Public Intellectual

Amazon's PR has been having a temper tantrum this past week on Twitter, going after politicians and random people online for daring to criticize the working conditions at their facilities. Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One Click America, shows that while the working conditions are bad and low paid, that is only part of the story about how Amazon is changing work, pay, and entire cities. 

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With a new scandalous biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new Ripley adaptation on the way for Showtime, we can't get enough of loving and hating our mistress of sociopaths and Americans (same thing). Novelist and journalist Lucie Elven (The Weak Spot) joins Jessa to discuss our "Sapphic Dennis the Menace", why we need to pathologize all of our eccentrics, and the still underappreciated and hard work of those glorious novels.

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Diversity is seen as an unalloyed good. We have committees, books, departments, specialists all devoted to increasing diversity, but what does anyone mean by that word. And why are we obsessed with it, in a time of globalization and homogenization? Russell Jacoby is the author of On Diversity, and we discuss the history of this vague buzzword and why Americans fetishize the thing they are destroying.

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If we can pinpoint a moment when the internet got truly bad, I think it is when Tumblr removed all of the porn. It was clear that diversity, freedom, and creativity did not matter as much as money to anyone running the platforms. Ana Valens, author of Tumblr Porn, joins Jessa to discuss nostalgia for the early internet, the new hostility to adult content, and the importance of letting things be wild.

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With people losing homes and jobs and the government taking a hands off approach, it is a chance to rethink our response to the last economic crisis of 2008. Pavlos Roufos, the author of A Happy Future is a Thing of the Past, joins Jessa to discuss the austerity measures taken in Greece and the catastrophic results they had, while also commenting on the stories used to explain why this economic punishment was for the best. 

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With the true crime boom, we have been awash in stories of dead women and girls. And while those stories have been used to romanticize the police and advocate for "safety" measures that just end in more surveillance and oppression, occasionally these stories show us just how broken our institutions from justice to politics have become. Sonia Faleiro is the author of the new book The Good Girls about two teenage girls found hanging from a tree in their family's orchard, but as you will learn from this episode, the story is much larger than that.

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"The opposite of nostalgia is truth." So writes Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in her new book The Freezer Door. We discuss how nostalgia fuels gentrification, why our streaming services are full of shows set in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and how Patti Smith's "Just Kids" inspired suburbanites to flood into New York City. 

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There is a widening gap between the aims of feminism and the lived experience of women. Angela McRobbie, as a historian of women's magazines, is in a better position than most to see the lie of gender meritocracy and aggressive "have it all" narratives. She joins Jessa to discuss whether the pandemic is a crisis for feminism, and whether class consciousness can be reintroduced to the movement.

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With such a rich history of film tackling sexual violence in horror, exploitation, and other genre films -- and doing it well -- why when we try to take it seriously does it come out all wrong. Vincent Chabany-Douarre returns to PI to discuss the disappointing Promising Young Woman, why our queen Gillian Flynn must return to us, and remind us that it's okay to be the villain sometimes.

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Americans have very good reasons to be angry. Hundreds of thousands of us are dead from the pandemic, stimulus checks are nowhere to be seen, our government serves the very rich and few else. So why are we upset about fictions like child slavery and blood drinking Satanists? Mark Blyth is one of the authors of Angrynomics, and he speaks with Jessa about moral outrage, the failures of representation, and whether Biden is as progressive as FDR.

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Many of the odd social media arguments over the last couple years -- from Scorsese v Marvel to teach Harry Potter instead of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- can be understood as being actually about uncertainty about what art is for. Which is a new development of the age old "what makes art meaningful" conversation. Rita Felski, the author of Hooked: Art and Attachment, speaks to Jessa about some of these recent controversies, why it can be profoundly irritating to be told a film is great, and why we can't solve the problem of art.

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We'll be returning to our regular weekly schedule starting January 11th. Until then, please enjoy this first entry in our series of bonus episodes about the opera with singer Amber Fasquelle. We discuss Don Giovanni, an opera about a murder and rapist, and using art to talk about trauma and tragedy. 

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On the darkest day of the year, and with Trent Reznor everywhere with two new scores, it seems an appropriate time to discuss the Nine Inch Nails masterpiece The Downward Spiral. How did someone with actually so few real hits become such an influential artist? Why do people love to take their clothes off to Closer? Will Trent ever go through another velvet phase (please please)? 

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Chelsey Weber Smith runs the American Hysteria podcast, so who better to come on to discuss America's various conspiracy theories, cults, and moral panics? Chelsey and Jessa discuss the links between the Satanic Panic and Q, how abuse of authority leads to con men and frauds, how the greatest threat to your child is you, and why Jim Jones was right (for a while). Yes, America is falling apart, but America is always falling apart. 

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We were promised great art under the Trump administration. Everyone said it: our suffering would lead to a Renaissance of art, literature, and music. It obviously did not happen. (Well, we got a baby Trump balloon, that was cool.) So what happened? Art critic and editor at Caesura Allison Hewitt Ward discuss the recent trends -- Decolonize, idpol, #resistance, portraits of Trump with a micropenis -- and why none of them led to great art.

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Over the last four years under Trump, we've seen the emergence of a far right with militias, the alt-right, and other weirdo fascists, but we've also seen a push to the revolutionary left. What happens with our polarized kin now that we've got another centrist? Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints joins Jessa to discuss the backlash she experienced for telling people to vote, and why guillotines were trending.

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Talk about guns is now shorthand for a certain kind of American: white uneducated racists. But conversations and action around gun control often hurt those most vulnerable, including those who can't count on the police for their own protection because of their race, class, or past interactions. How do we bring sanity to the conversation around guns, and now that militias are cosplaying civil war, some police are on unofficial strike, and violent crime is increasing, is now the time to get a gun? Jessa speaks with Zach Toman who runs the Gun Penguin youtube channel and owns a gun shop in South Carolina about gun culture.

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It's election week in America, so of course we're going to talk about horror, ghosts, and watching violent death as a way of relieving anxiety. Claire Cronin, author of Blue Light of the Screen, joins Jessa to discuss the body horror of Catholicism and why all these haunting shows are just manifestations of anxiety about real estate.

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Who owns a cultural object? Who benefits from artistic production? Where is the line between looting and preservation? While museums have been thought of as this cultural good, these bright shining sacred institutions of learning and edification, they are also the sight of plunder, erasure, and exploitation. Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums, talks with Jessa about what the hard work of decolonization might actually look like. 

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Ladies love a fascist. In Victoria de Grazia's new book The Perfect Fascist, she tells the story of Lilliana Weinman -- a beautiful Jewish heiress, attracting love and devotion in opera houses around Europe -- and Attilio Teruzzi, head of the blackshirts in Mussolini's Italy. Their love story, and the way it falls apart, resonates with what drives men to fascist groups today, the political misdeeds of women, and why instead of starting a war you should maybe just go to the opera instead.

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