Vince Granata starts his book, “Everything Is Fine,” with the truth: His brother, in the midst of a schizophrenic episode, murdered his mother. The rest of the book tells the story of how and why Vince never stopped loving him. And on "With Adorables Likes These" this week - Penny and her human Leo Duran. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
May 14, 2021•52 min
ESPN NFL analyst Mina Kimes comes on to give her hot take on how analysts should and shouldn’t talk about sexual assault and institutional bad behavior. One idea: Never again utter the phrase “off-field issues.” And introducing "With Adorables Like These" - interviews with Crooked staff and guests about the animal companions they love. This week's guest is Scooter and his human Dayanita Ramesh. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese . Learn more about you...
May 07, 2021•58 min
“United Shades of America” host W. Kamau Bell joins to discuss the miserable job performance of the police, who are our employees! Also: how trauma can make you funnier and why marginalized folks have to have bigger and better imaginations than others. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Apr 30, 2021•52 min
Documentary “Boys State” was short-listed for an Oscar for its engrossing portrayal of Texas teenagers’ cutthroat politics. One of its stars, Steven Garza, stops by to discuss if the kids are alright. Spoiler alert: Maybe not! For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Apr 23, 2021•49 min
Stand-up Tig Notaro comes by to talk about being free and fearless, and how that makes you a better person and funnier comedian. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 16, 2021•43 min
New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky,” explores the damage to the planet humans have done (or could do) in trying to fix the damage they’ve done: everything from electrocuting carp and to sprinkling the sky with diamond dust. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Apr 09, 2021•48 min
Rebecca Carroll grew up as the only Black person in her adopted family, and in her small town. Her memoir, “Surviving the White Gaze,” is about exactly what it says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 02, 2021•55 min
Harvard Law professor Martha Minow has an idea: what if we forgive debts to society with the same generosity that we forgive the debts of corporations? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 26, 2021•44 min
New York Magazine's Rebecca Traister expands on her reporting about Andrew Cuomo's reckoning and suggests broadening our understanding of what sexual harassment and abuse look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 19, 2021•43 min
Intercept senior writer Liliana Segura has been reporting on the death penalty for years, including the Trump administration’s lame-duck killing spree. She comes on to discuss the legacy of putting people to death during a pandemic — and to share stories about the heroes she’s found in the darkness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 12, 2021•48 min
Maurice Chammah, author of the NYT Editor’s Pick “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty,” joins us to talk about how enforcing the death penalty poisons everyone who is a part of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 05, 2021•54 min
On this season of With Friends Like These, host Ana Marie Cox looks at post-Trump America and tries to find models for how we forgive people, and if we should. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 04, 2021•50 sec
To celebrate With Friends Like These 200th episode, we talk with Rolling Stone senior writer Jamil Smith about how he helped inspire the show, what the pandemic has taught us about grief, and being careful about who you call a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 26, 2021•58 min
CW: Eating disorders, dieting. Aubrey Gordon, of Maintenance Phase and “Your Fat Friend,” joins to take us through the twisty history of Weight Watchers and its founder, Jean Nidtech. Stops on the tour include Heinz ketchup and Maya Angelou! Aubrey’s new book is “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr
After the National Guard descended on Minneapolis to enforce an 8PM curfew on the streets, advocates for those living on the streets bought a block of rooms at a shuttered Sheraton to house them. The volunteers decided to impose as little authority as possible, hoping that a radical approach to harm reduction would empower the residents. But their experiment went terribly wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Feb 12, 2021•32 min
Robert Martinson was a radical anti-racist activist in the 1960s: He ran for mayor in Berkeley as a socialist. He was arrested in Mississippi for participating in Freedom Summer. And then he authored the academic paper that became the political justification for “tough on crime” policies. He’s forgotten; can he be forgiven? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson guides us through his tragic story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Feb 05, 2021•35 min
New York Magazine senior writer and Friend of the Pod Rebecca Traister joins to talk us through how Biden’s missteps around issues of gender and race made him the white guy who could win in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 29, 2021•41 min
The Atlantic's Adam Serwer comes on to talk about the inauguration and the future of this fragile democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 22, 2021•41 min
We love to love mothers, except when we don’t — like when they’re Black, or queer, or too thin, or too fat, or want to end their pregnancy, or do it alone, or have a glass of wine. Friend of the pod Lyz Lenz joins to discuss her new book, “Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 15, 2021•51 min
“The only sustainable foundation for a changed world is internal transformation” — that’s the message of Sonya Renee Taylor, author of “The Body Is Not an Apology.” Her mission is to take us out of the realm of mere “body positivity” or “self-acceptance” and into a place of “radical self-love.” That means not just creating a world where all bodies are celebrated, but also embracing who we are, exactly as we are. Which part of that mission sounds harder to you? Learn more about your ad choices. V...
