Sluggish

Could the theory of monotropism help explain ADHD? What about executive dysfunction, or my Bipolar 2 misdiagnosis, or OCD? Can you trick yourself into a flow state? Is rumination just flow, but evil?? All this and more in conversation with writer, science educator, and chair of the Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh , Fergus Murray! 📝📝 Transcript Links: * Monotropism.org * Fergus’ website * W...

In this episode, I chat with UX designer, leftist technologist, and creator of Irrational Technology , Lou Millar-McHugh, about the sort of questions we really need to be asking about our relationship to social media. We also talk about: why understanding is more important than control, how social media literacy could improve leftist comms strategies, the problem with screen time apps and gamifica...

What does neuroqueering look like? What shape is time? How is executive functioning like compulsory heterosexuality?? All this and more in today’s episode featuring my dear friend Marta Rose, a queer AuDHD writer and artist who founded Divergent Design Studios, an online peer support space for neurodivergent creatives, and KR Moorhead, an AuDHD, gender non-compliant educator, author, and creative...

I recently discovered two papers by a group of researchers who are working on establishing a field of Critical ADHD Studies, and a couple of them were down to chat with me about it! Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist is a sociologist and a professor in Social Work at Södertörn University and   co-editor of the book  Neurodiversity Studies,  and Lill Hultman is a postdoctoral researcher at Marie Cedersch...

I had always assumed flow and hyperfocus were just different names for the same thing, but flow was framed as a superpower ( Harness your flow state to achieve optimal performance!) , and hyperfocus was framed as a deficit ( Why can’t these autistic people stop talking about dinosaurs and get jobs??) . But in the last five years, studies have begun trying to pull these concepts apart... This is an...

I got to talk to neurodivergent philosopher Robert Chapman about their new book Empire of Normality, which explains how norms of brain functioning got baked into our economic system. We talk about how a focus on individual rights and superpowers can only get neurodivergent people so far, why the line between neurodivergent and neurotypical is more squishy than you think, and how anti-psychiatry wa...

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How do neurodivergent creatives function when we can’t executive function? What do we really mean when we say we want to be productive? And what does climate change have to do with our creative process? In this episode I talk to co-founder of Writer’s HQ and award-winning environmental journalist Sarah Lewis about the climate stories we tell and our struggles in telling them. Plus, Sarah explains...

In this episode, I talk to compost practitioner and writer Cassandra Marketos about how composting can radically transform the way we look at the world. We get into the stigma around waste, why compost seems to scare so many people, the joy of learning from our intuition, the resilience and magic of a well-tended pile, and what it really means when we say that we’ve thrown something “away.” We als...

I’m starting an interview series — there are so many people whose brains I want to pick and a podcast feels like the perfect format for it. To kick off these conversations, I bring you a great chat I had with Micha Frazer-Carroll on her new book, Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health . Micha is a writer and editor based in London whose work focuses on the theme of liberation, and when she sent...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.sluggish.xyz Gray and I listened to the (extremely frustrating) Adderall episode of the podcast Science Vs and we got a little stuck on this thing they said about stimulants keeping people with ADHD from crashing their cars. So I dug up the citation they referenced and asked Gray to help me read the numbers, and we found that they l...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.sluggish.xyz

In part 2 of this critical series on the concept of timeblindness, we explore just how common the experience of always running out of time really is with the help of a little social psychology research. PLUS: a little detour on the pro-business history of industrial psychology and discussion of how culture affects our perception of time. For transcript and sources, see the full post on sluggish.su...

Where did the idea of "timeblindness" come from? And what does research on time perception actually say about it? Let's take a stroll through Google Scholar. For transcript and sources, check out the full post on sluggish.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe