On the podcast today we have P.E. Moskowitz, a writer who also runs the newsletter Mental Hellth, and author of the book Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World Through Drugs. We discuss breaking outside of narrative meaning in mental health, dissociation/depersonalization/derealization, the neoliberalization of mental health, and the move away from understanding how systemic structures cause mental illness toward an individualistic model.
Today I’m speaking with Regina Mahone, senior editor at The Nation magazine, founder of Repro Nation, a free monthly newsletter providing the latest news on the struggle for reproductive justice, and also coauthor, with We Testify founder Renee Bracey Sherman of the book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. We will be discussing her article, "Abortion Bans Upended Their Lives—Now They’re Fighting Back, One Story at a Time,” which appears in the May 2025 edition of The Nation.
I talk with Paul Freedman, a history professor at Yale and author of the book American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way which looks at the history of how food evolved over time in the US. in 1900 40% of US population worked in agriculture. Now that number is under 2%. Correspondingly food used to be 40% of a family’s budget and in 2016 that number was 12.6%. We talk about the positives and negatives of the industrialization of food, the evolution of food science, the 70s farm to table revolution, and more!
Today we are talking about Eamon Whalen’s article “Are Men OK?” which is a recent cover story for The Nation about women’s rise in economic power, the declining cultural power of men, and the manhood intellectual Richard Reeves. Male labor force participation has fallen from 80% in 1970 to 69% in January 2020, and undergraduate enrollment for men has fallen from 58% to 44% in that same time period. Richard Reeves proposes policies to ameliorate this. Conservatives think he isn’t acknowledging the “feminist conspiracy” going on and the liberals think he’s a watered down men’s rights activist reifying the gender binary. What can we take away from his point of view?
“The idea now that running a company is some type of sacred trust, that employees are something to be taken care of, is treated by most people as a laughable idea… this period is the basis of the income inequality we see today.” - Bryan Burrough
Published in 1989 by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate is a financial thriller about the leveraged buy out of RJR Nabisco. This book is a time capsule of the 1980s greed era zeitgeist and an insiders look at the creation of our casino society.
Today I’m talking with Will Tavlin about his N+1 article “Casual Viewing” on the history of Netflix and how Netflix, with increasing power and leverage, is changing the film industry for the worse. “The type of movie that starts to get made starts to change. Especially as these streaming platforms increasingly realize that they are not really Hollywood studios but customer acquisition businesses.” - Will Tavlin
Today I talk with Enzo Escober about his profile of the trans Filipina model Geena Rocero in LA Review of Books titled “Homespun Tiara.” We discuss the gender fluid indigenous history of the Philippines, the colonial history of the Philippines, its Catholic fiesta culture and trans beauty pageants, American imperialism, the long reach of American soft power, legal recognition versus cultural recognition for trans people in the Philippines and the US, and the complicated feelings that accompany expatriation to the US. “We left in the name of opportunity but the reason opportunities are so limited in the first place in the Philippines is because of colonialism.” - Enzo Escober.
Today I’m talking with Jasper Craven about his Harper's Magazine piece "The Thin Purple Line" on the private security industry and the attendant fear economy that it fuels. On this episode we talk about the changing cultural symbolism of “chaos” and what particular iteration of it is driving people's fears and actions today.
Also it has officially been a year of the Nonfiction with Callie Hitchcock podcast! The conversations that I have gotten to do for this podcast have opened up the world to me in so many interesting and expansive ways and I hope they have for you too.
In light of the anniversary I am starting a Patreon so that you guys can support my work and in the future I’m going to set up exclusive content, gifts, perks, and more. The project is currently a labor of love filled with reading, research, pitching, interview preparation, recording, audio editing, producing, and marketing. Your contribution will go towards supporting this project and moving it from a labor of love to a paid endeavor that will help me have more time to get more episodes to you. Thank you so much for listening and taking the time to engage with my project, I love you all!
Today we have the writer Lily Burana, author of the memoir Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America. Lily’s memoir is emotionally complex, philosophical, and navigates the multiplicity of self, gender performance, and the theory of theatrical performance. We discuss the intersection of performance and relationships and the live theater liminality of strip clubs, breaking out of the hero vs victim binary for strippers, and her 2.85 million dollar strip club class action lawsuit that set a labor rights precedent for FedEx.
Also side note, I am writing an article about stripping in NYC so if you are are a stripper in NYC or know someone who is, please leave a comment or DM me on Twitter @cal_hitchcock because I would love to talk to you about your experience.
