Jennifer Senior: Secrets and Lies

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 4 Hey, everybody, as I mentioned on yesterday's pod, I'm in Portugal at my friend's wedding this week, and so I pre-taped this interview with Jen Sr., who I just adore, has been nominated for two Pulitzers, one one in the past couple of years.

Speaker 4 I wanted to talk about those articles, but also her analysis of our political life right now. She's written movingly about COVID and long COVID.
She wrote about Steve Bannon.

Speaker 4 She's written about conspiracy theories.

Speaker 4 We definitely have some deep personal talk at the end about some of her profiles that are a little bit off the news, but stick around for the top because she's got some real insights into the authoritarian right and what's happening in our political moment.

Speaker 4 Tomorrow, Wednesday, AB will be in this chair talking about the end of Row with some very special guests.

Speaker 4 On Thursday, JVL will be in this chair with our old friend Amanda Carpenter, who volunteered to come anytime on vacation. So I'm grateful to Amanda at Protect Democracy.

Speaker 4 We'll take Friday off, and then I'll be back next Monday. So enjoy this conversation with Jen Sr.
Be nice to AB and JVL and Amanda, and I'll see you all next week. Peace.

Speaker 4 All right, we are here with Jen Sr., my friend, staff writer at The Atlantic, the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her piece, What Bobby McElvane Left Behind, which turned into a book on grief.

Speaker 4 She's also the author of the book All Joy and No Fun, The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

Speaker 4 And she was a finalist for the Pulitzer, No Big Deal, for a 2023 piece about her aunt Adele, The Ones We Sent Away. Jen, what's happening? Thank you for doing this.

Speaker 5 You're welcome. You know, I adore you, so no problemo.
Nothing is happening. Well, actually, that's not truth.

Speaker 4 Okay. Mutual Adoration Society.

Speaker 5 Yes, no, I could totally fanboy at you. So many things, so many good one-liners that I would gush about, but that's kind of nauseating.
But you've been terrific.

Speaker 5 So I got in at two last night, so I'm kind of exhausted. And I was at a sleep conference in Houston.

Speaker 4 Do you talk at a sleep conference or do you sleep at a sleep conference?

Speaker 5 Well, this is what I was going to say.

Speaker 5 No, you attend a million lectures about sleep, all of which seemed, by the way, for those of us who are sleep-deprived, to be saying, you know, the subtext was like, Jen Senior, you're going to die an early death.

Speaker 5 The amazing thing was how many people drink coffee, like a ton of coffee. And then my flight is like delayed by eight hours, and I have to wake up early today.

Speaker 5 So I come back from a sleep conference, and I'm like exhausted. Anyway, sorry, I'm just.
venting.

Speaker 4 That's perfect for podcasting, actually. Are you using bowl and branch sheets?

Speaker 4 Have you started your bowl and have you tried your bowl and branch sheets?

Speaker 5 This is a a freebie.

Speaker 5 That wasn't what I was doing. No, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 5 I can build on this. Okay, you swung the door wide open, so I'll walk through my pillow.
We should do it.

Speaker 5 Or as Bannon likes to say, I'll do my pillows read here.

Speaker 4 Pillows read. Did you ever try my pillow?

Speaker 5 You know, I was told it was such a piece of shit. I think, and I should, because if it's only a $40 piece of shit or whatever it is, it seems like it's worth test driving and charging to the company.

Speaker 5 But no, have you?

Speaker 4 No, of course not. Never.

Speaker 4 Give me the heebie-jeebie.

Speaker 5 Right. Well, I don't think that he slept on it, but anyway, yes, I think

Speaker 5 it's a good idea.

Speaker 4 It was around him, it was in the building of him. It's a very creepy, but the whole thing is creepy.

Speaker 5 You don't know where it was.

Speaker 5 It might be China. You know, we know.
Oh, no, wait, that's a shtick that it's not, right? I don't know.

Speaker 4 Not China. Okay, so we're going to talk about some of your long-form pieces that are not non-politics, but though they might have a politics angle.

Speaker 5 So we'll get to that.

Speaker 4 But before we do, I feel obligated because it was like a sign from the gods that an hour before we taped this, our mutual friend, Stephen K.

Speaker 4 Bannon, was informed by a judge that he has to report to prison at long last by July 1st.

Speaker 4 He has been the subject of articles by both of us. Yours better than mine.

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 yours is much funnier.

Speaker 4 It's not just funnier, sure, but you know,

Speaker 4 there are other gradients where you can judge writing

Speaker 4 besides poop humor.

Speaker 5 I think you could argue that vaudeville is the way to go, but anyway, yeah, fine.

Speaker 4 With Bannon. So I'm just wondering your reaction to that and just kind of like a reflection.
You have a little bit of depth.

Speaker 4 You did talk about that article when you were on with Charlie a while back, but

Speaker 4 kind of just reflection on

Speaker 4 the Bannon Oof.

Speaker 5 Oh, ooh, interesting. Okay, well, first of all, he plumped like a sponge in front of the cameras today.
I mean, I don't think that was an act. I don't think you can fake that.

Speaker 5 I mean, it was almost the way that in the Anthony Weiner documentary, he couldn't suppress how pleased he was when he was watching himself on Chris Matthews when he was secretly kind of embarrassing himself and revealing himself to be a horrible narcissist.

Speaker 5 I think Ben was genuinely kind of plumbing to the prospect of going to jail for this. I don't know how he'll feel once he's there, but this is super on brand to be the martyr, all that stuff.

Speaker 5 I'm sure you had the same reaction, right? I agree.

Speaker 4 He seemed too excited. It actually took my joy away.
Like I had a moment when I saw the tax raw, I was like, you know, this is nice, but it did, um, it did take my joy away a little bit.

Speaker 5 I don't want to comment about sort of how I felt about it.

Speaker 5 I mean, I'm sure reading that piece, you could see there was this very strange act that was going on when I was writing it, where at the end, I realized that I'd been lulled into sort of feeling like I was Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, where I felt like, okay, he's out there in the world, but he won't come after me.

Speaker 5 And that was, I think, true, but he outsourced it, and other people did very aggressively after the piece about him came out.

Speaker 5 He had his deputies, you could see, and there were all these kind of, you know, on MSNBC.

Speaker 5 He had clearly outsourced this work where it was the most unflattering shot you could take of a 50, what was I, two-year-old woman at that point, where they would zoom in on my face just as I would, they would freeze as I was doing, you know, like one of those.

Speaker 5 I guess this is mainly a podcast, but I'm making a frog face or whatever face.

Speaker 4 I want to get back to the point you're making, though, because I feel the same way. He is not like some of these other people in the MAGA world.

Speaker 4 His dark side is the same as theirs, but he's affable, he's charming, and like he's an interesting hang. Yeah.
If you had to suffer through a five-hour boozy dinner with Donald Trump Jr.

Speaker 4 or Stephen Miller or Dan Bonjier, like you can just list all these people, all these horrible people, Laura Ingram or Greg Gutfeld or Bannon. It's like Bannon, immediately.

Speaker 4 Like, please, you know what I mean? Like, he would by far be the most interesting person to sit with for five hours and all these other horrible gnomes.

Speaker 4 And so you have to process that a little bit when you're thinking about him.

Speaker 5 So, if I can jump in for just one second here, Jeff Goldberg said to me after I had written two sociology pieces, one that was about the McIlvanes and another that was an essay on friendship.

Speaker 5 He said, okay, democracy is on the line. You have to choose a MAGA person, any MAGA person.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I said, Bannon, exactly. It was the same, like, Bannon for 500, please.
Because he was the only person I thought whose company I would find

Speaker 5 genuinely interesting. Also, I mean, as we know, he's

Speaker 5 whether he likes it or not, he is an establishment guy.

Speaker 5 So he knows how to code switch. And so I thought it'd be interesting to watch him doing that in real time.

Speaker 5 I mean, he'd sit there and speak to me about John Sales movie and then go live on the air and start

Speaker 5 braying and howling to his listeners.

Speaker 5 but anyway yeah he genuinely seemed energized by this the funny thing to sort of think about also in terms of him going to jail is you could think about like oh this is sort of the Omerta thing right you don't talk but you're doing that on behalf of the Don right which has two meanings here I'm now realizing the Donald and the Don but

Speaker 5 He also is in some ways the Don because he really does think of himself as being the head of some other grassroots movement. So it's sort of interesting.

Speaker 5 Like, I don't think he thinks he's martyring himself, even though he says publicly that it's on the movement's behalf. I think that there's some part of him who thinks it's

Speaker 5 on his own behalf, that his own listeners are going to be, you know, energized by this, not just on the movement's behalf, but on his. That's my secret theory.

Speaker 4 The dark part about him was the follow-up statement, not his bushy-tailed press conference where he has just had a shitty and grin and he's pleased to play the fighting.

Speaker 5 Right. And was heckling the heckler.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the dark side of him was his statement after that, which is, uh, he said, Don't pray for me, pray for my enemies. He said this to Jonathan Swan.
I think it seems like he used it a couple times.

Speaker 4 Yep. And, like,

Speaker 4 it's such bullshit bravado. You know, it's like, it's such bullshit bravado.
And he doesn't want to send anybody after you or me, anybody he knows. It's not like his actual enemies are not that.

Speaker 4 Like the media, he loves, like, the Democrats, like, he watches MSNBC all day. You know, like, this is all part of a big WWF wrestling thing for him.

Speaker 4 The problem is that there will be real, like some people will suffer, you know, and if that's if they do get back to power and they do seek revenge, then there will be real suffering.

Speaker 4 And these guys don't care about that, actually. And that's the part that makes him so loathsome.

Speaker 5 Well, whenever he lost his shit, he would say, hey, I'm Irish, right?

Speaker 5 I mean, and I think there's a little bit of the, you know, he definitely, this is in no way to ascribe this to Irish people, but like he, he keeps falling back on that because he doesn't want to in some ways own his own, you know, anger and his own venue, you know, he's got like a deeply vengeful streak.

Speaker 5 And also, I think you're right.

Speaker 5 I don't think it would necessarily come out at people like you or me, but the number of people who I spoke to who were afraid to be on the record and who really did feel like they were getting threats and they would describe to me as threats.

Speaker 5 And they were pretty sure they were emanating from Ben. And there's no way to know.
You know, there's no way to know. I'm not really clear on whether he's got his own goon squad.

Speaker 5 I don't think it's tough to say, right?

Speaker 4 And he's got goons, and he's got security, you know, and I think that I don't think he's going to bodily harm anyone.

Speaker 4 Yeah, if you're between him and power on the right, you definitely are at threat. Right.
Like, in some ways, like, we're his performative enemies.

Speaker 4 Like, his real enemies are the internal, the intra-party, like, he wants control over the MAGA and the Republican ecosystem.

Speaker 4 And so his real enemies are the ones that try to stop him in that fight, right? And so those are the people that are his actual enemies. The rest of us are kind of enemies via Kayfe.

Speaker 5 I mean, I think that,

Speaker 5 you know, I don't know what the state of affairs is now,

Speaker 5 but his biggest enemy when he was in the administration was Jared. Right.
So you're exactly right.

Speaker 5 And by the way, I'm not suggesting that this man is truly going to outsource any violence, but, you know, or come out. I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 4 But it might be an unintentional.

Speaker 5 I see what you're saying. Yes.
I do think that he is responsible for a lot of the energy. I don't think, you know, the guy can't even organize a birthday party.
He's so disorganized.

Speaker 5 But I do think he's responsible for summoning a lot, conjuring a lot of the energy around January 6th. And so in that way, and what we saw on that day is that it only takes a handful of people

Speaker 5 to breach the security of the Capitol. I mean, to storm the Capitol.
He's an asymmetrical threat.

Speaker 5 right you don't need that many people and so in that way of course he's a danger and you also listen to his podcast I mean, you can see what he's doing.

Speaker 5 You, like me, have listened to hours, you know, thousands of hours at this point, probably, hundreds. So yeah, you know what kind of threat he poses.

Speaker 4 One hour a week. It's my medicine.
Yeah. I mean, my last thing for you on this is to that asymmetric thing.
You know, it's just when I was on a live podcast and I was writing something about him.

Speaker 4 And so I was kind of hiding inside and like he sees me and calls me out there to the danger versus the Kfave, the faking. He's laughing.
His staff thinks it's funny and likes me. He's picking on me.

Speaker 4 Some in the crowd are laughing and think it's funny. A couple of them in the crowd come up to me afterwards and are like fascinated by me.
And like, what is this? Never Trumper think, you know?

Speaker 4 One guy is really mad, starts yelling, starts cussing, like banning security has to get between him. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 And so, like, just as if that's like a little microcosm of his audience, you know, it's like,

Speaker 4 if it's only 1%,

Speaker 4 you know, with their 100%, there was 2%, there were probably 50 people there. You know, if 2% are getting really violently angry, that's a lot.
That's too many people. It's a lot of people.

Speaker 5 It's the literally versus seriously. I mean, the 2% who take him literally.
Sorry, who take him seriously. What was the old Trump saw? Why am I forgetting it now?

Speaker 5 This is where the, you know, no sleep because I was in Houston problem happens.

Speaker 4 Yeah, his followers take him seriously, but not literally.

Speaker 5 Right. So, and we take him literally, but not seriously.
And I think that for the people who take him both ways, this is where the problem comes in.

Speaker 5 And those are the people who showed up at the Capitol and those are the people who decide, you know, who were in the horns and the fur dresses. So, yeah.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houghton.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 4 I want to kind of get into your articles in this way, though. I want one more kind of politics question.

Speaker 4 Last week, we had McKay Coppins on, and he talked to a 25-year-old woman in Poland, and her question for him is, What the fuck is happening in America, or what the fuck is wrong with America?

Speaker 4 Something, one of those. And, you know, you, because of you know, your travels, you're at sleep conferences, you're you know, doing a lot of interviews with regular people.