Jan 08, 2021•53 min
Derek Black thought he was done with the white nationalist movement when he wrote a public letter renouncing the ideology he grew up in. Then he realized that white nationalism wasn’t just the racists that used to listen to his white nationalist radio show and read his white nationalist website — white supremacy was everywhere, people just weren’t talking about it. (With a new introduction; this episode originally aired 06/12/20.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Jan 01, 2021•51 min
Santa isn’t the only myth we use to keep children in line! In the 1990s, evangelical churches bought and gave away thousands of copies of the book, “Left Behind,” hoping its overwrought depiction of the End Times would frighten unbelievers into the arms of Christ. That is not what happened. Amy Frykholm, author of “Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America,” explains what did. Originally aired 8/7/2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Dec 25, 2020•43 min
What, exactly, are parents accomplishing when they encourage their children to believe in the idea of an extravagently-dressed stranger breaking and entering into their homes on Christmas Eve? Is Santa a well-meaning myth or the beginning of the end of filial trust? CW: The truth about Santa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 18, 2020•43 min
Welcome to Grafton, New Hampshire, a not-very-picturesque town where the streets are dark, the fires are unregulated, the cats are missing, and the camps are armed. Oh, and there are bears. Smart, dangerous bears. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling tells us the story of “When a Libertarian Walked Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears).” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Dec 11, 2020•56 min
NYU and University of Hamburg psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen explains why positive thinking can backfire, and offers a method that might work better. She is the author of “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 04, 2020•49 min
Julie Rodgers was raised in a conservative evangelical home, so she knew they’d be horrified when she came out as a lesbian in her teens. To please her family and community, she first tried to change who she was, then she tried to deny it. We talk about how she went from being a star on the “ex-gay” speaker circuit to believing that God delights in all aspects of LGBTQ people, including their sexuality. Her forthcoming memoir is “Outlove: A Queer Christian Survival Story.” Learn more about your ...
Nov 27, 2020•59 min
Trigger warning: This episode is about suicide and suicide prevention. While the pandemic has made mental health a part of the national conversation, policy makers and the public still tend to think of suicide as a matter of intervention at the point of crisis. Stephanie Wittels is on to explain why that is not the case. The second season of her podcast, “Last Day,” explores individual stories as a way of illustrating that true suicide prevention isn’t about intervening when someone’s life is at...
Nov 20, 2020•50 min
CW: Sexual violence Author Sarah Schulman joins the show to discuss her provocative and influential book, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. She argues that both the right and left can needless escalate mere conflicts into accusations of abuse, creating victims where there are none and blaming and shaming those who might be simply misunderstood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Nov 13, 2020•41 min
Oxford University professor of anthropology Chris Gosden joins us to discuss his book: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present . Also: We make politics disappear! Which is to say, there is NO DISCUSSION OF THE 2020 ELECTION IN THIS EPISODE. You’re welcome! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 06, 2020•47 min
This week, a deep dive into how political enthusiasts’ default background noise is ruining our country. First, we hear from a former MSNBC producer who left the network after feeling like she was part of the problem. Then media critic Jay Rosen warns us about how the habits formed in covering Trump might warp coverage of whatever administration comes next. Lastly, CJR columnist Maria Bustillos helps us ponder why it is journalists who start out meaning well wind up making things worse. Learn mor...
Oct 30, 2020•59 min
