Podcasts about Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion famously chronicled California's culture and mythology in works like “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.” And it's Didion's relationship with Hollywood in particular that New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson explores in “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” her new analysis of the California writer. “The movies,” Wilkinson writes, “shaped us — shaped her — to believe life would follow a genre and an arc, with rising action, climax and resolution. It would make narrative sense. The reality is quite different.” We talk to Wilkinson about how Didion saw an American political landscape that was molding itself after the movies — and came to value story over substance. Guest: Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic, New York Times Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By Walt HickeyDouble feature today!Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.I'm a huge fan of Alissa, she's a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It's a really wonderful book and if you're a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it's a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless.Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on.Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be back, wherever we are.Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It's a really exciting book. It's a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work?Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn't read any books, because they don't make you read books in school, or they didn't when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in '03. It's sort of a meditation on grief, but it's not really what that sounds like. If people haven't read it's very Didion. You know, it's not sentimental, it's constantly examining the narratives that she's telling herself about grief.So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn't have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I'd never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else.Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don't remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades.From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn't realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that's 20 years of history.Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I've always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.”It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don't really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she's a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief.So that's the long-winded way of saying I wasn't, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer.That's really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion's experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there?The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she's in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John's brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it's all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it's at.So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That's the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the '80s as screenwriters still.People sometimes don't realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion's novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don't realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives.John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn't understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It's a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it.So it's, it's really, that's all very interesting. They're threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion's early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns.Then in the '80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There's an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together.So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there'd be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn't seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens.Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she's such an interesting figure, but she's also lived so very publicly that I'm just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also be the Hollywood system as a whole.Yeah. I mean, I didn't interview her for obvious reasons.Understandable, entirely understandable.Pretty much everyone in her life also is gone with the exception really of Griffin Dunn, who is her nephew, John's nephew, the actor. But other than that, it felt like I needed to look at it through a critical lens. So it meant examining a lot of texts. A lot of Didion's magazine work (which was a huge part of her life) is published in the books that people read like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and all the other books. What was interesting to me was discovering (I mean, not “discovering” because other people have read it) that there is some work that's not published and it's mostly her criticism.Most of that criticism was published in the late '50s and the early '60s when she was living in New York City, working at Vogue and trying to make it in the literary scene that was New York at that time, which was a very unique place. I mean, she was writing criticism and essays for both, you know, like National Review and The Nation at the same time, which was just hard to conceive of today. It was something you'd do back then. Yeah, wild stuff.A lot of that criticism was never collected into books. The most interesting is that she'd been working at Vogue for a long time in various positions, but she wound up getting added to the film critic column at Vogue in, '62, I want to say, although I might have that date slightly off. She basically alternated weeks with another critic for a few years, writing that until she started writing in movies proper. It's never a great idea to be a critic and a screenwriter at the same time.Her criticism is fascinating. So briefly, for instance, she shared that column with Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael became well known after she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. This was prior to that. This is several years prior to that. They also hated each other for a long time afterward, which is funny, because, in some ways, their style is very different but their persona is actually very similar. So I wonder about that.But in any case, even when she wasn't sharing the column with Pauline Kael, it was a literal column in a magazine. So it's like one column of text, she can say barely anything. She was always a bit of a contrarian, but she was actively not interested in the things that were occupying New York critics at the time. Things like the Auteur Theory, what was happening in France, the downtown scene and the Shirley Clark's of the world. She had no use for it. At some point, she accuses Billy Wilder of having really no sense of humor, which is very funny.When you read her criticism, you see a person who is very invested in a classical notion of Hollywood as a place that shows us fantasies that we can indulge in for a while. She talks in her very first column about how she doesn't really need movies to be masterpieces, she just wants them to have moments. When she says moments, she means big swelling things that happen in a movie that make her feel things.It's so opposite, I think, to most people's view of Didion. Most people associate her with this snobbish elitism or something, which I don't think is untrue when we're talking about literature. But for her, the movies were like entertainment, and entering that business was a choice to enter that world. She wasn't attempting to elevate the discourse or something.I just think that's fascinating. She also has some great insights there. But as a film critic, I find myself disagreeing with most of her reviews. But I think that doesn't matter. It was more interesting to see how she conceived of the movies. There is a moment later on, in another piece that I don't think has been republished anywhere from the New York Review of Books, where she writes about the movies of Woody Allen. She hates them. It's right at the point where he's making like Manhattan and Annie Hall, like the good stuff. She just has no use for them. It's one of the funniest pieces. I won't spoil the ending because it's hilarious, and it's in the book.That writing was of huge interest to me and hasn't been republished in books. I was very grateful to get access to it, in part because it is in the archives — the electronic archives of the New York Public Library. But at the time, the library was closed. So I had to call the library and have a librarian get on Zoom with me for like an hour and a half to figure out how I could get in the proverbial back door of the library to get access while the library wasn't open.That's magnificent. That's such a cool way to go to the archives because some stuff just hasn't been published. If it wasn't digitized, then it's not digitized. That's incredible.Yeah, it's there, but you can barely print them off because they're in PDFs. They're like scanned images that are super high res, so the printer just dies when you try to print them. It's all very fascinating. I hope it gets republished at some point because I think there's enough interest in her work that it's fascinating to see this other aspect of her taste and her persona.It's really interesting that she seems to have wanted to meet the medium where it is, right? She wasn't trying to literary-up Hollywood. I mean, LA can be a bit of a friction. It's not exactly a literary town in the way that some East Coast metropolises can be. It is interesting that she was enamored by the movies. Do you want to speak about what things were like for her when she moved out?Yeah, it is funny because, at the same time, the first two movies that they wrote and produced are The Panic in Needle Park, which is probably the most new Hollywood movie you can imagine. It's about addicts at Needle Park, which is actually right where the 72nd Street subway stop is on the Upper West Side. If people have been there, it's hard to imagine. But that was apparently where they all sat around, and there were a lot of needles. It's apparently the first movie supposedly where someone shoots up live on camera.So it was the '70s. That's amazing.Yes, and it launched Al Pacino's film career! Yeah, it's wild. You watch it and you're just like, “How is this coming from the woman who's about all this arty farty stuff in the movies.” And Play It As It Lays has a very similar, almost avant-garde vibe to it. It's very, very interesting. You see it later on in the work that they made.A key thing to remember about them (and something I didn't realize before I started researching the book)was that Didion and Dunn were novelists who worked in journalism because everybody did. They wrote movies, according to them (you can only go off of what they said. A lot of it is John writing these jaunty articles. He's a very funny writer) because “we had tuition and a mortgage. This is how you pay for it.”This comes up later on, they needed to keep their WGA insurance because John had heart trouble. The best way to have health insurance was to remain in the Writers Guild. Remaining in the Writers Guild means you had to have a certain amount of work produced through union means. They were big union supporters. For them this was not, this was very strictly not an auteurist undertaking. This was not like, “Oh, I'm gonna go write these amazing screenplays that give my concept of the world to the audience.” It's not like Bonnie and Clyding going on here. It's very like, “We wrote these based on some stories that we thought would be cool.”I like that a lot. Like the idea that A Star is Born was like a pot boiler. That's really delightful.Completely. It was totally taken away from them by Streisand and John Peters at some point. But they were like, “Yeah, I mean, you know, it happens. We still got paid.”Yeah, if it can happen to Superman, it can happen to you.It happens to everybody, you know, don't get too precious about it. The important thing is did your novel come out and was it supported by its publisher?So just tracing some of their arcs in Hollywood. Obviously, Didion's one of the most influential writers of her generation, there's a very rich literary tradition. Where do we see her footprint, her imprint in Hollywood? What are some of the ways that we can see her register in Hollywood, or reverberate outside of it?In the business itself, I don't know that she was influential directly. What we see is on the outside of it. So a lot of people were friends. She was like a famous hostess, famous hostess. The New York Public Library archives are set to open at the end of March, of Didion and Dunn's work, which was like completely incidental to my publication date. I just got lucky. There's a bunch of screenplays in there that they worked on that weren't produced. There's also her cookbooks, and I'm very excited to go through those and see that. So you might meet somebody there.Her account of what the vibe was when the Manson murders occurred, which is published in her essay The White Album, is still the one people talk about, even though there are a lot of different ways to come at it. That's how we think about the Manson murders: through her lens. Later on, when she's not writing directly about Hollywood anymore (and not really writing in Hollywood as much) but instead is writing about the headlines, about news events, about sensationalism in the news, she becomes a great media critic. We start to see her taking the things that she learned (having been around Hollywood people, having been on movie sets, having seen how the sausage is made) and she starts writing about politics. In that age, it is Hollywood's logic that you perform for the TV. We have the debates suddenly becoming televised, the conventions becoming televised, we start to see candidates who seem specifically groomed to win because they look good on TV. They're starting to win and rule the day.She writes about Newt Gingrich. Of course, Gingrich was the first politician to figure out how to harness C-SPAN to his own ends — the fact that there were TV cameras on the congressional floor. So she's writing about all of this stuff at a time when you can see other people writing about it. I mean, Neil Postman famously writes about it. But the way Didion does it is always very pegged to reviewing somebody's book, or she's thinking about a particular event, or she's been on the campaign plane or something like that. Like she's been on the inside, but with an outsider's eye.That also crops up in, for instance, her essays. “Sentimental Journeys” is one of her most famous ones. That one's about the case of the Central Park Five, and the jogger who was murdered. Of course, now, we're many decades out from that, and the convictions were vacated. We know about coerced confessions. Also Donald Trump arrives in the middle of that whole thing.But she's actually not interested in the guilt or innocence question, because a lot of people were writing about that. She's interested in how the city of New York and the nation perform themselves for themselves, seeing themselves through the long lens of a movie and telling themselves stories about themselves. You see this over and over in her writing, no matter what she's writing about. I think once she moved away from writing about the business so much, she became very interested in how Hollywood logic had taken over American public life writ large.That's fascinating. Like, again, she spends time in the industry, then basically she can only see it through that lens. Of course, Michael Dukakis in a tank is trying to be a set piece, of course in front of the Berlin Wall, you're finally doing set decoration rather than doing it outside of a brick wall somewhere. You mentioned the New York thing in Performing New York. I have lived in the city for over a decade now. The dumbest thing is when the mayor gets to wear the silly jacket whenever there's a snowstorm that says “Mr. Mayor.” It's all an act in so many ways. I guess that political choreography had to come from somewhere, and it seems like she was documenting a lot of that initial rise.Yeah, I think she really saw it. The question I would ask her, if I could, is how cognizant she was that she kept doing that. As someone who's written for a long time, you don't always recognize that you have the one thing you write about all the time. Other people then bring it up to you and you're like, “Oh, I guess you're right.” Even when you move into her grief memoir phase, which is how I think about the last few original works that she published, she uses movie logic constantly in those.I mean, The Year of Magical Thinking is a cyclical book, she goes over the same events over and over. But if you actually look at the language she's using, she talks about running the tape back, she talks about the edit, she talks about all these things as if she's running her own life through how a movie would tell a story. Maybe she knew very deliberately. She's not a person who does things just haphazardly, but it has the feeling of being so baked into her psyche at this point that she would never even think of trying to escape it.Fascinating.Yeah, that idea that you don't know what you are potentially doing, I've thought about that. I don't know what mine is. But either way. It's such a cool way to look at it. On a certain level, she pretty much succeeded at that, though, right? I think that when people think about Joan Didion, they think about a life that freshens up a movie, right? Like, it workedVery much, yeah. I'm gonna be really curious to see what happens over the next 10 years or so. I've been thinking about figures like Sylvia Plath or women with larger-than-life iconography and reputation and how there's a constant need to relook at their legacies and reinvent and rethink and reimagine them. There's a lot in the life of Didion that I think remains to be explored. I'm really curious to see where people go with it, especially with the opening of these archives and new personal information making its way into the world.Yeah, even just your ability to break some of those stories that have been locked away in archives out sounds like a really exciting addition to the scholarship. Just backing out a little bit, we live in a moment in which the relationship between pop culture and political life is fairly directly intertwined. Setting aside the steel-plated elephant in the room, you and I are friendly because we bonded over this idea that movies really are consequential. Coming out of this book and coming out of reporting on it, what are some of the relevances for today in particular?Yeah, I mean, a lot more than I thought, I guess, five years ago. I started work on the book at the end of Trump One, and it's coming out at the beginning of Trump Two, and there was this period in the middle of a slightly different vibe. But even then I watch TikTok or whatever. You see people talk about “main character energy” or the “vibe shift” or all of romanticizing your life. I would have loved to read a Didion essay on the way that young people sort of view themselves through the logic of the screens they have lived on and the way that has shaped America for a long time.I should confirm this, I don't think she wrote about Obama, or if she did, it was only a little bit. So her political writing ends in George W. Bush's era. I think there's one piece on Obama, and then she's writing about other things. It's just interesting to think about how her ideas of what has happened to political culture in America have seeped into the present day.I think the Hollywood logic, the cinematic logic has given way to reality TV logic. That's very much the logic of the Trump world, right? Still performing for cameras, but the cameras have shifted. The way that we want things from the cameras has shifted, too. Reality TV is a lot about creating moments of drama where they may or may not actually exist and bombarding you with them. I think that's a lot of what we see and what we feel now. I have to imagine she would think about it that way.There is one interesting essay that I feel has only recently been talked about. It's at the beginning of my book, too. It was in a documentary, and Gia Tolentino wrote about it recently. It's this essay she wrote in 2000 about Martha Stewart and about Martha Stewart's website. It feels like the 2000s was like, “What is this website thing? Why are people so into it?” But really, it's an essay about parasocial relationships that people develop (with women in particular) who they invent stories around and how those stories correspond to greater American archetypes. It's a really interesting essay, not least because I think it's an essay also about people's parasocial relationships with Joan Didion.So the rise of her celebrity in the 21st century, where people know who she is and carry around a tote bag, but don't really know what they're getting themselves into is very interesting to me. I think it is also something she thought about quite a bit, while also consciously courting it.Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. For someone who was so adept at using cinematic language to describe her own life with every living being having a camera directly next to them at all times. It seems like we are very much living in a world that she had at least put a lot of thought into, even if the technology wasn't around for her to specifically address it.Yes, completely.On that note, where can folks find the book? Where can folks find you? What's the elevator pitch for why they ought to check this out? Joan Didion superfan or just rather novice?Exactly! I think this book is not just for the fans, let me put it that way. Certainly, I think anyone who considers themselves a Didion fan will have a lot to enjoy here. The stuff you didn't know, hadn't read or just a new way to think through her cultural impact. But also, this is really a book that's as much for people who are just interested in thinking about the world we live in today a little critically. It's certainly a biography of American political culture as much as it is of Didion. There's a great deal of Hollywood history in there as well. Thinking about that sweep of the American century and change is what the book is doing. It's very, very, very informed by what I do in my day job as a movie critic at The New York Times. Thinking about what movies mean, what do they tell us about ourselves? I think this is what this book does. I have been told it's very fun to read. So I'm happy about that. It's not ponderous at all, which is good. It's also not that long.It comes out March 11th from Live Right, which is a Norton imprint. There will be an audiobook at the end of May that I am reading, which I'm excited about. And I'll be on tour for a large amount of March on the East Coast. Then in California, there's a virtual date, and there's a good chance I'll be popping up elsewhere all year, too. Those updates will be on my social feeds, which are all @alissawilkinson on whatever platform except X, which is fine because I don't really post there anymore.Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you so much.Edited by Crystal Wang.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

