Past Due with Ana Marie Cox and Open Mike Eagle

Former mayor of Tallahassee and Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum joins to talk how about recovery influenced his perspective on politics and his own sense of self as a former politician, bi-erasure, and what Matt Gaetz’s behavior can tell us about projecting. Then on “With Adorables Like These” Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau tells us how his dog Leo made him a better flyer. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vince Granata starts his book, “Everything Is Fine,” with the truth: His brother, in the midst of a schizophrenic episode, murdered his mother. The rest of the book tells the story of how and why Vince never stopped loving him. And on "With Adorables Likes These" this week - Penny and her human Leo Duran. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ESPN NFL analyst Mina Kimes comes on to give her hot take on how analysts should and shouldn’t talk about sexual assault and institutional bad behavior. One idea: Never again utter the phrase “off-field issues.” And introducing "With Adorables Like These" - interviews with Crooked staff and guests about the animal companions they love. This week's guest is Scooter and his human Dayanita Ramesh. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“United Shades of America” host W. Kamau Bell joins to discuss the miserable job performance of the police, who are our employees! Also: how trauma can make you funnier and why marginalized folks have to have bigger and better imaginations than others. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Documentary “Boys State” was short-listed for an Oscar for its engrossing portrayal of Texas teenagers’ cutthroat politics. One of its stars, Steven Garza, stops by to discuss if the kids are alright. Spoiler alert: Maybe not! For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stand-up Tig Notaro comes by to talk about being free and fearless, and how that makes you a better person and funnier comedian. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky,” explores the damage to the planet humans have done (or could do) in trying to fix the damage they’ve done: everything from electrocuting carp and to sprinkling the sky with diamond dust. For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/withfriendslikethese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Carroll grew up as the only Black person in her adopted family, and in her small town. Her memoir, “Surviving the White Gaze,” is about exactly what it says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harvard Law professor Martha Minow has an idea: what if we forgive debts to society with the same generosity that we forgive the debts of corporations? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York Magazine's Rebecca Traister expands on her reporting about Andrew Cuomo's reckoning and suggests broadening our understanding of what sexual harassment and abuse look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Intercept senior writer Liliana Segura has been reporting on the death penalty for years, including the Trump administration’s lame-duck killing spree. She comes on to discuss the legacy of putting people to death during a pandemic — and to share stories about the heroes she’s found in the darkness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maurice Chammah, author of the NYT Editor’s Pick “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty,” joins us to talk about how enforcing the death penalty poisons everyone who is a part of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this season of With Friends Like These, host Ana Marie Cox looks at post-Trump America and tries to find models for how we forgive people, and if we should. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To celebrate With Friends Like These 200th episode, we talk with Rolling Stone senior writer Jamil Smith about how he helped inspire the show, what the pandemic has taught us about grief, and being careful about who you call a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CW: Eating disorders, dieting. Aubrey Gordon, of Maintenance Phase and “Your Fat Friend,” joins to take us through the twisty history of Weight Watchers and its founder, Jean Nidtech. Stops on the tour include Heinz ketchup and Maya Angelou! Aubrey’s new book is “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the National Guard descended on Minneapolis to enforce an 8PM curfew on the streets, advocates for those living on the streets bought a block of rooms at a shuttered Sheraton to house them. The volunteers decided to impose as little authority as possible, hoping that a radical approach to harm reduction would empower the residents. But their experiment went terribly wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Martinson was a radical anti-racist activist in the 1960s: He ran for mayor in Berkeley as a socialist. He was arrested in Mississippi for participating in Freedom Summer. And then he authored the academic paper that became the political justification for “tough on crime” policies. He’s forgotten; can he be forgiven? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson guides us through his tragic story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York Magazine senior writer and Friend of the Pod Rebecca Traister joins to talk us through how Biden’s missteps around issues of gender and race made him the white guy who could win in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer comes on to talk about the inauguration and the future of this fragile democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We love to love mothers, except when we don’t — like when they’re Black, or queer, or too thin, or too fat, or want to end their pregnancy, or do it alone, or have a glass of wine. Friend of the pod Lyz Lenz joins to discuss her new book, “Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The only sustainable foundation for a changed world is internal transformation” — that’s the message of Sonya Renee Taylor, author of “The Body Is Not an Apology.” Her mission is to take us out of the realm of mere “body positivity” or “self-acceptance” and into a place of “radical self-love.” That means not just creating a world where all bodies are celebrated, but also embracing who we are, exactly as we are. Which part of that mission sounds harder to you? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Derek Black thought he was done with the white nationalist movement when he wrote a public letter renouncing the ideology he grew up in. Then he realized that white nationalism wasn’t just the racists that used to listen to his white nationalist radio show and read his white nationalist website — white supremacy was everywhere, people just weren’t talking about it. (With a new introduction; this episode originally aired 06/12/20.