Public Intellectual

Susan Lepselter is the author of The Resonance of Unseen Things. She joins Jessa to discuss how some stories seem to become contagious, how the stories we tell actually shape how we experience trauma, and why conspiracy theories won’t stay dead.

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The ninth part in a series about the films of Paul Verhoeven and David Fincher. Elle is a film about power dynamics, the way men treat women, sexual desire, violation -- and it presents different ways of thinking about trauma. So for this episode, she invites two straight men, Joe Cilio & Alex Ramsey, onto the show to discuss what they thought Elle was about.

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Jessa sits down with Talja Blokland, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin and the author of "Community as Urban Practice."

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Jessa sits down with journalist and poet Dominika Dyminska. They spoke about the men who rule the left, why the left has such a limited vision of the future, and why the future will almost necessarily have to come out of feminism.

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Jessa sits down with professor Kocku von Stuckrad. In his book, The Scientification of Religion, Stuckrad talks about the process of identity formation through strategies of distancing: Religion understands itself as being not science, not just as being religion, and vice versa. Together, they discuss the intermingling of religion and science, and the revival of astrology.

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There are consequences to travel. From the environmental impact of international flights, to massive displacement in trendy neighborhoods for air bnb vacation rentals, to unfair distribution of tourist dollars, and so on. But travel writing has never been great at dealing with the ethical or moral questions of travel.

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There is always a myth about a city that may or may not line up with the reality. For Berlin, the myth is that it’s incredibly cheap, with endless resources, and everyone there is creative. But one myth about Berlin that it does live up to is that it offers a temporary home to the rootless and the restless. Jessa sits down with C.C. O'Hanlon.

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The Love Witch is the feminine version of Fight Club. Not only in the sense of it being an exploration of the extreme expressions of gender and all the societal pressures to perform that gender -- but also because the people who created both The Love Witch (Anna Biller) and Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk) seem to have no idea what their own creations are actually about.

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In Suzanne Leonard's new book, Wife Inc, she looks at the pop culture industry based around the idea of what a wife is. From reality television, to films and so on, we learn how to make ourselves into marriage material. The wife industry is enormous, but meanwhile, fewer and fewer women are marrying, and those who do are already the most privileged of the population.

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We’ve already done an episode about Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, but there are a few more things left to say: in particular, the radical optimism of its ending. To be able to find optimism in a movie about rape and violation is kind of extraordinary — so Jessa and her friend Marta Peirano re-watched the film in Madrid, drank some wine, and recorded this discussion for you.

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