdi is a huge fan of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a 12-week program of creative exercises meant to unblock

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, the Netflix series based on the massively popular book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo