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This Plus That
This Plus That episodes
- Queer Memoir + Rhizomes with Serena Chopra
Serena Chopra (she/her) is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker, and a visual and performance artist. She has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, and a Fulbright Scholar. She has two books, This Human (Coconut Books 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, Dogana//Chapti (Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, and Seattle Queer Film Festival), and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper's Bazaar (India) as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” She has recent publications in Sink, Foglifter, Matters of Feminist Practice, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Central Avenue Publishing). In October 2020, Serena co-directed No Place to Go, an artist-made queer haunted house with Kate Speer and Frankie Toan. Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University.
In this episode, Serena and Brandi talk about the intersections of Queer Memoir + Rhizomes, including:
- The way Serena isn’t just holding contradictions now but sees contradictions as “the situation of life.”
- How queer narratives don’t have to be “legible” or easily consumable.
- In what ways we’ve repressed our visionary intuitions in order to fit inside of institutions.
- The difference between an “arborescent” version of intelligence, and a “rhizomatic” version of intelligence.
- Tarot reading as a blueprint of our subconscious and engaging in reading and writing as a form of “bibliomancy.”
- The refusal to be contained by the capitalist and colonialist economies that create binaries and margins that oppress and harm us.
- The way you’re “supposed to be an academic” filters into one’s psyche.
- Growing up in ballet and the struggle to let go, which led Serena to poetry and modern dance.
- The best advice Serena has ever had, which came from a dance teacher.
- How much extra work it takes BIPOC, queer, female-identified writers and artists to be artists.
Listeners can find Serena’s work on her website, serenachopra.com, and on Instagram @serena_rose_chopra.
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Check out the Website: thisplusthat.comMusic: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital1 hr 3 min - Love + Death with Andreas Weber
Dr. Andreas Weber (he/him) is a Berlin-based book and magazine writer and independent scholar. He has degrees in Marine Biology and Cultural Studies, having collaborated with theoretical biologist Francisco Varela in Paris.
Andreas' work focuses on a reevaluation of our understanding of the living. He proposes to understand organisms as subjects, and hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, Andreas holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimization machine, but rather as an ecosystem that transforms mutual sharing of matter and energy in a deepened meaning.
Andreas has contributed extensively to developing the concept of enlivenment in recent years, notably through his essay Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (Berlin 2013; published in expanded and rewritten form as Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene, MIT Press, 2019). He has also put forth his ideas in several books and is contributing to major German magazines and journals, such as GEO, National Geographic, Die Zeit and Greenpeace Magazine. Weber teaches at Leuphana University and at the University of Fine Arts, Berlin. He is also part of the staff of und.Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability, Berlin, which is devoted to link the fields of art and culture with the field of sustainability, and to develop exemplary models of productive exchange; and was named the 2016 Jonathan Rowe Commons Fellow, Mesa Refuge, Point Reyes, CA, USA.
In this episode, Andreas and Brandi talk about the intersections of Love + Death, including:
- How one of his books helped Brandi fall back in love with the world a handful of years ago.
- The first time they both remember death becoming real in our lives, not just conceptually, but somatically.
- How our world is in a century-long struggle against death.
- The physical experience of aliveness.
- What biology has to say about purpose.
- How you can’t just be concerned with your own aliveness at the expense of others and your community.
- What fermentation and composting have to do with community and healthy ecosystems.
- How Andreas is trying to make himself more edible.
- How he’s leaning further into more animistic thinking.
- The challenge of institutionalizing these ideas at scale. Or, how we might “organize” aliveness.
- How Dr. Weber practices love in his life practically.
Listeners can find Dr. Andreas Weber at his website, https://biologyofwonder.org/ and on Twitter @biopoetics.
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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital1 hr 54 min - Inefficiency + Joy with David Epstein
David Epstein (he/him) is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Range and The Sports Gene. He was previously an investigative reporter at ProPublica, where his work spanned from drug cartels to poor practices in scientific research. Prior to that, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism, and has lived aboard a ship in the Pacific Ocean, and in a tent in the Arctic. His TED Talks have been viewed more than 10 million times, and he’s formerly the host of Slate’s popular “How To!” podcast.