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Santa isn’t the only myth we use to keep children in line! In the 1990s, evangelical churches bought and gave away thousands of copies of the book, “Left Behind,” hoping its overwrought depiction of the End Times would frighten unbelievers into the arms of Christ. That is not what happened. Amy Frykholm, author of “Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America,” explains what did. Originally aired 8/7/2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What, exactly, are parents accomplishing when they encourage their children to believe in the idea of an extravagently-dressed stranger breaking and entering into their homes on Christmas Eve? Is Santa a well-meaning myth or the beginning of the end of filial trust? CW: The truth about Santa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Grafton, New Hampshire, a not-very-picturesque town where the streets are dark, the fires are unregulated, the cats are missing, and the camps are armed. Oh, and there are bears. Smart, dangerous bears. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling tells us the story of “When a Libertarian Walked Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears).” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

NYU and University of Hamburg psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen explains why positive thinking can backfire, and offers a method that might work better. She is the author of “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julie Rodgers was raised in a conservative evangelical home, so she knew they’d be horrified when she came out as a lesbian in her teens. To please her family and community, she first tried to change who she was, then she tried to deny it. We talk about how she went from being a star on the “ex-gay” speaker circuit to believing that God delights in all aspects of LGBTQ people, including their sexuality. Her forthcoming memoir is “Outlove: A Queer Christian Survival Story.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trigger warning: This episode is about suicide and suicide prevention. While the pandemic has made mental health a part of the national conversation, policy makers and the public still tend to think of suicide as a matter of intervention at the point of crisis. Stephanie Wittels is on to explain why that is not the case. The second season of her podcast, “Last Day,” explores individual stories as a way of illustrating that true suicide prevention isn’t about intervening when someone’s life is at risk, it’s about making life worth living from the start. If you feel at risk in any way, please text "START" to 741-741 or call 1-800-273-TALK (8255). As we point out in the episode: If you’re thinking of reaching out but asking yourself if your situation is “bad enough” to deserve help, that means you definitely deserve help. We all do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CW: Sexual violence Author Sarah Schulman joins the show to discuss her provocative and influential book, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. She argues that both the right and left can needless escalate mere conflicts into accusations of abuse, creating victims where there are none and blaming and shaming those who might be simply misunderstood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oxford University professor of anthropology Chris Gosden joins us to discuss his book: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present. Also: We make politics disappear! Which is to say, there is NO DISCUSSION OF THE 2020 ELECTION IN THIS EPISODE. You’re welcome! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, a deep dive into how political enthusiasts’ default background noise is ruining our country. First, we hear from a former MSNBC producer who left the network after feeling like she was part of the problem. Then media critic Jay Rosen warns us about how the habits formed in covering Trump might warp coverage of whatever administration comes next. Lastly, CJR columnist Maria Bustillos helps us ponder why it is journalists who start out meaning well wind up making things worse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

QAnon! What a *wild* conspiracy theory! Blood-drinking! Pedophilia! JFK Jr.! Pretty fascinating stuff! I bet you want to listen to this episode! Which is exactly why we need to rethink how the media covers conspiracies and how we think about them. George Mason University disinformation researcher John Cook helps explain how we can keep toxins out of the media bloodstream. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do people enter public service? How do they keep going when times get hard — or they wind up not lasting long in a presidential primary? Julián Castro talks about injustice, strategic voting, and his new podcast, “Our America.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s easy to feel superior to John Allen Chau, the evangelical Christian who died attempting to bring the Bible to the North Sentinelese. We should ask ourselves if maybe it’s a little too easy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You might think being obsessed with politics — watching cable news, reading political blogs, and, er, listening to political podcasts — is a good thing! Historian Claire Bond Potter isn’t so sure. She joins us to talk her book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We begin our “Good Intentions” series exploring the origin of the impulse to help. The good news is that empathy and altruism appear to be instinctive reactions to the pain of others! The bad news is that it’s super-easy to divert or suppress that instinct (hint: the President does it all the time!). USC neuroscientist Leo Christov-Moore explains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eva Hagberg thought she knew who she was: a smart, overachieving loner on her way to literary fame. Then her brain went boom (technical term), and she had to reevaluate her relationship to achievement, to herself, and to the people that loved her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two founders of the Lincoln Project on their “psychological warfare” campaign against Trump, why Susan Collins must go, and how those viral ads are just the tip of the iceberg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this final episode of our “Converts” edition, we revisit some past episodes to see exactly what we’ve learned about how people do (and don’t) change their minds. What