Give and Take

My guest is Amy Julia Becker. Her new book White Picket Fences: Turning Toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege welcomes us into her life, from the charm of her privileged southern childhood to her adult experience in the northeast, and the denials she has faced as the mother of a child with special needs. She shows how a life behind a white picket fence can restrict even as it protects, and how it can prevent us from loving our neighbors well.

White Picket Fences invites us to respond to privilege with generosity, humility, and hope. It opens us to questions we are afraid to ask, so that we can walk further from fear and closer to love, in all its fragile and mysterious possibilities.

Special Guest: Amy Julia Becker.

My guests are Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley. They are the co-hosts of Why Theory, a podcast that brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomenon.

Special Guests: Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan.

My guest is Jackson MacKenzie. Jackson MacKenzie has helped millions of people in their struggle to understand the experience of toxic relationships. His first book, Psychopath Free, explained how to identify and survive the immediate situation. In Whole Again he guides readers on what to do next–how to fully heal from abuse in order to find love and acceptance for the self and others.

Through his close work with–and deep connection to–thousands of survivors of abusive relationships Jackson discovered that most survivors have symptoms of trauma long after the relationship is over. These range from feelings of numbness and emptiness to depression, perfectionism, substance abuse, and many more. But he’s also found that it is possible to work through these symptoms and find love on the other side, and this book shows how. Through a practice of mindfulness, introspection, and exercises using specific tools, readers learn to identify the protective self they’ve developed – and uncover the core self, so that they can finally move on to live a full and authentic life–to once again feel light, free, and whole, and ready to love again.

Special Guest: Jackson MacKenzie.

My guest is Simeon Zahl. He is University Lecturer in Christian Theology at the University of Cambridge. He recently wrote a piece in the Scottish Journal of Theology on the "use" of tradition in theology and what it reveals about the subjective life of the theologian. Building on a close analysis of Martin Luther's distinction between the ‘substance’ of a thing and its ‘use’, the article makes a theological case for the importance of attending not just to what we retrieve from tradition, but also to how and why we retrieve it. Analysis of Luther's distinction suggests (1) that the meaning of theological claims remains unexpectedly fluid until such claims have been located within the ethical drama of ‘use’, and (2) that one of the best ways to get theological traction on the dynamics of ‘use’ is to attend to the affective economies in which theological reasoning is always located. It concludes by drawing attention to specific areas in contemporary ethics where new light can be shed through attention to the dynamics of ‘use’.

Special Guest: Simeon Zahl.

My guest is Bradley W. Hart.

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege―sending mail at cost to American taxpayers―to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

Special Guest: Bradley W. Hart.

My guest is David Shields. His new book Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention, is perhaps the only genuinely original thing you have read yet about Donald Trump. It can be read in a variety of ways: as a psychological investigation of Trump, as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, as a satirical compilation of the “collected wit and wisdom of Donald Trump,” and above all as a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse—a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump. The book’s central thesis is that we have met the enemy and he is us. Who else but David Shields would make such an argument, let alone pull it off with such intelligence, brio, and wit, not to mention leaked off-air transcripts from Fox News?

Special Guest: David Shields.

My guest is Cai Emmons. Her newest book, Weather Woman, is the story of meteorologist Bronwyn Artair who discovers she has the power to change the weather.

Feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, 30-year-old Bronwyn drops out and takes a job as a TV meteorologist in Southern New Hampshire, much to the dismay of her female mentor, Diane Fenwick. When, after a year of living alone by the Swampscott River, enduring the indignities of her job, first neglected by her Boston boyfriend, then dumped, she discovers that her deep connection to the natural world has led her to an ability to affect natural forces. When she finally accepts that she really possesses this startling capability, she must then negotiate a new relationship to the world. Who will she tell? Who will believe her? How can she keep herself from being seen as a kook? And, most importantly, how will she put this new skill of hers to use? As she seeks answers to these questions, she travels to Kansas to see the tornado maverick she thought was her mentor; falls in love with Matt, the tabloid journalist who has come to investigate her; feels called to visit the fires raging out of control in Los Angeles; and eventually voyages with Matt and Dr. Fenwick to the methane fields of Siberia near the Arctic Sea. This is the story of a woman experiencing power for the first time in her life. She must come to grips with that power and test its limits. What can she do for the world without hurting it further?

Cai Emmons is the author of His Mother's Son, published by Harcourt in 2003 and The Stylist, published by HarperCollins in 2007. Her short work has appeared in Arts and Letters, Narrative Magazine, The New York Post, and Portland Monthly, among others, and she has a selection in Now Write: Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers _(Tarcher Publications, 2006). Before turning to fiction Cai wrote for theater, film, and television. Two of her plays—_Mergatroid _and _When Petulia Comes—were produced in New York theaters. She wrote for the TV show The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, and she has optioned numerous feature-length screenplays.

Special Guest: Cai Emmons.

My guest is Austin Fischer. Too often, our honest questions about faith are met with cold confidence and easy answers. But false certitude doesn't result in strong faith—it results in disillusionment, or worse, in a dogmatic, overweening faith unable to see itself or its object clearly. Even as a pastor, Austin Fischer has experienced the shadows of doubt and disillusionment. In Faith in the Shadows, he leans into perennial questions about Christianity with raw and fearless integrity. He addresses contemporary science, the problem of evil, hell, God's silence, and other issues, offering not only fresh treatments of these questions but also a fresh paradigm for thinking about doubt itself. Doubt, Fischer contends, is no reason to leave the faith. Instead, it's an invitation to a more honest faith—a faith that's not in control, but that trusts more fully in its Lord.

Austin Fischer is the lead pastor at Vista Community Church in Temple, Texas, and the author of Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed.

Special Guest: Austin Fischer.

My guest is David Quammen. In his new book The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, this nonpareil science writer explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology can change our understanding of evolution and life’s history, with powerful implications for human health and even our own human nature.

In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field—the study of life’s diversity and relatedness at the molecular level—is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. It turns out that HGT has been widespread and important. For instance, we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection—a type of HGT.

In The Tangled Tree David Quammen, “one of that rare breed of science journalists who blends exploration with a talent for synthesis and storytelling” (Nature), chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them—such as Carl Woese, the most important little-known biologist of the twentieth century; Lynn Margulis, the notorious maverick whose wild ideas about “mosaic” creatures proved to be true; and Tsutomu Wantanabe, who discovered that the scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a direct result of horizontal gene transfer, bringing the deep study of genome histories to bear on a global crisis in public health.

“Quammen is no ordinary writer. He is simply astonishing, one of that rare class of writer gifted with verve, ingenuity, humor, guts, and great heart” (Elle). Now, in The Tangled Tree, he explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life—including where we humans fit upon it. Thanks to new technologies such as CRISPR, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic composition—through sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing. The Tangled Tree is a brilliant guide to our transformed understanding of evolution, of life’s history, and of our own human nature.

David Quammen’s fifteen books include_ The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin_, and Spillover, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. He has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, Outside, and Powder, among other magazines, and is a contributing writer for National Geographic. He wrote the entire text of the May 2016 issue of National Geographic on the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem—the first time in the history of the magazine that an issue was single-authored. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, an environmental historian, along with two Russian wolfhounds and a cross-eyed cat. Visit him at DavidQuammen.com.

Special Guest: David Quammen.

My guest is Alyshia Gálvez. In her gripping new book, Eating NAFTA: Trade Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico – sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have sometimes failed, resulting in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives.

Alyshia Gálvez is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the author of Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants _and _Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care, and the Birth-weight Paradox.