Think Again ? a Big Think Podcast

NOTE: This is a special guest episode of Jason's new podcast Clever Creature. Please subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts! The Moleskine is open, the page is staring back accusingly/ Like 'come on, Punk, what makes you think you possibly could fill the likes of me? Reflections on a big creative leap of faith: the making of this podcast. A staples manufacturer on the brink of death, taking solace in his gut flora and the memory of his daughter's love for LOL Surprise dolls. A song about deserts, real and figurative. A conversation with Jason's son Emre about the Ice Cream Desert and music-making as a doorway. And a "bonus track" 7 minute guided meditation at the end. . . . You can learn more and join my mailing list at my website. Or maybe you want to join our Facebook Group And hey?I'm making this first season all on my own?it's a blast, but it takes a lot of time! Please consider supporting the show by joining our creative community on Himalaya Premium. Just download the Himalaya app for any smartphone, search for the show, and click "join membership" at the bottom. . . . Episode art by Nathan Gelgud Theme song by Emre Gots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] Adult life, with all its schedules and responsibilities, can turn into a kind of library of locked boxes. The ones we open every day sit on a shelf at eye level, their keys clipped to a carabiner at our waist: Set the alarm. Pack a gym bag. Pick up milk for the kids. But on the lower shelves and in the dusty back rooms there?s an ominous jumble of odd-shaped containers. They hold the stories that don?t fit so neatly into the skin we?ve decided to live in. Maybe we?ve misplaced the keys, or maybe we?ve deliberately lost them. My guest today keeps all the keys close at hand. In his stories and graphic novels worlds collide and, as the fairy Ariel puts it in Shakespeare?s Tempest, they ?suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange?. The walls of reality are permeable, and dangerous magic is always seeping through. Neil Gaiman is the author of the Sandman graphic novels, The Graveyard Book, Coraline, American Gods, and many other wonderful things. His latest is a marvelous retelling of Norse Mythology, with most of the nasty bits left in. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Barbara Oakley on learning speeds and styles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] I?m underground as I write this, one day before taping the conversation you?re about to hear, speeding through New York City subway tunnels that aren?t all that ancient but whose darkness, and rats, and crumbling, esoteric infrastructure holds fear and fascination enough for anyone who contemplates them. Waking up this morning?notice how you wake up, not down?I felt my already barely remembered dreams sliding off of me in layers, like leaves, or hands. And the longing to submit to those hands and slide back down, underground, into the caverns of sleep. My guest today, Robert MacFarlane, has dug deeper than I could ever hope to into the meanings and magnetism of the underworld ?tunnels, caves, sinkholes, and the living, fungal earth of our world and our imaginations. At one point in his new book UNDERLAND he brings up the fact that to a neutrino, our solid physical world is just a a mesh?Mount Everest is a wide-gauge net it can pass easily through. In MacFarlane?s writing, the layers of the world are transparent, overlapping, always already present. He?s often called a ?nature writer?, but that?s a poor proxy for what he actually is: a philosopher poet with the gift of sight in the darkness, whose penetrating vision turns the world inside out. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: E.O. Wilson on the world of pheromones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] -- Faith in anything is its own special form of madness. It?s a challenge to entropy, and entropy takes no challenge lightly. If there?s any better metaphor for this struggle than trying to make a big budget movie with even a shred of integrity, I haven?t found it. On the one hand, you?ve got this impossible dream. This faith in the beautiful thing that?s supposed to emerge at at the end of the process. On the other hand, the process is a hellish sausage-making machine of studio bosses, financing, and acts of god like four days of flash flooding in the middle of your big shoot. You might as well be Don Quixote, doing battle with a windmill. What kind of masochist would put themselves through that? My guest today, Terry Gilliam, is that very masochist. And we should be grateful, because his stomach for the fight has given us movies like THE FISHER KING, BRAZIL, 12 MONKEYS and MONTY PYTHON?s THE LIFE OF BRIAN. And now, almost 30 years after his first, biblically disastrous attempt to make it, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE. Starring Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, the movie is as funny, thrilling, and unpretentiously deep as the best of Gilliam?s work. It?s also kind of like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls: a film inside a film inside a film, all of them metaphors for the holy folly of believing in anything at all. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is out April 19th in select theaters and on demand video. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Michelle Thaller on whether time is real or an illusion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] -- Among other things, music can be medicine. Like a vaccine, it sometimes works by giving your body a little taste of the disease. Other times, of course, you just wanna dance, and James Brown might be just what you need. But the medicine songs I?m talking about are the ones that break your heart open no matter many times you hear them. And you want them to?because that?s what it feels like to be alive. Nobody knows this better than my guest today, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. Like the centuries of blues and folk songs that echo through it, transubstantiated by her voice and guitar into something almost too beautiful to bear, her music is powerful medicine. Anaïs wrote all the songs, lyrics and the book of the new (14x Tony-nominated!) Broadway musical, HADESTOWN, directed by Rachel Chavkin. It makes new again the ancient story of the singer-songwriter Orpheus and his lover Eurydice, who he follows all the way to hell, and leads most of the way back again.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] -- At this point, it?s very rare to read something and find myself thinking: This is something new. This is unlike anything I?ve ever read before. It doesn?t have to be written in hieroglyphs or be some kind of three-dimensional interactive reading experience with pull-out tabs and half the pages upside down. That kind of formal experimentation, in my experience as a reader, more often ends up being gimmicky and annoying than exhilarating. In fact, paradoxically, the ?wow this is something new? experience often comes along with a sense that this new thing has somehow always existed, in your dreams if nowhere else.  Marlon James?the Jamaican writer who won the Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings? has done something in his new fantasy novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf that?s unlike anything I?ve ever read before. The first book of a trilogy, it?s been described as an ?African Game of Thrones? and likened in scope to Tolkien?s Lord of The Rings. But the stories within stories it tells and the shifts in voice and perspective thrust you into a seething, hallucinatory, morally ambiguous world that?s part Ayahuasca dream and part blacklight nightmare, anchored in a rich African mythology that?s worlds away from all those elves, wizards, dragons, and goblins?all those well-worn tales of light versus darkness.  Surprise conversation-starters in this episode:  Jeffrey Sachs on whether Jeff Bezos should distribute his Amazon wealth Damian Echols on tattoos as a lifeline  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] -- Note: I feel I should let listeners know that this episode of Think Again is about surviving and thriving in the face of unspeakable trauma and sexual violence. And in order to get to the thriving, we have talk about the trauma, which may be painful for some listeners and inappropriate for kids. But I don?t want to scare anybody off?I think it?s one of the most valuable conversations we?ve ever had on the show.  -- For a human child growing up, trust is the foundation of everything. We learn how to regulate our emotions, how to see the world as relatively stable and safe through the connection with the people who care for us. Severely neglected children can suffer all kinds of harm to their ability to think, connect with others, and learn. But what happens when the caring bond is not only missing, but is horribly abused? Distorted through incest and sexual violence? How do you build a self and life after that? And let?s say you somehow manage to survive to adulthood?to thrive, even. How do you fill the place in your heart where the love and the trust is supposed to be? My guest today has had to answer all these questions for herself. She is the playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler. You may know her as the creator of the Vagina Monlogues. What you might not know is that all the horrors I?m talking about happened to her as a kid. Let me take that out of the passive voice: her father did that to her, and more. And he died without saying anything remotely close to ?I?m sorry?. So Eve wrote his apology for him?her book THE APOLOGY is a letter to her?to Eve?in the imagined voice of her dead father, retelling what happened, why it happened, and trying to figure out in these twisted circumstances what an apology would even mean? Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Jared Diamond on immigrants and innovation  -- Thoughts on relistening:  This episode with Eve Ensler means a lot to me. I came late to the feminist conversation about patriarchy and masculinity. About the ways men are taught to be ashamed of vulnerability, and how all that fear and shame can lead to violence. Listening back I?m struck again by this one thing she says: ?Language changes everything. It?s like the word 'vagina'. If you can?t say it, you can?t see it. If you can?t see it, a lot of things can happen to it in the dark without your permission.? There is so much hope and power in the work Eve does to break the silence and encourage others to do the same. As a man, I hear it especially loud and clear when she says it?s time for men to ?...make a choice. Whether they?re going to maintain allegiance to the male code or step into the next paradigm. Stopping the domination so they get to be free in this lifetime.? I hear it and I personally, enthusiastically accept that call.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

[From February through March 22, 2020 (his last day hosting Think Again) Jason will be revisiting favorite past episodes. Jason's new show, starting May 12th, is Clever Creature with Jason Gots.] Life is full of horrible things. I dare you to deny it. Things like death, sickness, and alcoholism. And did I mention death, which lies in wait for us all? But if you talk about these things at dinner parties, or at work, or to someone you have just met in line at the grocery store, you risk being branded a negative person. In some circles, such as the state of California, negativity is like leprosy. It can really mess up your social life. This does not seem to trouble my guest today, who has spent much of his life turning horrible, true stories into festive comedy. like many people, I first heard David Sedaris? unmistakable voice on public radio in the late 90s. My sister and I took a couple of his audio books on a road trip across America in her red Saturn with a bumper sticker on the back that read ?Humanity is Trying?. Having Sedaris along as company somehow made the endless miles of Stuckeys? and strip malls, and the weeping people at Elvis?s grave side in Graceland a little less alien and terrifying. In his latest book, Calypso, David is doing his thing better than ever. It?s about what?s on his mind these days, from decluttering the English countryside, to feeding a surgically removed lump of fat to a snapping turtle, to a sister?s suicide. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Martin Amis on the ?etiquette? of good writing Lucy Cooke on the extraordinary genitalia of female spotted hyenas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since 1976, Sharon Salzberg has been sharing ancient meditation and mindfulness practices in a voice the contemporary West can understand. Her warm, funny, down-to-earth books, dharma talks, and guided meditations have helped struggling meditators worldwide establish a strong practice and reduce the suffering in their lives. In this episode master teacher Sharon Salzberg considers whether it's ok to teach mindfulness to the armed forces, how practitioners of meditation and mindfulness should balance openness with discipline, and so much more. Sharon?s latest book is Real Happiness: a 28 day program for realizing the power of meditation, now thoroughly updated and revised for its 10th anniversary.  Note: This will be the last original episode of Think Again with show creator and host Jason Gots. Throughout February and March he?ll be running a retrospective of favorite episodes with new commentary. On May 12, 2020, he?ll launch a new, independent show: Clever Creature.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thelma and Louise, Ponch and John, Pancho and Lefty, Quixote and Sancho Panza, Marx and Engels, Marx and Chast?history and literature are full of magical buddy stories. Every now and then, for reasons no one can explain, Two people come together and produce something greater, or at least very different, from the sum of their parts. I?m here today with one such team: the writer-cartoonist duo of Patricia Marx and Roz Chast. They?re both longtime contributors to the New Yorker and fearsome humorists in their own rights. But together they form a third fearsome thing, a thing which has created books such as Why Don?t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct it: A Mother?s Suggestions, And their latest: You Can Only Yell At Me For One Thing At A Time: Rules for Couples. They?re also the enigmatic figures behind yet a fourth thing, the legendary ukulele band Ukelear Meltdown.  ? Jason Gots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Freedom. Everyone wants it, but knowing where to look for it is another matter. And to make matters worse, the world is full of things that feel like freedom but might just get us more tangled up in everything we?re trying to escape. How much freedom can money buy? How much money? How free are you on a tropical vacation? Would uploading your consciousness into the cloud and downloading it into a robot avatar on Alpha Centauri make you more free? How about falling in love again? How about three margaritas with friends? Or six? How about falling in love again? A better government? Less government? No government at all?  I?m here today with Joseph Goldstein, a beloved teacher of Buddhist ideas and practice in the West and a personal inspiration to me, to talk about freedom of the mind and spirit?and the kinds of effort and insight that can lead there. Joseph is the co-founder of Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and the author, most recently, of Mindfulness: a Practical Guide to Awakening.  - Jason Gots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you?d told me a couple months ago that a podcast about Dolly Parton could move me deeply and raise all kinds of questions that go straight to the wounded heart of America today, I guess I would have been skeptical to say the least. But that skepticism might be exactly the point. America is an image factory. Country music. Rock and Roll. New York City. Nashville. We paint with big, broad brushes. And if we?re not careful, we miss a lot of the details.  My guest today is audio storytelling wizard Jad Abumrad. He?s the creator and a host of Radiolab, More Perfect, and now, of Dolly Parton?s America ? a nine part podcast series that achieves all those aforementioned implausible things. Jad?s trips into the Dollyverse with his co-producer Shima Oliaee reveal the country singer as something between a bodhisattva and one of those fairytale mirrors that tell you the truth about yourself.  ? Jason Gots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The other day on social media a friend asked what the heck is up with this Mr. Rogers revival. Why does everyone suddenly love this guy so much? Moments before, I had been listening to a new podcast about Dolly Parton, and her weird, almost saintlike ability to bring people together across cultural divides. In a moment of deep mistrust and cynicism, there?s this hunger for people and things worth believing in.  I?ve also got Bodhisattvas on the brain lately. In Mahayana Buddhism, Bodhisattvas are the embodiment of compassion. Absolute compassion for all living things, even those that really piss us off.  