have we picked up from the a cop-turned-activist, a scientist who embraced mysticism, a conservative climate change advocate, and a onetime white nationalist who marched to say Black Lives Matter? The answers may surprise you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may know about the ways that “conversion therapy” has played out when it comes to religion. But what about the once-mainstream, secular professionals who refused to give up on the idea that their work wasn’t just necessary, but also the truly scientific approach to homosexuality? This is their story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1990s, evangelical churches bought and gave away thousands of copies of the book, “Left Behind,” hoping its overwrought depiction of the End Times would frighten unbelievers into the arms of Christ. That is not what happened. Amy Frykholm, author of “Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America,” explains what did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julie Rehmeyer is a science writer who studied math at MIT. She also lives with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a disease that many doctors treat with skepticism bordering on derision. So when traditional medicine couldn’t help her, she had to try treatments science couldn’t support. Julie’s book is Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer’s Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn’t Understand Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thousands of people crowding public venues to hear the word of the Lord. Men fainting, women claiming to be healed, all rejoicing at being “born again.” When you think of “converts,” this may be what you picture, because it’s a familiar scene — more familiar than you may realize. The quintessentially American revival meeting was born before the country itself, in the mid-1700s, during what we call today “The First Great Awakening.” Our guest this week is Thomas Kidd, a historian at Baylor University of The Great Awakening and colonial society. I brought him on to walk us all through the specifics of it, and to speculate on how the American thirst for spiritual change reverberates today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former mayor of Minneapolis Betsy Hodges comes on to talk about how the Rodney King uprisings started her journey to anti-racist activism — and what happened when, in 2015, her anti-racist ideals ran up against the realities of governing a city rocked by the shooting of a black man by white police officers. Her piece on the King uprisings is here. Her op-ed in the New York Times about how white liberals stand in the way of progress on police violence is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would turn a passionate, witty feminist into a xenophobic white nationalist? This week’s episode tells the story of Cordelia Scaife May, the eccentric heiress whose fortune underwrote both the Pittsburg Children’s Museum and the most influential network of immigration restrictionists in American history. Our episode owes much to the New York Times’ investigative report on Scaife May last year, [“Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out”] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his 34 years in law enforcement, Norm Stamper participated in — or approved of — the gassing of protesters “hundreds” of times. Yet, he thought of himself as a reformer. He was, he thought, one of the “good guys.” His first book was intended to pull back the curtain and expose those *other* cops. Five years into retirement, he realized he was one of those other cops all along. Today, he’s advocate for not just changing policing policy, but resetting the whole system. Find out how he got there.That first book is Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (2005). The one that reflects who he is now is To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police (2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) was proud of his Tea Party bona fides, until his son said he couldn’t vote for a climate change denier. Inglis wound up changing his mind, and gained one vote but lost a lot more — he’s now a former congressman, on a mission to recruit more conservatives to the climate cause. You can find out more about Inglis’ organization at RepublicEN.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How White Light Moments Change Your Brain, with Andrew Newberg If you’ve listened to the show at all this season, you’ve learned that the brain doesn’t want to change. And when it does change, it’s usually a slow process of erosion or evolution. So... what about the white light moments we’ve all heard of, if not experienced? Throughout history, there are accounts of people who undergo an instantaneous conversion of some kind: a flash of insight or comprehension that changes their lives forever. “Neurotheologian” Andrew Newberg joins us to talk about his research into what’s behind the white light, and what it does to us when it shines. You can find out more about Andrew and his research on his website His book about white light experiences is How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain If you’d like to hear Ana talk about her own white light experience, that discussion is here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Derek Black thought he was done with the white nationalist movement when he wrote a public letter renouncing the ideology he grew up in. Then he realized that white nationalism wasn’t just the racists that used to listen to his white nationalist radio show and read his white nationalist website — white supremacy was everywhere, people just weren’t talking about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can’t escape the images of protest and unrest happening in our country this week. But what will be their lasting impact on Americans’ — especially white Americans’ — views? We look back to the 1960s civil rights movement for clues. Princeton political science professor Omar Wasow work focuses on how the two different waves of protest in that era effected both voting patterns and Americans’ interest in cause of ending racial discrimination. SHOW LINKS How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/agenda-seeding-how-1960s-black-protests-moved-elites-public-opinion-and-voting/136610C8C040C3D92F041BB2EFC3034C If you’re able to donate, here’s how to support people and groups protesting police violence and working to combat racism and injustice: Go to crooked.com/bailfunds to support community bail funds around the country, and go to crooked.com/changefunds to support 11 groups fighting racism and police brutality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices