podcasts

I wasn't sure if this was a better fit for my TV blog, but since so many of the podcasts mentioned here are about topics I discuss here, well, here we are.

I finally got an iPhone this year, after being a late adopter of smartphones in general and then having a Windows Phone for a bit. Although I'd listened to podcasts before, the iPhone streamlines every part of the process so much that it made me really delve into them, and they've become a significant enough part of my media diet that, like with TV, movies, books, etc., I've had to make priorities because there isn't time to just take everything in.

So after exploring, expanding, and winnowing, this is what I listen to. I don't listen to every episode of everything. I listen to some or a lot of the following.

Interviews

WTF with Marc Maron. The first podcast I listened to on a regular basis. Longform interviews of the kind that you don't see anywhere anymore - Charlie Rose doesn't even really do this anymore, Tavis Smiley is only half an hour. This is Dick Cavett stuff. Some of the guests you expect to be great certainly are -- Paul Thomas Anderson -- but you'd be surprised how great the Ed Begley Jr interview is, and Maron may arguably be at his best talking comedy with comics you might not have heard of.

On Being with Krista Tippett. Tippett's interview subjects cover a wide range of areas - anyone engaged in some way with the human condition. At times I think she could interrogate some of her softer subjects a little more instead of just letting them have the floor, but I suppose that's not the show.

Anna Faris is Unqualified. A newer podcast, Anna Faris and her guest answer relationship questions, often preceded by an informal interview with the guest.  

The Scholars' Circle Interviews. Hosted by Maria Armoudian.

Television

Kumail Nanjiani's The X-Files Files. My favorite TV podcast. Kumail -- you may (and should) know him from Silicon Valley -- goes deep on the X-Files, even going back and reading mid-90s alt.tv.x-files posts about the episodes being discussed. It's a labor of love about a show we all love, and you would think, is there anything new to say about the X-Files? There really is! This is one of the few podcasts I don't skip episodes of, but I've discovered it recently enough that I'm not at all caught up.

I love that podcast enough that I've tried to find similar TV podcasts, but ... well, it's a tough standard to live up to. I found a Friends podcast, for instance, hosted by twentysomethings who keep talking about how they were seven when they saw such and such an episode and how Friends was their first sitcom. My first sitcom was like, Taxi, or Welcome Back Kotter. More power to them, but I can't relate to the conversation. There's a Buffy podcast that tries too hard to be polished and funny, and somehow even when it succeeds it's offputting.

But there's also these two:

Better Call Saul Insider. Hosted by Better Call Saul editor Kelley Dixon, this is an indispensable accompaniment to one of the best shows on TV, a cut way above the after-shows that have proliferated TV and frankly better than most audio commentaries these days (which have become so rushed and perfunctory). 

The West Wing Weekly. This got a lot of press when it started, probably because it's co-hosted by West Wing co-star Joshua Malina (though he didn't join the show until a later season they haven't gotten to yet). So far so good.

Religion and Philosophy

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The preeminent philosophy podcast, it is exactly what it sounds like, and it is mammoth.

The Religious Studies Project. Weekly discussions from scholars around the world.

Homebrewed Christianity. Probably the leading progressive Christianity podcast, started by Tripp Fuller and including interviews with big names like Crossan, Wright, Caputo, etc. Also hosts of the Theology Nerd Throwdown and other podcasts.

Seminary Dropout. An interview-focused podcast by young Texas pastor Shane Blackshear.

Nomad. "Two friends who like Jesus but dislike religion." Sound familiar?

Judaism Unbound. A relatively new podcast on Judaism hosted by, if I remember right, a Gen Xer and a Millennial. 

New Books in Religion. What it says on the tin.

Religious Studies News. From my peeps at AAR.

Miscellaneous

Radiolab. You know Radiolab. Radiolab is one of those shows everyone listens to.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Very very long episodes about various topics in history. I usually have to make a block of time to listen to these, since the run to four hours.

The Brookings Cafeteria. As you know, Bonker, the Brookings Institution is a social sciences and public policy think tank on Think Tank Row. The Brookings Cafeteria is a Brookings-hosted podcast on a wide assortment of topics.

This Week in Law. Just what it sounds like! A weekly discussion of legal issues. I don't blog about legal issues here much because, hey, I'm not a lawyer. But it's a topic I keep an ear out for, in no small part because, as a religious studies scholar, I'm sensitive to the fact that the law, like religion and politics, is something that people talk and opine incessantly about without knowing shit about it. So I want to know more than shit about it.

The Psychology Podcast. Pretty general interest, I tend to skip around and look for the interesting ones.

Bon Appetit. Interviews and other brief discussions with the magazine's staff.

Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. X-actly what it sounds like.

Decompressed. Phonogram creator Kieron Gillen's podcast about the craft of comics.

Podcasts I have on my iPhone that I have not listened to much yet but seriously I have been meaning to

NoSleep

Pseudopod

Escape Pod

PodCastle

Drunks and Dragons

Critical Hit

Philosophize This

How to Be a Person

Off Camera with Sam Jones

Black List Table Reads

Story Worthy

Sklarbro Country

self-judgment and self-compassion

This is actually expanding from a Facebook post, but going into new territory for this blog, insofar as I haven't previously discussed being in therapy here, I don't think. I don't think that's something I can go into a lot of detail about too often or anything, but I do think this particular concept is useful to talk about.

What I'm working on lately in therapy is self-compassion. Words like self-compassion are why therapy can sound like a lot of hug-yourself rigmarole, I know, and that's one reason it took so long for me to find a therapist I was comfortable with (and admit the need for therapy), but bear with me here.

The broad strokes of the backstory that you need to understand are that I was abused as a kid, intermittently over a period of years in a series of instances involving multiple abusers (only one abuser at a time, to be clear, none of them relatives; so many books aimed at child abuse survivors, especially male ones, are aimed at survivors of incest, because it's so commonly the case). As is typically the case with male victims, I didn't begin really dealing with this until my late thirties -- I didn't "forget," these aren't recovered memories, I just didn't deal with it.

The effects of abuse are not always the obvious ones. I have all kinds of jumpiness tics -- I have trouble sitting with my back to the door, if someone wakes me up I wake up fast and violently, I have what they call an exaggerated startle response. These are things you might start to think of if you were to make a list predicting the adult-onset effects of childhood trauma. Other things I think are less predictable unless you have experience in this area, like my habit of self-judgment.

In therapy, we keep coming back to one of the examples that I used when I first brought up the problem I was having: the awesome pan Caitlin got me. So let me use that to explain.

Caitlin got me this awesome pan. It was a non-stick pan with high sides, big enough to cook a couple burgers or chops on, high enough to cook tomato sauce or curry in ... basically, I found out quickly that I could use it for almost anything, and it was such a joy to cook with that I cooked everything in it. Sure, it aged a little like all pans do, especially since I was using it multiple times a day, but it held up remarkably well.

Until I braised beef shanks in it.

One of the things you aren't supposed to do is cook bones in it, especially if you're braising, where the bones can move around. The bones scrape the nonstick coating. When they're braising, and moving around, they scrape it a lot.

That one meal ended the pan. And this is the nature of nonstick pans (especially the good ones): they don't go from "great non-stick pans" to "decent non-stick pans" to "eh, decent pans." They go from "non-stick pans" to "very very sticky pans." Once you ruin a non-stick pan, it doesn't become as mediocre as your other pans, it becomes worse than them. The pan was unusable except to boil water -- and even then, pasta would stick to the bottom if I cooked too much of it.

It took me a long time to throw that pan out.

When I finally did, I felt horribly guilty. I had felt guilty about ruining it anyway -- ruining a gift! -- but I felt worse for throwing it away, even though I couldn't use it and it was taking up space in our tiny kitchen which we had just put considerable effort into rearranging -- we had just bought new furniture, relocated the liquor cabinet to a different room, moved the appliances and changed what went in which cabinet ... all to maximize the little bit of space in there ... and yet I couldn't bring myself to throw out the largest pan in the kitchen, or even to put it in the loft for storage, even though I never used it and never would. And I waited until she wasn't home to throw it out!

Caitlin did not feel bad about me throwing it away at all. She was not at any time mad at me for ruining the pan, and pointed out that I had used it so much that I had gotten more value out of it than a lot of other kitchen things we own.

But I felt terribly guilty and ashamed for ruining this pan. I still feel bad when I think about it.

There are many mechanisms feeding into this. The one that ties the most directly into self-compassion is this: it is very difficult for me to feel sadness.

That sounds crazy.

I know it sounds ridiculous, especially when I say I didn't really realize it until I was 40, but the sort of "sadness algorithm" for me has worked like this:

* SADNESS EVENT occurs.

* SADNESS begins.

* SADNESS truncated, as SELF-JUDGMENT kicks in, flooding the system with SHAME, GUILT, or sometimes ANGER.

So, something that causes sadness occurs, I feel negative emotions, and I think "well, I'm feeling sad about this," but it's not actual sadness I'm feeling. Even typing this, it sounds nuts, or it sounds like something that should have been obvious. But you feel bad, so maybe you need a third party to point out that it's not the context-appropriate flavor of bad.

To underscore the point here: I don't just feel disproportionate shame or guilt in response to shame- or guilt-provoking events; I also feel shame or guilt instead of most other negative emotions. (Anger is easier to feel than sadness, but it's also easy to direct back on myself.)

Self-judgment is the, like, engine that powers the machines doing all of this. I don't wallow in problems and feel like I'm the only one they happen to, but I do over-identify with them and feel like they are the result of my choices, character, or inaction, rather than bad luck or the actions of other agents.

Self-compassion, then, is the alternative, or the healthy thing that is supposed to be happening instead. Self-compassion is the ability to respond to ruining the pan by saying "oh shit, my favorite pan, now I can't cook with my favorite pan anymore, this fucking sucks," and feeling sad about it, instead of getting angry at myself for it. This is the thing I need to work on. Without talking too much about my history of abuse here, it is true that I have not, historically, done a very good job about letting myself feel sad about it having happened, as opposed to angry with myself for not having prevented it. So there are a lot of seeds there. And I won't lie, even typing that, the angry part of me is nodding and saying, well yes, you should be angry. This is something I'm working on, not something I have fixed. It's something I'm still only now learning to see.

When I posted about this on Facebook, thinking this was some crazy thing nobody else has trouble with, enough other people responded with "oh yeah, I talk about that in therapy too" that I thought I would post something more expansive, because who knows, maybe this is a problem for somebody else too, and you've just never heard it articulated.