THE WORLD COULD BE OTHERWISE: the Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path is a wonderful new book by my guest today, poet, Zen priest, and translator Norman Fischer. It?s a collection of thoughts and practices for becoming Bodhisattvas ourselves, warts and all. A Bodhisattva commits to the impossible for the benefit of everyone. ?beings are numberless: I vow to save them all.? According to Norman and a couple thousand years of Buddhist tradition, we can do this too.  Boddhisattvas or saints, Dolly and Fred Rogers possibly included, are needed at all times and places. But right now, when trust and kindness are in short supply, we maybe need them?and need to embody them?more than ever.  ? Jason Gots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I?ve spent more of my life than most people I know immersed by choice in what my guest today would call ?scripture?. I was never much of a Roman Catholic, in spite of being dragged weekly to church until I was about 13 and could no longer be dragged, and, in my boredom, sometimes believing I saw the statue of Jesus moving on the cross. But in late adulthood, the need for spiritual meaning gripped me tight and wouldn?t let go. It led first into Judaism and Jerusalem, and then, for the past couple decades, mostly to Buddhist study and practice. But I?m as troubled as all the Enlightenment thinkers I know by scripture-thumping orthodoxy and intolerance of any kind. Troubled watching my wife Demet?s country, Turkey, split between retrograde, homophobic and misogynistic Islamism on the one hand and intractable secular nationalism on the other. Moses and I don?t have much in common, but like him, I get tongue-tied talking about these things. Religious, or spiritual, or scriptural ideas and practices can be so essential and become so problematic at the same time.  My guest today is Karen Armstrong. On these subjects, she doesn?t get tongue-tied. She?s one of the clearest and most nuanced thinkers I know of on god, religion, and scripture. Author of THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE and THE CASE FOR GOD, recipient of the TED Prize, and a co-creator of the interfaith Charter for Compassion. Her new book is called THE LOST ART OF SCRIPTURE and I?m so happy it brings her to Think Again.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While reading Deborah Levy?s novel THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING and her recent ?working autobiography? THE COST OF LIVING I often found myself pausing and kind of sinking into a passage I?d just read. Going back and rereading it not because my attention had wandered nor exactly to unpack an idea but because I felt the need to experience it over again. To have it happen to me.  Levy started her career writing plays that have been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and broadcast by the BBC. She is the author of multiple novels, several of which have been Man Booker Prize finalists, the short story collection Black Vodka, and two of the aforementioned ?working autobiographies?.  The two books of hers I?ve read are packed with ideas, but like great theater, they treat ideas as verbs. They?re thought in action. In a sense they defy you to talk about them. But let's try to, anyway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The phrase ?common sense? can be misleading. The way we use it in casual conversation, it means something like ?that which is obvious to any sensible person, of course?. It?s like what philosopher Daniel Dennett says about the word ?surely?. Surely we can all agree that it?s just an innocent word, right? Surely I?m not manipulating you by starting this sentence with a positive conclusion? Common sense, in fact, is just what it sounds like: the commonly agreed upon sense of how things are at any given time. But as social primates, we too easily mistake consensus for truth.  My guest today is Yancey Strickler, cofounder of Kickstarter?the company that made ?crowdfunding? a common sense idea. That?s a very big deal when you consider that when Kickstarter was getting, uh, kickstarted, that idea made very little sense to anybody at all. Having people chip in to launch something they?ll never own? Ludicrous! Contrary to human nature as explained by Adam Smith!  Having helped transform how creative work is financed, Yancey?s moved on from Kickstarter. His new book: This Could Be Our Future: a Manifesto for a More Generous World is after bigger game?a kind of values reset that moves us away from a narrow, unsustainable, inhumane obsession with profit at all costs. He calls it ?bento values? because it?s a box with four compartments: Me and us, now and in the future. Maybe it?s not common sense today, but surely it could be.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

?Maybe the opposite of goodness is not evil. Maybe the opposite of goodness is, in fact, numbness.?  There are so many questions we never ask. So many assumptions we make every second of every day because our minds and our lives are sealed off from one another, accessible only through time, patience, and the slow work of trust?all of which are often in short supply while we?re running around trying to stick to schedules. And there are some questions we don?t ask for other reasons?because the answers might tell us more than we want to know about ourselves.  I?m so very happy to be here today for the second time on this show with British-Turkish author, speaker, and educator Elif Shafak. In her latest novel, as in all of her work, she asks some of these forgotten questions and, maybe more important, signposts the infinity of doorways we walk past without noticing. The book, 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World, was one of six on the shortlist for this year?s Booker Prize. Like any human life, that of its heroine Leila is strange, beautiful, and important. And all too easily tossed aside.  Surprise conversation starters in this episode:  Ibram X Kendi on the dangerous idea of the dangerous black neighborhood, and anger and analysis in social justice movements, from our conversation on Think Again Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some experiences change you so completely that you?re left with a choice: either spend your life running from them or spend your life turning them over in memory, trying to find new ways in, through, and out the other side. The power of the impulse to explain or somehow articulate these experiences is inversely proportionate to other people?s ability to understand them. They?re everything all at once. It seems to me that my guest today has made that second choice, the hard choice not to run away. Or maybe it?s a choice you have to keep making over and over again. His name is Reginald Dwayne Betts. He?s 39 years old?an accomplished poet and essayist and a graduate of Yale Law School. But he spent most of his teenage years and young adulthood in prison and over a year in solitary confinement, experiences neither society, nor memory, nor his fellow feeling for the more than 2 million people behind bars in the United States, the vast majority of them black men and boys, has let him forget. Dwayne?s beautiful and necessary new book of poems is called FELON, and I?m honored to have him with me here today to talk about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you have a body? I do, but I was mostly unaware of this fact until somewhere in my mid-30s, when my life strategy of living like a bourbon-loving brain-in-a-vat became increasingly untenable. Since then, I?ve come to understand something that might have been obvious to you all along. The body?s not just a convenient support system for coming up with clever things to say?it?s how we experience the world. It?s most of what we mean by living. And for all its marvelous autonomy, it?s also wonderfully, bafflingly complex. My guest today is the author Bill Bryson. In his new book THE BODY: A GUIDE FOR OCCUPANTS, he has been kind enough to demystify it for us to the extent that that?s possible, and to help us revel in its mystery everywhere else. Bill is the beloved author of A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING and A WALK IN THE WOODS, and I?m delighted to have him on the show.  Surprise conversation starters in this episode:  ?Excerpted from Think Again episode #215 with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I grew up in the almost entirely white suburbs of 1980?s Bethesda, Maryland thinking of myself and my world as 100% not racist. It?s hard to notice what?s missing: for example pretty much any black or brown people anywhere I went except on vacation, in spite of the fact that we were right next to Washington DC. At some point in middle school I learned that my Jewish dad had been unwelcome at the most popular local country club, and so chosen another, less popular one that admitted Jews at the time. But this seemed like a weird anomaly, and boo hoo about not getting your first choice of country club anyway, right?  