Speaker 4 We're going to talk about some of these articles, are seeing the full

Speaker 4 the full pastiche, the full majesty of America. Like, how do you just process all of it?

Speaker 5 And it's just what is happening.

Speaker 4 Yeah, just like just the radicals, like the people are so interested in what Bannon's offering that people in your life that were Republicans, but kind of normal Republicans are like off the deep end angry now.

Speaker 4 And like just the polarization and the radicalization, even on the left in some ways. How are you processing all of that? Do you have any kind of wisdom for us?

Speaker 5 Well.

Speaker 5 One is that when I write about normal people in America, I discover that thing that you always find in polls, which is that two-thirds or whatever percentage, I mean, it's fewer now than it used to be, but it's still a substantial percentage of Americans still aren't very interested in politics, which we always forget.

Speaker 5 And the other thing is how many Americans who voted for Trump, but in point of view, have very nuanced personal feelings about things. And one always forgets that, too.

Speaker 5 That still, I think, remains something that we don't pay attention to. This said,

Speaker 5 I am also amazed at how many things from the margins are infiltrating the way that the Overton window really has been expanded on the left and the right.

Speaker 5 So one of my closest friends who just blurted out a statistic to me.

Speaker 5 And I'm not even going to bother saying what it was, whatever. And I said, really?

Speaker 5 And I was rooting around online for it, and I couldn't find it. There was just one place that it was.

Speaker 4 Can we know the topic? Can we know the subject matter?

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was about, okay, sure. It was about millennials dying at a greater rate.
And was this because of vaccinations?

Speaker 9 Got it.

Speaker 5 This originated originated on Bannon's show and filtered out into the

Speaker 5 dark, webby, super MAGA-y ecosystem. And it somehow made its way back to my friend, right? And so

Speaker 5 how that leaked through is sort of, I mean, that's amazing to me, the porousness now of this kind of stuff.

Speaker 5 So I'm saying two contradictory things, I recognize, but this friend is very, very interested in politics.

Speaker 5 So it would not actually be weird for her to have, you know, kind of expanded her diet and somehow, boom, there it is.

Speaker 5 And she also mentioned to me that she's quite horrified by the trans issue, which I think is really interesting because in point of fact, I get it, but in point of fact, this doesn't affect very many people.

Speaker 5 Like, why truly would you vote based on this when democracy is in fact on the line? I would argue that, like, solve the democracy problem problem first, make sure we've shored that up.

Speaker 5 And yeah, then worry about the left's excesses on, let's say, the transition. You know, I think your priorities sort of have to be clear here.

Speaker 5 And it got muddled and one has to wonder how that's happening. So I think that's also true.
Your turn, because you're going to have a far, you know, more nuanced take than I, actually.

Speaker 4 No, I don't have a far more nuanced take. And honestly, I'm going to have to start cutting out the compliments if you keep complimenting me.

Speaker 5 It's making me uncomfortable okay that's fine you've got an editor

Speaker 4 the uh my question for you is

Speaker 4 okay this is happening the crazy is leaking out from the extremes and it is contaminating regular people at a greater degree like i don't think we need data to know this i think this is just observationally true is that something about connectivity, like people's lack of connectivity with community, you know, lack of church, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 Or is it news consumption? Is it lack of having a shared truth, you know, that people are like getting news now from the, from whatever, like, they're scrolling by on their phone?

Speaker 5 Is it

Speaker 4 mass onset psychosis?

Speaker 5 Let's rule out three for now.

Speaker 5 Let's definitely say that two is right, that, you know, that people are getting their news from all sorts of places and that the moderating forces are no longer really moderating anymore.

Speaker 5 And we're in the minority now, I think. And that what my kid sees on TikTok is sort of horrifying.
I also think

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 what you said, the Robert Putnam bowling alone arguments that were first made in 2000, or popularized and sort of, there was really granular data showing exactly, you know, we have fewer friends, we have fewer closer friends, we don't socialize, all that stuff, I think, absolutely plays a role.

Speaker 5 You know, who's keenly aware of it to loop it back through what we were just talking about. Bannon.
Bannon knows this.

Speaker 5 The most interesting thing that Bannon said, and it wasn't to me, it was to Errol Morris in the documentary that no one would show and it's a darn shame.

Speaker 5 And Earl was momentarily deplatformed for it, but it's great, right? Is that

Speaker 5 this one point that Bannon made where he said, look, I worked in Hong Kong for a gaming company, and the first thing I noticed is that all these lonely guys who were playing video games in their basements felt really emboldened when they were online as avatars.

Speaker 5 Because if they died in real life, you know, Bill and Accounting, if he dropped dead, 10 people would show up at his funeral, 100 people would show up at his funeral, whatever.

Speaker 5 But if he dropped dead online,

Speaker 5 thousands of people would show up and you know, he would be known as Ajax online and people would carry him to his funeral pyre on a caisson and he would be celebrated and people would miss a day of work, like actually miss a day of work to celebrate him.

Speaker 5 And that's loneliness, right? He was, his starting point was the guy in the basement. People are gonna go to these sources where they feel

Speaker 5 like people are drumming up a community, you know. I mean, Tucker Carlson is talking to you.

Speaker 5 Steve Bannon is talking to you.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 I think there's some of that, a lot of that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the young boys.

Speaker 5 But also feeling estrangement, feeling, yeah, and, you know, finding your community.

Speaker 4 And lack of empowerment,

Speaker 4 lack of purpose.

Speaker 5 I do think that the breakaway republic of the 1% and the fact that a lot of people don't feel like they are getting anywhere, I think you can't emphasize that stuff enough. Purpose matters.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they feel real despair. So I think all the deaths of despair we're reading about, I mean, I think those are all real.
And it's millennials, it's working-class people. I mean, it's everything.

Speaker 5 I think it's everything you've isolated. It's all of it.

Speaker 4 I had a great Scott Galloway convo about this, but I just keep coming back to it. It's like people need to feel like they are accomplishing something or like that something they're doing matters.

Speaker 4 The upper middle-class version of these boys are like they have some stupid job that they think is totally worthless and pointless.

Speaker 4 And the working-class version of this is they struggle to find a job. You know, they're struggling to find like meaningful work and they're struggling to date.

Speaker 4 And like, there's a version of this at both levels, I think, is

Speaker 4 tough.

Speaker 5 And this is like David Brooks's and Oren Cass's project, right? Trying to find meaning and purpose in life when I think people don't have a purchase in their communities anymore.

Speaker 5 Or, right, they don't have kind of professional fulfillments and they don't have family fulfillments. It's all of it.
And it's

Speaker 5 hard. You know, fragmentation is hard and not feeling purpose in your work is harder.

Speaker 5 That you've got a union behind you or that you've got like a family at work is not, you know, you don't want it to replace your church.

Speaker 5 And in fact, some people are trying to do that and it's not working, you know, because church attendance is down and neighborhoods aren't neighborhoods anymore, all that stuff. It all plays a role.