Episode 165 is another instalment of #BookstagramMadeMeDoIt, and this time Gen and Jette are reading Book Lovers by Emily Henry. Show NotesThe banter between Nora and Charlie is perfect and we need to know if this is true for all Emily Henry books.The town hall meeting was giving major Gilmore Girls vibes and we loved it. We love a Sarah MacLachlan reference.The next episode is our beloved annual James Baldwin episode. We'll be reading Go Tell It On the Mountain.Don't forget to read along with our book club pick, The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, which we'll be talking about in early March.Update - The Rural Diaries and Slouching Towards Bethlehem are still holding strong at #1 and #2 Other Books by Emily HenryBeach ReadPeople We Meet on VacationHappy PlaceFunny StoryGreat, Big, Beautiful Life (Coming April 2025)Other Books MentionedThe Dream Harbor Series by Laurie GilmorePayback's a Witch by Lana HarperMore #BookstagramMadeMeDoIt Episodes60: The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes by Elissa R. Sloan69: These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong75: Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley 86: Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong99: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid114: Hayley Aldridge is Still Here by Elissa R. Sloan118: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi 125: Verity by Colleen Hoover139: The Twist of the Knife by Anthony Horowitz154: I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Maya Hawke performs Joan Didion's classic collection superbly. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile's Alan Minskoff discuss how Hawke pays attention to Didion's exquisite prose and captures her careful observations. Hawke gets Didion's measured pace and thoughtful tone just right as she conveys the much-admired author's idiosyncratic, elegant language. The audiobook vividly brings back the 1960s, when Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson created "new journalism."  Read our review of the audiobook at our website. Published by Macmillan Audio.  Discover thousands of audiobook reviews and more at AudioFile's website.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Episode Nineteen, DDSWTNP turn outward to a discussion of Rachel Kushner, whose Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake, a 2024 novel about the folly of espionage, revolutionary violence, life underground, and confronting modernity with ancient practices in rural France, solidifies its author's reputation as a key inheritor of DeLillo's influence and themes. Creation Lake is narrated by a nihilistic spy named Sadie Smith who infiltrates a farming commune called Le Moulin and grows enchanted with the claims of their cave-dwelling philosophical advisor, who argues that Neanderthal life thousands of years ago holds the key to reshaping humankind. In it Kushner explores the legacy of France's 1968 while echoing The Names, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star, Mao II, and other DeLillo works, as we outline in our discussion. We find rich references as well in Creation Lake to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joan Didion, Michel Houellebecq, and Kushner's own previous works, especially The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Listeners looking for new writing reminiscent of DeLillo and those already knowledgeable of Kushner's works will find plenty here, and we hope this episode will be the first of several over time dedicated to DeLillo's massive influence on exciting new world literature. Texts and quotations mentioned and discussed in this episode, in addition to Creation Lake and those by DeLillo: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) Dana Goodyear, “Rachel Kushner's Immersive Fiction,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2018 (includes discussion of Kushner's friendship with DeLillo) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850) Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin (2019) Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018) ---. “Rachel Kushner: ‘The last book that made me cry? The Brothers Karamazov,” The Guardian, October 5, 2018 (source of this answer: “The book that influenced my writing: Probably novels by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson and Don DeLillo. But a whole lot of other books, too”) “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)– a line mangled slightly in the episode)

Evelyn had been talking about writing this book for some time with her publishers. Trying to write a biography of a person who's still alive is never easy, especially for such a vaulted figure as Joan Didion.  After her death, the book had a context of also trying to explain Didion's legacy in the wake of many articles that came out on Didion. Evelyn wrote this book because there was so much interest in Joan Didion, but also hype around her.Listen in to hear more about Didion's Contrasts and Transformations including significant connections between Evelyn and Joan.

Retired teacher Chris Starling shares a few of his favourite works of literature that inspired him as a linguaphile and educator. We hope Chris' book list inspires you to continue the conversation by sharing your favourite titles with your teaching community and in the comments section on the TESOL Pop website.KEY TALKING POINTSDiscussion of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joan Didion:"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is a collection of 1960s journalism by Joan Didion, offering a critical look at the counterculture movement.Chris appreciates Didion's style and personal approach to journalism, which invites readers into her world and provides insightful commentary.Favourite quote: "This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke…"Discussion of "Fugitive Pieces" by Anne Michaels:Chris describes "Fugitive Pieces" as a powerful exploration of memory, personal history, and self-construction set against the backdrop of the Holocaust.He praises Anne Michaels' poetic writing style and the depth of insight each reading offers.Favorite quote: "The past is never dead, it's never even past."Discussion of "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens:Chris highlights Charles Dickens' storytelling prowess in "Bleak House," emphasising its intricate plot and rich character development.He discusses Dickens' use of symbolism, particularly the fog, to represent societal issues and interconnectedness.Favourite quote: "Fog everywhere... Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners."ABOUTChris qualified as a librarian and then as a teacher of English, careers he followed with pleasure for over 30 years although he was drawn away from the librarianship side quite early. His longest service, over 20 years, was in a school where the students had over sixty home languages.REFERENCESDidion, J. (1968) Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and GirouxMichaels, A. (1996) Fugitive Pieces. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.Dickens, C. (1852-1853) Bleak House. Bradbury & EvansLinks to later editions of these title can be found on the TESOL Pop website.TRANSCRIPTWatch with closed captions.SUPPORTWe'd love to record more special episodes like this one for you.Please support us to make this possible by buying us a coffee here.JOIN OUR EVENTSUpcoming lives and workshopsCREDITSProducer Laura WilkesEditor Haven TsangThanks to our charming guest, Chris Starling. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:Thomas Powers on Didion and California:'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'Martin Amis on Didion's style:'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In honor of our first live show LOS ANGELES, unlocking a favorite bull session on Joan Didion's landmark SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM (and the odious Netflix documentary about her) with Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist.    For many more like this and access to twice as many adventures, including the most intimate and scandalous ones and our first live show recording, please subscribe to the show at patreon.com/filthyarmenian   X/insta: @filthyarmenian

For the last episode in our summer season on the great twentieth-century essays and essayists, David discusses Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:Thomas Powers on Didion and California:'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'Martin Amis on Didion's style:'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Actor, writer, producer, director, and loving nephew. Griffin Dunne is the only man who could have directed "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold", an intimate insight into the remarkable career and tragic struggles his aunt, literary icon Joan Didion. The 2017 film is a touching tribute which includes a trove of archival materials as well as an interview with Didion herself, one of her last appearances before her death in 2021. In this episode, Griffin shares with Tiller his reflections on the title of the film (1:50), how he convinced Joan to trust him with her legacy (5:12), amassing his cast of interview subjects (12:26), his tonal inspirations for the film (16:35), Joan's defining reaction to the acid-dropping five-year-old from "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (23:38), his experience sharing the film with Joan (27:04), and her lasting legacy with new generations (32:41).  Produced by: Jacob Miller Executive Producers: Tiller & Fitz Music by: Graham Tracey & Zydepunk Distributed by: Jake Brennan & Brady Sadler, Double Elvis Productions

We share our (hot?) takes on stickers and The Notebook; we share yours on your younger selves and Pioneer Day.This week's past-selves quotes come to you via Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didian and this profile of Ryan Gosling in GQ by Zach Baron.The Notebook—James Marsden also has thoughts, ℅ this W mag profile by Evan Ross Katz. Related-ish: Roger Ebert's own love story ​​"Roger loves Chaz."Stickers! Sandylion on Etsy, @stickerarchive, Red Bubble's nineties collection, and the Xyron Create-A-Sticker, for starters. Let us know if you're watching 1883 at 833-632-5463, podcast@athingortwohq.com, or @athingortwohq—or join our Geneva! This episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct, or indirect financial interest in products, or services referred to in this episode.Try professional counseling with BetterHelp and take 10% off your first month with our link.Find wellness on your next stay at Westin.Level-up your garden with Fast Growing Trees—15% off your order when you use our link.Start hiring now with a $75 sponsored-job credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.Produced by Dear MediaYAY.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the second part of "The Transmogrification of the Goddess " cycle. It tells the story of of Pagan, the General, Rashelum and what has occurred after the banishment of the Goddess and the wars on earth.This is Episode 1 of 4. "Blood For The Father".The Players: Morgan Butler, Samantha Takizawa, Steve Levy, Valerie BarallMarcus Rivers, Anna Bisharyan, Alexander Wheittlesey, Jessica HollandBuddy Saleman.The Musicians: Steve Levy-Drums, Roberto Rios-Percussion, Kenneth Johnson-KeysSarah Rosenberg-Vox, Kiki Spaulding-Violin, Jordon Casares-BassWayne Sherwood-Guitar, The Reverend LordRifa-Guitars, Cello, Vox,  Bass, Rifatronics.Lyrics by: The Rev and Saul Bloom

In Episode 115, Gen and Jette talk about Jette's most recent book club pick — Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. How have we gone 115 episodes before doing a Didion episode? I know, right. While Jette can't remember where the idea for this book as her pick even came from, she's glad she picked it. This collection of essays from the 1960s, mostly focusing on California, makes it clear why Didion is a classic. Show Notes If you're ever in LA, you must visit the Howard Hughes Headquarters This is the SNL skit that Jette is still laughing at – The Californians If you love Joan Didion be sure to check out the Netflix documentary The Centre Will Not Hold Other Works by Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking Blue Nights The White Album South and West: From a Notebook Don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter or email us at hello@anotherbookontheshelf.com. We'd love to hear from you! Sign up for our newsletter and add us to Pinterest!

The Mountains of California by John Muir (1882) vs Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968).

Sarah Bagby spent years working at Watermark Books & Cafe in Wichita, Kansas, before taking over the reigns of ownership. She walks us through the store's rich history and shares some of the best-selling titles, including a few spring 2023 releases that she predicts will be hits. Books We Talk About: I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, Inciting Joy by Ross Gay, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Continental Drift by Russell Banks, Devotions by Mary Oliver, The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Stout, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Search by Michelle Huneven, Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson, I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, Blaze Me a Sun by Christoffer Carlsson, Spare by Prince Harry.

In Episode 111, Gen and Jette talk about their most recent book club book, The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle. It's a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's short story, "The Horror at Red Hook" that subverts the xenophobic message of the original tale. Show Notes: We fell down a Lovecraft rabbit hole that made us realize how little we know about him (and how many references we probably missed in the novel!) As with so many books we read, we now want to get our hands on everything else Victor LaValle has written...and also up out Lovecraft knowledge so we're better prepared to catch those references Turns out we've inadvertently made Lovecraft the theme for January. For more Lovecraftian vibes, stay tuned for our next episode on Ed Brubaker's graphic novel Fatale. Read along with our current book club pick, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Other Books Mentioned By Victor LaValle – Slapboxing with Jesus, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Destroyer (graphic novel) The Girls by Emma Cline The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin Lovecraft Country by Matt RuffDon't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter or email us at hello@anotherbookontheshelf.com. We'd love to hear from you! Sign up for our newsletter and add us to Pinterest!

It's our last episode of 2022, so we're taking a look back at our reading and writing goals for the year, as well as looking ahead to 2023. Show Notes: We may have dropped the ball on 52 Weeks of Short Stories, but that doesn't mean we won't try something new in 2023. The Artist's Way, anyone? Jette is so close to being done her graphic novel script! Gen finally finished the first draft of her YA novel! We can't wait for all the events next year, like Word on the Street, TCAF, and Toronto Festival of Authors. Stelliform Press is a new to us publisher that we hope to work with in the new year! Check out our holiday wrap-up blog post for more of our 2023 reading and writing goals. Our first book club pick of 2023 is Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Books Mentioned: Ghost World by Daniel Clowes The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi Pet by Akwaeke Emezi The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle Something is Killing the Children by James Tynion IV & Werther Dell'Edera Hawkeye by Matt Fraction & David Aja Sandford Meisner on Acting How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming by Michael E. Brown Persuasion by Jane Austen 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph Through the Woods by Emily Carrol Shades of Fear edited by Allison O'Toole By Chance or Providence by Becky Cloonan Making A Scene by Constance Wu Paper Houses by Dominique Fortier Thoreau and Me by Cedric Taling The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig Don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter or email us at hello@anotherbookontheshelf.com. We'd love to hear from you! Sign up for our newsletter and add us to Pinterest!

The man trudges on, to where he doesn't know. He just needs a place to land. The air is hot and choking, his brain is racing. Then, he realizes: it's Santa Ana season. “The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. ...[T]he violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. (1968)

Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (University of Chicago Press, 2017) by Deborah Nelson, the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English and chair of the Department of English at the University of Chicago. Deborah Nelson's fascinating book Tough Enough looks at a group of challenging 20th century writers (and a photographer)—Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion—who were all committed in various ways to moral and aesthetic “toughness.” Our conversation was occasioned by the death of Joan Didion in December 2021. Her passing also prompted the Classic Book Discussion at the Library to take on a recent three part career-retrospective series on Didion, from her early essays in the collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, to the political reporting and novels of her middle period, through to her bestselling memoirs of grief The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Deborah Nelson and Tough Enough help us put Didion in context. These women, Nelson writes, were self-consciously “unsentimental” in their approach to addressing the suffering and horrors of the 20th century and critics were often scandalized by the extremity of their tone or positions because they were women. Our conversation uses the thinking of these writers (and the example of Joan Didion in particular) to examine unsentimental sensibilities and the “costs and benefits of these alternatives” to common ideas about literature, art, empathy, feeling, and suffering. Whether you are a fan of Joan Didion, a member of our book discussion, or one of our many listeners near or far, this conversation is a fascinating resource for thinking anew.  You can check out Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil here at the Library, or find many other books by and about these writers. You can also find the book through The University of Chicago Press. Tough Enough won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book of 2017 and the Gordan Laing Prize in 2019 for the most distinguished contribution to the University of Chicago Press by a faculty member. If you liked this episode, you may enjoy our 2019 conversation with cartoonist Ken Krimstein on his book The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt.  The Deerfield Public Library Podcast is hosted by Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the library. We welcome your comments and feedback--please send to: podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org. More info at: http://deerfieldlibrary.org/podcast Follow us: Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube 

Mit ihren sehr privaten Büchern "Das Jahr das magischen Denkens" und "Blaue Stunden" wurde Joan Didion auch hierzulande eine bekannte Größe - und auch frühere Bücher der brillanten Analytikerin und Kommentatorin amerikanischer Zustände erscheinen nach und nach auf Deutsch. So nun auch die Essaybände "Das weiße Album" und "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" - beide übersetzt von Antje Ravíc Strubel. Katharina Döbler stellt die beiden Bücher vor.

