This week's guest is Helen Pluckrose, co-author of the bestselling Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody and founder of Counterweight, an organisation which advocates for liberal approaches to social justice. In this episode, Helen discusses her unorthodox route to becoming a public intellectual, why she decided to set up Counterweight and how her thinking has evolved over time. We have a frank and - in places - challenging discussion on our changing attitudes to feminism, critical social justice, and freedom of expression.

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This week's episode features author and literary agent Catherine Cho on her experience with postpartum psychosis and the incredibly beautiful book that she wrote about it - Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness. We discuss mental health and illness, the sometimes thin difference between sanity and insanity, the brittleness of our relationship with reality, and the way we consider people with mental health issues. Catherine is refreshingly honest in discussing being institutionalised after the birth of her son and the very deliberate work she undertook to develop her relationship with him, as well as her choice to expand her family again and face the fifty/fifty risk of experiencing psychosis once more in order to bring her daughter into the world.

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Writer Sarah Maria Griffin is this week's guest on Second Self. Author of Other Words for Smoke, Spare and Found Parts, and Not Lost: A Story About Leaving Home, Sarah is a unique writer and a true individual. We discussed choosing the less trodden path in life, authenticity, retroactively empathising with our dickish teenage selves, making art, changing your mind and the philosophical power of science fiction. If you enjoy the podcast and want to support it, consider subscribing via Patreon at www.patreon.com/lkennedy

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After a week's break from Second Self, we are back for episode four with writer and public intellectual Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas is the author of Self Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, and Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd. He is also a columnist at Harper's and a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Magazine. We discuss Thomas' re-evaluation of his own racial identity and race as a form of collective identity, defying incentives to conform in order to live authentically as an individual, the truly strange cultural moment in which we find ourselves, and the influence of philosophy on his work and ideas.

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Episode three's guest is author Tom Cox. We discuss Tom's choice to leave legacy media to create the writing he's passionate about (he did it before it was cool), newspapers, publishing and media, class identity and creativity. Tom talks through his unusual and inspiring trajectory as a writer, navigating failure, what he's learned along the way, his upcoming debut novel, and the benefits of year-round sea swimming.

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Second Self episode two features author, broadcaster and academic Emma Dabiri. We discuss race, identity, taking a radical approach to a world that is anything but, and her book What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition. We also discuss change, Irishness, and we settle the question of the best butter ever made. As if it were really a question.

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We kick off Second Self with a conversation with my fellow Limerickian, author, artist and podcaster Blindboy Boatclub. In this episode we discuss Limerick (the good, bad and bizarre), the strangest city in Ireland (possibly the world), where we both grew up and where his surrealist outlook thrives, mental health, Jean Baudrillard, art, and living authentically while wearing a bag on your head.

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Welcome to Second Self, the podcast about the self we inherit, and the one we create.

In this series, I’ll be having conversations with interesting people about the important ideas they’ve adopted and the ones they’ve moved away from through their lives. Though we live in an increasingly polarised landscape where ‘picking a side’ and digging your heels in is incentivised, Second Self is about intellectual curiosity, constructing your own individual identity, and when you need to, changing your mind.

In this introductory minisode, I introduce the logic behind Second Self.

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