Public Intellectual

With the death of RBG and the Supreme Court once again in a position to overturn Roe v Wade, journalist Alissa Quart and Jessa attempt to complicate the abortion debate. We discuss how the pro-choice movement often fails to take care of women, how legality does not mean accessibility, and why pro-lifers are not your enemy.

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Just a few days before the Pope release a barnfire of an encyclical about the evils of neoliberalism and capitalism, Eugene McCarraher (The Enchantments of Mammon) and Jessa discussed the tangled relationship between Christians and the Left, the soulfulness of anarchism, and how capitalism became the religion of modernity.

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In his new memoir Inventory, Darran Anderson recounts growing up in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the 80s, amid all of the humiliation and intimidation by police and an occupying army, the polarized politics, and the roughness of working class life. He talks with Jessa about the inheritance of anger and violence, and what such an immersive experience tells us about how to live today.

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We continue our series on the stress the pandemic is putting on domestic spaces. Jen Howard, the author of the new book Clutter, talks to Jessa about pandemic hoarding, why Marie Kondo drives some (mostly white upper class people) absolutely insane, how we imbue the material world with meaning it doesn't actually deserve, and what to do with all of our stuff.

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Mark Arax (The Dreamt Land) is one of our finest chroniclers of the American West, and he joins Jessa to discuss the wildfires, the mismanagement of resources like water, soil, and timber, and why California is our land of extremes.

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Now that Samuel Beckett's "Fail Better" is a motivational poster in some Silicon Valley bro's office, what is the value of art in the neoliberal age? And is it possible to still create art -- rather than just Content -- with the pressures of branding, the anxiety of audience, and the crippling of the industry? Jessa talks to Marianna Ritchey about her book Composing Capital and the state of the arts on the market.

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What is hiding behind your Instagram photos of perfectly baked sourdough bread? First of all, all of the labor and time and knowledge it took to create it. Second, the strained and in some places broken food supply chain during the pandemic. And third, all of the money and countertop space that some have but most do not. Cookbook writer and teacher Jaimee Edwards joins Jessa to discuss how domesticity became a status symbol and a luxury, and how to restore the transmission of domestic knowledge.

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Natalie Alford, a singer songwriter out of Chicago, started to feel sick in the spring. Now four months later, she's still sick. As a part of our conversation about the how health care in this country is going to have to change post-pandemic, I thought a one-on-one with someone hit with debilitating and longterm symptoms from covid would help illuminate what we're up against.

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Often when we discuss health care reform, we're talking about issues of accessibility and affordability. It is assumed American medicine is great, top notch. The only problem is how expensive it is and how broken the insurance networks are. But patients with pain, headaches, chronic illness are too often not only not cared for in American medicine but mistreated. Cassie Thornton talks with Jessa about what a new form of care might look like, and how the pandemic and its long haulers are making this conversation urgent. (Just a note: there were connection issues, audio is a little janky at points.)

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Do we and should we have free speech or not? Why can't anyone agree on that? Bosnian-born writer Elvis Bego joins Jessa to discuss how free speech went from being a leftist issue to a conservative talking point, the dangerous sentimentality of America, and why a media saturated with one demographic -- class-based, not race -- is the real issue.

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