Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

In celebration of Pride month, we’re bringing you some extra episodes of the Outward podcast. This week, host Bryan Lowder talks to Slate contributor John Culhane about his new book More Than Marriage: Forming Families After Marriage Equality. In the book, Culhane explores legal arrangements other than marriage that could protect people’s relationships and finances. While we might once have decried these options as consolation prizes, contracts such as designated beneficiary agreements offer exciting possibilities for queer and other nontraditional families.

We'd love to hear about your Pride plans in this challenging year. Please send a voice memo, along with feedback, topic ideas, and advice questions to outwardpodcast@slate.com.

Items discussed in the show:

More Than Marriage: Forming Families After Marriage Equality, by John C. Culhane

Gay Agenda

John: Support your local drag performers.

This podcast was produced by June Thomas.

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On the centenary of her birth another chance to hear much-loved author Judith Kerr discussing her memorable young adults' novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit with Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world.

Set during the Second World War, this semi-autobiographical novel traces the story of a young Jewish girl and her family who flee Berlin just as the Nazis come to power. The journey of a family splintered by conflict, driven by fear and eventually rewarded with reunion is seen through the eyes of the nine-year-old Anna.

Judith Kerr’s novel, by turns heart-lifting and heart-rending has stood the test of time and continues to be enjoyed by readers of all ages to this day.

(Picture: Judith Kerr. Credit: Eliz Huseyin)

On this episode: Zak Rosen talks with author and philosopher, Ryan Holiday, about his new book, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids. Elizabeth Newcamp and Jamilah Lemieux join to go over recommendations and to listen to your advice. 

Recommendations: 

Jamilah: Banana pudding

Zak: Using magnet tiles on your walls, which may be magnetic.

Elizabeth: Summer Brain Quest books and cards

If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on Mom and Dad are Fighting. Sign up now at slate.com/momanddadplus to help support our work.

Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to ask us new questions, tell us what you thought of today’s show, and give us ideas about what we should talk about in future episodes. You can also call our phone line: (646) 357-9318. 

Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson and Maura Currie.

This Pride Month, make an impact by helping Macy’s and The Trevor Project on their mission to fund life-saving suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more.

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This week, host June Thomas talks to Ellen Hart, a mystery author who’s been active since the late 80’s and who is most famous for the long-running Jane Lawless series. In the interview, Ellen talks about her early career as a chef and explains why (and how) she pivoted to writing. Then she explains why, after so many years of heavy output, she’s deciding to write less and less, and both she and June reckon with the dreaded “R” word (retirement!). 

After the interview, June and co-host Isaac Butler discuss what happens when work becomes your identity. 

In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, June asks her favorite question to ask writers. 

Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com or give us a call at (304) 933-9675.

Podcast production by Cameron Drews. 

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This Pride Month, make an impact by helping Macy’s and The Trevor Project on their mission to fund life-saving suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. 

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Every family has secrets. As a girl, Leta McCollough Seletzky learned that her father, Marrell McCollough– was on the scene of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. But it would be years before she learned that he was there as a spy for the Memphis police, who wanted information on King’s local allies. On today’s episode of A Word, she speaks with Jason Johnson about her father’s story, captured in her new book, The Kneeling Man: My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King.

Guest: Leta McCollough Seletzky, author of The Kneeling Man: My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King

Podcast production by Ahyiana Angel

You can skip all the ads in A Word by joining Slate Plus. Sign up now at slate.com/awordplus for $15 for your first three months.

This Pride Month, make an impact by helping Macy’s and The Trevor Project on their mission to fund life-saving suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more.

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On this week’s episode of The Waves, it’s all about the beauty industry. Senior writer and editor at New America, Julia Craven is joined by author and NPR host-at-large Elise Hu. They discuss Elise’s new book, Flawless - a remarkable investigation into the Korean beauty world. They also unpack the hustle culture inherent in beauty, how Eurocentric beauty trends are everywhere, and more. 

In Slate Plus: Is Shiv Roy from HBO’s Succession misunderstood? 

If you liked this episode, check out: Who’s Getting Rich Off Menopause?

 

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.

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

If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work.

This Pride Month, make an impact by helping Macy’s and The Trevor Project on their mission to fund life-saving suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this month’s episode of Future Tense Fiction, host Maddie Stone talks to Justina Ireland about her short story “Collateral Damage.”