Like a love letter to generalists, backed by mounds of scientific data, his second book, Range, makes the case that delayed selection is actually better for development. When you “sample” many different things, taking your time to find what really suits you, you might spend years looking “lazy” or “directionless” from the outside, but there’s a good chance you’ll find greater satisfaction when you finally find “your thing.” In fact, in combining all of your varied experiences, you might also fill a unique niche in the world—one no one else has ever considered.
And while the world might see this process as very “inefficient”—a hated behavior in an industrialized world—David and Brandi talk about how inefficiency is actually quite connected to the concept of “match fit,” which is really just another way to say “joy.”
Plus:
- Vincent van Gogh, who didn’t come into painting until very late in his life, after years of trying many, many different things and often seeming a “failure.”
- The first time David realized that normalizing life as a generalist might be incredibly cathartic, and why he thinks “Range” continues to elicit such an emotional response.
- David’s own path as a generalist and how his “average” skills in one domain, when applied to something seemingly unrelated, suddenly became very unique.
- How switching so many jobs in your life can be seen as “inefficient,” but often leads you to a better “match fit.”
- Why we’ve traditionally cared so much about efficiency, but what society actually calls for now.
- How things like school debt can keep us in jobs that aren’t a good fit for us, and what the “sunk-cost fallacy” has to do with it.
- How humans are actually more suited to late-blooming than any other organism.
- How David practices inefficiency to keep himself joyful and curious.
- The people currently inspiring David when it comes to “connecting the seemingly un-connectable.”
Listeners can find David Epstein at his website https://davidepstein.com/ (please do sign up for his newsletter there—you’ll get instant goodies to dive into) and on Twitter @DavidEpstein.
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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital1 hr 17 min - Trauma + Curiosity with Tyler Thrasher
Tyler Thrasher (he/him) is an artist, scientist, and plant lover. With an undying love for nature and its respective curiosities, there are few things his brain isn’t obsessing over. Between his pursuits to crystallize the world, opalize everything, and hunt down some of the realm’s most unique plants, his passion to combine art and science every step of the way is his fire and fuel. Chances are, if you catch Tyler at a party, he’ll talk your ear off about exploring caves, growing minerals in his lab, playing Dungeons and Dragons, hybridizing new plants, electronic music, grappling with and overcoming trauma, and just how amazingly beautiful and mysterious this whole wide universe is. When he's not spending time crystallizing insects, you can find him in the greenhouse hybridizing plants, cultivating mutations, or screaming into the existential void.
But behind all of his online plant rants, dressing up like monster, and pretending to be a fern on social media, Tyler Thrasher has been through more than his fair share of pain. After a childhood of abuse and the sudden and shocking fire that destroyed Tyler and his wife Molly’s home a few years ago, you’d think Tyler might have given up on the inherent goodness of existence. But a wild outpouring of generosity that helped his family survive tragedy turned his perspective completely around.
In this episode, Tyler and Brandi talk about the intersections of Trauma + Curiosity, including:
- How art and curiosity and sleeping in a greenhouse as a child was whimsical, but more often served as an escape from trauma Tyler was facing at home.
- How going through trauma doesn’t mean you’ll never heal.
- How Tyler sees his work as a dance back and forth with the universe—which is really just himself—where he gives a little and then the universe gives a little.
- How systems teach us racism and all of the micro aggressions that feed into Tyler’s desire to give and support Black causes.
- Not needing a degree to do science or call yourself a scientist.
- Social anxiety, mental health, and how to cope.
- Jealousy and scarcity in the art world.
- Being exactly who you are and taking up space because there will always be people who hate what you do.
Listeners can find Tyler Thrasher at his website, https://tylerthrasher.com/ and on Instagram @tylerthrasherart.
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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital1 hr 16 min - Neuroscience + Dance with Devika Nair
Devika Nair (she/her) manages a large translational brain tumor project at UCSF. Their goal is to better predict tumor transformation to higher grades and differentiate between tumor and treatment effects in primary gliomas using advanced MR imaging techniques. Outside of research, she helps direct a science podcast group called Carry the One Radio whose mission is to ignite scientific curiosity. She also takes classes in and performs Indian classical dance, which has informed her understanding of her field of study—neuroscience.
As a clinical researcher, she finds herself operating between brilliant colleagues with specialized training in high-level physics who run the MRI machines at a tumor research facility and the clinicians who make important decisions based on the lab’s findings. One day, though, an unexpected health scare took her out from behind the glass to inside of the very MRI machines she asks patients to enter every day. Suddenly, what was simply a professional passion—using story to communicate science to the general public—became a personal mission. She wasn’t sure how to explain the way MRIs work that might actually be interesting to other people, until she realized that the movement of hydrogen protons, which is how images wind up on film, look just like the movements of the Indian classical dance she learned as a child.
In this episode, Devika and Brandi talk about the intersections of Neuroscience + Dance, including:
- The amazing story of how we met.
- Her health scare and how she applied her research skills to lend herself a sense of control in the midst of a scary situation.
- Growing up with an artistic mom that inspired her early dance training and who continues to teach today.
- And, her fascination for what art and science have in common, and how they can be used to encourage curiosity and seeing different perspectives outside of your own.
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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital1 hr 10 min - Environment + Genre with Shannon Davies Mancus
Shannon Davies Mancus’s (she/her) undergraduate and first degree was in musical theatre, and she has maintained a performance praxis through her second career as an academic. She is currently an Associate Teaching Professor and coordinator of the Nature and Human Values program at the Colorado School of Mines. Her work can be found in publications such as Performing Ethos, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-first Century Feminist Theory. Her work focuses on the political performativity of environmentalist media in visual and popular culture. She loves traveling, community, and sharing exciting ideas.
Her obsession with pop culture runs deep, but mostly focuses influences the narratives that tell us there’s only one “right” way to be an environmentalist, and how we can move beyond that script to reach new and better stories. Not just so we can “appear” a new way, but so that we might actually relate to one other more and begin to truly shift our environmental future.
That’s part of what she and Brandi talk about on this official first interview episode of the show, on the intersections of Environment + Genre, plus:
- What scripts and genres have to do with the media we consume and how we behave in the world.
- The power of stories and something called “the information deficit model,” an idea from science communication.
- Shanon’s story of living through 9/11 and the film that helped her see movies as a form of artwork that can create a public sphere for difficult dialogue.
- Why she loves studying popular imagination around witches and how they connect to our sense of environmental doom.
- How she’s weaved together all of the seemingly disparate things in her career into where she is now, but how that only became clear in hindsight.
- And, why she loves teaching unexpected things to math and engineering students.
Listeners can find Shannon Davies Mancus on Twitter @shannonmancus and on Instagram @shannonmancus.
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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital1 hr 12 min - Why This Matters to Me
The description of “This Plus That” is “a show about connecting the seemingly un-connectable and why it matters.” Most episodes will center on the combination of two seemingly unrelated things, where I'll interview guests about how they've built lives at the center of all their wild interests, but I wanted to start out with why this matters to me. It’s deeply personal.
So personal that a lot of the audio for this first episode was recorded in private messages I sent to friends, never expecting to make them public to the world. The rest happened knowing I'd be "in conversation" with you. But it's all uncut, entirely unscripted, and recorded in moments of clarity and excitement.
Some of what I discuss:
- A run-down of my last couple of years and how I wound up here, including wanting to become an astronaut at age 36.
- My love paradox in others, but not as much in myself.
- A running family story that told me I didn’t “belong in the sciences.”
- What quantum physics started to teach me about holding my own complexities.
- Our struggle to hold conflict in the midst of queer and organizing communities.
- The way we build new “religions” after leaving the dogma of oppressive environments.
- And, how contradictions are the nature of the universe.
If even a little bit of it resonates with you, I'm so glad you're here.
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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital1 hr 9 min - This Plus That Trailer
It's This Plus That, and it's finally here! In the show's official trailer, Brandi talks about who the podcast is for and what you can expect in each episode. She also gives quick insights into why this kind of "paradoxical" thinking is so important. The official show launches on Tuesday, September, 14th 2021, and will release every other week after that.
3 min
About This Plus That
From the publisher's feed
Struggle to weave together all of the seemingly un-connectable parts of yourself? Tired of feeling like you can only ever be one thing? Or, sick of being told there’s only one “right” way to be, so…
you feel like you have to cut off pieces of yourself in order to belong? This podcast is for you. This Plus That is a show about connecting the seemingly un-connectable and why it matters—everything from Neuroscience + Dance, to Fractals + Free Will, to Love + Death. Join host Brandi Stanley as she interviews people creating lives at the intersections of all their interests and complexities—even and especially if those interests are paradoxical.