Starting next Monday, I’m doing another special series—this set is about addiction. You’ll hear from four distinct voices in the space, covering harm reduction, new paths to recovery, codependency, and the shape of addiction in our culture. This is just scratching the surface, but hopefully the beginning of conversations in our own lives, as addiction touches us all, in its myriad forms. While this set is focused on substance, we'll be back with more in this space—and if you want to get started, you’ll find links to two previous episodes on this theme. Dr. Gabor Maté, who spent much of his career working in the most addicted corner of North America, explains why trauma is central to understanding addiction, and Dr. Anna Lembke, explores the role of dopamine and the delicate balance between pleasure and pain. You can find those links in the show notes—and I’ll see you on Thursday for a regular episode of Pulling the Thread, and Monday for the beginning of this special episode.

SHOW NOTES:
ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”
TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”
 
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Coming Soon: Special Series on Addiction

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“I realized I think there's a few things that are in our heads that are so deep in the culture. One of them is the idea that being overweight is a sin. It goes right back to if you look at Pope Gregory I in the 6th century when he first formulates the seven deadly sins, gluttony is there, it's always depicted with some fat person who looks monstrous, overeating. And how do we think about sin? If being overweight is a sin, we think sin requires punishment before you get to redemption. The only forms of weight loss that we admire are where you suffer horribly, right? You think about The Biggest Loser, that horrid, disgusting game show. If you go through agony, if you starve yourself, if you do extreme forms of exercise that devastate your body, then we'll go, he suffered. We forgive you. Well done. We'll let you be thin now, right?”
So says Johann Hari, author of many bestselling books—Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, and Chasing the Scream. Johann is a fellow cultural psychic and his latest book—the subject of today’s conversation—bears this out. He takes on drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro in Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. He also writes about his own relationship to these drugs, as Johann is taking them. His book is a subtle and sensitive navigation of what is a tightly bound convergence of health and culture—and every page of his book anticipates and precedes the conversation. (As a disclaimer, I’m in it.) We talk about all  of it in today’s conversation, along with what would have happened if a woman had written this book first.

MORE FROM JOHANN HARI:
Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs
Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again
Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
Johann’s Website
Follow Johann on Instagram
 
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The Complexity of Weight Loss Drugs (Johann Hari)

Hi, It’s Elise, host of Pulling the Thread. Starting next Monday, I’m doing another special series—this set is about trauma, specifically trauma and the body. You’ll hear from four important voices in the space. We’re going to start with Dr. James Gordon, who works with groups all over the world who are in crisis, helping them move their experiences through the body before it gets stuck. Next, we’ll turn to the father of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine, who has a new autobiography about a horrific trauma from his childhood that led him to the formation of his practice, from which we all benefit today. Next, I’m joined by my friend Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands, the creator of the somatic abolitionist movement who works with me directly to illustrate how we all carry fear. And finally, Prentis Hemphill is taking us home: Their stunning new book, What it Takes to Heal, explores finding our calcified feelings and patterns of behavior in our bodies and navigating conflict without projecting our pain. In the show notes, you’ll find related episodes from years past, including guests like Galit Atlas, Gabor Maté, Thomas Hubl, and Richard Schwartz. I’ll see you this Thursday for a regular episode—though it’s Johann Hari, so there’s nothing regular about it.

RELATED EPISODES:
Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”
Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”
Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”
Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”
Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”
 
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Coming Soon: Special Series on Trauma

“When we can pause for a moment and rifle through all that noise to figure out what the root of the fear is, then we can be with it in a meaningful way, rather than just let it run our lives. And a little bit of fear of death and a little bit of death anxiety is totally normal, for all of us. I mean, it's that thing inside that tells you not to keep walking when you get to the edge of a cliff, and even to like drink water, you know, hydrate, stay alive. It's in us. It's in our DNA. It's rooted in there. And so the goal is never to get over it entirely, but rather to learn from it, to be with it, to not let it run our lives, but rather to let it fuel our lives.”
So says Alua Arthur, a death doula and recovering attorney who is the author of Briefly, Perfectly, Human, which is a guidebook for both how to live and also how to die. Alua is the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. In today’s conversation, we talk about what it would look like to get our death phobic culture a little closer to the end, why people fear dying, and what can be gained when we recognize the priceless gifts that come when our lives come to a close. Let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM ALUA ARTHUR:
Briefly, Perfectly, Human
Follow Alua on Instagram
Going with Grace Website

RELATED EPISODES:
B.J. Miller: “Struggle is Real—Suffering is Optional”
Roshi Joan Halifax: “Standing at the Edge”
Frank Oswaseski: “Accepting the Invitation”
 
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Loving the End (Alua Arthur)

“But one thing the whole “Karen” thing did, which I think was very good, was that it pointed out the existence of spaces Ostensibly open to everyone, but not, and then patrolled often by white women saying you don't belong here. And she got a name, and people with that name wince and rightfully so, but without that wince-worthy kind of situation, I don't think large numbers of Americans would realize that there really is a sort of silent apartheid in our public spaces.”
So says Nell Irvin Painter, who Henry Louis Gates Jr. refers to as “one of the towering Black intellects of the last century.” I first heard Nell on Scene On Radio with John Biewen in his series “Seeing White,” and have been biding my time for an opportunity to interview her ever since. I got my chance, with her latest endeavor, an essay collection called I Just Keep Talking, which is a collection of her writing from the past several decades, about art, politics, and race along with many pieces of her own art.
Now retired, Nell is a New York Times bestseller and was the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Princeton, where she published many, many books about the evolution of Black political thought and race as a concept. She’s one of the preeminent scholars on the life of Sojourner Truth—and is working on another book about her right now—and is also the author of The History of White People. Today’s conversation touches on everything from Sojourner Truth—and how she actually never said “Ain’t I a Woman?”—to the capitalization of Black and White. 

MORE FROM NELL IRVIN PAINTER:
I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays
The History of White People
Old in Art School
Nell’s Website
Follow Nell on Instagram
Scene On Radio: “Seeing White”
 
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On Telling The Truth (Nell Irvin Painter)

“What is that instinct that might be asking me to do something really unadvisable or radical or leap outside the bounds of my own life? And that's the space by which I think we move forward in life. And that's the space in which I think we move forward honestly on the page and in writing. And I tell people, you know, what is it that you want to explore in your writing? Like the page is this beautiful opportunity to start taking some big risks, whether it's persona poetry, where you're literally writing in a different voice, or you're naming something that cannot be held in any other space available to you, or you're testing out just an idea that you're not ready to say out loud. The page is this really beautiful field that gives us a lot of courage to then apply that, I think, to our actual lives.”
So says Joy Sullivan, the author of Instructions for Traveling West, which is a guidebook of poems for letting your life fall apart and remake itself as something new. In our conversation, Joy and I explore her early life: how she grew up in Africa, the child of medical missionaries, bound tight by evangelicalism and purity culture—and her relationship to religion and faith now that she’s left that behind. Eve is a central figure in Joy’s poetry, and you will hear why. 

MORE FROM JOY SULLIVAN:
Instructions for Traveling West
Follow Joy on Instagram
Joy’s Newsletter, “Necessary Salt”
Joy’s Website
 
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Coming Soon: Special Series on Addiction

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