Podcasts Can Be Good

I had to do some painting again, which means... podcasts.

Today's episode of This American Life is called Tell Me I'm Fat, much of it with writer Lindy West (creator of Shrill). I didn't hear the whole thing (I'm sure it's all great), but the segment by Elna Baker called It's a Small World After All is shattering. I sat in the car and listened to the last third of it, and plan to go back and here the whole hour of content on either side of it.

I also listened to two episodes of Why Is This Happening. (Looking through my past posts, it looks as though I don't talk about this podcast nearly enough, probably because I know how boring it is to hear people talk about how great podcasts are. But really, this one is always worth listening to, and it's only once a week.)

First: Dying of Whiteness with Jonathan Metzl, author of a book by the same name. It's pretty well known that life expectancy in America has gone down three years in a row, and that the decline is led by deaths among white men. Metzl has been studying white people in places like Tennessee (where he lives now) and Missouri (where he's from) and found that policies that maintain the power of whiteness are shortening the lives of the white Americans who vote for them. In the book, he focuses on four policy areas: gun rights, Medicaid expansion under the ACA, funding education, and tax cuts.

Second: Are We a Democracy? with Astra Taylor, maker of a documentary called What Is Democracy? It sounds like a film to see, and the conversation about what we mean by the term and what all of its inherent tensions are is one I'll be thinking of and referring to.