Then, at 16, I had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Anacostia, DC and was astonished to find it wasn?t the ?war zone? I?d been told it was throughout the Reagan years. To see people walking calmly to the grocery store or chatting on the corner. No guns. No open air drug markets, whatever those were. Racism, gender bias, economic elitism?they?re not anomalies. They?re cultural, economic, political, psychological. But as Paul Simon?a favorite songwriter of mine who some see as the poster boy for cultural appropriation once wrote: "Well, breakdowns come and breakdowns go, so, what are you gonna do about it? That?s what I?d like to know.? My guest today is Ibram X Kendi. he?s been working on these problems for a long time, and he?s developed some powerful ideas and methods for solving them. Ibram won the National Book award, he?s the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington DC, and he?s the author of the important new book How to be an Anti-Racist.  Surprise conversation starters in this episode:  A read excerpt from MINDF*CK: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, by Christopher Wylie  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 1972, the year I was born, there was apparently a famous TV ad for Geritol. My guest today describes it thus: ??a husband spoke to the camera while his wife draped herself over his shoulder, smiling like something between a model and the brainwashed resident of a creepy commune??My wife?s incredible. She took care of the baby all day, cooked a great dinner and even went to a school meeting?and look at her!? Her potion of eternal youth, of course, is Geritol. It?s got all the vitamins and iron she needs. This perfect woman grins silently at the camera as her husband concludes: ?My wife: I think I?ll keep her.?  Though what constitutes ?getting old? for women in America has been a moving target throughout US history, it has rarely been a picnic. But our history?s also full of women who have raised hell and pushed back in a hundred different ways against the cultural and literal corsets America keeps trying to stuff them into.  My guest today is New York Times columnist and celebrated author Gail Collins. Her new book is No Stopping Us Now: the Adventures of Older Women in American History. It?s a bumpy, often exhilarating ride through the lives of older women in America from colonial times up to the present day. And Gail?s good company as our wise, wisecracking stagecoach driver. We?re headed West, and there?s hope on the horizon. Conversation starter clips in this episode:  Liz Plank on masculinity, from episode 214 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I don?t even know where to begin with this one. You?ve probably heard of Cambridge Analytica. Maybe you know they?re a company that did some nefarious things involving facebook and the 2016 US presidential elections. If you?re anything like me, you don?t know the half of it. If you get through this episode without wanting to move to a remote hut in the Arctic circle, I will personally refund this hour of your life. My guest today is Christopher Wylie, author of MindF*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America. in high school, he found himself on the outside of lots of social circles. Computers and hacker culture gave him community. Identity. From there, it?s a long strange trip through progressive politics in Canada to military Psy ops in London to helping Steve Bannon and the Billionaire Robert Mercer build the most powerful psychological weapon of mass destruction in existence?one that very likely won the presidency for Donald Trump and the Brexit vote. Chris was 24 at the time. When the scale and consequences of Cambridge Analytica got too big to ignore, he turned whistleblower?and none of our lives, his included, will ever be the same. Conversation starter: A clip from an upcoming episode with Ibram X. Kendi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the past half century or so feminism has had its hands plenty full dealing with the abuse and inequality women suffer at the hands of horribly behaved men and the systems they build. Too full to worry much about what the hell is going on inside those men and why. And there are powerful arguments to be made for the fact that it is not women?s responsibility to help men figure out how not to be monsters. But I?ve noticed an interesting shift in the discourse lately. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (things happen fast these days?that blew up at scale in 2017), some threads of the public conversation have turned toward what my guest today might talk about in terms of the "gender ecosystem", the ways that ideas about gender shape our identities and behavior and the fact that those behaviors impact everyone in society for better and worse. Regardless of whose responsibility it is to solve these problems, the question of where masculinity goes from here should matter to everyone. My guest today is journalist and cultural critic Liz Plank. she was named one of Forbes? 30 under 30, has produced and hosted multiple acclaimed digital series for Vox, and is the author of the new book FOR THE LOVE OF MEN: a  new vision of mindful masculinity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the word ?epicurean? brings to mind a porcine man in a toga reclining on a velvet couch and dropping fat juicy grapes into his open mouth, one by one, you are not alone. But this caricature, probably the descendent of some ancient propaganda by rival philosophers, tells us very little in fact about Epicureanism - the worldview of the 4th century BCE Greek philosopher Epicurus and his later disciple Lucretius, whose ideas prefigured and shaped much of the modern world. My guest today is philosopher Catherine Wilson, author of the book How to be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well. At a confusing cultural moment where many people are looking for a guiding framework, she?s here with a strident defense of Epicureanism as a way of life. In its pragmatic approach to embracing pleasure and minimizing pain, she sees a saner way of living in the world. And maybe enjoying a few juicy grapes while you?re at it. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Mass shootings and masculinity with Michael Kaufman, founder of the White Ribbon Campaign Longevity with Dave Asprey of Bulletproof Coffee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like too many of us, I hated history classes throughout my school career, and only realized as an adult that there are few things more interesting to ponder than the ways people lived and thought in different times and places than my own. After all, we?re all stuck in our own time, limited by our culture, consciousness, and whatever knowledge we may possess of what came before. Maybe that explains part of the appeal of historical fiction like the series Downton Abbey, set in a great Edwardian country house in the early 20th century. My guest today is stage and screen Director Michael Engler. He?s the director of the new Downton Abbey feature film, and he directed episodes of Downton Abbey, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, 30 Rock and much more for TV. Meticulously recreating one corner of Edwardian England and building original story worlds within it, Downton Abbey is part romantic comedy, part historical drama grappling with the tensions of class and society at the sunset of empire. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Comedian Pete Holmes on visualization  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

