Public Intellectual

For all of the think pieces about why Millennials aren't having as many children as previous generations -- maybe they are too selfish blah blah blah -- very few ever hit on how very difficult it is to raise a child in America right now, where every resource from decent schooling and child care, must not only be sought out but competed for. Jessa speaks with Maxine Eichner, author of The Free Market Family, about how America started to prioritize the market over the family, and asks an essential question: what is the economy for?

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Tiger King was a sensation, so a million words had to be spilled in response. Most of those words accused the Netflix docuseries itself of being immoral, misogynistic, exploitative. Rather than just depicting immorality, misogyny, and exploitation. Why do we look to our entertainment to teach us moral lessons, why do we need so many strong female heroines, why do we need our filmmakers, writers, and artists to talk to us like we are children? Cultural critic and poet Eileen G'Sell joins Jessa Crispin to discuss.

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Jason Pine (The Alchemy of Meth) joins Jessa to discuss the invisibility of America's drug crisis. Pine spent a year in Missouri to research his book on the overwhelming presence of meth, an extremely common and yet almost entirely invisible issue. But this is also a conversation about creativity under late capitalism, the health care crisis, and exploitation vs representation.

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The shelter in place and work from home orders are straining domestic spaces, and it feels like the most professional and public feminist speakers are not up the task of imagining how to respond. What is the "feminist angle" on the coronavirus? It's not just that men need to do more housework. We need to re-imagine the domestic sphere now that this crisis is showing its weaknesses. Breanne Fahs (Firebrand Feminism, Burn It Down) joins Jessa to discuss material feminism and the revolutionary power of divorce.

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Anne Case and Angus Deaton released Deaths of Despair this year, the culmination of their study into how your education level determines how much pain you'll experience in life, how long you'll live, and your ability to fend off addiction and despair. Basically: if you lack a college degree, you will die sooner and live harder. Anne Case joins Jessa to discuss these "forgotten" men and women.

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Jim Behrle reports from the tumbleweeds of Time Square to discuss eco-fascism, why the bees should just take over, how to get through this sheltering-in-place with arts and crafts, and the respective strengths of our wills to live.

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Joe Kennedy, author of Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness, swings by to talk about the parallels between the UK and US elections, how everyone loves to be pandered to, why the "forgotten" white working class voter is more complex than the politician pretending to be one, why American politicians absolutely must be photographed eating corn dogs, animosity toward the cosmopolitan class, and James Bond.

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We're releasing this bonus episode from the Patreon vaults. Come subscribe to our Patreon and get content like this all the time! (Or, you know, on a semi-regular basis, we have jobs and so on.) Regular bonus episode co-host Margaret Howie joins Jessa to talk about the outspoken career of Sinead O'Connor, and how she has paid the price for that outspokenness.

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Why are celebrity crushes so embarrassing? Critic and editor Jennifer Hodgson joins Jessa to overintellectualize their shared crush on Bill Hader, to think about female desire, how celebrity crushes are labor, and why we suddenly find ourselves attracted to a middle aged father of three from the American midwest.

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JoAnn Wypijewski joins Jessa to discuss the Weinstein trial and conviction, after writing about it for the Nation. We discuss how trials for sexual violence have changed rapidly over the last few years, how the media gave a misleading account of how the trial was going, and why the sexual predator has such a fairy tale-like quality in our culture.

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Support this podcast: http://patreon.com/publicintellectual