Speaker 5 It all plays a role.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I wish Oren Cass could just focus on the goody tushus part of this and not

Speaker 4 the overthrowing our democracy side of it, you know, just kind of laser focus on the giving people purpose and sort of shed the turning our stupidest citizen into an autocrat part.

Speaker 4 I think you have some more insights on this that are going to be revealed based on your two Pulitzer-nominated articles, which we're going to talk about. But before we get to those, I want to

Speaker 4 ask you about something. You also wrote recently about questions not to ask you about long COVID.
You have long COVID.

Speaker 4 I just couldn't help but notice that during the period that you had long COVID, you've also been nominated for two Pulitzer

Speaker 4 1-1.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I do wonder about that.

Speaker 5 Well, first of all, the 2022 Pulitzer was for a piece published in 2021. It's always a little deceptive.
You win whatever year Pulitzer for something you wrote the previous year.

Speaker 4 For those of us who don't have any awards, it's hard to, yeah, that is hard to get that straight.

Speaker 5 Sorry, this was never on my bucket list because magazine people weren't qualified until like five minutes ago.

Speaker 5 And also, by the way, I was at New York magazine for like 18 years, and I got really used to saying, no, New York, not the New Yorker.

Speaker 5 So I was very comfortable working at Avis. Like, we're number two.
I was really happy there. I privileged my happiness for a very long time.
So, and by the way, we were a great magazine.

Speaker 5 Just nobody took us seriously for forever.

Speaker 4 Avis is a great rental car company. Right.

Speaker 4 Get you where you need to go.

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 5 And New York, thank you. And New York was a great magazine.
Exactly. So I was healthy as a horse when I wrote the McElvane thing.
I had a great, really productive year. When I won,

Speaker 5 it was like in the beginning of May, and I got infected

Speaker 5 June 28th. That's when I popped positive in 2022.
So I had like six weeks to enjoy that before it all went to hell. And by the way, the piece that I wrote that was a finalist,

Speaker 5 it shipped out in June of 2023. That is one year to work on one piece.
I mean, that's crazy. That's one-third the number of long pieces that I had done the year before.

Speaker 5 And I wrote the whole thing while lying on my back. Like, not even sitting, but lying down with the laptop on my tummy.

Speaker 5 Let me tell you, I didn't realize until then that there is a real connection between how much you move and how fast you think, you know, and how much you think. I didn't have any brain fog.

Speaker 5 I mean, those are not my symptoms, the kind of brain fog fatigue, shortness of breath. I don't have any of that stuff.
I have, you know, kind of next-gen stuff from the Omicron wave.

Speaker 5 And the other thing is, I mean, if you heard me in my interview, in the final interview that that I did, there's a moment where I said, can I lie down on your couch? I need to lie down.

Speaker 5 And I conducted the whole interview. Like, the next three hours were me being horizontal.
And she was lovely about it.

Speaker 6 Ah, greetings for my bath, festive friends. The holidays are overwhelming, but I'm tackling this season with PayPal and making the most of my money, getting 5% cash back when I pay in four.

Speaker 7 No fees, no interest.

Speaker 8 I used it to get this portable spa with jets.

Speaker 9 Now the bubbles can cling to my sculpted but pruny body. Make the most of your money this holiday with PayPal.

Speaker 4 Save the offer in the app.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carrise Van Houghton.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny, infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 4 Long Long COVID thing, I have an admission against interest here, and we might not actually get to your antidel because you might storm off the podcast when I ask you this question.

Speaker 4 But I feel like it's important because if I have this

Speaker 4 bad thought in my head, then some percentage of listeners probably have this bad thought in their head. And so it's good to get it out and hash it out.
And that is, I went through a period of time,

Speaker 4 really, I think, before we met recently in person. And another person I've met recently that is struggling with long COVID, where I was like, Are we sure this isn't psychosomatic?

Speaker 4 And I know that that just might make you want to choke me.

Speaker 5 It does a little, yeah.

Speaker 4 It feels confusing. It feels confusing.

Speaker 5 It's confusing because I pass as a normal person. So, I'll say two things about this.
I was taking one medication before this, Unisom, to sleep.

Speaker 5 I'm now taking 12.

Speaker 5 So, I'm pretty humpty-dumptied over here. And a number of them are really strong, including an anti-epileptic.

Speaker 5 And my primary symptoms are really intense, kind of strange vertigo, where it feels like a heavy metal gyroscope is spinning in my head.

Speaker 5 And if you think about that, I didn't even know a body was capable of generating that sensation. It's a very weird concept to gin up for someone.
And it happened immediately after, right?

Speaker 5 Immediately after. I mean,

Speaker 5 I was blazing through the world.

Speaker 5 It was highly productive.

Speaker 4 Just for people who, like me, are dumb. Yeah.
And don't have two Pulitzer nominations, because you wrote this in the article too: the gyroscope in the head.

Speaker 4 What are we talking about? What is that?

Speaker 5 I mean, neurologists have sort of heard variations on this before, or this exact thing. It means that I don't feel like the room is spinning.
I feel like something is spinning inside my head.

Speaker 5 I have always been infection-prone, and I'm sure that this is one of the reasons I have a natural killer cell deficiency when my natural killer cells show up in medium or low concentrations.

Speaker 5 And these are the first line of defense in any kind of viruses. I mean, I've had immunologists looking at this.
So it qualified me early for getting a vaccine and all that stuff.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's a part of my medical profile.

Speaker 5 And so when I had spinal meningitis in my 30s, I had something that was a little bit similar, where when I sneezed, it felt like my brain was banging against the front of my head.

Speaker 5 That's a pretty classic sign of that you've got spinal meningitis and not just in 104 fever.

Speaker 5 So I will often have this sensation that if I tip my head forward, my whole brain feels like it's moving forward. And if I tip my head backwards, it will feel like everything is sliding backwards.

Speaker 5 And if I sit up, it will feel like something is spinning. And I'm used to it.
I'm now just used to it.

Speaker 4 For YouTube viewers, I was just kind of testing that out. And that's not, I don't have to.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, well, of course, you're not going to feel that. I mean, like, I've never felt that in my life, except for mildly when I had spinal meningitis.
I mean, you can see it.

Speaker 5 If I stand up and I close my eyes, I immediately tip over. And my eyes sort of, everything bounces.
I feel like I have a GoPro camera on my head.

Speaker 5 And I've had that when I had inner ear infections again. I'm prone to this stuff.
But they all go away. This just hasn't gone away.
I'm probably living in some permanent inflammatory state.

Speaker 5 And by the way, before I do anything, I lie down for like three hours. That's the other thing.
You don't see the rest preceding a social visit. You don't see all of that.

Speaker 5 You also don't see the fact that I've made myself kind of worse and worse and that I keep taking more and more meds in order to be functional because I am stubborn and my self-concept is so intertwined with work.

Speaker 5 I now wear a nicotine patch. I've never smoked in my life.
It's the lowest dose.

Speaker 4 Nicotine patches, I tried that once. That made me dizzy.

