Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

Food is at the center of everything, writes University of Washington professor of American Indian Studies Charlotte Coté. In A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (U Washington Press, 2022), Coté shares stories from her own experience growing up and living in the Pacific Northwest. From salmon, to wild berries, to community gardens, the food abundance of this region is central to Indigenous decolonization and sovereignty. Coté connects protecting the free movement and ecological health of salmon runs to issues as global as climate change, arguing that in order to understand the big picture, you need to start with what people put on their dinner tables. A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other is a book about resilience, healing, and sustenance in the face of challenges, and about the real, material, work people are doing to decolonize their diets and in doing so, healing the land and their communities.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History.

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In Amazonian Cosmopolitans: Navigating a Shamanic Cosmos, Shifting Indigenous Policies, and Other Modern Projects (U Nebraska Press, 2022), Suzanne Oakdale focuses on the autobiographical accounts of two Brazilian Indigenous leaders, Prepori and Sabino, Kawaiwete men whose lives spanned the twentieth century, when Amazonia increasingly became the context of large-scale state projects. Both give accounts of how they worked in a range of interethnic enterprises from the 1920s to the 1960s in central Brazil. Prepori, a shaman, also gives an account of his relations with spirit beings that populate the Kawaiwete cosmos as he participated in these projects.

Like other Indigenous Amazonians, Kawaiwete value engagement with outsiders, particularly for leaders and shamanic healers. These social engagements encourage a careful watching and learning of others’ habits, customs, and sometimes languages, what could be called a kind of cosmopolitanism or an attitude of openness, leading to an expansion of the boundaries of community. The historical consciousness presented by these narrators centers on how transformations in social relations were experienced in bodily terms—how their bodies changed as new relationships formed. Amazonian Cosmopolitans offers Indigenous perspectives on twentieth-century Brazilian history as well as a way to reimagine lowland peoples as living within vast networks, bridging wide social and cosmological divides.

Suzanne Oakdale is Professor of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico. She specializes in Brazil, with research focused on Amazonian indigenous peoples. She explores the dynamics of ritual practice; history; and the social anthropology of the person and personal experience, particularly how these genres reflect and are used to address large scale social shifts. She is the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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In this episode, Cheryl Strayed (Dear Sugar and Tiny Beautiful Things) joins Prudie (Jenée Desmond-Harris) to answer letters from readers about whether it’s a good idea to offer to be your platonic best friend’s housewife, how to handle a husband’s disturbing body odors, and what an overachieving eldest millennial daughter can do to find happiness.

If you want more Dear Prudence, join Slate Plus, Slate’s membership program. Jenée answers an extra question every week, just for members. 

Go to Slate.com/prudieplus to sign up. It’s just $15 for your first three months. 

This podcast is produced by Se’era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, and Jenée Desmond-Harris, with help from Maura Currie.

Dear Prudence is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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On this week’s episode of Well, Now, Maya and Kavita talk about practical ways to break up with diet culture with fitness instructor, speaker and educator Chrissy King. 

She’s the author of The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom.

Chrissy also ties in how breaking up with diet culture is a piece of a larger conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion in the wellness industry.

If you liked this episode, check out: What “Wellness” Is and Isn’t

Podcast production by Vic Whitley-Berry with editorial oversight by Alicia Montgomery.

Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to wellnow@slate.com 

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Candice Lim talks to Mychal Threets (@​​mychal3ts), a Bay Area librarian by day and beloved TikTok creator by night. In December 2023, Threets was the target of a negative tweet that called his TikToks weird. But in a shocking twist, the internet ran to Threet’s defense, praising his work and platform as a librarian. Threets joins the conversation to talk about his reaction to that moment, his new rules for navigating the comment section and his surprisingly millennial-core music taste.

This podcast is produced by Se’era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton.

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Andrew snores so badly that his cats won’t sleep in the same room as him. He’s desperate to sleep better at night, and breathe more easily during the day. On this episode of How To!, we bring on James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, to share the history of why we breathe the way we do. Turns out being a “mouth-breather” is more than just an insult, it’s harmful to our health. James gives Andrew some nasal breathing exercises to improve his snoring, anxiety, and overall wellness.

If you liked this episode, check out “How To Sleep.”

Do you have a problem you can’t get out of your head? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Podcast production by Derek John, Rachael Allen, and Rosemary Belson.

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On this month’s edition of Gabfest Reads, John Dickerson talks with author Brad Stulberg about his new book, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything is Changing – Including You. They discuss how to make change itself a mindset, John’s notebooks, what we can learn from athletes, and more.

Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.

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In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in Hawaii. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses mainly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project was a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.

Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and a soon-to-be law student. 

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Decades before most people had heard of Barack Obama, Black Republican Colin Powell was widely believed to be on the path to the presidency. And the Republican Party was the first political home of many African Americans. But the contemporary G.O.P, led by former President Donald Trump, has introduced a new class of Black Republicans who command little respect within the community. What happened, and is there a place for Black Americans in today’s or tomorrow’s Republican Party? On today’s episode of A Word, Jason Johnson discusses that with Clay Cane, journalist and author of The Grift: The Downward Spiral of Black Republicans from the Party of Lincoln to the Cult of Trump. 

Guest: Writer Clay Cane

Podcast production by Kristie Taiwo-Makanjuola

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Scott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence explains a political culture of violence from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, illustrating how physical force, often centered on racial hierarchy, sustained the central tenets of American liberal government. It offers an important story of nationhood, told through the experiences and choices of civilians, Indians, politicians, soldiers, and the enslaved, providing historical context for understanding how violence has shaped the United States from its inception.

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