Memento Morbid

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Lee Unkrich—director of Coco, Toy Story 3, and longtime Pixar creative—joins Joanna Ebenstein for a deeply personal conversation about collecting, mortality, and the unexpected ways art can reshape our relationship with loss. Long before Coco brought Día de Muertos to a vast global audience, Lee was fascinated by cemeteries, ghost stories, and the uncanny. In this i...

What if mediumship and creativity trace back to the same roots? In this episode of Memento Morbid , Joanna Ebenstein is joined by medium, researcher, educator and author Tiffany Hopkins for a wide-ranging conversation that moves between science, spirituality, and the porous edges of perception. From her academic background in cognitive science, computing, music, and international business, Tiffany...

What happens when a lifelong fascination with mortality leads you into crypts, catacombs, pet cemeteries, and skull festivals across the world? Photographer, writer, and art historian Paul Koudounaris joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging conversation about death, beauty, human remains, and the stories we tell through the dead. Best known for his acclaimed books Empire of Death, Heavenly Bodie...

What happens when a photographer spends 25 years documenting people who believe they can speak with the dead? Photographer Shannon Taggart joins Joanna Ebenstein for a fascinating conversation about spiritualism, séance culture, spirit photography, and the enduring human desire to remain connected with those who have died. Best known for her acclaimed book Séance , Taggart reflects on how a myster...

Is Reality Stranger Than We’re Willing to Admit?  Religious scholar and author Jeffrey J. Kripal joins Joanna Ebenstein for an engrossing conversation exploring mysticism, sexuality, death, and the edges of what we call “real.” Kripal reflects on his early years in a Catholic seminary, where fasting, faith, anorexia, and psychoanalysis shaped his understanding of religion as far stranger and more...

In this episode of Memento Morbid , Joanna Ebenstein speaks with independent scholar, historian, and author Asti Hustvedt about hysteria, gender, spiritualism, and the uneasy territory where medicine meets the uncanny. What happens when the body refuses to behave according to science? Beginning in nineteenth-century Paris, the conversation explores hysteria as a once-dominant medical diagnosis — o...

What happens when a lifetime spent studying death collides with personal loss? Death scholar, writer, and educator John Troyer joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about mortality, grief, funeral culture, and the sometimes uneasy relationship between intellectual understanding and lived experience. Best known for his book Technologies of the Human Corpse and his work with the Centre for Death...

What happens when we recognise creativity as a form of magic? Writer, curator, and cultural critic Pam Grossman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about witchcraft, creativity, death, and the unseen forces that shape our lives. Best known for her books Magic Maker and Waking the Witch, Grossman reflects on her lifelong relationship with magic — from childhood fascinations with mythology and...

What does it mean to live well, knowing our time is finite? Author Oliver Burkeman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about time, mortality, and what it means to live well inside finite lives. Best known for Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman reflects on his shift from scepticism about self-help and productivity culture to a deeper engagement with anxiety, limitation, and acceptance. Together, t...

Grave dirt makes the best mud pies…  Leila Taylor, writer, designer, cultural critic and Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library, joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the Gothic as both a cultural form and a lived sensibility—one that moves through memory, history, music, and space. Drawing from her acclaimed books Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul...

What Does It Mean to Become Someone Else? Award-winning actor and producer Paul Giamatti joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging, eerie, and often amusing conversation about monsters, performance, and the porous boundary between life and death. From childhood fascinations with werewolves and classic horror to the uncanny psychological states accessed through acting, Giamatti reflects on a lifelo...

What Happens to a Body After Death? Mortician, author and death care reformer Caitlin Doughty joins Joanna Ebenstein for a candid, curious and surprisingly funny conversation about what really happens to our bodies after we die and why modern Western culture would rather not think about it. From Caitlin’s early days working in a crematory to founding Order of the Good Death, they explore death pos...

Memento Morbid Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries. Join Joanna Ebenstein , founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New Y...