Speaker 5 Well, you get the spins at first. That's absolutely true.
And I thought I was getting worse. But eventually it was great.
And there are two theories.

Speaker 5 Number one, nicotine binds to the same receptors that the spike proteins do. And it's a stronger molecule.

Speaker 5 So there's some thought that maybe it dislodges the spike proteins that are sort of clamped onto your nerves like squid, and that nicotine lodges on instead.

Speaker 5 And then your very shitty immune system eventually gobbles up those spike proteins. This might just be a Kakamimi theory.

Speaker 5 But the other is that nicotine raises your blood pressure and mind craters because I now have this thing called POTS. And that an entire long COVID cohort is walking around with.

Speaker 5 That's not at all arcane. I didn't have it until now.
This is an autonomic nervous system problem. And this is probably something that has happened post-virus anytime there's been a pandemic.

Speaker 5 I'm sure people walked around with this in 1918 or after any major flu pandemic. There's just these post-viral syndromes that happen.
So I got that. Never had it in my life.

Speaker 5 These are measurable symptoms. I also have microclots.
You can't. will your way toward microclots.
You don't have them. I do.
That can't be a byproduct of anything psychosomatic.

Speaker 5 So you could say, sure, that it's psychosomatic, but then you have to ask, why did I wait until the moment I had COVID COVID to have it?

Speaker 4 I feel compelled by your answer.

Speaker 4 I feel apologetic that I'm like, you need to defend all of your symptoms, but I think it's important, though, to hash, because I know what the boys are saying after a couple of beers about people with long COVID.

Speaker 4 And so it's important for people to hear.

Speaker 5 I mean, the question is why anyone would do this to themselves. You know, I have a talent for getting all sorts of crappy things, but I always get over them.
And I've always been fine.

Speaker 5 This time, I'm not fine. You know, this was the thing that sort of did me in.

Speaker 5 All I could say is I had 52 years, you know, to be on my fainting couch, you know, and to have the sort of Victorian lady problems. But I mean, why on earth would I choose this?

Speaker 5 And by the way, I'm going on disability because I've just made myself worse and worse.

Speaker 5 I want to know how I'll be after a month of truly resting because I will get off this podcast and I'll tell you what will happen.

Speaker 5 My head will be juddering and vibrating like a lawnmower and my ear will be ringing and it will suck.

Speaker 4 My other question on this then is, so you wrote about what people shouldn't do.

Speaker 4 I always ask this people that are going through things I have trouble processing is like, has anybody done anything that's been like, man, that was really great?

Speaker 4 You know, is there a support advice that you have? Has anybody offered a conversation, a gift?

Speaker 5 My friends who just sort of say, okay, well, I'm coming over. You know, like, I'm just going to show up with like, you know, food.
You know, I mean, just people showing love is really cool.

Speaker 4 This is true of healthy people too. I love a drop-in.
I feel like we've lost the drop-in in American culture for some reason. I want to drop in.
Louisiana friends, drop on in. Just swing on by.

Speaker 4 I'd love to have somebody ring the doorbell and have it not be, you know, somebody serving me a jury summons or the fed of the Amazon man. I'd like for someone else to be at the door sometime.

Speaker 5 Totally with you. The pop-in, as Seinfeld called it, right?

Speaker 5 I think he probably was not a fan of the pop-in, but that's all Kramer did, right? Was pop-in.

Speaker 5 And I think actually, if you look at the most successful TV shows, shows, like Friday Night Lights, nobody called and said, I'm coming over.

Speaker 5 Like the kids just showed up at the door, right, wanting to talk to the coach, right? And to his wife, right? I mean, I think there's something appealing about all that.

Speaker 5 The other things, I mean, what do people say? They say, how are you feeling? Describe what you're feeling. And when I tell them what I'm up to, they don't say, oh my God, this is a nightmare.

Speaker 5 Because of course, when they say this is a nightmare, I hear your life is a nightmare. And I don't want to hear that.

Speaker 5 So even though it's totally well-intentioned, it's completely well-intentioned when they say say that. Okay, that's a good flag.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 They're trying to show that they grasp the enormity of the problem. But what I hear is your life is a nightmare.
What's nice is when they say, oh, my God, so what do you do for that?

Speaker 5 When they kind of lean more into the curiosity thing. And one of my friends, when I said, I think I have to spend the rest of my life in bed, and I was weeping.

Speaker 5 And I was at that point genuinely suicidal. Jonathan V.
Last.

Speaker 5 sent me chocolate and a book. And I have to call him and tell him, look, I'm up right now.

Speaker 5 I looked at my husband and I said, I don't know how long I have like on my own two feet, but we're going on a family vacation.

Speaker 5 Like, I don't know how long I got doing this because if I get reinfected a third time, you know, maybe I'll just always be horizontal. And by the way, I really have the spinny sensation right now.

Speaker 4 Right now?

Speaker 5 Oh, it's horrible. I'm just super, super used to it, and I'm going to lie down.
And I was lying down before. I podcast from like bed usually.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we can continue this from bed if you want. We can have this part three be from bed.

Speaker 5 Possibly. I didn't take my dizzy pills, to be honest, because they make me a little low-geep.

Speaker 5 And I didn't want to be. I mean, you kind of have to have your running shoes on when you're with Tim Miller.
You, you know, you're quick on your feet.

Speaker 4 I'm coming clean on multiple things about my false doubts about long COVID and now the fact that I never actually read the Adele article until today. And I was bawling,

Speaker 4 like walking around my neighborhood in Ferret, just on a single person walk. And it's like an old lady that looks maybe like doing a nanny possibly situation, like pushing a stroller down the street.

Speaker 4 She looks at me, like, is everything okay? And I'm like, I have to wave, I'm waving at her. I'm like, it's fine, it's fine, I have it in my ears.

Speaker 4 I was like, absolutely, I totally lost my shit altogether. So,

Speaker 4 you know, you achieved that. Ones We Sent Away is what it was called.
It was about your aunt Adele. who had disability.

Speaker 4 I guess you can explain what that was and how she grew grew up in an era where kids with this kind of disability were put into institutions instead of how we treat them now.

Speaker 4 And I guess that's the contrast in the story. So maybe give people a thumbnail for those who haven't read it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I didn't even know I had an aunt. I thought my mother was an only child until I was 12.

Speaker 5 And I think I actually outright said, I wonder if I had a disabled kid, how I would react. I don't even know how we could have got there.

Speaker 5 It may have been because my grandfather was a volunteer at what was then, it was called WARC, which was, the acronym is so outdated, it was called the Westchester Association for Retarded Citizens.

Speaker 5 And my aunt at the time was diagnosed as profoundly retarded. He had given his daughter away when she was not even two years old.
He and my grandmother. And this was the protocol.

Speaker 5 There was just no choice. They were these working class.
They had no education. You know, my grandmother hadn't gone to college.
My grandfather, I guess, had, but

Speaker 5 they went from doctor to doctor. And every doctor said the same thing, which is, this child will ruin your life and moreover, will ruin your daughter's life.

Speaker 5 And for her sake, for your sake, for everyone's sake. And not only that, but the institutions will know better.
Their schools, they will be able to figure out how to handle her.

Speaker 5 And so my grandparents followed their advice. But in some ways, it really, I think, it broke their spirits.

Speaker 5 They managed to live their lives and lead full lives with this gaping Adele-sized hole at the center of it.

Speaker 5 But they put her in Willowbrook, which was notorious later on when Geraldo Rivera, of all people, did this expose,

Speaker 5 just kind of ambushing them with a camera in, was it 1972, I think?

Speaker 4 74. I just listened to it today.
So I feel like it was 74. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Speaker 5 I don't remember, I will confess. And again, these drugs are eating.
I mean, the brain mice of middle age are already pretty hard.

Speaker 5 So then you add it with all these things I'm taking, and that's even rougher. Willowbrook, as it turned out, was, here's the weird thing.
It probably wasn't even unusual.

Speaker 5 It was just the place that Geraldo Rivera wound up getting access to. He was given a key by a whistleblowing doctor who said, you have to see what a hellhole this is.

Speaker 5 And sure enough, there were 40 or 50 people to one attendant. I think that was the ratio.
So 80 people on a floor and let's say two attendants who were stark naked, rolling in their own feces

Speaker 5 or in diapers, wailing. And they had absolutely no toys.
They would all fight for like a piece of paper if someone dropped it on the floor because it was something to play with.

Speaker 5 Seven or eight kids to a crib if they were infants. But just the wailing and the stench was what overpowered Geraldo when he was in there.

Speaker 5 And the doctor saying that there's no way to even know how realizable the potential are of these people. My aunt was shifted to another institution that was closer to where my grandparents lived.

Speaker 5 I subsequently found out my grandmother learned how to drive for the sole purpose of driving out to Staten Island to see her. I wish I'd known that when I wrote the story.
It's weird.

Speaker 5 The one person who I didn't talk to was one of my mother's first cousins who knew this. Anyway,

Speaker 5 it was hideous. And this is where my aunt spent the formative years of her life.
But it's also, then she was shifted to another institution, which I'm sure was just as horrible until she was 29.

Speaker 5 And then then she was put in these group settings that weren't really any better until she finally, finally was put in this group home.

Speaker 5 It wasn't even, it was this tiny family, you know, this family setting with two other people in the house. And she lived there happily for 24 years.

Speaker 5 And, you know, what I did when I finally decided, like, look, here's this person who's always been this kind of blank spot on the family tree.

Speaker 5 And she was old. And I looked at my mom and I said, I'd like to visit her.
You don't have to visit her. It was, I'm sure, really traumatic to have her ripped away when you were six years old.

Speaker 5 You couldn't have had any comprehension about why this sister, who must have seemed perfect and adorable to you, was sent away. And she was told that she was sent away to walking school.

Speaker 5 So you can imagine. my mother's confusion, like how long does it take to learn how to walk?

Speaker 5 And, you know, whether unconsciously she was going, God, if I don't learn something on time, are they going to send me away forever? Right.

Speaker 4 So we went and we saw her and i actually had her genetically tested this is the craziest part of the story to me first off you were right it was 1972 so your brain mice are your brain mice are doing just fine they're still hitting the hamster wheel we're mixing metaphors they're still getting up there making sure they're hitting the cotton not the wires i don't know yeah this was one of my notes as i was as i was listening to the to the article today was just like it's crazy that you she was never tested and i guess you know she's never tested back then but you would have thought then later in life you know totally so anyway go ahead continue with that and here's the the thing: even if she had been tested, you know, she would have been the one in three people for whom they have no diagnosis.

Speaker 5 And actually, that's now. They still were telling me there's a 33% chance we'll be like, we don't know.
And it turns out that she has something called coffin cyrus syndrome

Speaker 5 number 12. It's a particular variant.
And if they had tested her in 2019, they wouldn't have found it. They just found it in 2020.
So I tested her in the winter of 2022.

Speaker 5 They'd barely known what it was. And there were only, there was like a database of maybe 30 people in the world who had it.

Speaker 5 So I was trying to find one person that didn't live in Italy or Russia who had it who I could visit with and see just how much more they could be cultivated.

Speaker 5 And of course, nobody's going to be exactly the same, but I was still curious, how neglected was she? And oh my God, was she neglected? I mean, the second I saw this seven-year-old,

Speaker 4 i mean your heart just breaks i mean to think about how much more potential was there that no one tapped i want to get to emma in a second who's the seven-year-old you talked about and her adopted mother and caretaker grace um but just before that like there was one phrase that kept coming back to me this like stupid aphorism of the out of sight out of mind aphorism you know that you have in life and like that was kind of like the fundamental premise behind which people dealt with folks with developmental disabilities in your aunt's era.

Speaker 5 Yep, that's exactly right.

Speaker 4 There's some elements of that that's kind of true, right?

Speaker 4 Like there were some ways in which life was able to go on for your mother and her parents, and they're able to do things they might not have been to do.

Speaker 4 But there are other ways in which that's just so wrong.

Speaker 5 Totally.

Speaker 4 And backfires in such a degree. So I was just curious if you could kind of reflect on that a little bit.

Speaker 5 It's not a cliche. I think it's exactly right.
And I think it was much easier for doctors to say that than for the families. Pearl S.

Speaker 5 Buck had a child, you know, Nobel Prize winner for literature and I can't remember what year, 1950, had a child with Down syndrome who she

Speaker 5 put in an institution and she was brave enough to actually write about the experience. It's amazing how many families did not forget.

Speaker 5 and their hearts were broken their whole lives and they thought about it a lot and the children were very confused because the child was home and then not home.

Speaker 5 Of course, then there were families where the mom would give birth and then come back from the hospital empty-handed and say that the child had died. And that happened too.

Speaker 5 Arthur Miller had a child who was put away, and it was a huge fight that he had with his first wife, Inga Morath, I think, where she really wanted to keep her son at home. He also had Downs.

Speaker 5 And I guess Arthur Miller won. He was institutionalized in Connecticut.
And in his obituaries, there wasn't a word written about this kid, except

Speaker 5 maybe in the L.A. Times, maybe in Variety.
And the New York Times didn't mention him, and he never mentioned him in his memoir. And I don't know, maybe it was easier for the men.

Speaker 5 Maybe Arthur Miller did think about him. I've not really revisited his plays to see whether there was any kind of veiled theme.
I think other people would have noted it, but maybe not.

Speaker 5 Maybe if I reread him, I would hear a different frequency in his work. I don't know.
I don't think these people were out of a lot of people's minds.

Speaker 4 There's some ways where I understand it. You know, so like I have a friend who has a kid with minkus, which is just like...

Speaker 5 I'm embarrassed to say, I don't know.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, no, that's because like three people in America have mincus. It's like, it's just even rarer than the disease that your aunt had, and it's degenerative.

Speaker 4 So, you know, so just get every day is worse. Yeah, every day is worse than the last.
You know. It was really tough for him, obviously.