?A conversation is like a tunnel dug under the prison floor that you?patiently and painstakingly?scoop out with a spoon. It has one purpose: to get you away from where you are right now.? That is from the very, very weird tale Car Concentrate from Israeli writer Etgar Keret?s wonderful new collection of short stories called FLY ALREADY. It?s not a bad description of the situation most of Keret?s characters find themselves in?wriggling like butterflies stuck on the pins of their own minds or circumstances, trying by any means necessary to get free. It?s maybe not too much even to say that this is the human condition as Keret sees it and the reason he writes stories?to open up magical escape hatches in the midst of suffocating realities like divorce or religious hatred. His stories are strange, beautiful, funny, and poignant?somehow emotionally connected even though they?re full of people who struggle to make sense to (and of) one another. Like all great art, they defy description, so ignore everything I?ve just said and go read them?but first, stick around for a bit to see what kind of escape tunnel this conversation might turn into.  Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Michio Kaku on uploading your consciousness and traveling to other planets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There?s a pattern that happens with any new thing. First it?s scary, then you settle in to a rhythm, then you hit your stride, then you get too attached to things being the way they are. For a while there I thought I could only record an episode of this show sitting in a particular chair facing a particular direction. When that kind of thing happens, it?s time to shake things up. So today?s show was recorded 5000 miles away from my comfy New York studio, in my wife?s hometown of Istanbul, Turkey. We took a ferry from the European to the Asian side of the city, to the neighborhood of Kadikoy. There we met Chef Musa Da?deviren?a one of a kind of food ethnographer who?s trying to preserve techniques and recipes from Turkey?s vast and diverse culinary history before they disappear forever. We ate at his restaurant Ciya Sofrasi and talked to him afterward in the offices of Yemek Ve Kultur (food and culture), the magazine he?s been publishing for the past 15 years. Musa is a man on an ambitious labor of love?a mission his mom gave him as a small child to investigate, understand, and pass on this knowledge. He?s totally unlike anyone I?ve ever met, and I?m happy to share this very different episode with you. THE TURKISH COOKBOOK ? Musa?s vast compendium for an English speaking audience. Comprehensive as it is, it contains less than half of the 1500+ recipes he?s collected in his travels. More to come! A beautiful documentary on Musa?s work on Netflix?s CHEF?S TABLE, Season 2.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I was a teenager and music was still on cassettes, a mixtape was an act of love. The selection and sequence of songs were a kind of message to the listener that left plenty of space for their own thoughts and feelings. Back in June Think Again hit its fourth year and its 200th show and it feels like the right time to take a step back and revisit some of the places the conversation has gone this past year. I?m intuitive rather than strategic about choosing guests for the show and books to read?when it works, it?s an art rather than a science. And as with any art, themes emerge and recur in different guises. In this episode, I?m putting together some of my favorite moments of 2019, strung together with minimal interruption from me. So kick back and enjoy this eclectic collection, and feel free to write me through my website jasongots.com and let me know your thoughts, feelings, and insights. Or send me a mixtape of your own! Featuring: Joseph Goldstein, Benjamin Dreyer, Anaïs Mitchell, Martin Hägglund, Aml Ameen, Marlon James, Terry Gilliam, Jeff Israel, Eve Ensler, Tracy Edwards, Frans De Waal, Edith Hall, Lama Rod Owens, Elif Shafak, Robert MacFarlane  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quick question. Answer without thinking too hard. Ready? Where is your mind? What is your mind? Ok, Raise your hand if you thought of your brain. If you did, you?re in good company. For centuries, Western science, culture, and language has been obsessed with the head as the center of thought and the body as the center of feeling. This split can get hierarchical, attaching ideas like ?sin? and  to the body and the emotions while putting the brain, along with rationality, up on a pedestal. I?m very happy to be speaking again today with neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio, who has done more than anyone one else I know to get that brain down off its high horse and reattach it to the body. We last talked a year ago, about his book THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS - Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, which has now come out in paperback. It turns everything upside down, not only re-anchoring mind in body, but finding in primitive bacteria and social insects patterns that help explain human culture. Maybe there?s more going on in the Mona Lisa than in a bacterial colony, but they also have quite a lot in common. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Frans De Waal on animal consciousness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first computer I ever had was the first Apple Macintosh, back in the mid 80?s. I can still remember the sense of friendly reassurance from that smiling little icon that popped up on the screen when you turned it on?a cute, tiny computer smiling back at you. This device, it suggested, knew you. Understood you. Was someone you could trust. Since then, we?ve come a long way, baby. The cold, black, addictive rectangle in my pocket?a gleaming window into all the hopes and terrors of the known world?is a far cry from the early, friendly promises of that smiling machine on which I could magically paint things at the touch of a button. My guest today, in a very different way, grew up in the long shadow of that same cultural trajectory. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was her dad. But like our relationship with the machines he helped unleash on the world, hers with him was deeply complicated. In her beautiful memoir Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes about his indifference, his attention, and her struggle to find herself in and outside of his shadow. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: None, due to tight taping time.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I think of my childhood home in Bethesda, Maryland, depending on what kind of mood I?m in, I think either of the mall or of the woods. Although there were some fun moments looking at the inappropriate novelty items like at Spencer Gifts, such as edible underwear, the mall in my memory is a symbol of suburban anomie and alienation. A place, as my guest today would put it, without context. The woods, on the other hand, were endless and full of surprises. We?d follow the twisting creek, overturn rocks to find crawfish, and eat sassafras leaves. Once we made Molotov cocktails out of my mom?s nail polish and threw them into the creek with pure, anarchic joy. In the woods, I was always, utterly present?connected to every sound and attuned to the slightest movement. In the mall, I was mostly conscious of whether or not my jacket looked cool. I?m here today with Jenny Odell. She?s an artist and educator who grew up in Silicon Valley and teaches at Stanford, the heart of the attention economy that?s colonizing more and more of the cultural woods. She?s also an avid bird watcher?or ?bird noticer?, as she might put it. Her wonderful new book HOW TO DO NOTHING: RESISTING THE ATTENTION ECONOMY is something like a primer for growing the woods inside the mall. It?s about carving out space for ourselves in a world that wants to put our time and our lives to other, more utilitarian uses.  Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Edward Slingerland on the Taoist concept of Wu Wei and how it plays out in Chinese business culture  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A Rabbi, a Priest, and an Imam walk into a bar. No, wait. Imams don?t drink. Most rabbis don?t drink much either, come to think of it. Priests drink?at least in the movies?but mostly not in bars . . . So maybe nobody walks into a bar? How, when, and where are we all supposed to figure out how to get along? My guest today, who also happens to be an old, good friend of mine, has an answer, or several. He?s Jeffrey Israel?a professor of Religion at Williams College and the author of a new book Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion. He argues that pluralistic societies like the United States need two uneasy siblings: a strong political will to recognize and protect our common humanity and also ?play spaces? where we can give rein to the difficult feelings- anger, resentment, even hate- that can?t be erased by politics, a Beatles song, or just by wishing them away. In his generous and provocative book, Jeff mines Jewish-American humor from Lenny Bruce, Philip Roth, and the sitcom All in the Family for models of rough and reflective play. Spike Lee?s film Do The Right Thing gets a well-deserved star turn, too. And for a civics that can protect human dignity while making space for all the nastiness and alienation we have no choice but to live with, He looks to philosopher Martha Nussbaum, among others. It?s a difficult conversation for an imperfect and imperfectable world, and the stakes couldn?t be higher. So Jeff makes a bold case and invites us all to the table ?rabbi, priest, Imam, and the rest us who don?t fit into easy categories?to hash it out. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: David Epstein on ?lateral thinking?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In spite of all the weird ways the word has been abused since the 2016 elections, I think of myself as a liberal. As a basic value, I try to be open-minded. And like many liberals, I live in a big, liberal city where I rarely meet anyone who doesn?t share my values, religious outlook, and political beliefs. As a result, like it or not, I?m in a bubble. And when I?m not being careful about it, I?m vulnerable to seeing ?the Bible Belt? and the American South as one monolithic, mostly white, evangelical, anti-abortion, Christian Right-leaning mass. As some kind of living history exhibit of a past us New Yorkers have left behind. And I know lots of people in some of the same bubbles I occupy who are quick to point to religion as the cause of horrors throughout human history. People who see reason and science as progress, religion as unequivocally retrograde, and who point to data showing that people everywhere are getting less religious as a hopeful sign that humanity might be moving in the right direction. But just as it doesn?t have a monopoly on morality, religion doesn?t have a monopoly on intolerance. And reason alone can?t give us values like love and kindness. Religion?s one of many ways that people organize their lives and like everything we make, it?s subject to both our courage and our cowardice. The best and the worst of us. A recent Pew survey says that 63% of Americans believe in God. In Bible Belt states like Oklahoma, where that number is much higher, there are fierce political battles going on for control of the Christian narrative?pushback against fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible as aligned with conservative republican values. These battles, invisible to most of us out here on the coasts, are the subject of AMERICAN HERETICS, a powerful new documentary by my guests today, Jeanine and Catherine Butler. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Michael Pollan on the history of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms in America Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After four years and just over 200 conversations for this podcast, I?m feeling the need for a new kind of politics. One that would champion uncertainty, fragility, emotional vulnerability against the tyranny of opinions that push us one way or another. I used to think that art was sufficient for this purpose. After all, it was books like J.D. Salinger?s Franny and Zooey or Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, bands like the Smiths and the Velvet Underground that gave a much younger me courage to embrace ambiguity as a great teacher. Art?s an open door, but you have to walk through it. And it?s the politics and culture around you that shape your ability to do so. We?re hurting and hungry for connection. Sick of misunderstanding and violence. I think this is true all over the world. I think it runs so deep it?s like an underground river, one whose presence we can only guess at from the contours of the surface earth. I?m very happy to be talking today with Turkish-born global citizen, novelist and activist Elif Shafak. She?s the author of  HONOR, THE FLEA PALACE, and THREE DAUGHTERS OF EVE, among many other books. In her writing and public speaking, she?s one of the most eloquent voices I know of this new politics that doesn?t fit easily on any flag. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Pete Holmes on #metoo and binary thinking  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What?s the hardest thing you?ve ever done? The thing everyone said was impossible,  that you knew you had to do anyway, and that you doubted a thousand times while it was underway that you?d be able to see through to the end? There?s a good chance you can think of at least one example. And an even better chance it doesn?t even come close in monumental, soul-smelting intensity to what Tracy Edwards put herself through back in 1989 to 1990, along with the all-female crew of her racing yacht Maiden. In that year, with the dismissive, derisive, mostly male eyes of the racing world upon them, this 9 member crew proved beyond a doubt that they could sail every bit as skillfully and fearlessly as their male competitors in the Whitbread Round-the-World-yacht-race. They crossed the southern ocean from Uruguay to Australia, surviving icebergs and deadly waves to win the most difficult leg of the race, then beat their closest rival, move for move, in a tactical sprint to New Zealand. By the time they made it home to England, derision had long given way to admiring awe. Tracy and her crew did a thing everyone thought was impossible. And in doing so they gave hope to countless others. The documentary film MAIDEN, out from Sony Pictures Classics, captures every leg of their incredible journey, and shows the full cost and rewards of Tracy?s single-minded persistence. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Explorer Erling Kagge on journeys and solitude Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I was in middle school in the suburbs of Maryland, a man?let?s call him Robert?started doing some occasional gardening and housecleaning for my parents. By high school, Robert was our full-time housekeeper and a nanny for me and my sister, a family member, really. And he had become a she?let?s call her Tina. My sister and I learned to use her new pronouns and we watched as her clothes and then, with the help of hormones and surgery, her body changed to that of a woman. At the same time, the transition we went through with Tina at home was playing out in American popular culture. Homosexuality and drag and other queer lives and identities came out of the closet and onto the stage, screen, and streets. In 1984, in Mahattan?s Tompkins Square Park, Wigstock was born. It started as a kind of afterparty and evolved into a DIY, outrageous, funny, and fabulous annual drag festival that by the 90?s was drawing crowds in the thousands. It?s hard even to think back to the time when Robert who became Tina had to hide who she was for fear of upsetting her religious mother or?who knows?maybe not getting that job with my folks. In a world where RuPaul?s Drag Race is going into its 12th smash season, It?s easy to forget the courage it took, and still takes, for so many people to live on the outside what they know they are on the inside. My guest today is documentary filmmaker Chris Moukarbel, the director of Lady Gaga biopic GAGA FIVE FOOT TWO. In his new HBO documentary WIG, Chris and his stars?including Lady Bunny, Charlene Incarnate, and many more?take us back through the history of drag in New York City. And they show that now more than ever we need public spaces like Wigstock where we can perform, amplify, and celebrate our differences. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Bill Eddy on ?toxic people? John Cameron Mitchell on online communication and miscommunication Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I?m underground as I write this, one day before taping the conversation you?re about to hear, speeding through New York City subway tunnels that aren?t all that ancient but whose darkness, and rats, and crumbling, esoteric infrastructure holds fear and fascination enough for anyone who contemplates them. Waking up this morning?notice how you wake up, not down?I felt my already barely remembered dreams sliding off of me in layers, like leaves, or hands. And the longing to submit to those hands and slide back down, underground, into the caverns of sleep. My guest today, Robert MacFarlane, has dug deeper than I could ever hope to into the meanings and magnetism of the underworld ?tunnels, caves, sinkholes, and the living, fungal earth of our world and our imaginations. At one point in his new book UNDERLAND he brings up the fact that to a neutrino, our solid physical world is just a a mesh?Mount Everest is a wide-gauge net it can pass easily through. In MacFarlane?s writing, the layers of the world are transparent, overlapping, always already present. He?s often called a ?nature writer?, but that?s a poor proxy for what he actually is: a philosopher poet with the gift of sight in the darkness, whose penetrating vision turns the world inside out. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: E.O. Wilson on the world of pheromones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like Mick Jagger, the Indian prince we know as The Buddha taught that we can?t get no satisfaction from this world, though we try and we try, and we try, and we try . . . Buddha means ?awakened one?. Awake to the fact that the world is impermanent and we suffer and cause suffering to one another because of that. ?Woke? is a newer word for something similar. Waking up to pervasive social injustice. To racism, economic disparity, homophobia, and other forces that poison and destroy people?s lives and relationships. In other words, suffering people cause by clinging onto impermanent things?in this case, power. The intersection of  these two kinds of awakening is at the heart of the work of my guest today, Lama Rod Owens. An ordained Lama in a Tibetan Buddhist lineage and the coauthor of RADICAL DHARMA, he grew up a queer, black male within the black Christian church in the American south. Navigating all of these intersecting, evolving identities has led him to a life?s work based on compassion for self and others, and on trying to help people wake up in all senses of the word. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Michael Shermer on why we die Pete Holmes on the power of words Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You?re a body in the world. From the moment you?re born, from that very first gasp of air, you?re taking in sensations, trying to get a handle on things and the relationships between them. There?s a lot of things to get a handle on. Too many. So your brain needs to simplify. It makes boxes for objects, maps them onto grids to track their motion. Through this process, the physical world enters your mind. It makes your mind. And that?s where things start to get really interesting. My guest today is cognitive psychologist Barbara Tversky. Her new book MIND IN MOTION: How Action Shapes Thought, upends everything most of us think we know about thinking. Tversky?s first law of cognition is that there are no benefits without costs. We simplify the physical world?reduce it to lines and boxes. We build abstract thought?everything from Shakespeare to string theory to how to design a pair of sneakers?on top of that same flawed foundation. And that explains all of our superpowers and all of our blind spots. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Philosopher Alva Noe on the puzzle of perception Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Note: I feel I should let listeners know that this episode of Think Again is about surviving and thriving in the face of unspeakable trauma and sexual violence. And in order to get to the thriving, we have talk about the trauma, which may be painful for some listeners and inappropriate for kids. But I don?t want to scare anybody off?I think it?s one of the most valuable conversations we?ve ever had on the show.  -- For a human child growing up, trust is the foundation of everything. We learn how to regulate our emotions, how to see the world as relatively stable and safe through the connection with the people who care for us. Severely neglected children can suffer all kinds of harm to their ability to think, connect with others, and learn. But what happens when the caring bond is not only missing, but is horribly abused? Distorted through incest and sexual violence? How do you build a self and life after that? And let?s say you somehow manage to survive to adulthood?to thrive, even. How do you fill the place in your heart where the love and the trust is supposed to be? My guest today has had to answer all these questions for herself. She is the playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler. You may know her as the creator of the Vagina Monlogues. What you might not know is that all the horrors I?m talking about happened to her as a kid. Let me take that out of the passive voice: her father did that to her, and more. And he died without saying anything remotely close to ?I?m sorry?. So Eve wrote his apology for him?her book THE APOLOGY is a letter to her?to Eve?in the imagined voice of her dead father, retelling what happened, why it happened, and trying to figure out in these twisted circumstances what an apology would even mean? Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Jared Diamond on immigrants and innovation  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

?Are we in the best of times? Or the end of times? One of the oddities of the current era is that extreme pessimism about the world coexists with extreme optimism ? and both have a plausible case to make.? I?m quoting Gideon Rachman from a recent Financial Times piece about Bill Gates and David Attenborough. Broadly speaking, Gates is a technooptimist: convinced, like his friend Steven Pinker, that the world?s getting better all the time due to technological and scientific progress, and that our problems are largely solvable. Attenborough is the world?s most recognizable narrator of nature documentaries and, well, with all that?s been happening to the flora and the fauna of the Earth, you can probably guess where he stands. My guest today, neuroscientist and MIT president emerita Susan Hockfield, is the author of the new book THE AGE OF LIVING MACHINES. And I think it?s fair to say she leans toward the Bill Gates side of the spectrum. Given what she?s seen and done in her historic career, it?s easy to understand why. The technologies she looks at in the book sit at the intersection of biology and engineering?what Hockfield calls ?Convergence 2.0?. From water filters based on cellular proteins to self-assembling batteries, they seem miraculous, even to the trained eye. And they?re densely packed with hope for human ingenuity, and for solving global problems from food shortages to climate change. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Nichol Bradford on transformative technology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If I had to choose one word to capture this moment in American (and maybe world) history, ?patience? wouldn?t be it. From every direction, everything demands our urgent attention. Everything is a ticking time bomb, or one that?s just exploded, and we?re all the poorly-trained volunteer ambulance squad. I don?t mean to dismiss the challenges we face: climate change, families being ripped apart while seeking asylum, a school shooting every other week, just to name a few. These are very real. Very urgent indeed. But in fight-or-flight mode, we make drastic, either/or decisions. We forget, as my guest today would have it, how to count to two. He?s New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and he?s the author of the new book A THOUSAND SMALL SANITIES: the Moral Adventure of Liberalism. It?s a surprising and surprisingly necessary book at this cultural moment. And it?s willing to look awkward and uncool in the eyes of Gopnik?s teenaged daughter and her generation by defending good old fashioned, pluralistic, humanistic Liberalism. Liberalism, as Gopnik puts it, is more of a rhinoceros than a unicorn?a creature of evolutionary compromise that?s not always pretty to look at. But put a saddle on it, he argues, and it gets you more or less where you need to go. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Kurt Andersen on the gun control debate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine yourself a German citizen the day after the end of World War II. Much of your city is bombed to ruins. A good part of the population is dead. The Nazi ideology that has dominated your nation for the past decade has been repudiated as definitively as Bambi in ?Bambi Meets Godzilla?. Basically, it?s the end of the world. Now consider Berlin today. It?s the biggest economy in Europe. The center of the European Union. A progressive welfare state where the old racial and nationalist resentments have been reduced to fringe movements. Still disturbingly present, but by no means mainstream. How do you get here from there? And could the pendulum ever swing back again? This is the subject of Jared Diamond?s new book, UPHEAVAL. In it, the geographer, historian and author of GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL looks to human crisis counseling for a model of how nations deal with crises both acute and gradual. For Americans like myself, troubled in this historical moment by dreams of the late Roman Empire, its a refreshingly clear-eyed look at the many different ways these things can go. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Timothy Snyder on partisan politics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Among other things, music can be medicine. Like a vaccine, it sometimes works by giving your body a little taste of the disease. Other times, of course, you just wanna dance, and James Brown might be just what you need. But the medicine songs I?m talking about are the ones that break your heart open no matter many times you hear them. And you want them to?because that?s what it feels like to be alive. Nobody knows this better than my guest today, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. Like the centuries of blues and folk songs that echo through it, transubstantiated by her voice and guitar into something almost too beautiful to bear, her music is powerful medicine. Anaïs wrote all the songs, lyrics and the book of the new (14x Tony-nominated!) Broadway musical, HADESTOWN, directed by Rachel Chavkin. It makes new again the ancient story of the singer-songwriter Orpheus and his lover Eurydice, who he follows all the way to hell, and leads most of the way back again.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I remember visiting New York when I was 18 and thinking about coming here for college. How badly I wanted to be ?from? New York. How cool, how real, how substantial that would be. What does it mean to be ?from? any place? At what point do you own the culture like you own your native language? Your very own little shard of the broken mirror that adds up to New York. Or Irkutsk. Or Tehran? Actually, you can?t own a culture: it owns you. And you can?t immerse yourself in a different culture without turning into a different person. My guest today, investigative reporter Delphine Minoui, grew up in a relatively orderly, secular France. She wanted to know what it meant to be from Iran, her grandfather?s country, under the veil of the Islamic Republic. Over a decade living there, she found out. Her book I?M WRITING YOU FROM TEHRAN is the story of that investigation and how it changed her. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Robert Sapolsky on religious faith in the brain  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well into her 90?s, my grandma Selma and I had this running conversation about the state of the world. She?d escaped Polish pogroms as a 5 year old, lived through the loss of half her relatives in World War II, and saw the founding of the UN in 1945 and NATO in 1949 as signs of a world sick of chaos and finally ready to be sensible and humane. Well, that?s not really how things turned out, is it. And I spent a lot of time trying and failing to reassure Selma that there was still hope in the world, just on a smaller, more localized scale. But what if the real problem isn?t the world but our obsessive tendency to systematize and sanitize it? My guest today, philosopher Simon Critchley, looks to the form of tragedy in theater?from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and maybe also to Breaking Bad, as a possible antidote. In his new book TRAGEDY, THE GREEKS, AND US, he shows us how tragedy works, why Plato was scared of it, and how it answers the kind of deflated idealism my grandma Selma was dealing with. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Ashton Applewhite on happiness and aging  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Faith in anything is its own special form of madness. It?s a challenge to entropy, and entropy takes no challenge lightly. If there?s any better metaphor for this struggle than trying to make a big budget movie with even a shred of integrity, I haven?t found it. On the one hand, you?ve got this impossible dream. This faith in the beautiful thing that?s supposed to emerge at at the end of the process. On the other hand, the process is a hellish sausage-making machine of studio bosses, financing, and acts of god like four days of flash flooding in the middle of your big shoot. You might as well be Don Quixote, doing battle with a windmill. What kind of masochist would put themselves through that? My guest today, Terry Gilliam, is that very masochist. And we should be grateful, because his stomach for the fight has given us movies like THE FISHER KING, BRAZIL, 12 MONKEYS and MONTY PYTHON?s THE LIFE OF BRIAN. And now, almost 30 years after his first, biblically disastrous attempt to make it, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE. Starring Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, the movie is as funny, thrilling, and unpretentiously deep as the best of Gilliam?s work. It?s also kind of like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls: a film inside a film inside a film, all of them metaphors for the holy folly of believing in anything at all. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is out April 19th in select theaters and on demand video. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Michelle Thaller on whether time is real or an illusion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was thinking this morning that It?s funny how ?humane? is the only word we have for that idea, since so much that?s inhumane has been created by us humans. When we talk about the humane treatment of animals, considering the ways we?ve treated animals for most of our history, what can we possibly mean? Anyway... It?s a fair guess that prehistoric humans spent most of their time in awe of something or other. Mountains, oceans, the Earth, the Sun. And also of big cats with the power to hunt and kill us: lions, panthers, tigers, oh my. Awe is a very special emotion, somewhere between terror and love. And while it can inspire all kinds of superstitious nonsense, the good thing about it is it keeps us humble. For humans, who can be mind-bogglingly inhumane to one another and to the natural world, a little humility goes a very long way. Once master of vast tracts of territory in Asia, wild tigers have been poached nearly to extinction. In fact, many species have gone extinct in recent history. In his documentary film TIGERLAND, director Ross Kauffman, who won an Academy Award for BORN INTO BROTHELS, follows the efforts of a dedicated few in India and Russia who are trying to save them, and with them a little sliver of much needed awe for the rest of us. And if you want to learn more about tiger conservation efforts and how to support them, visit https://projectcat.discovery.com/tigerland Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Tina Brown on why the journalism business is imploding Frans de Waal on why people and chimps throw temper tantrums Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I was a kid, there used to be a TV commercial for this series of animal videos you could order that were basically nothing but killing and sex. The tagline was ?Find out why we call them . . . ANIMALS?! ?Wait a minute . . .? I used to think: ?That?s not why we call them animals. Also, we?re animals too, aren?t we? What exactly are you trying to say?? That video series was a cynical cash grab, but it?s not too far removed from how science has approached animal research, with some very recent exceptions. Generosity? Empathy? Happiness? Reconciliation? These rich emotions and prosocial behaviors were for humans. The animal kingdom was about dominance, survival, and the right to reproduce. Hey, it was a jungle out there. My guest today, primatologist Frans de Waal, has spent decades gathering field and laboratory evidence that the line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is very blurry indeed, and that emotions are the deep connective tissue across species. His wonderful new book MAMA?S LAST HUG will help you find out, once and for all, why they call us?ANIMALS. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: David Wallace-Wells on climate change Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They say Confucius said ?Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.? I did the research. Confucius probably didn?t say that. But whoever said it was right?revenge bites back. Victor Headley?s 1992 book YARDIE launched a genre of Jamaican pulp fiction. It?s the story of a life driven and destroyed by revenge, from the Kingston gang wars of the 70?s to the international drug trade of the 80?s. And it?s the basis for Idris Elba?s directorial debut?a movie of the same name staring my guest today, actor Aml Ameen. YARDIE, the movie, captures a slice of Jamaican life and musical culture you don?t often see on screen?the clash of rival sound systems and DJs at dance parties. And as the main character, D, Aml captures the complexities of a man haunted by his brother?s murder and torn between the paths of righteousness and damnation. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Ashton Applewhite on ageism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices