First, the hosts discuss I’m Still Here and the continued addition of non-English speaking films getting some of the biggest Oscar buzz. Then we tackle the latest Trump shakeups at the National Endowment for the Arts and The Kennedy Center. Finally, Dana and Julia sit down with the CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Bill Kramer.
When comedian Chelsea Devantez began writing her memoir, she knew exactly where to start: with a teenage relationship that spiraled into domestic violence. But when she submitted her draft, lawyers informed her she legally couldn't name her abuser or detail what happened.
"I threw the book in the trash for a few months," Chelsea recalls. After consulting friends and family, she decided to continue writing with a new approach. "Instead of telling my story, I would try to tell the story of how our systems are set up to silence."
In this episode, Chelsea and Anna also discuss how a complex PTSD diagnosis helped explain puzzling personality traits, friendship breakups, family secrets, and navigating a male-dominated, rich kid comedy scene.
Death, Sex & Money is now produced by Slate! To support us and our colleagues, please sign up for our membership program, Slate Plus! Members get ad-free podcasts, bonus content on lots of Slate shows, and full access to all the articles on Slate.com. Sign up today at slate.com/dsmplus.
And if you’re new to the show, welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Find us and follow us on Instagram and you can find Anna’s newsletter at annasale.substack.com. Our new email address, where you can reach us with voice memos, pep talks, questions, critiques, is deathsexmoney@slate.com.
There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - though, those all matter too. The state's reach has traveled globally, Johnson argues, influencing everything from how people around the world eat, to how they pray, to the music they listen to. In his new book, Johnson describes the long history of the Lone Star State, from its thousands of years of Indigenous habitation up through the present day. Along the way, he makes some surprising detours, including explaining how Indigenous Texas was anything but a backwater to Mesoamerica, and demonstrating the long progressive legacy in a state known today for its ardent conservatism. Texas is a book as big as its topic, trekking through centuries of history via noteworthy anecdotes which provide a window into a place that defies stereotypes.
Why are some people able to talk with just about anyone—about almost anything? One answer may lie in the questions we ask—and how deeply we ask them. Stick with us here…
In this episode, host Charles Duhigg examines why deep questions are so powerful and how to ask them in everyday life.
He talks to Nick Epley, psychology professor at the University of Chicago and lifelong researcher of deep questions. And we catch up with Mandy Len Catron, 10 years after she wrote the viral New York Times article “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.”
This Slate miniseries dives into the art and science of meaningful conversations, inspired by Duhigg’s bestselling book, Supercommunicators.
Supercommunicators was produced by Derek John and Sophie Summergrad.
In Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas(U Toronto Press, 2025), Stephanie M. Pridgeon explores cultural depictions of Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity within a comparative, inter-American framework. The dynamics of Jewishness interacting with other racial categories differ significantly in Latin America and the Caribbean compared with those in the United States and Canada, largely due to long-standing and often disputed concepts of mestizaje, broadly defined as racial mixture. As a result, a comprehensive understanding of Jewishness and the construction of racial identities requires an exploration of how Jewishness intersects with both Blackness and Indigeneity in the Americas.
Absorption Narratives charts the ways in which literary works capture differences and similarities among Black, Jewish, and Indigenous experiences. Through an extensive and diverse examination of fiction, Pridgeon navigates the complex connections of these identity categories, offering a comparative perspective on race and ethnicity across the Americas that destabilizes US-centric critical practices. Revealing the limitations of US-focused models in understanding racial alterity in relation to Jewishness, Absorption Narratives emphasizes the importance of viewing the narrative of race relations in the Americas from a hemispheric standpoint.
On this week’s show, Slate Business and Tech reporter Nitish Pahwa sits in for Julia. The panel discusses Severance season 2 from Apple TV+. They then talk about the Oscar-nominated film No Other Land – a Palestinian documentary following a young activist fighting his community's mass expulsion by Israeli occupation. They end by discussing Nitish’s recent reporting on Buzzfeed’s upcoming AI-infused social media platform, BF Island.
Emily Bazelon talks with author Rich Benjamin about his new book, Talk to Me: Lessons From a Family Forged by History. They delve into Rich’s complex family history— particularly the experiences of his grandfather, Daniel Fignolé. Fignolé was the president of Hatti in 1957 before being ousted by a coup that involved American influence. Rich and Emily discuss how the political upheaval had a lasting impact on Rich and his family, the immigrant experience of “internalizing America” and the lasting scars of trauma.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failures through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurper, Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile(U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) invites readers to consider concepts of failure, knowing, and being in the world within a rural Mapuche community.
How do we learn what failure looks like? During the years anthropologist Magnus Course spent living with Indigenous Mapuche people in southern Chile, he came to understand failure - both his own and those of the discipline of anthropology - through Mapuche narratives of the witch, the clown, and the usurper. In a context of enduring poverty and racism, increasing state repression, and his own disintegration, he began to realize that these figures of failure, and their insatiable appetites for destruction, greed, and property, reflected as much upon his own failings as on anybody else’s, but also showed the way forward to a better way to live.
Set amidst the stunning natural beauty and political tragedies of southern Chile, Three Ways to Fail is the story of what it means to become a part of other people’s lives, of what it means to fail them, and of what it means to live well when everything falls apart. Grounded in three decades of work and collaboration with Mapuche people, Three Ways to Fail sheds new light on Indigenous lifeways in the Americas while grappling with broader questions about the nature of ethnographic writing and the future of anthropology.
Magnus Course is Chair and Professor in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research is concerned with the relations between kinship, personhood, power, language, and land. His published books include Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile (University of Illinois Press, 2011) and the co-authored Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
When the poet and writer Kaveh Akbar likes something, he really likes it. As a high school student, he got hooked on poetry. In college, it was alcohol. This week, Kaveh talks to Anna Sale about the factors that led to his sobriety, and he explains exactly how he manages a life that’s full of healthy, wonderful obsessions as well as problematic ones.
Death, Sex & Money is now produced by Slate! To support us and our colleagues, please sign up for our membership program, Slate Plus! Members get ad-free podcasts, bonus content on lots of Slate shows, and full access to all the articles on Slate.com. Sign up today at slate.com/dsmplus.
And if you’re new to the show, welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Find us and follow us on Instagram and you can find Anna’s newsletter at annasale.substack.com. Our new email address, where you can reach us with voice memos, pep talks, questions, critiques, is deathsexmoney@slate.com.
Novelist Meg Rosoff joins Harriett Gilbert to answer listeners' questions about one of her best-loved novels, How I Live Now.
It is the story of Daisy, an American teenager shipped off to live with her aunt and cousins in England. What is at first an idyllic escape into English countryside life is shattered at the onset of War, when England is suddenly occupied by an unknown enemy. Daisy finds herself struggling to survive and keep her new family safe as they face violence, fear and starvation, while at the same time experiencing her first love, with her own cousin - Edmond.
Beautiful, brutal, and laced with Daisy’s razor-sharp, jaded teenage humour, this is a book that brings readers into a world that feels incredibly, terrifyingly real, and will likely stay in your memory for years to come.
(Photo: Meg Rosoff. Credit: Glora Hamlyn/Penguin Books)
