Nancy and Sarah talk Love Story, the latest Ryan Murphy jam, about the romance between, and tragic end of, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. Do the kids even know about these two people anymore? (One of them, it turns out.) Based on the book, Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, by Elizabeth Beller, the series takes liberties — and one is unforgivable. But there are things to like! Top of that list is Sarah Pidgeon, the actress playing Bessette, who transforms a little-known figure with ice-queen vibes into a carnal and mesmerizing presence.

Also discussed:

* Nancy’s back in Tulsa, wants to buy a house

* The best Ryan Murphy series to date is …

* One Degree of Nancy Rommelmann!

* Naomi Watts as Jackie O??

* Ooooh, the Darryl Hannah in this show

* Nancy does a pretty good Jackie O. impersonation

* Mazzy Star, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” and the ‘90s jams Sarah is digging in “Love Story”

* An understandable reaction on Dallas’s grassy knoll

* Almost three weeks since Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping

* Hepola, cub reporter!

* Jenny Craig or Kate Moss: Who said it?

Plus, pouring one out for Robert Duvall, who died this week at 95; the subversive humor of Paul Rubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, a hot box pick that changes how we understand #MeToo, and much more!

Last-minute alert: Nancy will appear tomorrow morning — Thursday, February 19 —on the FOX show “America’s Newsroom,” to talk about her recent piece, “Caring for Mom Is an Education in Scams and Fraud.”

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January 2026 was bleak, and February ain’t doing much better. Or is it just a matter of where you’re looking? Nancy and Sarah talk about bright spots in the culture, which starts with a big communal TV experience and somehow involves… a lot of sports.

Also discussed:

* Patriots’ coach Mike Vrabel, kind of hot?

* Football needs stories (for Sarah)

* Nancy does accents!

* Super Bowl ads we loved

* A bad day for MAGA, a good day for America

* What up with that Brad Pitt trailer?

* Nancy wants to see what new movie?

* The Epstein saga is longer than the Friday the 13th franchise

* The abandoned Western movie Larry McMurtry wrote before Lonesome Dove

* Peter Bogdanovich vs. Peter Boghossian

* What Olympic sport would Nancy and Sarah choose?

* Our sports crushes

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“I had started out determined to learn about Amanda, but as more people contacted me wanting to talk, it was Jason they wished to talk about.” - from To the Bridge, A True Story of Motherhood and Murder*

This 7th installment of “The Sociopaths Among Us” is about the person who put me I mind to do the series in the first place. His name is Jason Smith, and he is the father of the two children his estranged wife, Amanda Stott-Smith, dropped from Portland’s Sellwood Bridge shortly after 1am on May 23, 2009. Amanda was arrested later that same day, a story I partially tell you in the audio (and fully in the book).

Walking into a story like this, one knows nothing other than one’s own and others’ preconceived notions. In the case of a mother who kills a child, these notions run from evil to crazy and not much more. Neither answered for me why Amanda did what she did.

It can also be the case, in stories like this, that the real story, or stories, reveal themselves slowly. You can charge directly at it all you like and you are not going to get it. But if you wait, and you listen…

In the audio you will hear how people started coming to me with stories about Jason Smith, he was not the man he presented himself to be, they said; that he was very, very good at what he did, and what he did was practice deception.

“He could sell ice to an Eskimo, he could sell you the dream,” I was told by the man who’d thought of Jason as his best friend, a thought the man had, by the time he called me, been thoroughly disabused of.

I have written before of the sociopath’s terrific and terrible talent of being able make you feel as though you ‘get’ him as others do not. They spin webs of so, so, so many, lies that eventually catch up with them. They do not register the damage they leave in their wake, or not as something they should care about, and by the time people realize what has happened, the sociopath is onto the next person or situation from which he can gain sustenance. From To the Bridge:

“We become grist for the sociopath’s mill, in other words; we become his fuel. Dr. Hervey Cleckley, in his seminal work on the psychopathic personality, The Mask of Sanity, posited that what sociopaths lack is ‘soul quality.’ Another work I came across called sociopaths “soul eaters of Psychophagic.’ Reading this, I pictured Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son and considered the idea that sociopaths must feed on others because they lack souls of their own.”

Consider what this consumption can do to others.

I can understand someone wondering right about now why I do not have more sympathy for Jason Smith, who after all lost his four-year son. Read on…

* To the Bridge is a"Kindle Exclusive Deal" this month. If you grab it, let me know what you think.