This week’s January 6th congressional hearings offered an in-depth look at the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other violent extremist groups that organized the insurrection. On today’s episode of A Word, Jason Johnson discusses the issues with counter terrorism expert Malcolm Nance, who has spent years chronicling the rise of white supremacist and other American political extremist movements. His new book is “They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency.”
Guest: Analyst Malcolm Nance
Podcast production by Kristie Taiwo-Makanjuola
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This week, David Plotz, John Dickerson, and Mark Leibovich discuss Biden’s 2024 plans, the establishment Republicans who stand by Trump, and Herschel Walker’s alarming Senate campaign.
Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:
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Understanding and explaining societal rules surrounding food and foodways have been the foci of anthropological studies since the early days of the discipline. Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast (U Alabama Press, 2018), however, is the first collection devoted exclusively to southeastern foodways analyzed through archaeological perspectives. These essays examine which foods were eaten and move the discussion of foodstuffs into the sociocultural realm of why, how, and when they were eaten.
Editors Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf present a volume that moves beyond basic understandings, applying new methods or focusing on subjects not widely discussed in the Southeast to date. Chapters are arranged using the dominant research themes of feasting, social and political status, food security and persistent places, and foodways histories. Contributors provide in-depth examination of specific food topics such as bone marrow, turkey, Black Drink, bourbon, earth ovens, and hominy.
Contributors bring a broad range of expertise to the collection, resulting in an expansive look at all of the steps taken from field to table, including procurement, production, cooking, and consumption, all of which have embedded cultural meanings and traditions. The scope of the volume includes the diversity of research specialties brought to bear on the topic of foodways as well as the temporal and regional breadth and depth, the integration of multiple lines of evidence, and, in some cases, the reinvestigation of well-known sites with new questions and new data.
Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.
On this episode: Zak talks to filmmaker, author, and actor Sarah Polley about her book Run Towards the Danger. They talk about how losing a parent early influences how she parents now. How to handle guilt and why finding your parenting community is so valuable. They also discuss her boundaryless childhood and why she won’t let her kids be child actors. Finally, Sarah talks about navigating parenting while healing from a years-long injury.
Zak recommends Sarah Polley’s films, specifically Stories We Tell.
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Podcast produced by Kristie Taiwo-Makanjuola and Rosemary Belson.
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community(U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.
With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time and director of the Better Life Lab, is joined by author Angela Garbes. They unpack the modern challenges of motherhood, further illustrated and then exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. They talk about Angela’s new book, Essential Labor, how caregiving is seen as sacred, yet we make it so hard in the United States, and why we pay caregivers—a key part of our society—poverty wages.
In Slate Plus, Angela and Brigid talk about the subtitle of Angela’s book: Mothering As Social Change.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Shannon Palus and Alicia Montgomery.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com
In 2019, Brenda took a year off from their PhD program to try to feel pleasure again…with anything. Brenda has come a long way since then but there’s one thing that’s still elusive—they’ve never experienced an orgasm. Whenever they try, anxiety kicks in and they’re left feeling frustrated and, in their words “broken.” On this episode of How To!, we bring in Ev’Yan Whitney, sex educator, author, and host of the podcast Sensual Self. Ev’Yan has some wonderful wisdom for learning about your body and reconnecting with pleasure, both sexual and non-sexual, in a way that feels safe.
In the season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club talks to Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid about his compelling novel, Exit West.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Exit West features Nadia and Saeed, two ordinary young people, attempting to fall in love in a world turned upside down. Civil war is driving them from their homeland and they join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, to find their place in the world. Then something extraordinary happens: doors start appearing, all over the world. They lead to other cities, other countries, other lives. But once you leave there’s no coming back. Readers from around the world put their questions to Mohsin Hamid about this dazzling book.
Conversations with LeAnne Howe(UP of Mississippi, 2022) is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013).
Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe's poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, "'An American in New York' LeAnne Howe" (2019) and "Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe" (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019's Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe's newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln's hallucination of a "Savage Indian" during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century.
Emily Bazelon talks with author Keri Blakinger about her new memoir, Corrections in Ink which recounts Blakinger’s path from Olympic ambitions, to heroin addiction, to prison, and ultimately a return to life on the outside.
