Nonfiction with Callie Hitchcock

On the podcast today we have P.E. Moskowitz , a writer who also runs the newsletter Mental Hellth , and author of the book Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World Through Drugs . We discuss breaking outside of narrative meaning in mental health, dissociation/depersonalization/derealization, the neoliberalization of mental health, and the move away from understanding how...

Today I’m speaking with Regina Mahone, senior editor at The Nation magazine, founder of Repro Nation , a free monthly newsletter providing the latest news on the struggle for reproductive justice, and also coauthor, with We Testify founder Renee Bracey Sherman of the book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve .  We will be d...

I talk with Paul Freedman, a history professor at Yale and author of the book American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way which looks at the history of how food evolved over time in the US. In 1900 40% of US population worked in agriculture. Now that number is under 2%. Correspondingly food used to be 40% of a family’s budget and in 2016 that number was 12.6%. We talk about the positives and negativ...

Today we are talking about Eamon Whalen’s article “Are Men OK?” which is a recent cover story for The Nation about women’s rise in economic power, the declining cultural power of men, and the manhood intellectual Richard Reeves. Male labor force participation has fallen from 80% in 1970 to 69% in January 2020, and undergraduate enrollment for men has fallen from 58% to 44% in that same time period...

“The idea now that running a company is some type of sacred trust, that employees are something to be taken care of, is treated by most people as a laughable idea… this period is the basis of the income inequality we see today.” - Bryan Burrough Published in 1989 by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate is a financial thriller about the leveraged buy out of RJR Nabisco. This book...

Today I’m talking with Will Tavlin about his N+1 article “Casual Viewing” on the history of Netflix and how Netflix, with increasing power and leverage, is changing the film industry for the worse. “The type of movie that starts to get made starts to change. Especially as these streaming platforms increasingly realize that they are not really Hollywood studios but customer acquisition businesses.”...

Today I talk with Enzo Escober about his profile of the trans Filipina model Geena Rocero in LA Review of Books titled “Homespun Tiara.” We discuss the gender fluid indigenous history of the Philippines, the colonial history of the Philippines, its Catholic fiesta culture and trans beauty pageants, American imperialism, the long reach of American soft power, legal recognition versus cultural recog...

Today I’m talking with Jasper Craven about his Harper's Magazine piece "The Thin Purple Line" on the private security industry and the attendant fear economy that it fuels. On this episode we talk about the changing cultural symbolism of “chaos” and what particular iteration of it is driving people's fears and actions today.  Also it has officially been a year of the Nonfiction with Callie Hitchco...

Today we have the writer Lily Burana, author of the memoir Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America . Lily’s memoir is emotionally complex, philosophical, and navigates the multiplicity of self, gender performance, and the theory of theatrical performance. We discuss the intersection of performance and relationships and the live theater liminality of strip clubs, breaking out of th...

I speak with Clair Wills about her book Missing Persons which explores her family’s connection to the mother and baby homes for unwed mothers in Ireland that operated from 1922-1998 and have come into the news in the past few years after multiple mass child graves were discovered at different locations. In one of the largest of these homes called Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork, more than...

On this episode I talk to the writer Jane Song her article “Rock Beats Scissors” about the sociological implications of the shift from dagger consumer products to our current deluge of pebble consumer products. In this episode we talk about how this phenomenon maps onto a kind of boom and bust cycle in the economy and also has larger implications for cultural powerlessness and loneliness. We also...

Today we have James Pogue, a journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine who has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, and elsewhere. We talk about his essay “Wagner in Africa” published in the extraction issue of Granta that came out this Spring which is about his reporting trip to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic or CAR, and...

Today I’m talking with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman about their book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice , a book of philosophy and cultural criticism surrounding the choice of whether to have children or not. The birth rates in the US are at a record low, and are also low in countries with the most progressive parenthood policies. What is causing this pervasive ambivalence? Is...

Today’s guest is journalist Donald Morrison talking with us about his article “American Rehab” published in the most recent June issue of The Baffler. This article is about Measure 110 which was passed in November 2020 in Oregon and was the most liberal drug law in the country in US history, decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs including marijuana, heroin, cocaine, methamphetam...

Today’s guest is Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer prize winner for criticism, staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of her new book Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV . We talk about the history of reality TV, the changing conception of reality TV labor power dynamics, reality tv as modern fables, the sociological function of reality TV as a cultural object, and what feelings we are looking to...

I speak with Michael Cecchi-Azzolina about his memoir called Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’ about being a maître d’ in New York City’s top restaurants from the 80s onward. This book is a historical time capsule of the culture of the past 40 years and a meditation of the restaurant as a dense site of psychology, theater, familial simulation, and the joy of communion. We dis...

I talk with Michael W. Clune about White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin , his memoir about his heroin addiction and his recovery. His writing is experiential, poetic, philosophical, and dwells on the liminal. Clune defamiliarizes experiences and reassembles them with new language. He also puts language to experiences that haven’t been entered yet into the collective imagination. We discuss the rhe...

Tony Tulathimutte on the podcast today. He has written the novel Private Citizens, and a short story collection called Rejection coming out this September ( pre-order here ). On this episode we talk about his recent nonfiction essay for The Paris Review called “The Rejection Plot.” We explore the experiential properties of rejection, plotlessness, the delamination of an infatuation narrative from...

I spoke with Emmeline Clein, author of the new book Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm about the cultural forces surrounding eating disorders and beauty standards in the US, and their roots in racism, classism, and nationalism. We talk about the different historic forms eating disorders have mutated through over time, the failures of health insurance and treatment centers, and more!  My review...

“I didn’t think I ran the risk of dying I though I ran the risk of not living the life that I wanted to live.” On today’s episode I speak with Sarah Hepola, a journalist and the author of the book Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget , which is a nuanced and articulate memoir of Sarah’s life and her experiences with blackouts, all leading to her journey to sobriety. Check out her pod...

Rachel Cohen, a journalist working at Vox, explores what she calls "Millennial Mom Dread" in her article “How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood.” Rachel thinks there has been at least a decade long campaign of cultural messaging to women that having children is something that will ruin your happiness, your autonomy, and your ambition. Is it really just holding your breath for 18 years and th...

On today’s episode I speak with Alexander Stille, the journalist and author of the book The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune which looks at the history and ideological underpinnings of a group called The Sullivanians which operated from 1957 through 1991 in the Upper West Side of New York City. His book looks at the group’s mission to build a “utopian worl...

For this episode I speak to Sarah Brouillette, a professor of English at Carleton University about her essay "Domestic Heteropessimism" that she wrote for Post 45’s Heteropessimism cluster. We discuss the resource inefficiency of the nuclear couple and alternatives to the supremacy of the nuclear family as the only place structurally to receive care, safety, and sustenance. We also discuss the con...

Today we are talking with Emi Nietfeld the author of the memoir Acceptance . Emi made it through a lot of difficult life circumstances like homelessness, mental health struggles, abusive relationships, assault, and navigated herself to safety as much as she could, finding success at Harvard University and in a career in software engineering. But she also thinks critically about the pressure to be...

Alex Sammon a political journalist, went to Michoacán a state in Mexico that produces 80% of the United State’s avocados and a third of the global supply. It’s a multibillion dollar industry which draws avocado cartels and eco-democracies like the town Cherán whose indigenous people called the Purépecha kicked out loggers, police, and the local government in 2011 to start their own self-governed t...