The story follows a group of soldiers deployed alongside TED, the Army’s first self-aware combat drone. TED is relentlessly efficient, quickly outpacing its human counterparts—and leaving them worried for their jobs. But when a wrong call from the clunky robot puts soldiers’ lives at risk, they realize just how hard it is to program for battlefield experience.

After the story, Ireland shares how her own time in the military shapes her writing, and why tech dreamed up in D.C. rarely reflects the needs of soldiers on the ground.

Guest: Justina Ireland, a veteran and author of books including Dread Nation, Deathless Divide, and Ophie’s Ghosts 

Story read by Joanne Lichtenstein

Podcast production by Tiara Darnell

Check out AWS Insiders here: https://link.chtbl.com/awsinsiders?sid=podcast.futuretensefiction

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On this week’s episode of The Waves, are female characters becoming less likable? Slate senior supervising producer, Daisy Rosario is joined by author and comedian Jena Friedman. Jena’s new book Not Funny explores likeability and what that means for women in comedy and the world. They talk about unlikeable female characters and anti-heroines in shows like Rosanne, Killing Eve, and more. How unlikeable female characters have evolved - and how streamers actually helped bring down some gatekeepers making more room for complex women on TV. 

In Slate Plus: When Jena asked famous male comics the questions so many female comics get asked every day.

If you liked this episode, check out: How to Survive in Hollywood.

 

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.

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

If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/thewavesplus to help support our work.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month, Outward explores utopian fiction and dystopian reality TV. First, Bryan and Christina are joined by author Theodore McCombs to discuss Uranians, his new collection of speculative stories, which uses queer difference and divestment from the normal as an engine to drive five fascinating tales. Then they’re joined by producer June Thomas to discuss The Ultimatum: Queer Love, Netflix’s latest take on the dating show, which follows a cast of queer women and nonbinary folks as they try to decide who they will marry. Finally, the hosts add some new items to the gay agenda.

Items discussed in the show:

The CBC report on Patricia Ginn of the WindSisters

Uranians: Stories, by Theodore McCombs

More on Karl Heinrich Ulrich’s take on the Uranian

The Ultimatum: Queer Love on Netflix

June on the queerness of portrait galleries

Gay Agenda

June: The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh

Bryan: That! Feels Good!, by Jessie Ware

Christina: “Radical Desire: Making On Our Backs Magazine,” from Cornell University Library

This podcast was produced by June Thomas.

Please send feedback, topic ideas, and advice questions to outwardpodcast@slate.com.

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With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventures into horror. White Horse follows Kari, an urban Native living in Denver, as a family heirloom belonging to her long-missing mother launches her into a world of the uncanny: ghosts and monsters lurch into real life and portals transport her into scenes from the past that reveal traumatic family secrets.

Wurth speaks with critic Leif Sorensen and host Rebecca Evans about what abides at the intersection of politics and craft, and what’s at stake in particular for the Indigenous writers of genre fiction whose work takes shape at that intersection. Their conversation pokes serious fun at everything from the faltering literary truism that being good at plot is somehow less impressive than being good at characterization to debates over authenticity in Native literature. Horror, as Wurth describes it, offers real and meaningful pleasures, solves the craft problems of over exposition, and opens up powerful questions of identity, politics, and history. Tune in for recommendations for genre writers from the emerging Fifth Wave of Indigenous fiction, reflections on orality and linguistics, and Wurth’s cure for “writer’s depression” instead of writer’s block!

Mentions

• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
• Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead
• Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
• Tattered Cover Book Store
• Talking Scared Podcast
• Stanley Hotel
• Red Power movement and the American Indian Movement
• Tommy Orange’s There, There
• Water protectors
• Idle No More
• Black Lives Matter
• Astrophil Press
• The Writer’s Chronicle
• Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter
• Save the Cat!
• Erika T. Wurth’s “The Fourth Wave” and “The Fourth Wave in Native American Fiction”
• David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual



Wurth also references and recommends a number of genre writers, from romance to speculative literature to crime fiction to horror and beyond. Check out her picks, including B. L. Blanchard, V. Castro, Kelli Jo Ford, Lev Grossman, Grady Hendrix, Brandon Hobson, Marlon James, Jessica Johns, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, Victor LaValle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Danica Nava, Rebecca Roanhorse, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden!

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