Speaker 4 You know, as I'm thinking about that, you start to imagine like, what do I do in this situation? How would I handle it? And, like, what was the right thing?

Speaker 4 And, like, there is a part of you that's like, maybe the right thing is to have the kid in the hospital and to go on with your life and have your other kid be able to live a more normal life.

Speaker 4 And you go visit still. And, you know, it's not like it's like, we're not talking about Willowbrook, but, you know, that you're like, you can still go and get as much out of the person as you can.

Speaker 4 And they've not. done that, obviously.
And their son is in the home. And I think about them and it's just like the challenge of that is real, but like

Speaker 4 the value of it when you actually spend time with people that have developmental disabilities, like the value of that presence like seems so obvious.

Speaker 4 You know, even though like in some ways it seems logical, you might want to have distance, it's like that feels wrong.

Speaker 4 It seems like that was what you obviously came to, the more time you got to spend with Adele.

Speaker 5 I'm having so many thoughts about this because... All right, let's set aside the degenerative piece for a second because that's just its own setup for a heartbreak.
Let's set that aside for a moment.

Speaker 5 I think that thinking first of all about the fact that you're being on some level denied a full parenthood if you don't have that child with you, and the child is certainly being denied their full potential.

Speaker 5 We now have a lot more infrastructure in place, you know, free aid from the state in every state for occupational therapy and physical therapy and for speech therapy, all these things.

Speaker 5 And it may not for some children, by the way, be enough.

Speaker 5 Often parents need to stay home and it's often mom and you're foregoing income and let's be clear a lot of parents are giving over their lives to this stepping out of the workforce it makes family life harder it shapes the lives of the siblings in all kinds of ways and my mother being the very rational woman that she is she was a music major and she taught music theory at Brooklyn College to put my dad through law school and she worked at IBM an early programmer she's got this super super rational mind and she will say, well, look, we wouldn't have had the same life, Jennifer.

Speaker 5 I mean, we were able to go on family vacation. My parents were able to enjoy this wonderful, beautiful retirement.

Speaker 5 I mean, by the way, I don't want to judge or weigh in on any family that makes the choice to put their child in an institution if they cannot do this by themselves. It's so hard.
It's so grueling.

Speaker 5 So it's just that there were no options then, and the institutions were so hellish. So, what your friend is doing is it's much more common these days.

Speaker 5 I think also all these diseases that where the child dies often in childhood or dies early,

Speaker 5 they're excruciatingly hard, like spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, every way.

Speaker 5 And you have teams of people who are trying to maintain quality of life for that child, right? And it becomes harder and harder as they degenerate.

Speaker 5 So it becomes more and more expensive and more and more labor intensive. And also they have the heartbreak that it's probably an arcane disease.

Speaker 5 So when you've got rare genetic diseases, every year I think people go before Congress and talk about this. And it's hard to get funding, right?

Speaker 5 Because you're talking about 3,000 people in the entire world who have it. So, you know, nobody's wearing a ribbon for it.

Speaker 4 No, it's just brutal.

Speaker 4 But the thing that was the most, well, the most moving about your story, the most uplifting part is the value that comes from having, you know, that person, the young person with a disability around.

Speaker 4 And you talk about Emma, who you go to visit in Kansas City, and she's adopted by this couple. This mother's name is Grace.

Speaker 5 Aptly named.

Speaker 4 Yeah, very aptly named.

Speaker 5 And her last name, too, Feist for Feisty, because she hits.

Speaker 4 Just tell us what you learned when you went to visit Grace and Emma.

Speaker 5 Oh, my God, a million things. First of all, you know, if you have a child with a disability, boy, oh boy, do you want Grace as your mother? I mean, she was just this unbelievable life force.

Speaker 5 Walked around in flip-flops if it was like 20 degrees. You know, I mean, she's just amazing.
Had her first kid at 16. She was a military officer, I think.

Speaker 5 You know, she got pregnant in high school, but her mom took care of the baby. So she got to,

Speaker 5 and this kid is terrific. I just love her.
She's 16 now herself, or probably older, 17, but she's super Christian.

Speaker 5 She felt called to adopt this child, like knew that she had to adopt this child. She loved fostering and knew that she wanted to adopt Emma.
Knew it from the start.

Speaker 5 And her husband is just kind of this easygoing guy who runs this Christian YouTube channel. But she told me about the moments that she was wailing in the shower, asking God why this was Emma's fate.

Speaker 5 Never her own fate. but Emma's fate.
And why was Emma suffering? And why was Emma banging her head on the floor until her forehead turned purple? You know, what was Emma unable to say?

Speaker 5 They have redesigned their life, restructured their life around this girl. And this girl is just amazing.

Speaker 5 You know, she has like a huge collection of stuffies and she's named them all and wanted to show me all of her dance moves, which are fabulous. My aunt could dance P.S.

Speaker 5 and sing and sing like my mom and do needlepoint like my mom and likes to make necklaces like my mom. It's all crazy how they are the same person.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's really weird and it's fastidious like my mom, won't let you load the dishwasher like my mom. Anyway, I could go on and on, but Emma was not like that.

Speaker 5 Emma, well, I mean, she liked order, but she also had a very messy room and had a very kind of more laissez-faire way about her and could articulate her inner state.

Speaker 5 You know, how does not being able to read make you feel, you know, mad and sad. Everyone else can read.
I can't read. I have to color.

Speaker 5 You know, maybe not with the full grammatical, but most of it, actually. Anyway, but charming.
And God, I'm just psychotically smitten and in love with Grace. I will just be in love with her for life.

Speaker 4 I want to ask about Grace. The exchange that really, I think, put me over the edge.

Speaker 4 I guess you were talking with Emma about, and maybe you had a picture on your phone or something of Adele, of your aunt. And Grace said, to Emma that you guys have something in common.

Speaker 4 And like you were kind of expecting her to explain the disease. And she said, You both have found somebody that loves you.

Speaker 5 I can't even think about it now without getting so upset.

Speaker 4 And I was just, yeah, I literally was sitting there, I was listening to it. My husband's sitting on the next show over, and I belted out, oh my god, and then started walking around the neighborhood.

Speaker 4 And I was like, and thank God for her. And then my brain is so fucking broken that after I finished sobbing, I thought to myself, I wonder if Grace is for Trump.
And I think she probably is.

Speaker 4 And in some ways, that's a good thing for me to know and think about just because there is some goodness. Like maybe that is an area of connection.
So anyway, that ties us back to our first topic.

Speaker 4 Am I right about Grace?

Speaker 5 1,000%.

Speaker 5 Yep. She voted for Trump.
She was really thinking about DeSantis this time around because, you know, she has... lots of questions about Trump's character and I'm guessing she has more out now.

Speaker 4 See, I just made a sarcastic face at Grace right there. Even though she's such a good person and even though I know better, I can't help myself.
Just, I made a sarcastic face. I can't help myself.

Speaker 5 She is such a good person. Yeah, I didn't, just for the record.
I did not.