This week Vicky is flying solo because of organisation issues so she decided to share 10 books she's read and loved recently. If you're wondering what to read, and how to read, and whether you should be reading books on writing or just books—tune into this episode and sort out your reading plans for the next couple of months. Enjoy!   Key Takeaways: [0:45] Vicky is going solo this week! And the podcast name is changing!  [2:10] If you want to write a book, you need to also read!  [2:35] The more diverse authors you read, the better of a writer you will become.  [3:15] First book review: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. [4:35] Second book review: Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes by Phoebe Robinson. [6:20] Third book review: Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon [7:35] Fourth book review: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw [8:10] Fifth book review: Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson [9:45] Sixth book review: An Idler's Manual by Tom Hodgkinson [10:50] Seventh book review: My Mess Is a Bit of a Life: Adventures in Anxiety by Georgia Pritchett [12:10] Eighth book review: Good Pop, Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker [13:05] Ninth book review: Their eyes were watching god by Zora Neale Hurston [14:10] Tenth book review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion [15:25] Vicky highly recommends that you join a book club!    Mentioned in This Episode: Website Creative Book Coaching Join Vicky's Power Hour Free Writing Prompt Calendar Start Your book Templates Book Breakthrough Jam Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, and Overcast Email Vicky about 1:1 coaching at: vicky@moxiebooks.co.uk The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays Book by Phoebe Robinson Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon) by Austin Kleon The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson An Idler's Manual by Tom Hodgkinson My Mess Is a Bit of a Life: Adventures in Anxiety by Georgia Pritchett Good Pop, Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker Their eyes were watching god by Zora Neale Hurston Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Shoutout to Joan Didion whose collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem deals with this theme of the center not holding and W.B. Yeats for first saying it in his poem The Second Coming. In this episode Claudia deals with the polarization of America by way of Roe v. Wade, inflation killing the quality of things, Klaus Schwab and the great reset and Micheal Burry's predictions that things are about to get a lot worse. RIP Dr. Vladimir Zelenko. Learn more about Dr. Zelenko's legacy here: https://www.zfreedomfoundation.com Sponsor this podcast: contactclaudiamillions@gmail.com RATE THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY AND APPLE PODCASTS!

Jack returns from The Perfume Nationalist to ponder what is wrong with Joan Didion, what is depressing beyond belief about that Netflix documentary that memed her, and what rings true and timeless and based and redpilled about her classic book Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), written when she was a Goldwater girl with a little secret.   This is the first hour only. To listen to the whole thing, plus all the other bull sessions and premium episodes that complete the adventure, subscribe at patreon.com/filthyarmenian    Follow Jack @lotue__oint on Twitter and follow me @filthyarmenian   Please rate, review, and spread the word :) 

We missed you! And so we have hosted a surprise imaginary dinner party to tide us over until we meet again for season two. In this episode we sit down in a crumbling Hollywood mansion with essayist, journalist, author, playwright, and all-around cool customer Joan Didion to talk migraines, disguises, self respect, reporting on one's own grief, John Wayne, and much else. Joining us for the whole Corvette ride, from parsley chopping through to a final bourbon, is British Vogue Contributing Editor, digital consultant, friend, and fellow Didion enthusiast Ellie Pithers. Pack your almonds and notebooks and come on over!Thanks for listening! Send us your thoughts, feelings, reactions and ideas: fanfarefanmail@gmail.com Our Dinner with Joan Didion playlist is here. Mentioned reading & watching: "On Self Respect" first published in Vogue, 1961."Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem 1967. "John Wayne: A Love Song" by Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem 1967."In Bed" by Joan Didion, The White Album 1979. "The Autumn of Joan Didion" by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, January/ February 2012. "The Elitist Allure of Joan Didion" by Meghan Daum, The Atlantic, September 2015. Follow:@ElliePithers on Instagram & Read her writing here. If you loved the episode, don't forget to rate & review! See you next time! M&E Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion--- Welcome - 3:15 The Literary Life of Joan Didion - 3:32 John Wayne - 11:30 On Keeping a Notebook #1 - 20:00 Ezekiel 7:6 - 23:00  Leaders Do Self-Awareness Work - 25:00 On Keeping a Notebook #2 - 26:00 Leaders Keep a Notebook - 29:30 The Documenting of Spiritual Drift in Real-Time - 32:00 The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats - 32:45 Slouching Towards Bethlehem - 35:00 The Center Held for a Long Time - 45:00 Goodbye to All That - 55:00 Leaders Must Not be Self-Deceived - 1:03:00 Staying on the Path - 1:05:00 The Aura of Melancholy by Zenboy1955 (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zenboy1955/64976 Ft: AT (audiotechnica), Quantum Theor(y), Ezra Skull---Pick up your copy of 12 Rules for Leaders: The Foundation of Intentional Leadership NOW on AMAZON!---Check out HSCT Publishing at: https://www.hsctpublishing.com/.Check out LeadingKeys at: https://www.leadingkeys.com/Check out Leadership ToolBox at: https://leadershiptoolbox.us/Contact HSCT for more information at 1-833-216-8296 to schedule a full DEMO of LeadingKeys with one of our team members.---Jesan Sorrells Presents - YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/JesanSorrells/featuredJesan Sorrells - IG  - https://www.instagram.com/therealjesanmsorrells/Jesan Sorrells - FB - https://www.facebook.com/JesanMSorrells/Jesan Sorrells - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrellsJesan Sorrells - Twitter - https://www. twitter.com/jesanmsorrellsJesan Sorrells - https://www.jesansorrells.com/

To celebrate International Women's day and Women's History Month Jess and Lauren are exclusively reading books written by women all month long. In this week's episode they interview Daphne Palasi Andreades on her debut novel, Brown Girls. This episode is brought to you by Wild, the UK's number one natural deodorant company that focuses on performance, sustainability and style! Their long lasting deodorants are free of aluminium and parabens, whilst also be cruelty free and vegan. For 15% off your order head to Wearewild.com and use code BOOKS at checkout. Books Mentioned in this Episode: Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades and Assembly by Natasha Brown Competition Time: We have partnered with Books That Matter to gift one lucky listener a free Books The Matter gift box! To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is subscribe, rate and review this podcast. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts leave a review and put your Instagram handle as your 'Nickname', if you're listening on another platform, subscribe then share our podcast on your instagram story and we'll track your entry that way. Each month a winner will be selected at random and informed via Instagram. Daphne's Reccos: Bluets by Maggie Nelson, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, A Room of One's Own" essay by Virginia Woolf, Feel Free and NW by Zadie Smith, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka Milkman by Anna Burns. Get in Touch: Instagram: @bookreccos Email: bookreccos@gmail.com Jingle written and produced by Alex Thomas licensed exclusively for Book Reccos

The iconoclastic screenwriter, essayist, and former Siberia Bar owner recently self-cancelled from social media after her commentaries drew the ire of the online mob. She now unleashes her polemics in Quillette Magazine and on the Substack platform. This Joan Didion acolyte is no shrinking violet. Tonight Meghann comes on like a runaway train, and the Troubled Men hang on for dear life as it nearly teeters off the tracks. Topics include the Elysian Bar, the Diewater, Yoko Ono, make ‘em ups, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Al Pacino prank calls, Super Bowl traditions, Dick Butkus, Raider Nation, sports betting, violent crime, psychologists, a Sacramento childhood, Salinas land barons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jim Jones, miscegenation, millennialism, Judaism, Jane Goodall and David Graybeard fan fiction, victimhood, UC Santa Cruz, finding New Orleans, an outlaw boyfriend, “Panic In Needle Park,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the Silent Generation, the “Karen” phenomenon, “Fun Home,” and much more. Intro music: Styler/Coman Break music: “When I Sing About You” from “Total Death Benefit” by The Happy Talk Band Outro music: “Best Interest At Heart” from “Hope Is Not For The Weak” by The Geraniums Support the podcast: Paypal or Venmo Join the Patreon page here. Shop for Troubled Men’s Wear here. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts or any podcast source. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Troubled Men Podcast Facebook Troubled Men Podcast Instagram Meghann McCracken Substack Meghann McCracken on Quillette Meghann McCracken Twitter

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Global Policy Watch: Joan Didion On MoralityInsights on global issues of the day- RSJI want to write about the Andhra Pradesh cinema ticket price cap kerfuffle this week (read here for context). A regular reader, Prem Sagar, wrote to us last week giving us a picture of what was happening in Tollywood. All the great ingredients of a timeless PolicyWTF have come together there - good intentions, political games, conspiracy theories, a government order on price controls that Indira Gandhi would have been proud of and the inevitable unintended consequences. I wept with joy going through them all. But before that Joan Didion. The great chronicler of American life passed away a couple of weeks back. Why Joan Didion in a public policy newsletter, you may ask? Public policy is an interdisciplinary science. At the heart of it is understanding the public - the basis for its motives, its fears and insecurities and its wants. There was no one better than Joan Didion to show a mirror to a society in prose that was unsparing, sparse and crystalline. Didion didn’t go looking for grand narratives. There was no conscious painting of a big picture. She was intimate in her approach and got busy with the minutiae. But from that appeared something that made you rethink your priors. She wrote as she saw it. And she saw a lot. From the underlying vacuity of the unrest in colleges in the late 60s, the hollowness of the counterculture movement in California, the depravity hiding under Kennedy’s Camelot, the absence of any ideological truth bar nihilism among Black Panthers, the mendacity of Nixon and the arriviste pretensions of the Reagans. She covered them all with insight and acuity. Not many realise today that Didion grew up as a Goldwater conservative who wrote quite often in that conservative bible, the National Review during the late 50s and 60s where she reviewed films, eviscerated other authors and their books (her takedown of Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye is one for the ages), championed individual liberty and cautioned against the inevitable disorder that stems from collective self-righteous passions. No one was spared. Later in her life, she would turn that flint-edged gaze onto herself in her collection of essays ‘Where I Was From’ where she reflects on the myths and beliefs of the old California way that shaped her person. And on how wrong she could have been. Didion On MoralityAmong her essays, a particular favourite of mine is On Morality (in the anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem) where she holds the word morality in her finger and turns it over and over again against the cold light of the day to make sense of it. I often think of it as a short cultural companion piece to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments in its dissection of morality. She writes:“What does it (morality) mean? It means nothing manageable. There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come. “I followed my own conscience.” “I did what I thought was right.” How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers? Klaus Fuchs said it, and the men who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre said it, and Alfred Rosenberg said it. And, as we are rotely and rather presumptuously reminded by those who would say it now, Jesus said it. Maybe we have all said it, and maybe we have been wrong. Except on that most primitive level—our loyalties to those we love—what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience?At least some of the time, the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch; were I to follow my conscience then, it would lead me out onto the desert with Marion Faye, out to where he stood in The Deer Park looking east to Los Alamos and praying, as if for rain, that it would happen: “...let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in the white dead dawn.”She then agonises over the frequency of the word ‘morality’ appearing in politics, media and everyday lives. Like most timeless pieces, there’s both prescience and a definite universality in her analysis of morality. She puts her finger on the performative nature of those sermonising others in society:“You see, I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what is “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to “believe” in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten doneYou don’t have to look too closely at that passage to find its echo in today’s India. She warns as she concludes the essay:“Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And we suspect we are already there.”The only thing constant about Joan Didion’s work over half a century was her honesty. She didn’t lie. She told us no stories to make us feel better or righteous. She changed her views of people and she changed herself. She didn’t belong to camps. She was fiercely her own person. She could not be appropriated. She was an original. RIP.PolicyWTF: The Disuse of Knowledge in SocietyThis section looks at egregious public policies. Policies that make you go: WTF, Did that really happen?- RSJ & Pranay KotasthaneOkay. Back to the A.P. Government’s decision to cap the price of film tickets in the state. Here’s the order. How many different ways can you say WTF while reading a government order? Let me count the ways.There’s a maximum ceiling rate of film tickets that’s set by a committee that was constituted vide G.O.Ms No.42, Home (Gen.A) Department, dt.09.03.2020 under the Chairmanship of Special Chief Secretary to Govt., Revenue Department. Whenever I read the word ‘vide’, I feel a surge of power flowing through me. Nothing says sarkaari power more than ‘vide’. Mere reading it makes you picture a Turkish towel on the backrest of your chair and a glass of water with a coaster on top of it. Now, this committee has divined the fixed rates for admission into cinema theatres based on geography (municipal corporation area, nagar panchayat area et al), on theatre type (Multiplex, Ac/Air Cool, non-AC) and on ticket class (economy, deluxe and premium). The prices range between Rs. 5 (gram panchayat, non-AC, Economy) to Rs. 250 (municipal corporation, multiplex, premium). The management is at liberty to charge lesser rates but before doing that they should inform the Licensing Authority and take an acknowledgement.Any violation of the maximum rates can lead to penal action. Of course!The theatre management must make provision for online ticketing. It gets better. The AP government is now planning to launch an online portal (like IRCTC) which will be the only portal that will sell cinema tickets in the state. Yes, there’s so much state capacity lying idle that we can now afford to have the government run the business of selling cinema tickets.The number of shows in a day is restricted to 4. Why? Because 4 is perhaps the lucky number of someone in administration. The maximum retail price of any item should not be exceeded while selling refreshments to the customers. Free drinking water and clean restrooms must be provided. Yeah. 75 years of independence and many governments later, the state hasn’t provided clean drinking water to homes of people but now it can demand private establishments to do so.A.P. Government short films must be screened for 120 seconds before the start of the show and for 30 seconds during the interval of the show. Good. Hopefully, the propaganda short films would be about how price caps on cinema tickets are helping Telugu biddas. The maximum retail price of any item should not be exceeded while selling refreshments to the customers. Free drinking water and clean restrooms must be provided. I know this is the same as #5 above. But this isn’t a typo on my part. The official government order has this point repeated twice at sections 2 (iv) and 2 (vi). I am assuming there’s a deeper meaning hidden here because I start with the assumption that the state can do no wrong. The entry and exit into the theatres should be such that traffic around the theatre does not stop or slow down. Sure. Because there are no traffic jams elsewhere in AP. Autobahns all over the state.Sufficient parking must be provided and the parking charges should be reasonable. Why not? Why leave parking out of all this?All The Wrong ReasonsI grew up with more than a handful of Telugu speaking friends around me (the late 80s and early 90s). Films were a bit more than entertainment to them than any other community in our small town. This meant they were often the ones who would rent a video player for 24 hours (fixed cost) and a movie marathon would ensue with whatever videotapes we could get our hands on. This led to the happy circumstance of me watching the greatest hits of Chiranjeevi and the entire canon of ‘Rowdy’ films (Rodwy Alludu, Rowdy Gari Pellam, State Rowdy, Assembly Rowdy et al). Those were the days. I digress. Anyway, so films are big in A.P. There are thousands of cinema theatres in the state with millions directly or indirectly employed. There’s a material impact on livelihoods because of a bad policy decision. But here we are.There are three reasons given for this move by the state government. One, the pandemic has been tough on people and the prices of tickets are prohibitively high. So, the government is doing this to make cinemas affordable for people. Two, there’s huge tax evasion by theatre owners and the state barely gets the tax revenues it should. Three, the YSRC government feels the film industry leans towards the opposition parties (TDP, Pavan Kalyan) and this is its attempt to bring it under their thumb. These are specious and plain stupid. Like we have written umpteen times here, the price isn’t set by someone who knows better. No one knows better. It is a signal that sends information to buyers and sellers. When supply or demand changes, market prices adjust to reflect the new reality affecting the incentives of buyers and sellers. Nobody needs to set this. It happens on its own in a market system. But this is an idea that never finds acceptance in India. The public often expects the government to set price caps and governments feel it is their duty to make sure ‘corporates’ aren’t gouging customers and making huge profits.Price Is Not For You To SetWe have written about this in edition #140 with an extract from Hayek’s landmark essay ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’. The essay explains that the price system is a decentralised coordinating mechanism for society. As he wrote in the essay:“Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all.”Every time the government interferes with the price system, the information residing in the price gets diminished. The real-world implications of this loss are all too familiar — price caps lead to shortages and poor quality, price floors lead to wasteful expenditure. Distorting prices costs lives.And it is funny but sad when the government complains of large scale tax evasion as the reason for doing this. The solution to tax evasion is simpler taxes, an efficient mechanism to collect them and a clean administrative machinery. To give more power to a corrupt and overbearing administration to lord over license distribution, do surprise raids and be all-powerful is to invite inspector raj all over again. The unintended consequences are already showing up. Cinema halls are shutting down because the prices are unviable. Distributors and exhibitors who are still reeling from the impact of pandemic and lockdowns on their business are exiting. Raids and fines have become common. Soon there will be an artificial scarcity of tickets created and a black market will emerge. The quality of production will go down because who will invest in a high-quality product when the profits are capped. Good content will go to OTT or its supply will go down. The state government will neither get more taxes and the people will lose out on quality entertainment. Everyone loses. We have seen this movie before. But governments never tire of showing this to us again and again. There’s never any cap on that.Addendum: — Pranay KotasthaneThe creator of the idiom “We’ve seen this movie before” obviously lived in a place where movie price tickets weren’t capped. Hat-tip to two readers of this newsletter for alerting us about this issue, which has been simmering over the last eight months. RSJ has already covered the important points of the saga. Nevertheless, this policyWTF was too inviting a rabbit-hole. So here are some more points to consider. Some personal context first. Like RSJ, I too have Telugu friends who love cinema dearly. Back in my college days, every hostel block had a “TV Room”. Except on cricket match days, only one other item ran on that TV: Telugu movies. So powerful was the pull of the movies that any person trying to locate a batchmate from Andhra Pradesh would begin their search from the TV Room. So I don’t find it surprising one bit to see journal papers with titles like Box-Office Revenue Estimation For Telugu Movie Industry Using Predictive Analytic Techniques. Or that both Telangana and AP have a ministerial portfolio for cinematography. Or that capping movie tickets would make for a popular policy.What should surprise us is how bad ideas regurgitate from state to state. AP is but just one of the many states that impose price caps for cinema tickets. Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, all have their own versions of movie ticket price regulations. Based on news reports, I was able to compile this table.Not only do some states impose price caps, but they also impose price floors i.e. no theatre can show a movie for prices below the government-mandated price, even if they wished! Also, note that Kerala — a state one would expect to administer prices enthusiastically — doesn’t. Instead, that state prefers to collect higher entertainment tax and use the collections for other policy purposes.My colleague Anupam Manur had anticipated the unintended consequences of such policies way back in 2017 when the Karnataka government joined the bandwagon. Let me summarise the main points below.Since they can’t change ticket prices, theatre owners will be incentivised to showcase movies that are guaranteed to run full houses. Movies with time-tested stories and superstars win. Consumers lose as their choices shrink. (Someone should create a Herfindahl–Hirschman index to track how such price caps help incumbent production houses).Tickets will be sold in “black” to people who are willing to pay higher than the price cap. The price of complementary goods — popcorn, cola, parking — will increase.It will have the Bombay Rent Control Act effect — theatres will spend less on maintenance and safety. Some of them might close down due to low profitability, further reducing consumer choice. Increasing price caps in the future will become a centralised political question rather than a decentralised economic question. This is the case in TN where — much like the Central Pay Commission revision — price caps were hiked after a full 10 years in 2017.Reflecting on the CausesThere are three larger points to ponder why despite these obviously anticipable effects, controlling movie ticket prices remain popular. First, the inequality argument. “If actors can become billionaires due to astronomical signing amounts, why are they opposed to lowering down prices for the average cinema-goers?” This is a classic moralising stance completely devoid of economic logic. The causation actually flows the other way. It’s because there are enough and more people willing to buy tickets that producers are confident to remunerate actors better. Nevertheless, “protecting the interests of the common man” is an evergreen justification for terrible policies.Second, “protecting the culture” argument. While the linguistic organisation of states perhaps helped India stay together, state governments consider themselves not just as administrators of federal units but as custodians of local culture, language, and cinema. Besides capping prices, governments don’t bat an eyelid before making it mandatory to screen movies in the state language.Third, the fascination with low movie ticket prices. That one could see a movie in Tamil Nadu at ₹120, was seen as a matter of the state’s pride and neighbours’ envy for a long time. The question we really need to ask is — why should it be the government’s responsibility to equalise everyone’s chances for watching the “first-day, first-show” of a movie? Until we, the citizens don’t appreciate what we lose when prices are kept artificially low, governments will gleefully administer prices. Thus it’s not the first time that we’ve seen the fracas over movie ticket prices. In fact, it’s probably the first time that this policyWTF is facing spirited and united opposition from a cinema community. Hopefully, the movie stars will be able to impart some Economics101 gyaan to us all. My best wishes are with them.Announcement: Puliyabaazi with Jairam Ramesh on the 1991 Reforms— Pranay KotasthaneOver at Puliyabaazi, Saurabh and I hosted member of parliament and historian Jairam Ramesh for a chat on the politics of 1991 economic reforms. Having served as an officer-on-special-duty in Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s office at the time, he closely witnessed — and shaped — several conversations around the reforms. I have quoted from his 2015 book To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story on many occasions in this newsletter. So it was an absolute delight to discuss these topics with him. In particular, his story about getting his ideas on industrial delicensing approved by the cabinet tells a lot about the importance of narratives in public policy.Do not miss this episode and yes, do subscribe to the Puliyabaazi YouTube channel.India Policy Watch: Upgrading the Reform Narrative Insights on burning policy issues in India— Pranay KotasthaneMarketcraft is a brilliant new term I came across recently, courtesy of fellow traveller Rohit Chandra’s newsletter for The Morning Context. Rohit’s description of the term covers the main idea quite well:“Markets are not birthed spontaneously in the absence of the state; as political scientist Stephen Vogel has argued, most countries have actively constructed, governed and shaped markets in underdeveloped sectors rather than just blindly deregulating them, a process he calls marketcraft. While discarding the legacies of state ownership and Plan-based micromanagement may be part of marketcraft, so is creating an efficient legal system to resolve disputes, changing bureaucratic mindsets that tend to regard the private sector with suspicion, and creating a level playing field to prevent large corporations gaining excessive market power. Marketcraft is as much about building institutions as it is about doing away with previously interventionist regulation.”Caricatures of capitalism in India suggest that it is a system where matsyanyaaya reigns — rapacious businessmen run amok while the government is happy to sit out. Marketcraft instead emphasises that even the US — the poster child for free-market economies — is in fact, heavily governed. Not everything that Vogel writes applies to the Indian context but there’s one idea that resonated with me — the need to change the narratives we use for talking about reforms. Decades of dissing markets have resulted in a deep distrust for markets in India. The 1991 economic reforms have had limited success in changing this narrative. There is still more-than-enthusiastic support for price-fixing, bans, and government-run enterprises. Nothing scares people more than typeset phrases of the capitalist canon; “leave it to the market”, “trust markets”, “privatisation” are terms that evoke fear rather than hope. They conjure the image of being abandoned by one’s parents in a mela (the government is maai-baap after all). In response, policy analysts sing in the praise of markets using the same vocabulary that most Indians either find foreign or deeply distrust. Hence, it’s not surprising that reforms are episodic and often done through stealth rather than conviction. Since using standard free-market vocabulary is not quite effective, what we direly need are new narratives that make the case for reforms in a language India can understand. This table from Marketcraft gives an idea of how it could be done. There is merit in finding similar phrases that would make the language of reforms less alienating. Aatmanirbhar, Make in India are some good examples that could’ve been deployed for this purpose. Alas, they morphed into protectionism and industrial policy measures instead of building the case for markets. Another way to make reforms more palatable is to lay stress on the improvements in regulatory capacity when reforms are articulated. Take the case of the now-abandoned farm laws. The government spoke about the need to reduce intervention but failed to assuage farmers on dispute resolution. Moreover, replacing the jurisdiction of civil courts with a complex method under the full control of a bureaucrat fanned fear among the farmers. Crafting the right narratives is a much more difficult task than coming up with catchy slogans or spiffy abbreviations. It’s time we rise to that challenge.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Paper] An economic guide to ticket pricing in the entertainment industry[Article] Anupam Manur’s article on why fixing movie ticket prices is a terrible policy.[Podcast] We’ve started a new 15-minute episode series on Puliyabaazi, where we discuss one public policy question every week. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

Just before Christmas this past year, the writer Joan Didion died. She was 87. Didion rose to fame for her journalism – she immersed herself in stories. In the late 60s, she broke through with Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In her career she covered a bunch of different topics – counter culture, war, immigration. She also wrote a handful of novels, a couple memoirs. We never got to interview Didion – she became a pretty private person in her last years. But in 2017, a documentary about her came out. The documentary was directed by Griffin Dunne, her nephew. Griffin Dunne is also an actor – he was in My Girl, the Martin Scorsese film After Hours, and the TV show This is Us. We remember the life of Joan Didion by revisiting this conversation with Griffin on the latest episode. We talked with him about the documentary, and the legacy of his aunt.

The latest Radio Book Club begins with reflections and a thank you to Joan Didion, who passed away in December. She left the world with her layered, sharp, and resonant writing. And, hosts have a lively discussion about the books they have NOT read on the New York Times' ‘Top 25 Books in the Past 125 Years' list. Infinite jests are had by all! Plus, ample book reviews and recommendations. Reviews + Recommendations: The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World by Matt Kracht Blue Nights; Year of Magical Thinking; Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion All About Love by bell hooks New York Times Cooking: No-Recipe Recipes by Sam Sifton Black Diamond: A Mystery of the French Countryside by Martin Walker These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West by Peter Hiller The Thursday Murder Club; The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman The Beatles: Get Back ed. John Harris The House of Owls: In the Company of Crows and Ravens by Tony Angell Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by Brom Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette Canyonlands Carnage by Scott Graham

In this season of Policy in Plainer English we're looking at skills food professionals use to understand how people experience flavor and what influences food choices - and what implications that might have for health professionals working with patients on diet change. The episodes build from each other, so if you haven't started at the beginning, consider pausing here and going back to "How We Experience Flavor".   Writer Alexandra Johnson helps us get the new year off to a strong start. Among the things she writes about is the practice of journaling to support creativity. You know what we'll all need to put into practice food appreciation as a tool to become adaptable in our diets? Creativity. It's time to redefine how we think about food journals - these aren't the standard food logs of calories and serving sizes,  Alex is helping us define a different tool entirely.  No surprise, we referenced a lot of writing over the course of this conversation. Here are some links for additional reading:The Hidden Writer, Alexandra JohnsonLeaving a Trace, Alexandra JohnsonOn Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion appears in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Here is an article about the essay, with excerpts, from The Marginalian. 2022 Food Trends - with the coffee & climate change reference (see also a longer piece from October, here)Why I Switched to Eating Grandma's Food, Geeta Pandey in BBC NewsMelissa Clark on Wine-Braised Chicken in the New York TimesFor examples of prompting questions for finding flavor details, peruse this handout from my "Describing Flavor" craft seminar. It's from the Lesley University MFA program that I mentioned at the top of the episode. Sadly, the food samples that went with it were only available in-person. Do look for Alex's other work - we focused on only one aspect of it in this episode. Her essays, reviews, and travel pieces appear in national publications and anthologies, and her book in progress set in southern Italy is The Saint's Laundry.  Chicory will surely make an appearance.This season of Policy in Plainer English is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of an award totaling $189,892.00 with 0 percentage financed with non governmental sources. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HRSA, HHS or the U.S. Government.This podcast does not cost $189,892.00 to produce. No, there is a much larger Food Access in Health Care program of which this is one small element (the most fun element, but still small). Find out more at VTFoodInHealth.net.

The new film Don't Look Up, a climate change allegory starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, became a hit for Netflix. But why is it dividing critics so intensely? And Showtime's Yellowjackets and HBO's Station Eleven are the most buzzy shows out right now. They're also really dark. Are we finally ready to have our grim reality reflected in our TV? In this week's Drop It In The Group Chat we talk bell hook's and All About Love, Betty White and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Insecure, plus, Joan Didion and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Segments Warm Up Question (Anti-New Year's Resolutions) - 00:01:55 Don't Look Up - 00:05:00 Yellowjackets / Station Eleven - 00:25:40 Drop It In The Group Chat - 00:41:20

Øystein og Christina snakker om etterspillet etter angrepet på Kongressen 6. januar 2021 og hvorvidt demokratiet i USA er mer truet nå enn det var for et år siden. De diskuterer også om det er noen måte landet kan komme seg ut av grøften igjen på. OR-anbefalinger: Øystein anbefaler Abid Rajas biografi “Min skyld” - som han fikk to eksemplarer av til jul. Christina snakker om forfatteren Joan Didion som døde i julen. Hun var en viktig stemme i New Journalism, som mange vil kalle gullalderen i amerikansk presse. Didions essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem er en klassiker. Du kan lese det her: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

This week, we reach into the City Arts & Lectures archives for a conversation with Joan Didion. One of the most influential writers of our time, Didion both chronicled and shaped American culture with a sharp, witty, and distinctively Californian sensibility.   The Sacramento native graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. Her novels include “Play it as it Lays”, “A Book of Common Prayer”, and “The Last Thing He Wanted”.  With her husband John Gregory Dunne, she co-wrote screenplays including “True Confessions”, “Up Close and Personal”, and “The Panic in Needle Park”.  Didion's nonfiction, beginning with the 1968 “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, exemplifies the New Journalism movement – a subjective approach to reporting that employs literary techniques. Didion's inimitable voice was brought even more to the foreground in her memoirs “The Year of Magical Thinking”, and “Blue Nights”, which describe the loss of her husband and daughter and her anxieties about parenting and aging.  Joan Didion died in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87. Joan Didion appeared on City Arts & Lectures six times between 1996 and 2011.  In her last visit, recorded on November 15, 2011, she spoke with novelist Vendela Vida, shortly after the publication of “Blue Nights” at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.  The program was a benefit for the 826 Valencia College Scholarship program. 

As we in the West become more conscious of inequalities that have been part of our societal fabric for a long time, we're becoming less sure of our identities. If art is a window on the soul of a nation, what does ours look like? Who do we think we are in the sense of identity? What's our mood? Of course, these are questions without answers or, at least, unique answers. Shirin Neshat, an acclaimed Iranian visual artist, and Jonathan Burnham at HarperCollins, discuss our evolving zeitgeist.

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, CA in 1934, the daughter of an officer in the Army Air Corps. A shy, bookish child, Didion spent her teenage years typing out Ernest Hemingway stories to learn how sentences work. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she got a degree in English and won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. The prize was a research assistant job at the magazine where Didion would work for more than a decade, eventually working her way up to an associate features editor. During this time she wrote for various other magazines and published her first novel, a tragic story about murder and betrayal, called RUN RIVER in 1963. The following year she married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne and the two moved to Los Angeles. The couple adopted a daughter whom they named Quintana Roo after the state in southern Mexico.Didion's first volume of essays, entitled SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM, was published in 1968 and was a collection of her feelings about the counterculture of the 1960s. The New York Times referred to it as “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” Her critically acclaimed second novel PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1970) was about a fading starlet whose dissatisfaction with Hollywood leads her further and further away from reality. Herself engaging in the Hollywood lifestyle, Didion would go on to co-write four screenplays with her husband: PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971), PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1972, based on her novel), A STAR IS BORN, (1981) and UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL (1996). A second book of essays, THE WHITE ALBUM, was published in 1979 about life in the late 1960s and the 1970s.Throughout the years Didion has written many more essay collections on subjects that have swayed her. Her fascination with America's relations with its southern neighbors could be seen in SALVADOR (1983) and MIAMI (1987). POLITICAL FICTIONS (2001) focuses on her thoughts on American politics and government. Didion and her family moved back to New York in the 1980s, and her observations of the city can be read in AFTER HENRY (1992). She reflects on California's past and present in her 2003 collection WHERE I WAS FROM.Joan Didion's husband died in 2003. Didion wrote about the grief she felt at Dunne's death in THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (2005). The book has been called “a masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism,” and won the National Book Award in 2005. Sadly, also in 2005, Didion lost Quintana Roo to acute pancreatitis. Didion wrote a memoir about the loss of her daughter called BLUE NIGHTS, which was published in 2011.Didion's work, which has been associated with the “New Journalism” movement, has been recognized on many occasions. She received the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters in 2005 and won the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2007. She is a member of the Academy of Arts & Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The Berkeley Fellows. She received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University in 2009 and an honorary degree from Yale in 2011.  In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Obama, and the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award.From https://www.thejoandidion.com/about. For more information about Joan Didion:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:David Ulin about Didion, at 18:55: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-085-david-ulin“‘After Life' by Joan Didion”: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/magazine/after-life.html“What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/what-we-get-wrong-about-joan-didion“Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion

Natasha Lester worked as a marketing executive for L'Oreal before penning the New York Times and internationally bestselling novel The Paris Orphan. She is also the author of the USA Today bestseller The Paris Seamstress and The Paris Secret. When she's not writing, she loves collecting vintage fashion, traveling, reading, practicing yoga and playing with her three children. Natasha lives in Perth, Western Australia.In Lester's hotly anticipated next book, The Riviera House, on-sale August 31, 2021, readers are whisked away to two drastically different worlds that span generations and collide in an unexpected and satisfying way; Lester masterfully alternates between German-occupied Paris during WWII and modern-day French Riviera.Without These Books is a thank-you-inspired Video/Podcast. Each episode celebrates authors, books, and characters that changed us as writers, readers, and as people. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast. Watch on our YouTube channel or at withoutbooks.org.Without Books®, a division of Heritage Future, is an author-centric book initiative. Our resources support authors. We also provide access to millions of books.Natasha Lester selected Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion for her episode of Without These Books.

We live in a time of profound change. For anyone who doubted how fundamentally our world is changing, the global pandemic was a catastrophic proof point. Even as we in the West become more conscious of inequalities that have been part of our societal fabric for a long time, we're becoming less sure of our identities. Even as technology breaks down borders and barriers, many of us are retreating to our tribes, becoming ever more local and isolated rather than global and engaged.  If art is a window on the soul of a nation, what does ours look like? Who do we, defined loosely as the West, think we are in the sense of identity? What's our mood? Of course, these are questions without answers or, at least, unique answers. In this episode of New Thinking for a New World, Shirin Neshat, an acclaimed Iranian visual artist who has lived and worked in the United States for decades and Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Division at HarperCollins, discuss our evolving zeitgeist.

In this episode, August and Kendra recommend some vacation reads. Everyone looks for a different experience when reading on their vacation, so the hosts offer their own preferences and what makes a book a vacation read for them (big surprise, they have very different picks!). This episode is completely spoiler-free. Books mentioned in the episode: Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino (2019) Home by Toni Morrison (2012) Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion(1968) Laura by Vera Casparay (1943) Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (2020) A Burning by Megha Majumdar (2020) White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet (1949) The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman (2018) Ariadne by Jennifer Saint (2021) A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (1947) No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (2005) The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (1977) Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (2014) Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950) Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954) Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (2001) The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy (1999) The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020) Dear Girls by Ali Wong (2019) The Maidens by Alex Michaelides (2021) The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton (2020) My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russel (2020) Anxious People by Fredrick Backman (2019) If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (1974) The Fever by Megan Abbott (2014) The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2019) Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

After a brief hiatus Chelsea and Bob mostly discuss the references to Revelations in poetry, but in actuality discuss a mildly frustrating episode of Angel instead

A final festive Payneful reflection at the end of a disconcerting year. (See below for what to expect over the Christmas holidays.)Just when we thought we were mooching towards a passably standard Christmas, we find ourselves once more (in my part of the world) in a state of covid anxiety. Will we be allowed to gather for Christmas services? Will Christmas lunch go ahead? Will we ever see our relatives again?There is some cause for hope. For example, will we ever see our relatives again?But the general mood of weariness and dislocation sends Christmas preachers and commentators off to rummage through their kitbag of cliches. Everything is ‘unprecedented'; plans have been ‘thrown into disarray'; ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold'. That final over-used phrase has been wheeled out more than once during this crazy, disconcerting 2020. It comes from one of the most rummaged-through poems of the 20th century, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. Written in the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, it speaks of a disintegrating world, where innocence has been drowned in blood and anarchy, and where any pretence that Western culture has an authoritative voice to guide it is now abandoned. Here is the famous first stanza. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.Like a wheeling falcon now out of reach of its falconer's voice, the world seems to have lost connection with its authoritative centre, and everything is falling apart. The best know that there is nothing any more to be sure of; the worst gleam with a fierce-eyed intensity to impose their will on the chaos. Rarely has a year felt more like this than 2020. The less well-known second stanza looks with dread on what might be coming to fill the void—a Second Coming, not of Christ, but of a nameless beast, stepping out of the apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament: Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?What dread future did Yeats see coming? Was it the rise of National Socialism, or of Communism, or of the juggernaut of modern hi-tech capitalism? We tend to read our own worst nightmares into the figure of that pitiless beast, making its inexorable, slouching way towards the centre of our culture—the place that Bethlehem once had. Like all really great poems, The Second Coming names something that is true in our experience in words that somehow say more than they say. It captures the emptiness at the centre of modern life and politics and culture. We no longer hear an authoritative voice. The best of us wearily resign ourselves to making what we can of a world without a central guiding truth. The worst of us rush to occupy the void for our own exploitative ends. In some ways, the sentimental, consumerist emptiness of the modern Christmas only reminds us of what has been lost. Instead of celebrating the birth of a king, sent from outside to save and to rule, we celebrate ourselves and our families and our insatiable capacity for getting and spending. Interestingly, though, the sense of loss in Yeats's poem is very passive. It hardly seems the falcon's fault that its ever-widening spirals take it beyond the reach of its master's voice. No-one seems to be culpable for the breakdown of the centre. Things just fall apart. Anarchy and the blood-dimmed tide ‘are loosed'; innocence ‘is drowned'. The voice of the verbs is as passive as the falconer, standing and calling, impotent to reach the falcon. In common with many other modern and post-modern observers who wistfully notice the loss of a Christian centre in Western culture, Yeats is unwilling to admit culpability. He glides past the conscious and relentless rejection of the Christian revelation by Western society over the previous two centuries. It is not that the falconer's voice has become distant and dim, left behind by the glorious progress of the falcon. It's that we have closed our ears to his voice, and flatly refused to acknowledge that the lion of Judah has already come, and is seated on his throne. For Yeats, there seems to be no going back. But going back—or repentance, as it is otherwise known—is the only valid response, if the Son of God has indeed come, and lived and died and risen, and been appointed as Lord and Saviour of all. Frustratingly for those of us who have put our trust in this Lord, turning back to Christ is a door that Western culture now considers closed. Yet he knocks at the door, and will come in some time soon to judge and to save. And when the Lion of Judah does come again, he will come looking like a lamb that was slain (Rev 5:5-6). He gaze will not be blank and pitiless, but piercing and merciful, full of justice and forgiveness. And if that seems like an impossibly strange image of our future—a fierce and regal lion coming with the look of a lamb that was slain—it is no more incongruous than the stunning contrast we remember at this time of year. Born of a woman. Born as a man. God in a manger. PSAs a good Anglican, I am full of ‘most humble and hearty thanks' for God's goodness and kindness in this past year, and in particular for all that he has done through your kindness and support for The Payneful Truth. I am very grateful for everyone who has signed up to the list, everyone who has emailed and commented, and particularly everyone who has become a ‘Payneful partner' and supported the whole venture financially. (And if you'd like to start doing that, it's not very hard! Just click on the button and follow the options.)I think we all deserve a break for a couple of weeks—me from writing, and you from my writing. So, here's what to expect over the next little while: * Later this week, before I clock off for the year, I'll send around to the partner list a very-close-to-final draft of the revised Two ways to live outline that I've been working on. Many of you have already given very useful feedback—any final comments or thoughts will be gratefully received.* Then, after a short break, I'll start rolling out a little series of light-hearted holiday-reading articles on the first Tuesday in January (taken from some dusty old pieces I found lying in the vault). They may or may not have something to do with golf, but I'm sure you'll enjoy them nevertheless. (These will go out free to everyone on the list—it's Christmas time after all.)* And then I'll be back in earnest on January 26 with the first proper edition of 2021. Until then, may God bless you with rest and rejoicing as we remember the coming of his Son.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

Wes and Erin continue their discussion of W.B. Yeats’ "The Second Coming." In Part 1, they analyzed the first stanza of the poem, in particular Yeats' use of "gyre"; the meaning of the phrases "things fall apart" and "the center cannot hold"; and the conflict between aristocratic and revolutionary values. In Part 2, they discuss -- with a little help from Nietzsche -- the anti-redemption of the second stanza, and the meaning of Yeats' vision of a "rough beast" slouching towards Bethlehem. 

Wes and Erin continue their discussion of W.B. Yeats’ "The Second Coming." In Part 1, they analyzed the first stanza of the poem, in particular Yeats' use of "gyre"; the meaning of the phrases "things fall apart" and "the center cannot hold"; and the conflict between aristocratic and revolutionary values. In Part 2, they discuss -- with a little help from Nietzsche -- the anti-redemption of the second stanza, and the meaning of Yeats' vision of a "rough beast" slouching towards Bethlehem.  Subscribe: (sub)Text won’t always be in the PEL feed, so please subscribe to us directly: Apple | Spotify | Android | RSS Bonus content: The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon. Follow (sub)Text: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.

June Campbell Cramer, known to all as Lady June, was one of the greatest party hosts of her day. She was the connective tissue that held whole musical scene together. She was the counterculture's landlady. And she was also an artist in her own right. On this episode of Ghost Echoes, we crash a house party and do a bit of psychedelic people watching. Follow on Facebook | Twitter | Podchaser Music and Sound Notes: --This episode contains excerpts of three tracks from Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy: “Some Day Silly Twenty Three,” “To Whom It May Not Concern,” and “Am I.” Further reading, listening: --Details on Lady June's life were gathered from Marcus O'Dair's Robert Wyatt biography Different Every Time, as well as various online sources. These include her obituary in the Independent, an interview in Facelift Magazine, this feature on a fansite for Canterbury music, these reminiscences from June's fellow Deia residents, the AllMusic review of Linguistic Leprosy, and Lady June's own semi-autobiographical poem Rebella. --The complete story of the wealthy Texan optician and Soft Machine patron Wes Brunson can be found on Aymeric Leroy's blog about the Canterbury Scene. --The full text of Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, complete with the prologue he wrote nearly thirty years later, can be found here. Joan Didion's “Goodbye to All That” is in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter Email us at: mmpodcastnetwork@gmail.com Website: mmpodcastnetwork.com Our art work is by Lilly Grasso and you can find her here: http://lilith-luxe.tumblr.com/ https://archive.org/download/episode93_202004/Episode%2097.mp3

Find us on Facebook and Twitter Email us at: mmpodcastnetwork@gmail.com Website: mmpodcastnetwork.com Our art work is by Lilly Grasso and you can find her here: http://lilith-luxe.tumblr.com/ https://archive.org/download/episode93_202004/Episode%2097.mp3

We're homing in on the right settings for this home podcasting thing during quarantine. Hopefully the days of studio casting will be upon us before too long. Chris talks about working from home, some weird conspiracy, and then tells another of his favorite "longest jokes(?) ever!" --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/impolite-company/support

We understand the catch-22 of A) not wanting to hear another thing about COVID-19 and B) not being able to think about literally anything else, so we're bringing you an extra long double-pronged episode. We've interviewed beautiful nurse and friend of the podcast Phaedra Gurton about why self isolation is so important, what 'flattening the curve' means and how to support the already-overwhelmed medical industry. Plus, we've collated a handful of tips for dealing with epidemic anxiety and the stress that comes with being home alone for weeks on end. If you're not wanting to hear about the crisis at all, skip forward to 32:00. Here, we'll give a big ol' list of reading, watching and listening recommendations and distract you with every little tidbit of mindless celebrity news we could muster. We also answer life's existential questions: Should millennials join TikTok? Why is Isabelle sexually attracted to gay men? Why is Ben Affleck so annoying? Why is Donna the best? Listen now - and for once we aren't asking you to rate, review and subscribe but to instead stay inside!The five senses trick for anxiety:5: Acknowledge FIVE things you see around you.4: Acknowledge FOUR things you can touch around you3: Acknowledge THREE things you hear2: Acknowledge TWO things you can smell. 1: Acknowledge ONE thing you can tasteWhat to watch in a lockdown:RuPaul's Drag Race - Grace's recommendation: Start with All Stars Season 2, followed by S5, S6, S4, S8, S3, S7, All Stars 1, S9, S10 (or something like that I really haven't thought about it). Leave All Stars 3 and 4 TBH.Queer Eye Dakota Johnson's house tour on Architectural Digesthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwhBTrzzqegGame of ThronesMad MenBreaking BadWhat to read in a lockdown:Literally anything Liane Moriarty (except Nine Perfect Strangers)Shantaram by Gregory David RobertsWatermelon by Marian KeyesThe Secret History by Donna Tartt The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Anything by David Sedaris - start with Calypso and Let's Explore Diabetes With OwlsThe Argonauts by Maggie Nelson Literally anything by Malcolm Gladwell - but start Blink, Talking to Strangers or OutliersAnything by Joan Didion - but start with The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical ThinkingEverything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton What to listen to: Alright Mary podcast (recapping RuPaul's Drag Race) Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Renaming to align with kunernetes and JEDI master Trump. Buy Coté’s book dirt cheap (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt)! And check out his other book that this guy likes (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6559881947412340736/). Mood board: Have either of you ever eaten dog meat? He easily slides into meataterian. Skype would be terrible if it weren’t so great! Follow the foot-stones Going up the well I like dogs, what I don’t like is additional responsibility. My life is mostly avoiding more responsibility Sorry about your dog… Oyster and Opals. Dogs and trains Once you get to Atlanta, trains be like, fuck that shit. I’m going to write that down and look at it when I’m depressed. Who put kubernetes in my Mesosphere? Not investment advice. 2 to 3 yards of J2EE books. If you put it into a container, you’ll probably be OK. Relevant to your interests Mesosphere changes name to D2IQ, shifts focus to Kubernetes, cloud native (https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/05/mesosphere-changes-name-to-d2iq-shifts-focus-to-kubernetes-cloud-native/) IBM fuses its software with Red Hat’s to launch hybrid-cloud juggernaut (https://www.networkworld.com/article/3429596/ibm-fuses-its-software-with-red-hats-to-launch-hybrid-cloud-juggernaut.html#tk.rss_all) After Trump cites Amazon concerns, Pentagon reexamines $10 billion JEDI cloud contract process (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/01/after-trump-cites-amazon-concerns-pentagon-re-examines-billion-jedi-cloud-contract-process/) Your multicloud strategy is all wrong (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3428682/your-multicloud-strategy-is-all-wrong.html) A Technical Analysis of the Capital One Hack (https://blog.cloudsploit.com/a-technical-analysis-of-the-capital-one-hack-a9b43d7c8aea?gi=85e88964a741) Dynatrace S-1 Analysis — Tracing a Transition (https://medium.com/memory-leak/dynatrace-s-1-analysis-tracing-a-transition-3c92896e8d29) NetApp Stock Is Tumbling After the Company Warned That Tech Spending Was Slowing (https://www.barrons.com/articles/netapp-stock-tumbles-after-warning-of-slowing-tech-spending-51564761782) Will Uber ever make money? Day of reckoning looms for ride-sharing firm (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/04/uber-ride-share-lyft-ipo-earnings) It’s the end of the big-data era: HPE to acquire MapR’s assets (https://siliconangle.com/2019/08/05/end-big-data-era-hpe-acquire-maprs-assets/) Microsoft launches Azure Security Lab, expands bug bounty rewards (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-announces-azure-security-lab-azure-bug-bounty-expansion/) Nonsense Alabama teen wins PowerPoint World Championship (https://www.al.com/news/huntsville/2019/08/alabama-teen-wins-powerpoint-world-championship.html) Airlines are finally fixing the middle seat (https://www.fastcompany.com/90377949/airlines-are-finally-fixing-the-middle-seat) Why is called an Oyster Card? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_card) Sponsors SolarWinds Papertrail (https://papertrailapp.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=direct-link&utm_campaign=sdt) TrackJS (https://trackjs.com/sdt/) Conferences, et. al. August 12th to 15th - Cloudbees DevOps World and Jenkins World (https://www.cloudbees.com/devops-world/san-francisco), San Francisco - use the code GOLOCAL for a discount. Also in Lisbon, Dec 3rd to 5th (https://www.cloudbees.com/devops-world/lisbon). August 30th - Agile Scotland, Glasgow (https://www.agilescotland.com/august) - Coté giving 90 minute workshop (https://www.agilescotland.com/august#comp-jwjlafj0__item1inlineContent-gridWrapper). Use the code AS-SPEAKER-MICHAEL for a discount: from £70 to £56.13. Sep 26th to 27th - DevOpsDays London (https://devopsdays.org/events/2019-london/welcome/) - Coté at the Pivotal table, come get free shit. Oct 7th to 10th - SpringOne Platform, Oct 7th to 10th, Austin Texas (https://springoneplatform.io/) - get $200 off registration before August 20th, and $200 more if you use the code S1P200_Coté (make sure to use the accented e). Come to the EMEA party (https://connect.pivotal.io/EMEA-Cocktail-Reception-S1P-2019.html) if you’re in EMEA. Oct 9th to 10th - Cloud Expo Asia (https://www.cloudexpoasia.com/) Singapore, Oct 9th and 10th Oct 10th to 11th - DevOpsDays Sydney 2019 (http://devopsdays.org/events/2019-sydney/), October 10th and 11th December - 2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringOne Tours are posted (http://springonetour.io/): Toronto Dec 2nd and 3rd (https://springonetour.io/2019/toronto), São Paulo Dec 11th and 12th (https://springonetour.io/2019/sao-paulo). December 12-13 2019 - Kubernetes Summit Sydney (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubernetes-summit-sydney-2019/) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast (https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/). Check out the back catalog (http://cote.coffee/howtotech/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Recommendations Brandon: Hard Knocks (https://www.hbo.com/hard-knocks) and Last Chance U (https://www.netflix.com/title/80091742). Matt: Tim Hecker: An Imaginary Country (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuXxwXWPz2Y). Coté: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/424.Slouching_Towards_Bethlehem), Joan Didion. Outro: “Depreston,” (http://youtube.com/watch?v=1NVOawOXxSA) Courtney Barnett.

Search on Thomas Power, and you will see him variously described as Entrepreneur, Author, Business Adviser, Professional Speaker, and an expert on Social Media, Technology and the world of Digital. He is also a fun character who always has an interesting and different view on things. In this episode, using his song choices, we plot his journey from suburban Solihull: through the early days of UK computing with ICL, Amstrad and Alan Sugar; the triumphs and challenges of the business network that was Ecademy, to the present day. In his usual honest and disarming way, Thomas opens up about the highs and lows in his life and career and leaves us in doubt that his profile should really read "endeavoring, dependable, cub scout." SHOW NOTES I hope these show notes will enhance your enjoyment of this episode. If there are additional things you would like included here then please let me know. Spotify Playlist This playlist contains the full versions of Thomas's 6 choices together with another dozen that have connections (tenuous or otherwise) with the content of the episode. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7DC7Kj92ze0y0DCgmtOTvj?si=vhF5Xd9DTgSuaoNitvUThQOther things mentioned in this episode Sting's book - Broken Music David Thomas - Alan Sugar: The Amstrad Story Faith's Song is the theme song for the BBC Wales Drama Series "Keeping Faith" . Available on DVD The W.B. Yeats poem is " Second Coming" . It was also the inspiration for Joni Mitchells song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" which uses a number of lines from the poem. The song is included in the playlist CULTURAL CONTEXT When Thomas talks about "the AA" he is not referring to Alcoholics Anonymous but the Automobile Association a British motoring organisation that was formed in 1905. Today it hosts a raft of services for the motorist but is still best known for its Roadside Assistance. ICL (International Computers Ltd) was the last major British Computer Company. In the 1980's they sold a successful mini computer called the ME29. The ME29 was an orange color which was officially known as "Hot Tango" - never has a company and a color been more inappropriately matched. ICL was acquired by Fujitsu in 2002 In the late 1980's Amstrad (which stands for Alan Michael Sugar Trading) had a substantial share of the PC market in the UK. Amstrad was once a FTSE 100 company but since 2007 it has been wholly owned by Sky UK whose Set top boxes it manufactured. CONTACT DETAILS Thomas PowerEmail – Thomas.power@9spokes.comTwitter – @thomaspowerWhatsApp +44 7875 695012Terry Smith Website - http://musictalkspod.buzzsprout.com/Email – musictalkspod@outlook.com Twitter - @musictalkspod Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/musictalkspodcast

This week I bring you a bonus episode inspired by my experience of being evacuated from my home for the past week due to the CA wildfires. I highly recommend going through a mock "end of the world" exercise as I was forced to this week. The insight gained from having to consider losing everything and thinking about the many ways humans are unprepared for any sort of situation where we couldn't rely on resources... it was highly informative to say the least. On this episode I share insights about home, security, Venus, what our responsibility is in planning for the future and much more. Books I read from: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion and The Great Bay by Dale Pendell. Songs featured: "Lusten" by Dead Man Winter + "Loving the Small Time" by Kara's Flowers. How to support the show: Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes! Support my work on Patreon and get access to bonus episodes & more: www.patreon.com/anyakaats Find me on Instagram Get full access to A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World at anyakaats.substack.com/subscribe

This week's book is Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I play some Beatles, some Ravi Shankar, some Randy Newman and much more. Have a listen!

This week, we're looking back on the lessons we've learned from all of our guests and the books that have changed their lives. To learn more about the books we've mentioned in this week's episode, check out Middlemarch by George Eliot, New People by Danzy Senna, The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman, Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace, Who Will Run The Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore, There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz, Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and Raymond Carver's Cathedral. You can find transcripts of this episode and past ones on LitHub. This episode is sponsored by Imposter's Lure. You can listen to the new podcast I Love You But I Hate Your Politics on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. You can listen to the new podcast The Girls on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts, and check out Courtney Summers' Sadie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brea and Mallory talk about books that have changed our lives and interview author and comedian Guy Branum. Use the hashtag #ReadingGlassesPodcast to participate in online discussion! Email us at readingglassespodcast at gmail dot com!   Reading Glasses Merch     Links - Reading Glasses Transcriptions on Gretta Reading Glasses Facebook Group   Reading Glasses Goodreads Group Apex Magazine Page Advice Article   Amazon Wish List The Last Bookstore event with A.J.K. Donnell   Guy Branum https://twitter.com/guybranum   Pre Order My Life As A Goddess   Pop Rocket Talk Show The Game Show Books Mentioned -   Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix How to be Famous: A Novel by Caitlin Moran The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan   We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg Where I Was From by Joan Didion Mythologies by Roland Barthes Maurice by E.M. Forster The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston   Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Decca by Jessica Mitford Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford   Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie Hawkeye: Kate Bishop vol 1 by Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero    

加拿大学者马歇尔·麦克卢汉最早提出的地球村 Global Village这个概念是1962年，但是这个词是在1968年在大众视野闪亮，甚至是爆炸式的登场，波兰、法国、美国、墨西哥，这些政治文化经济状态千差万别的国家，当然除此之外还有日本、德国、意大利、南斯拉夫等等，甚至是莫斯科红场，在没有社交媒体的帮助下，发生了一场又一场的，要看你的政治立场，可以被称为抗议、罢工、占领、群众运动、骚乱、反革命运动或者是群体事件。这些一连串事件的前因后果包括暗杀社会精英、屠杀平民百姓、坦克开进布拉格市中心，导致1968年成为人类历史上前无古人后无来者的一年。这期节目我和艺术史学家张宇凌和历史学家方曌一起重温1968。#会员通知# 我会在6.16邮件各位这期节目的彩蛋内容，呈现一个非常不一样的1968年，芝加哥大学的经济学家弗里德曼那年也发表了一个演说，对今后50年世界的影响可能超过了所有学生运动的总和。节目中提到的信息：非虚构《景观社会》，居伊·德波https://book.douban.com/subject/1775264节目中我们说的春季攻势在维基百科叫“新春攻势”/Tet Offensivehttp://suo.im/55CEEL马丁路德金遇刺后的一张著名照片，Joseph Louwhttp://suo.im/5kF27x方曌提到剑桥年轻学生叫托尼·朱特/Tony Judthttps://book.douban.com/author/418271/小说《查泰莱夫人的情人》，D. H. 劳伦斯https://book.douban.com/subject/4859493/电影《中国姑娘》，戈达尔https://movie.douban.com/subject/1302589/益康糯米提到法国文化部长是 André Malraux 马尔罗，他开除了 La Cinémathèque française 的创办人 Henri Langlois电影《寻找小糖人》， Stephen Segermanhttps://movie.douban.com/subject/7015798/音乐《I Wonder》，Sixto Rodriguezhttp://music.163.com/#/song?id=18669849小说/英剧 Patrick Melrose, Edward St Aubyn出现在文化土豆050文集《散漫地步向伯利恒》/Slouching Towards Bethlehem，琼·狄迪恩http://suo.im/4Y6sPa史诗《埃涅阿斯纪》，维吉尔https://book.douban.com/subject/1185910/Enoch Powell 的“血河演说” / River of Blood Speechhttp://suo.im/4J42LU张宇凌提到的巴黎美元的版画海报，今年有一个50周年回顾展览http://suo.im/4CdNxT线上图库：http://jeanpaulachard.com/mai/杰梅茵·格里尔创办的杂志叫 SUCK（1968-1974），全套在 Abebooks 有一套出售，1750美元，有没有老板愿意收藏，再让我看看？http://suo.im/4Y6txw非虚构《女太监》，杰梅茵·格里尔/Germaine Greerhttps://book.douban.com/subject/6520826/感谢收听这期节目，我们是一个由会员赞助播出的文艺潮流圆桌节目，聊影视、思想和艺术。如果你愿意为文化土豆出一分力，请访问 www.culturepotato.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Author Kevin Kwan on Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, losing his accent, and discovering he could be funny. To learn more about the books we discussed in this episode, check out The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy by Kevin Kwan, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the Adventure Series by Enid Blyton, and A Book of Common Prayer and Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Please fill out our survey at bit.ly/butthatsanothersurvey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An impressionistic look at the interplay of Rock N Roll and Culture in Los Angeles during the latter half of the 1960s. There are familiar elements: storytelling, critical discussion and commentary, and lots of Rock N Roll attitude. But this one is different from most of our previous RNRAP offerings.

