Every time we make a choice, our minds go through an elaborate process most of us never even notice. We’re influenced by subtle aspects of the way the choice is presented that often make the difference between a good decision and a bad one. How do we overcome the common faults in our decision-making and enable better choices in any situation? This question and more are answered in our guests latest book, The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters. Eric Johnson is a faculty member at t...
Jun 06, 2023•57 min•Ep. 25
Just when the world thought Oscar Pistorius’ meteoric rise to Olympic glory and international celebrity had terminated abysmally in prison, Brent Willock’s scientific perspective reopens this gripping narrative for an astonishing re-view. Olympian Oscar Pistorius’ spectacular assent to fame ground to a screeching halt in the wee hours of Valentine’s Day, 2013. Hearing a sound emanating from his bathroom, he grabbed his pistol and he stumbled to the washroom, screaming at the intruders to leave. ...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 201
In a world of either/or tradeoffs, it sometimes pays to explore the possibility of and/or. By changing our perspective and embracing paradox, we can see possibilities that were obscured by our tendency to see only tradeoffs. Wendy K. Smith is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Business at the University of Delaware and co-founder of the Women's Leadership Initiative. She is also an author, and with Marianne Lewis, their latest book is Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your To...
Jun 03, 2023•54 min•Ep. 23
In 1896 the British physician William Pringle Morgan published an account of “Percy,” a “bright and intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no way inferior to others of his age.” Yet, in spite of his intelligence, Percy had great difficulty learning to read. Percy was one of the first children to be described as having word-blindness, better known today as dyslexia. In Dyslexia: A History (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Philip Kirby and Margaret Snowling chart a journey that begins with Victorian med...
Jun 03, 2023•15 min•Ep. 19
In this interview, Anna Fishzon, co editor with Emma Lieber on The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), discusses her thinking about temporality, queer theory, psychoanalysis and childhood with Tracy Morgan who concomitantly calls time on her own work with the podcast. Together these two friends and colleagues and former hosts, laugh, maybe choke up a bit, reminisce and riff. Morgan, in a first in her over thirteen years as host and ...
Jun 03, 2023•55 min•Ep. 210
In this episode we meet Joseph Loizzo, MD, PhD, who is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and Columbia-trained Buddhist scholar with over forty years’ experience studying the beneficial effects of contemplative practices on healing, learning and development. Joe shares his story of founding the Nalanda Institute, in NYC, as an intersection between contemplative approaches from Buddhism, Psychology and Psychotherapy. The discussion focuses on the benefits and challenges of the practitioner model and ...
Jun 02, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 36
Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods (Princeton UP, 2023) invites us to consider a different approa...
May 30, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 64
Today I talked to Michaela Chamberlain, author of Misogyny in Psychoanalysis (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022) Chamberlain’s book is a product of “cumulative trauma” whose original starting point was an interest in in menstruation where, in psychoanalytic literature filled with papers on “micturition and feces”, there is a “startling lack of writing on the monthly passing of menstrual blood.” Chamberlain realized that this absence was a symptom of something bigger. That something is misogyny. Wor...
May 27, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 209
The monumental sense of dislocation we experience after losing a loved one can be life-altering. There is no script for grieving–each individual passes through their own phases of mourning. In Don't Be Sad When I'm Gone': A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires (Toplight Books, 2020), psychologist Beatriz Dujovne documents how she grieved the loss of her husband and sought therapy during an extended stay in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recounting her healing process day-to-day, ...
May 26, 2023•52 min•Ep. 208
Why Do Actors Train?: Embodiment for Theatre Makers and Thinkers (Bloomsbury, 2023) powerfully demystifies the actor-training process by focusing on acting as embodied cognition. In this framework, thought is action and action is thought. Krumholz uses the frame of embodied cognition to analyze which specific skills are actually being developed through several acting exercises. He bypasses typical acting-coach encouragements to "stop thinking" and "get out of your head," instead insisting that a...
May 24, 2023•48 min•Ep. 118
Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a much-needed analysis of wellness, new age, and yoga influencers who’ve gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about personal and public health. Authors Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker offer a sophisticated analysis of the emotional concerns that fuel conspiracy thinking, whether among right-wing QANON alarmists or progressive back-to-earth yoga practitioners. Religio...
May 21, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 200
Today I talked to Eugene Lipov about his new book (co-authored with Jamie Mustard), The Invisible Machine: The Startling Truth About Trauma and the Scientific Breakthrough That Can Transform Your Life (BenBella Books, 2023) Human beings aren’t biologically build to endure sustained stress. A 30-second blast of anxiety in dealing with a threat isn’t anything likely the ongoing suffering taking place in society today. From soldiers who are returning from overseas combat to poverty-ridden inner-cit...