Speaker 5 Yes, that was your sarcastic face. I will never make a sarcastic face about Grace.
So here's the thing. We talked about politics, but always in that.

Speaker 5 what one would think of as being more stereotypically female way where we were looking immediately for consensus.

Speaker 5 She, I was, you know, talking about what I thought were the excesses of the left, and she was saying, Right, and how ridiculous is it that people got all worked up over masks?

Speaker 5 I mean, how hard is it to wear a mask? And, you know, my four-year-old, who is not Emma, is immunocompromised. We were always wearing masks.
I mean, how tough is this really?

Speaker 5 You know, she was perfectly prepared to concede all kinds of things. She had highly, highly nuanced views about the world, as I think most people do.

Speaker 5 Here's what I, the way that I thought about this is a much bigger political question,

Speaker 5 which is,

Speaker 5 we are never going to persuade each other, right? I don't think we are going to make our way back to one another in politics. Something tells me that it will be quite a while.

Speaker 5 I mean, maybe it'll happen, but it seems so improbable. We're standing on different epistemological substrates, different moral values kind of substrates.

Speaker 5 We've just got different frameworks for understanding what truth is and what our real objectives are and like values are.

Speaker 5 So I used to think that really the only irreconcilable difference in American life was abortion because it's life ultimately, whether you believe that this is or isn't life.

Speaker 5 But everything else I thought we could find our way to and I don't think that anymore.

Speaker 5 But but but but but but but the things that I've spent my time doing

Speaker 5 I would never have articulated this to my boss because I knew what he meant when he said like democracy is on the line please write about someone in the MAGA movement but you could argue that what I'm doing is political in the following sense I think the only way that we will make our way back to one another is by bonding over the things that make us vulnerable and in some ways broken and in some ways human are most deeply human and that's over

Speaker 5 having a disabled child, having a friendship that ends, which is what my friendship essay was about, right?

Speaker 5 You know, it's your friends who break your heart and all the obstacles to friendship and all the things about friendship that make your life meaningful. Parenting.
And parenting, right?

Speaker 5 And the difficulties of parenting, but also in the McIlvane story, loss, grief. We all lose people.

Speaker 5 And this is the way that you can love the people who have a different politics.

Speaker 5 And there was just a study, I can't remember who did it, but it was sociologists who talked about the fact that, you know, you are always much more sympathetic to someone who voted differently from you if you hear their backstory and how they arrived at their politics.

Speaker 5 You're always going to like them more and find their politics a lot more comprehensible. And I'm not talking about that when I talk about that here, but it's like,

Speaker 5 do I care that Grace voted? I mean, sure, I care that Grace voted for Trump, but

Speaker 5 look, I didn't go and voluntarily adopt a child with Coffin Cyrus 12. She did.

Speaker 5 And God bless her, you know?

Speaker 4 We need that.

Speaker 4 You need to, it's easy, especially on the internet, to have, like, to use, to use the George W. Bush term to think about the worst examples of your political opponents.

Speaker 4 And, like, I need to do my best to think about, uh, think about Grace Weiss, because I think plenty about my, the worst examples. But that, um, that is a good woman.
Oh, she had more time.

Speaker 4 There's more in the story.

Speaker 4 I shouldn't ruin it for everybody. People should go read the rest of it if they haven't.
There's a lot about your mother and the Ayalas, the family that took care of Adele.

Speaker 4 And it's, it's something, Jen. I don't know.
How did you process it in the very end, I guess, is my final question for you.

Speaker 4 How did you process learning this about your family and about kind of the loss that Adele experienced?

Speaker 5 Thanks for asking that. That's such a nice question.

Speaker 5 So heartfelt.

Speaker 5 You know, I wish I could say that it deepened my relationship with my mom, and it did. But I don't know how much it did for her.
I was hoping it would do something for her.

Speaker 5 And I think it was just totally bittersweet for her. I think, like, the sense that it happened so late in her life that she had to be,

Speaker 5 what, 76,

Speaker 5 you know, for this to happen.

Speaker 5 You like to think that your journalism is doing a good thing. And what if it was for everyone except the person who matters to your most, which is your own mother? You know, I mean, like,

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 well, I mean, your own children and your spouse, but you know what I mean? I mean,

Speaker 5 your own family. People want a silver lining out of this, or they want, you And I don't, maybe it's my psychosomatic long COVID.

Speaker 4 Oh, come on. Oh, I'm never going to get over that.

Speaker 5 No, it's because Alex Berenson went after me online. So, you know, I am a little, I am.
I fuck all these people. I know.

Speaker 4 Now I'm back to my normal self.

Speaker 4 Hug, Grace. Hug, Grace.

Speaker 5 Fuck Alex Berenson, though.

Speaker 4 Your poor mother.

Speaker 4 Well, give her a hug for me.

Speaker 5 I will.

Speaker 5 This is not her fault.

Speaker 4 And it was a brilliant story. The ones we sent away.
Thank Thank you. This is already like twice as long as I told you it was going to be.
And so we didn't even get to what Bobby McIlvane left behind.

Speaker 4 That's another banger, though.

Speaker 5 That's okay.

Speaker 4 If you guys didn't read that one, please go and check it out. And, you know, one day we'll have another chance to talk about it again.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Thanks so much.
This has been great.

Speaker 4 I love your show. Senior.
Thank you. I love you too.
Thank you for coming on the Bulwark podcast on my little vacation. And everybody else will be back tomorrow.
Somebody else is in the chair.

Speaker 4 A.B.'s in the chair, I think, tomorrow. It'll be great, though.
Listen to it, and I'll see you all next week. A.B.
Stoddard, you know, you know her?

Speaker 5 We came of age at the Hill. Oh my God, together.
We were Cub Reporters.

Speaker 5 Oh, she's amazing. And by the way, I love you.
I think you said you love, but I adore you and your show.

Speaker 5 I just want to say because I think you were like, I didn't want people thinking it was asymmetrical. That's not the asymmetry I was describing earlier.

Speaker 4 Mutual love society here.

Speaker 4 Everybody, A.B. Stoddard will be here tomorrow.
I'll see you all next week. Peace.

Speaker 5 Time's come for us to part

Speaker 5 and think of living as it was

Speaker 5 into the future we must cross must cross

Speaker 5 I'd like to go with you

Speaker 5 and I'd like to go with you

Speaker 5 You say I'm harder than a wall

Speaker 5 A marble shaft about to fall.

Speaker 5 I love you dearer than them all,

Speaker 5 them all.

Speaker 5 So let me stay with you.

Speaker 5 So let me stay with you.

Speaker 5 And as we walked into the day,

Speaker 5 skies blue had turned to gray

Speaker 5 I might have not been clear to say

Speaker 5 to say

Speaker 5 I never looked away

Speaker 5 I never looked away

Speaker 5 And though I'm feeling you inside

Speaker 5 My life is rolling with the tide

Speaker 5 I'd like to see it be and

Speaker 5 open

Speaker 5 right

Speaker 5 along with you

Speaker 5 Go in love with you

Speaker 4 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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