An impressionistic look at the interplay of Rock N Roll and Culture in Los Angeles during the latter half of the 1960s. There are familiar elements: storytelling, critical discussion and commentary, and lots of Rock N Roll attitude. But this one is different from most of our previous RNRAP offerings.

Join ReWatchable as we discuss Angel 4×04, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and Angel 4×05, “Symmetry.” Superfans: Caitlin and Karen Newbies: Ariana and Kristen Fun Facts: Caitlin watches TV. Kristen is a holiday pooper. Ariana is doing her job leave her alone. Karen drinks wine. Angel season 4, episode 4, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: -Synopsis -Connor is a big fat liar. -Considering Cordy kind of got dropped in their lap, it’s understandable the pancakes would be hesitant to tell her the whole scary truth. -Lilah and Wes are terrible together but do we hate that we love it? -WHAT APOCALYPTIC HORRORS WILL BEFALL US -Caitlin tries out her poetry professor voice. -Favorite Scenes -Favorite Lines Angel season 4, episode 5, “Supersymmetry”: -Synopsis -FRED AND GUNN ARE THE CUTEST/SEXIEST -Fred is the girl Wes wishes he could be with… Lilah is the girl he should be with. -Fred still has PTSD from Pylea. -Angel has fans on the internet! -Wes helps out Fred but does he have ulterior motives? -Can Fred and Gunn ever come back from this? -CONNOR’S OEDIPUS COMPLEX IS THE GROSSEST -Cordy’s heading back to Angel’s place. Boi bye. -Favorite Scenes -Favorite Lines Listener Feedback: -DO A BOY MEETS WORLD REWATCH -Wes is in character and yall are whack. Ariana’s Assumptions/Kristen’s Kontemplations: –Angel season 4, episode 4, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” –Angel season 4, episode 5, “Supersymmetry” Contact us! Email: rewatchable.podcast@gmail.com Twitter: @Re_Watchable Tumblr: ReWatchablePodcast.Tumblr.com Or in the comments below. Please rate and review us on iTunes!

这期原班人马又在麦子店录音了。你们在节目中听到的低沉有韵律的碰撞声不是邻居在运动，而是某同学在录音台上打字！这期我们聊了两部英国导演的电影，第一部是院线正在上映的 Mathew Vaughn 导演的 Kingsman 2 Gold Circle/王牌特工2，是007电影 parody 系列，很多大牌卡斯在一起玩黑色幽默、坎普审美和恶搞暴力。第二部电影是寡姐Scarjo四年前的一部很可能被大家错过了的文艺惊悚科幻公路电影Under The Skin/皮囊之下。可能是文化土豆在一起聊过的最 art house 的一部电影了。寡姐的粉丝知道她从来就是把身体献给了漫威，心灵一直在文艺电影里的一枚女子，所以听完以后希望你也能去温习皮囊之下，千万不要被寡姐全裸出镜吓到了。节目中聊到的一些关键信息文化土豆官网 & 参与iTunes评分的链接：www.culturepotato.com文化土豆脸书小组：www.facebook.com/culturepotato电影：《王牌特工2：黄金圈》豆瓣：https://movie.douban.com/subject/26378579/电影：《王牌特工：特工学院》爱奇艺：http://www.iqiyi.com/v_19rrnqzc4g.html《王牌特工：特工学院》里的百人斩片段：腾讯视频：https://v.qq.com/x/page/t0150xqdjet.html?new=1#CORRECTION#《王牌特工2》里扮演瑞典公主的演员是瑞典 Hanna Alström，并不是益康耨米以为的美剧《副总统》里扮演挪威总理的英国演员 Sally Phillips。Glastonbury Festival 格拉斯托 是英国最重要的户外音乐节，但是2018年是格拉斯托的休息年，为了草地能够恢复生长。。。http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/益康糯米提到的香港毒面包事件是第二次鸦片战争期间，两广总督叶名琛号召广东华人杀英国人，香港 E Sing Bakery 在面包里放了砒霜。这段历史在 John Mark Carroll 的《香港简史》里有记载。http://bit.ly/2xt89SY (VPN)电影：《皮囊之下》Under the Skin腾讯视频：http://dwz.cn/6JJbUs《纽约书评》刊登的《皮囊之下》的评论http://suo.im/4tBVsC节目中没有益康糯米没有想起来的皮囊之下原型是中古神话中的“wandering succubus”书籍：《霍乱时期的爱情》豆瓣：https://book.douban.com/subject/10594787/龙荻推荐的美国记者琼·狄迪恩纪录片：Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold网飞：https://www.netflix.com/tw-en/title/80117454Didion的非虚构《奇想之年》豆瓣：https://book.douban.com/subject/26909872/文集《Slouching Towards Bethlehem》豆瓣：https://book.douban.com/subject/1989342/益康糯米推荐的《门先生》by anusman豆瓣有售：https://book.douban.com/subject/27118076/晏礼中的平遥国际电影节之选戛纳电影节金棕榈奖影片《魔方》（The Square）、美国大师理查德·林克莱特新片《最后的旗帜》、北野武最新力作《极恶非道·最终章》反馈邮箱：zyifan@me.com嘉宾：益康糯米，龙荻，晏礼中 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Across more than 50 years of essays, novels, screenplays, and criticism, Joan Didion has been our premier chronicler of the ebb and flow of America’s cultural and political tides with observations on her personal – and our own – upheavals, downturns, life changes, and states of mind. In the intimate, extraordinary documentary JOAN DIDION: THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD, actor and director Griffin Dunne unearths a treasure trove of archival footage and talks at length to his “Aunt Joan” about the eras she covered and the eventful life she’s lived, including partying with Janis Joplin in a house full of L.A. rockers; hanging in a recording studio with Jim Morrison; and cooking dinner for one of Charles Manson’s women for a magazine story. Didion guides us through the sleek literati scene of New York in the 1950s and early ’60s, when she wrote for Vogue; her return to her home state of California for two turbulent decades; the writing of her seminal books, including Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album; her film scripts, including The Panic in Needle Park; her view of 1980s and ’90s political personalities; and the meeting of minds that was her long marriage to writer John Gregory Dunne. She reflects on writing about her reckoning with grief after Dunne’s death, in The Year of Magical Thinking (winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction), and the death of their daughter Quintana Roo, in Blue Nights. With commentary from friends and collaborators including Vanessa Redgrave, Harrison Ford, Anna Wintour, David Hare, Calvin Trillin, Hilton Als, and Susanna Moore, the most crucial voice belongs to Didion, one of the most influential American writers alive today. Director Griffin Dunne (American Werewolf in London, After Hours) joins us for a conversation on "Aunt Joan" and her fiercely personal body of remarkable body of fiction and non-fiction. To view Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold go to: netflix.com

Ryan and Kelly talk Angel episodes The House Always Wins & Slouching Towards Bethlehem! They talk Cordy's departure from her arc, Life Size Men, and Connor RPGs!Note: this episode was recorded before the tragedy in Las Vegas. For ways to help Las Vegas victims, go here:http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/us/iyw-help-las-vegas-shooting-victims/index.html See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week on the MashReads Podcast, we read and discuss Max Porter's Grief Is The Thing With Feathers. The book follows three characters after a family's mother dies: Dad, Boys (a combination of the families two children), and Crow (who is the maybe real, maybe imaginary incarnation of grief who resides with the family while they grieve). Through a series of vignettes told from the perspective of each character, Grief explores just what happens when we lose someone and what it means to heal. Join us as we talk about what makes Grief Is The Thing With Feathers different than other grief books and what makes it so perfectly, beautifully, unforgettably heartbreaking. Then, inspired by Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, we chat about our favorite books about grief including The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Enon by Paul Harding, and the poem 'The Gaffe' by C.K. Williams. And, as always we close the show with recommendations: First and foremost, you should listen to Max Porter talk about Grief Is The Thing With Feathershere. Matt, Mashable's Social Good editor who joined us for the episode, recommends VS Podcast, a poetry podcast from the Poetry Foundation. "They talk about what its like to talk about what its like to be poets and humans, especially in 2017. And it's honestly just so enjoyable." MJ recommends listening to the Longform Podcast's interview with Maggie Haberman, who covers the White House for the New York Times. "It's just an amazing, thoughtful interview from someone who is at the top of her game is doing incredibly important reporting right now." He also recommends Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Peter recommends the album A Crow Looked A Me by Mount Eerie. "[The album] is so immaculately beautiful. It is so caring and sweet and soft and sad. There could not have been a better pairing [with Grief Is The Thing With Feathers.]"  

As we say goodbye to another Non-Fiction November, we decided to share some of our favourite non-fiction books, as well as many more that are still sitting atop our TBR piles. –– What We’re Currently Reading –– Nicola Bluets by Maggie Nelson | http://amzn.to/2fH0vhL Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys | http://amzn.to/2gxfcBw Night Waking by Sarah Moss | http://amzn.to/2fH5Sx5 Holly Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple | http://amzn.to/2fUK0fA See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt (sent by Tinder Press for review) | http://amzn.to/2gNvJ8s –– Books We Recently Acquired –– Nicola The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson | http://amzn.to/2gAAbV9 Also mentioned her novels, Gilead & Housekeeping Essays of E.B. White | http://amzn.to/2gxfzMt A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women by Siri Hustvedt (sent by Simon & Schuster for review) | http://amzn.to/2gxdWhx Holly The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante | http://amzn.to/2gxe14P Winter: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons by Melissa Harrison | http://amzn.to/2gmdQKj Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss | http://amzn.to/2gAHD2q His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet | http://amzn.to/2g8F9KD –– Our Non-Fiction Favourites & TBRs –– In order mentioned… Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty Also mentioned: her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician | https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath Election / death video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNSdNvm16Fg The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison Also mentioned Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz
 New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 edited by Teresa Carpenter The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton The Moth: 50 True Stories edited by Catherine Burns The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson How to Travel Without Seeing by Andrés Neuman –– Follow us! –– You can subscribe to Bookish Blether on SoundCloud, iTunes and Stitcher, or your podcast app of choice. Love our podcast? Leave us a review and share it with a friend! Twitter: http://twitter.com/BookishBlether
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 Email: bookishblether@gmail.com Holly:
 http://twitter.com/hollyjunesmith
 http://instagram.com/hollyjunesmith
 http://www.heyhollyjune.co.uk Nicola:
 http://twitter.com/robotnic 
http://robotnic.co http://youtube.com/robotnic https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6523767.Nicola_Balkind

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends." That is Joan Didion, from her essay "On Keeping a Notebook,' from her classic collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. We chose this book because we thought it might shine some light on the plight of the Lakers--things fall apart; the centre cannot hold--but in point of fact all it did was make us think of other Didion lines. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." "We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce." "Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself." Chock full of some of the greatest essays ever committed to paper, Slouching Toward Bethlehem begs to be read and read again. Our apologies if our discussion of the anemic 2016-2017 Los Angeles Lakers roster pales when placed alongside it. (NB: we discuss the Didion collection until around the 38 minute mark, then dive into our low expectations for the upcoming Lakers season. Also, stay tuned for our emergency pod with the novelist J. Robert Lennon on whether or not sports and literature have anything to say to one another. The answer may surprise you!)

In the first of our city/author mashups we'll be doing this summer, we picked Elmore Leonard and Miami. Yes, we are aware that Leonard is most closely associated with Detroit, but we've selected one of his Palm Beach/Miami books, 1995's Riding The Rap, which features his flinty lawman Raylan Givens, a hippie-dippie psychic and a botched ransom plot. We discuss Leonard's genius for quick-sketch character and razor-sharp dialog, as well as whether he should be considered a "genre" or a "literary" author. Then we keep things in South Florida with a look at the Miami Heat's offseason and potential for 2016-2017. Were they right to let Dwyane Wade walk? Will Chris Bosh ever play again? Can their youthful core of Tyler Johnson, Josh Richardson, Justise Winslow and Dion Waiters make the leap this year? All that and more in this episode of the Fan's Notes podcast. (NB: we talk about Riding The Rap until the 35 minute mark, then the Miami Heat talk begins. Also, for our next episode, we'll be reading Joan Didion's seminal 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and looking at what the future holds for the Los Angeles Lakers. Look for it the week of August 15th!)

