Hello podcast listeners. We're preparing this week's show for you with a close look at the themes and memes emerging from the coverage of mounting hostility between the U.S. and Iran. It's already been a news-heavy first week of the year.

Blazes across Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, and in New York,

jury selection in the trial of former Hollywood Titan Harvey Weinstein,

whose alleged sexual predations launched the Me Too movement in 2017,

and the allegations keep coming.

Just hours after the start of his criminal trial in New York, Harvey Weinstein is hit with

new sexual assault charges in Los Angeles.

Weinstein is charged with raping one woman and sexually assaulting another in separate incidents

over a two-day period in 2013.

To date, over 80 women in the film industry have accused him of rape and sexual assault and abuse.

Weinstein claims they were all consensual acts.

It was October 2017 when New York Times reporters Jody Cantor and Megan Tui and Ronin Farrow, writing in The New Yorker, published their

investigations into Weinstein. The reporting has been groundbreaking in its detail, laying

out the allegations for the public. But in Hollywood, Weinstein's abuses already were an open

secret. A week after the revelations in 2017, I spoke with BuzzFeed

senior culture writer Anne Helen Peterson about how women in Tinsletown often protect themselves,

and so found out about Weinstein. It was thanks in part to an oft-maligned news source, gossip blogs.

Yeah, that's how women outside of Hollywood especially learned this information.

I've heard people tell me that they first heard the rumors when they were frequenting

Usenet discussion boards in the late 90s before the internet had taken the form that we now

recognize it.

And that was at the apex of Weinstein's power?

...