Public Intellectual

Amazon's PR has been having a temper tantrum this past week on Twitter, going after politicians and random people online for daring to criticize the working conditions at their facilities. Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One Click America, shows that while the working conditions are bad and low paid, that is only part of the story about how Amazon is changing work, pay, and entire cities.

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With a new scandalous biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new Ripley adaptation on the way for Showtime, we can't get enough of loving and hating our mistress of sociopaths and Americans (same thing). Novelist and journalist Lucie Elven (The Weak Spot) joins Jessa to discuss our "Sapphic Dennis the Menace", why we need to pathologize all of our eccentrics, and the still underappreciated and hard work of those glorious novels.

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Diversity is seen as an unalloyed good. We have committees, books, departments, specialists all devoted to increasing diversity, but what does anyone mean by that word. And why are we obsessed with it, in a time of globalization and homogenization? Russell Jacoby is the author of On Diversity, and we discuss the history of this vague buzzword and why Americans fetishize the thing they are destroying.

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If we can pinpoint a moment when the internet got truly bad, I think it is when Tumblr removed all of the porn. It was clear that diversity, freedom, and creativity did not matter as much as money to anyone running the platforms. Ana Valens, author of Tumblr Porn, joins Jessa to discuss nostalgia for the early internet, the new hostility to adult content, and the importance of letting things be wild.

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With people losing homes and jobs and the government taking a hands off approach, it is a chance to rethink our response to the last economic crisis of 2008. Pavlos Roufos, the author of A Happy Future is a Thing of the Past, joins Jessa to discuss the austerity measures taken in Greece and the catastrophic results they had, while also commenting on the stories used to explain why this economic punishment was for the best.

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With the true crime boom, we have been awash in stories of dead women and girls. And while those stories have been used to romanticize the police and advocate for "safety" measures that just end in more surveillance and oppression, occasionally these stories show us just how broken our institutions from justice to politics have become. Sonia Faleiro is the author of the new book The Good Girls about two teenage girls found hanging from a tree in their family's orchard, but as you will learn from this episode, the story is much larger than that.

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"The opposite of nostalgia is truth." So writes Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in her new book The Freezer Door. We discuss how nostalgia fuels gentrification, why our streaming services are full of shows set in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and how Patti Smith's "Just Kids" inspired suburbanites to flood into New York City.

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There is a widening gap between the aims of feminism and the lived experience of women. Angela McRobbie, as a historian of women's magazines, is in a better position than most to see the lie of gender meritocracy and aggressive "have it all" narratives. She joins Jessa to discuss whether the pandemic is a crisis for feminism, and whether class consciousness can be reintroduced to the movement.

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With such a rich history of film tackling sexual violence in horror, exploitation, and other genre films -- and doing it well -- why when we try to take it seriously does it come out all wrong. Vincent Chabany-Douarre returns to PI to discuss the disappointing Promising Young Woman, why our queen Gillian Flynn must return to us, and remind us that it's okay to be the villain sometimes.

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Americans have very good reasons to be angry. Hundreds of thousands of us are dead from the pandemic, stimulus checks are nowhere to be seen, our government serves the very rich and few else. So why are we upset about fictions like child slavery and blood drinking Satanists? Mark Blyth is one of the authors of Angrynomics, and he speaks with Jessa about moral outrage, the failures of representation, and whether Biden is as progressive as FDR.

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