In this episode, Em and Sue and guest Matt Asendorf discuss a little Angel. We decided that Slouching was a tad boring, Supersymmatry is underrated and Spin the bottle is a lot of fun! There- now you don’t even need to listen. Except if you did that you would miss Sue squeeing over old times…Continue reading →

In this episode, Em and Sue and guest Matt Asendorf discuss a little Angel. We decided that Slouching was a tad boring, Supersymmatry is underrated and Spin the bottle is a lot of fun! There- now you don’t even need to listen. Except if you did that you would miss Sue squeeing over old times…Continue reading →

AFTERBUZZ TV – Defiance edition, is a weekly “after show” for fans of SyFy's Defiance. In this show, hosts Matt Lieberman, Scott Moore, Nando Velasquez, and Jesse Klein discuss episode 8. The series is set in the near future, where aliens known collectively as Votans have come to Earth seeking a new home after their […] The post Defiance S:2 | Slouching Towards Bethlehem E:8 | AfterBuzz TV AfterShow appeared first on AfterBuzz TV Network.

For Big Damn Heroes 51, Will and Hannah have some interesting things to cover. The new status quo is established over on Buffy, which addresses the things that came before, and at least tries to make them better. Also, the foreshadowing hammer gets a good workout, and lots of child TV stars from the 90s show up. Meanwhile, over on Angel, plots from last season that didn't work so well are recycled, and character development for one of our mains is completely wiped for funsies! Join Hannah and Will as they cover Buffy's "Same Time, Same Place" and "Help," and Angel's "The House Always Wins" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."

For Big Damn Heroes 51, Will and Hannah have some interesting things to cover. The new status quo is established over on Buffy, which addresses the things that came before, and at least tries to make them better. Also, the foreshadowing hammer gets a good workout, and lots of child TV stars from the 90s show up. Meanwhile, over on Angel, plots from last season that didn't work so well are recycled, and character development for one of our mains is completely wiped for funsies! Join Hannah and Will as they cover Buffy's "Same Time, Same Place" and "Help," and Angel's "The House Always Wins" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."

For Big Damn Heroes 51, Will and Hannah have some interesting things to cover. The new status quo is established over on Buffy, which addresses the things that came before, and at least tries to make them better. Also, the foreshadowing hammer gets a good workout, and lots of child TV stars from the 90s show up. Meanwhile, over on Angel, plots from last season that didn't work so well are recycled, and character development for one of our mains is completely wiped for funsies! Join Hannah and Will as they cover Buffy's "Same Time, Same Place" and "Help," and Angel's "The House Always Wins" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."

For Big Damn Heroes 51, Will and Hannah have some interesting things to cover. The new status quo is established over on Buffy, which addresses the things that came before, and at least tries to make them better. Also, the foreshadowing hammer gets a good workout, and lots of child TV stars from the 90s show up. Meanwhile, over on Angel, plots from last season that didn't work so well are recycled, and character development for one of our mains is completely wiped for funsies! Join Hannah and Will as they cover Buffy's "Same Time, Same Place" and "Help," and Angel's "The House Always Wins" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."

Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. Some drugs of extraordinary power and utility, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well-tolerated, and yet one can still be sent to prison for their use—whereas drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. There are other points on this continuum: MDMA, or Ecstasy, has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and some evidence suggests that it can be neurotoxic.[1] One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose and which are not. The problem, however, is that we refer to all biologically active compounds by a single term, drugs, making it nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the psychological, medical, ethical, and legal issues surrounding their use. The poverty of our language has been only slightly eased by the introduction of the term psychedelics to differentiate certain visionary compounds, which can produce extraordinary insights, from narcotics and other classic agents of stupefaction and abuse. However, we should not be too quick to feel nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960s. Yes, crucial breakthroughs were made, socially and psychologically, and drugs were central to the process, but one need only read accounts of the time, such as Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, to see the problem with a society bent upon rapture at any cost. For every insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their hair shuffling toward failure and regret. Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is wise, or even benign, only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and doesn’t leave your children wandering in traffic. Drug abuse and addiction are real problems, of course, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should these medicines be made illegal? Of course not. But people need to be informed about their hazards, and addicts need treatment. And all drugs—including alcohol, cigarettes, and aspirin—must be kept out of the hands of children. I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith, and my thinking on the subject has not changed. The “war on drugs” has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.) I have two daughters who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. I hope they someday enjoy a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If they drink alcohol as adults, as they probably will, I will encourage them to do it safely. If they choose to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation.[2] Tobacco should be shunned, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer them away from it. Needless to say, if I knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if they don’t try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug. It has been many years since I took psychedelics myself, and my abstinence is born of a healthy respect for the risks involved. However, there was a period in my early twenties when I found psilocybin and LSD to be indispensable tools, and some of the most important hours of my life were spent under their influence. Without them, I might never have discovered that there was an inner landscape of mind worth exploring. There is no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible). If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. While I do not recommend the latter experience, it does increase one’s respect for the tenuous condition of sanity, as well as one’s compassion for people who suffer from mental illness. Human beings have ingested plant-based psychedelics for millennia, but scientific research on these compounds did not begin until the 1950s. By 1965, a thousand studies had been published, primarily on psilocybin and LSD, many of which attested to the usefulness of psychedelics in the treatment of clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol addiction, and the pain and anxiety associated with terminal cancer. Within a few years, however, this entire field of research was abolished in an effort to stem the spread of these drugs among the public. After a hiatus that lasted an entire generation, scientific research on the pharmacology and therapeutic value of psychedelics has quietly resumed. Psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and mescaline all powerfully alter cognition, perception, and mood. Most seem to exert their influence through the serotonin system in the brain, primarily by binding to 5-HT2A receptors (though several have affinity for other receptors as well), leading to increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although the PFC in turn modulates subcortical dopamine production—and certain of these compounds, such as LSD, bind directly to dopamine receptors—the effect of psychedelics seems to take place largely outside dopamine pathways, which could explain why these drugs are not habit-forming. The efficacy of psychedelics might seem to establish the material basis of mental and spiritual life beyond any doubt, for the introduction of these substances into the brain is the obvious cause of any numinous apocalypse that follows. It is possible, however, if not actually plausible, to seize this evidence from the other end and argue, as Aldous Huxley did in his classic The Doors of Perception, that the primary function of the brain may be eliminative: Its purpose may be to prevent a transpersonal dimension of mind from flooding consciousness, thereby allowing apes like ourselves to make their way in the world without being dazzled at every step by visionary phenomena that are irrelevant to their physical survival. Huxley thought of the brain as a kind of “reducing valve” for “Mind at Large.” In fact, the idea that the brain is a filter rather than the origin of mind goes back at least as far as Henri Bergson and William James. In Huxley’s view, this would explain the efficacy of psychedelics: They may simply be a material means of opening the tap. Huxley was operating under the assumption that psychedelics decrease brain activity. Some recent data have lent support to this view; for instance, a neuroimaging study of psilocybin suggests that the drug primarily reduces activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in a wide variety of tasks related to self-monitoring. However, other studies have found that psychedelics increase activity throughout the brain. Whatever the case, the action of these drugs does not rule out dualism, or the existence of realms of mind beyond the brain—but then, nothing does. That is one of the problems with views of this kind: They appear to be unfalsifiable.[3] We have reason to be skeptical of the brain-as-barrier thesis. If the brain were merely a filter on the mind, damaging it should increase cognition. In fact, strategically damaging the brain should be the most reliable method of spiritual practice available to anyone. In almost every case, loss of brain should yield more mind. But that is not how the mind works. Some people try to get around this by suggesting that the brain may function more like a radio, a receiver of conscious states rather than a barrier to them. At first glance, this would appear to account for the deleterious effects of neurological injury and disease, for if one smashes a radio with a hammer, it will no longer function properly. There is a problem with this metaphor, however. Those who employ it invariably forget that we are the music, not the radio. If the brain were nothing more than a receiver of conscious states, it should be impossible to diminish a person’s experience of the cosmos by damaging her brain. She might seem unconscious from the outside—like a broken radio—but, subjectively speaking, the music would play on. Specific reductions in brain activity might benefit people in certain ways, unmasking memories or abilities that are being actively inhibited by the regions in question. But there is no reason to think that the pervasive destruction of the central nervous system would leave the mind unaffected (much less improved). Medications that reduce anxiety generally work by increasing the effect of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, thereby diminishing neuronal activity in various parts of the brain. But the fact that dampening arousal in this way can make people feel better does not suggest that they would feel better still if they were drugged into a coma. Similarly, it would be unsurprising if psilocybin reduced brain activity in areas responsible for self-monitoring, because that might, in part, account for the experiences that are often associated with the drug. This does not give us any reason to believe that turning off the brain entirely would yield an increased awareness of spiritual realities. However, the brain does exclude an extraordinary amount of information from consciousness. And, like many who have taken psychedelics, I can attest that these compounds throw open the gates. Positing the existence of a Mind at Large is more tempting in some states of consciousness than in others. But these drugs can also produce mental states that are best viewed as forms of psychosis. As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to draw conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences—no matter how profound they may seem. One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed. Many people wonder about the difference between meditation (and other contemplative practices) and psychedelics. Are these drugs a form of cheating, or are they the only means of authentic awakening? They are neither. All psychoactive drugs modulate the existing neurochemistry of the brain—either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing the neurotransmitters themselves to be more or less active. Everything that one can experience on a drug is, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has seen or felt after ingesting LSD is likely to have been seen or felt by someone, somewhere, without it. However, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering consciousness. Teach a person to meditate, pray, chant, or do yoga, and there is no guarantee that anything will happen. Depending upon his aptitude or interest, the only reward for his efforts may be boredom and a sore back. If, however, a person ingests 100 micrograms of LSD, what happens next will depend on a variety of factors, but there is no question that something will happen. And boredom is simply not in the cards. Within the hour, the significance of his existence will bear down upon him like an avalanche. As the late Terence McKenna[4] never tired of pointing out, this guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry. Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without a guidance system. One might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the compound and one’s “set and setting,” certain trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis. Hence, the terms psychotomimetic and psychotogenic that are occasionally applied to these drugs. I have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. The positive experiences were more sublime than I could ever have imagined or than I can now faithfully recall. These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of nature itself is a mere simulacrum. It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it. Positive psychedelic experiences often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be—and for most of us, normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of those deeper possibilities. People generally come away from such experiences with a sense that conventional states of consciousness obscure and truncate sacred insights and emotions. If the patriarchs and matriarchs of the world’s religions experienced such states of mind, many of their claims about the nature of reality would make subjective sense. A beatific vision does not tell you anything about the birth of the cosmos, but it does reveal how utterly transfigured a mind can be by a full collision with the present moment. However, as the peaks are high, the valleys are deep. My “bad trips” were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever endured, and they make the notion of hell—as a metaphor if not an actual destination—seem perfectly apt. If nothing else, these excruciating experiences can become a source of compassion. I think it may be impossible to imagine what it is like to suffer from mental illness without having briefly touched its shores. At both ends of the continuum, time dilates in ways that cannot be described—apart from merely observing that these experiences can seem eternal. I have spent hours, both good and bad, in which any understanding that I had ingested a drug was lost, and all memories of my past along with it. Immersion in the present moment to this degree is synonymous with the feeling that one has always been and will always be in precisely this condition. Depending on the character of one’s experience at that point, notions of salvation or damnation may well apply. Blake’s line about beholding “eternity in an hour” neither promises nor threatens too much. In the beginning, my experiences with psilocybin and LSD were so positive that I did not see how a bad trip could be possible. Notions of “set and setting,” admittedly vague, seemed sufficient to account for my good luck. My mental set was exactly as it needed to be—I was a spiritually serious investigator of my own mind—and my setting was generally one of either natural beauty or secure solitude. I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasant until they weren’t, but once the doors to hell opened, they appeared to have been left permanently ajar. Thereafter, whether or not a trip was good in the aggregate, it generally entailed some excruciating detour on the path to sublimity. Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it. On my first trip to Nepal, I took a rowboat out on Phewa Lake in Pokhara, which offers a stunning view of the Annapurna range. It was early morning, and I was alone. As the sun rose over the water, I ingested 400 micrograms of LSD. I was twenty years old and had taken the drug at least ten times previously. What could go wrong? Everything, as it turns out. Well, not everything—I didn’t drown. I have a vague memory of drifting ashore and being surrounded by a group of Nepali soldiers. After watching me for a while, as I ogled them over the gunwale like a lunatic, they seemed on the verge of deciding what to do with me. Some polite words of Esperanto and a few mad oar strokes, and I was offshore and into oblivion. I suppose that could have ended differently. But soon there was no lake or mountains or boat—and if I had fallen into the water, I am pretty sure there would have been no one to swim. For the next several hours my mind became a perfect instrument of self-torture. All that remained was a continuous shattering and terror for which I have no words. An encounter like that takes something out of you. Even if LSD and similar drugs are biologically safe, they have the potential to produce extremely unpleasant and destabilizing experiences. I believe I was positively affected by my good trips, and negatively affected by the bad ones, for weeks and months. Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there. As I discussed in The End of Faith, I view most psychedelic experiences as potentially misleading. Psychedelics do not guarantee wisdom or a clear recognition of the selfless nature of consciousness. They merely guarantee that the contents of consciousness will change. Such visionary experiences, considered in their totality, appear to me to be ethically neutral. Therefore, it seems that psychedelic ecstasies must be steered toward our personal and collective well-being by some other principle. As Daniel Pinchbeck pointed out in his highly entertaining book Breaking Open the Head, the fact that both the Mayans and the Aztecs used psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice, makes any idealistic connection between plant-based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naïve. As I discuss elsewhere in my work, the form of transcendence that appears to link directly to ethical behavior and human well-being is that which occurs in the midst of ordinary waking life. It is by ceasing to cling to the contents of consciousness—to our thoughts, moods, and desires— that we make progress. This project does not in principle require that we experience more content.[5] The freedom from self that is both the goal and foundation of “spiritual” life is coincident with normal perception and cognition—though, admittedly, this can be difficult to realize. The power of psychedelics, however, is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. William James said it about as well as anyone:[6] One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 388) I believe that psychedelics may be indispensable for some people—especially those who, like me, initially need convincing that profound changes in consciousness are possible. After that, it seems wise to find ways of practicing that do not present the same risks. Happily, such methods are widely available. Recommended Reading: Huxley, A. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. McKenna, T. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. McKenna, T. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. McKenna, T. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. Pinchbeck, D. Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. Stevens, J. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Ratsch, C. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications. Ott, J. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History. Strassman, R. DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences. Related article: What’s the Point of Transcendence? legacy-site/Pokhara.jpg