May 18, 2023•42 min•Ep. 133
In a society marked by extreme inequality of income and opportunity, why should economists care about how people feel? The truth is that feelings of well-being are critical metrics that predict future life outcomes. In The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair (Princeton UP, 2023), economist Carol Graham argues for the importance of hope--little studied in economics at present--as an independent dimension of well-being. Given America's current mental health crisis...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 135
Psychologist Paul Bloom and I talk about the human brain, morality, empathy, perversity, all the things—including Professor Bloom’s new book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (Ecco Press, 2023). Culturally Jewish but in practice an atheist, Paul Bloom comes at the recurring theological questions familiar to the Almost Good Catholics audience from the materialistic perspective of psychology. Paul Bloom’s Yale faculty webpage Paul Bloom’s Toronto faculty webpage Paul Bloom’s Wikipedia page Paul ...
May 11, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 51
Actresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines (Routledge, 2018) investigates the relationship between the work of the actress and her personal experience of mental illness, from the late nineteenth through to the end of twentieth century. Over the past two decades scholars have made great advances in our understanding of the history of the actress, unearthing the material conditions of her working life, the force of her creative agency and the politics of her reception and representation. By...
May 09, 2023•46 min•Ep. 117
In Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity (Oxford UP, 2023), Ami Harbin explores how fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair. We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. This book brings together philosop...
May 07, 2023•41 min•Ep. 286
How do we approach a "deeply forgetful" loved one so as to notice and affirm their continuing self-identity? For three decades, Stephen G. Post has worked around the world encouraging caregivers to become more aware of--and find renewed hope in--surprising expressions of selfhood despite the challenges of cognitive decline. In Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer's Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), Post offers new perspectives on ...
May 07, 2023•52 min•Ep. 198
Why do so many students and academics worry that they are imposters? Is it normal to experience this kind of self-doubt? This episode explores: The difference between imposter syndrome and imposter phenomenon. How we can better understand imposter syndrome. Why it strikes some people. How to recognize it when it does. Tips for helping others and ourselves. Our guest is: Dr Darragh McCashin, who is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Dublin City University (DCU), and is interest...
May 04, 2023•58 min•Ep. 146
In Break On Through, Lucas Richert explores Anti-psychiatry, psychedelics, and radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. In this interview Lucas discusses the issues that run through the sixties and seventies and how they're forming debates about mental health today. "Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave...
May 03, 2023•32 min•Ep. 65
Do we know what we really want, and what we are willing to do to get it? What if what we want doesn’t align with who we think we are supposed to be? Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber joins us today to help us think about what we really want. In this episode we consider some of life’s messy questions about opportunity, regret, ego, growth, and power. Today’s book is: Tell Me What You Want: A Therapist and Her Clients Explore Our 12 Deepest Desires (Atria Books,2023), by Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber, which is an...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 171
The study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), James Charney, MD, a practicing psychiatrist and long-time cinephile, examines films that delve deeply into characters' inner worlds, and he analyzes moments that help define their particular mental illness. Based on the highly popular course that Charney taught at Yale University an...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 164
Are science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question... Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritu...
Apr 26, 2023•29 min•Ep. 94
Are science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question... Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritu...
Apr 26, 2023•29 min•Ep. 94
A discussion with the the author of Free Will (from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) and Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem, Mark Balaguer, in which we discuss the scientific arguments for and against the possibility of free will. In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course...
Apr 25, 2023•14 min•Ep. 56
Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston about The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge, 2023). This is a book that’s as big as it is rich. It brings together 50 previously published articles that track both the history and the current directions in the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. The reader shows the conversations taking place not only within transgender studies but also between transgende...
Apr 24, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 51
Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's parti...
Apr 23, 2023•49 min•Ep. 154
Today I talked to Matt Johnson about his book (co-authored with Tessa Misiaszek) Branding That Means Business: How to Build Enduring Bonds Between Brands, Consumers & Markets (PublicAffairs, 2022) Too often companies look down the road, trying to future-proof their business when it fact they should be clueing-in on the fundamentals of human nature to stay aligned with the eternal verities of their consumers. So argues Matt Johnson, pointing out for instance our desire to belong (leveraged by...
Apr 20, 2023•30 min•Ep. 131
Stefan Van der Stigchel discusses how we filter out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we need to know. We are surrounded by a world rich with visual information, but we pay attention to very little of it, filtering out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we think we need to know. Advertisers, web designers, and other "attention architects" try hard to get our attention, promoting products with videos on huge outdoor screens, adding flashing banners to websites, and developing com...
Apr 18, 2023•14 min•Ep. 50
Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institu...
Apr 14, 2023•23 min•Ep. 13
Clients often seek therapists’ input for dealing with ethical dilemmas in their lives, but there is little guidance for therapists in how to do this. The Ethical Lives of Clients: Transcending Self-Interest in Psychotherapy (APA, 2021) shows therapists how to serve as ethical consultants who help clients balance their personal needs with their sense of responsibility to others. Dr. Bill Doherty blends decades of clinical experience with personal and philosophical insights to frame the skills and...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 200