Articles mentioned:
I speak with Clair Wills about her book Missing Persons which explores her family’s connection to the mother and baby homes for unwed mothers in Ireland that operated from 1922-1998 and have come into the news in the past few years after multiple mass child graves were discovered at different locations. In one of the largest of these homes called Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork, more than 900 children died and over a 20 year period between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s approximately 25% of the babies born in the home died there, five times the infant mortality rate for the state in 1950. According to the home's own records the common cause of death was malnutrition. Clair seeks to answer unanswerable questions through memories, emotions, and the history of the Catholic church, the government, and family respectability in Ireland.
On this episode I talk to the writer Jane Song her article “Rock Beats Scissors” about the sociological implications of the shift from dagger consumer products to our current deluge of pebble consumer products. In this episode we talk about how this phenomenon maps onto a kind of boom and bust cycle in the economy and also has larger implications for cultural powerlessness and loneliness. We also get into Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic theory of cute and how that informs the emergence of the pebble.
Items Mentioned in the Podcast:
Today we have James Pogue, a journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine who has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, and elsewhere. We talk about his essay “Wagner in Africa” published in the extraction issue of Granta that came out this Spring which is about his reporting trip to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic or CAR, and the presence of the Russian private military company called the Wagner Group in CAR and CAR’s geopolitical history. The Wagner group offers stabilization against rebel groups and security for CAR’s mines to operate but reportedly has profited billions of dollars from gold mining in CAR and other African countries, which funds the Wagner Group and likely the war in Ukraine. James weighs in on what the Wagner Group presence means for CAR historically and in the future.
Today I’m talking with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman about their book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice, a book of philosophy and cultural criticism surrounding the choice of whether to have children or not. The birth rates in the US are at a record low, and are also low in countries with the most progressive parenthood policies. What is causing this pervasive ambivalence? Is it finances, climate change, or a change in the conception of a happy and fulfilled life? The answer is more complicated than you think.
Today’s guest is journalist Donald Morrison talking with us about his article “American Rehab” published in the most recent June issue of The Baffler. This article is about Measure 110 which was passed in November 2020 in Oregon and was the most liberal drug law in the country in US history, decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs including marijuana, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl. The law would also funnel the money from legislative appropriations, savings from reductions in arrests, and marijuana tax revenue into harm reduction services and treatment centers. Donald’s article follows up with what has happened in Oregon since the passing of this law, and he talks about his own experience in Portland with what services helped him when he got sober.
Today’s guest is Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer prize winner for criticism, staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of her new book Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. We talk about the history of reality TV, the changing conception of reality TV labor power dynamics, reality tv as modern fables, the sociological function of reality TV as a cultural object, and what feelings we are looking to have when we watch TV.
I speak with Michael Cecchi-Azzolina about his memoir called Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’ about being a maître d’ in New York City’s top restaurants from the 80s onward. This book is a historical time capsule of the culture of the past 40 years and a meditation of the restaurant as a dense site of psychology, theater, familial simulation, and the joy of communion. We discuss all of this and the changing social role of restaurants with the introduction of the internet age and shifting social mores.
I talk with Michael W. Clune about White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, his memoir about his heroin addiction and his recovery. His writing is experiential, poetic, philosophical, and dwells on the liminal. Clune defamiliarizes experiences and reassembles them with new language. He also puts language to experiences that haven’t been entered yet into the collective imagination. We discuss the rhetoric of perception, unpeeling perception away from language, Candy Land, and Don Quixote.
Tony Tulathimutte on the podcast today. He has written the novel Private Citizens, and a short story collection called Rejection coming out this September (pre-order here). On this episode we talk about his recent nonfiction essay for The Paris Review called “The Rejection Plot.” We explore the experiential properties of rejection, plotlessness, the delamination of an infatuation narrative from real life, and entitativity.
Other links:
I spoke with Emmeline Clein, author of the new book Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm about the cultural forces surrounding eating disorders and beauty standards in the US, and their roots in racism, classism, and nationalism. We talk about the different historic forms eating disorders have mutated through over time, the failures of health insurance and treatment centers, and more!
My review of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv
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“I didn’t think I ran the risk of dying I though I ran the risk of not living the life that I wanted to live.”
On today’s episode I speak with Sarah Hepola, a journalist and the author of the book Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, which is a nuanced and articulate memoir of Sarah’s life and her experiences with blackouts, all leading to her journey to sobriety. Check out her podcast America's Girls and Smoke ‘Em If You Got 'Em.
