Public Intellectual

Professor of Law at York University Heidi Matthews has been writing about "creepiness," particularly as it relates to gender relations. What causes a man to be labeled a creep? What do we do about the creeps in our neighborhood? Why, with all we know about police violence, do we turn to the cops when we encounter someone we consider creepy? Are we just trying to increase marginalization on already marginalized populations, like the homeless, the mentally ill, the poor, and the neurodivergent? We discuss all this and uh also Joker.

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Jessa talks to writer Susan Ellen Finlay (Objektophilia) about the difficult position of small, independent publishers in today's cultural climate.

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With all of the publishing scandals going on, I thought it made sense to re-up this conversation with novelist John Biguenet. Why is the standard narrative in American writing the narrative of victimhood? How do we move past seeing creativity as only a form of personal expression?

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Richard Davies is the author of "Extreme Economies: And What They Can Teach Us." He visits places like Santiago, Chile to examine income inequality, Akita, Japan to see what happens when a population starts to age dramatically, refugee camps and prisons, and environmental disaster zones. What causes resiliency? How does a city or a community create a shared project?

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Gerald Russello, the editor of University Bookman and conservative intellectual, joins Jessa Crispin to talk about the growing political divide in American politics, and how the left is just as annoying as the right. Support this podcast: patreon.com/publicintellectual

If the year in film went the way film critics said it was, Joker would have caused an incel uprising and Little Women would have solved misogyny. This was a year that hyperbole and Think Pieces took over film criticism, with every film being touted as the Most Important Ever or the Best Ever or You Will Definitely Die If You See This in the Theater. Jacobin film critic and co-host of the podcast Filmsuck Eileen Jones joins Jessa Crispin to discuss the year that was in film, the year that definitely wasn't, and why we are both firmly Against Meryl Streep.

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Poet and well known curmudgeon Jim Behrle talks to Jessa about this season of cheer, hope, and friendliness and how terrible all of that is. You don't have to be grateful, you don't have to list your accomplishments like a trained puppy, you can feel bad about the world.

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The legendary cult expert and psychologist Robert Jay Lifton joins Public Intellectual to explain what the totalitarian experience shares with the religious cult, how Trump functions as a cult leader, and why deprogramming via intervention and logical debate never works. His most recent work is Losing Reality, and is an overview into cultist thought.

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Twitter is full of Nazis, Facebook is facilitating genocide, YouTube is, well, also full of Nazis but also child pornography. How did social media get here, or was it always this bad? And why are we all still on it? And what the hell is wrong with Mark Zuckerberg? Jacob Silverman is the author of Terms of Service, and he joins us to discuss.

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Jessa talks to Brandon Scott, currently the City Council President and hopefully the next mayor of Baltimore, to talk about how the language of politics can become the language of exclusion. We discuss how to treat gun violence as a public health issue, why we should lower the voting age to 16, and how to think about the prison abolition movement in a city like Baltimore.

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