The Lowdown with Ira Wood on WOMR-FM

Roughly half of American households have at least one dog. And the bond goes back a long way, evidence suggesting that dogs were viewed as family members even before the dawn of agriculture. And why not? Dogs keep us company, ease our stress, watch over the house, and give us the kind of support that never judges. But how well do we really know them? How much of what we see is the dog, and how much is just us, reading our own feelings into them? What's actually going on in those heads? And what can we do we to get through to them? Today we’re talking to Jen Golbeck, a Professor at the University of Maryland who studies some of the darker corners of the digital world but in another life is known as "the internet's dog mom." She rescues senior and special-needs golden retrievers and six of them live with her right now. She's written four books and her latest is "Think Like a Dog: How Positive Psychology Can Help Your Dog Thrive."

If you watch crime dramas on Britbox or PBS, then you definitely know the work of today’s guest, the bestselling British mystery writer, Ann Cleeves. She created DCI Vera Stanhope, the rumpled detective of Northumberland with a brilliant mind and a fierce compassion for the underdog; Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, of the Shetland Islands, who absorbs the grief and trauma of the people around him; and DI Matthew Venn, the quiet and meticulous gay detective operating in North Devon, all of whom are fan favorites with American viewers and mystery readers. She’s won numerous awards including the Diamond Dagger, crime writing's highest lifetime honor as well as the Order of the British Empire. She talks with Ira about her new novel, The Dying Light, where her ideas come from, why she switches up detectives, and the interplay between her ongoing series of books and the popular TV shows.

The idea of achieving personal happiness is big business. Books, podcasts, TV shows, workshops, health clubs, and drugs, all purporting to enable us to experience a baseline of perpetual bliss are selling one of the most persistent illusions of modern culture. In reality, biological evolution and scientific research have shown that humans were never designed to be happy all the time. Our brains developed, instead, to keep us alive and reproducing and those terrible emotional swings we all sometimes endure—anxiety, fear, sadness, and loneliness—serve to help us avoid potential threats and recalibrate our mistakes. If our ancestors felt completely satisfied and happy all the time, they’d lose the motivation to hunt, gather, build shelter, and create the relationships with other humans that kept them alive. We may not like them. We may beat ourselves up for having them. We may spend lots of money avoiding them. In his book The Opposite of Happiness, Professor George Loewenstein, a founding father of behavioral economics, explains why negative emotions play an important role in our lives.

With the daily avalanche of headlines, alerts and updates, it’s never been harder to know or easier to doubt the what’s real. And that’s no accident. For over a hundred years, big industry has been trying to shape modern culture, diet, healthcare, and consumer habits by altering public perception, often without the public realizing a campaign is even taking place. Whether its calling climate change a hoax, pushing a war to save us from weapons of mass destruction, or trotting out bogus experts to question the link between smoking and lung cancer, it’s all a part of a polluted information eco-system created by PR firms, think tanks, lobbyists, and university research. Award-winning journalist lays it all out in our discussion of her book Brought to You By.

Today we're talking about old age — seen by some as the first time in their lives they can unapologetically enjoy themselves, and by others as a living hell, especially those in bad health and with few resources. To put it bluntly, we're not good at old age in America, a country whose core values are built around youth, productivity, and extreme independence. The very notion of aging triggers anxiety in people who fear isolation and physical decline, and resentment in those who feel old people have ruined their future. The animus is so intense that most Americans fail to prepare for it, leading to crises in care, finances, and housing. In Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old, Lucy Schiller, a young writer investigates the frightening world inhabited by our elders, and one that inevitably awaits all of us.

For over 250 years, the American military has tried to define what a man is supposed to be: tough, aggressive, and dominant. Those ideals have traveled beyond the battlefield, shaping schools, politics, pop culture, and expectations of boys and men. In journalist Jasper Craven's new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don't, he examines how military academies, ROTC programs, and other institutions have popularized that narrow model of masculinity, revealing a culture built around hierarchy, discipline, and service, but also marked by hazing, misogyny, racism, violence, and the suppression of vulnerability.

The N-word is the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language. But how can a word used to dehumanize Black people be a used by the Black community to express affection, humor, and defiance? That's one complicated word. But it all gets explained by Richard Pryor's daughter, now a history professor at Smith College, who unpacks the N-word's long ugly story and talks about growing up with the man who pioneered its use on stage.

Overwhelmed by 20 years of back-to-back unsatisfying sexual relationships, queer, award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos decides to go cold turkey to see what she can find out about life, sex, and love.

Justin Kaplan was an award winning biographer, a literary icon, and one of the most famous writers of his time. To his daughter, however, he was a complete mystery. In her new memoir biography, Hester Kaplan attempts to find the father who would never even let her call him 'dad.' Where to begin? In his Pulitzer prize winning biography of Mark Twain...an iconic writer whose history of loss and emotional pain mirrors Kaplan's own.

Writer/researcher Jennie Durant spent 10 years following beekeepers as they trucked their hives across country to keep industrial farms pollinated...hives that face parasites, pesticides, punishing travel, and climate extremes. It's a tough life for these high demand service providers who pollinate one third of all the food we eat.